This business is really not for everyone. After being a long time member of several webmaster forums you start to see the same type of people, the same type of questions. One of these people is the small - medium affiliate who has money to invest back in their business, but just can’t pull the trigger. If they knew 100% they would succeed and have a positive ROI then they would definitely do it. That is just the wrong attitude.

Affiliate marketing is a lot like roulette. In it’s most simplest form you have red and you have black. And in business you have black for profits and red for losses. Either way, you can’t win if you don’t place your bets and once you do it will either be red or black. You can’t make money if you don’t take a risk. And it’s true, even if you want it to hit black every time you place your bet, eventually it will hit red and you will lose. It’s all part of the game.

Investing your money into affiliate products or websites is easy when you break it down.

1. Choose your affiliate product. If you are going to be promoting an already existent website of yours make sure your lead gen page is optimized for conversions.

2. Hypothesize where the best place to invest money in that you think will produce a positive ROI. Do your research, take some educated guesses and don’t think about the possibility of losing your investment.

3. Do it. Wait for the results and you will see it - red or black. Make sure you are tracking properly and efficiently.

4. Trash the campaign if you missed and it’s clearly losing. Tweak if you are making money or just leave it running and start new campaigns targeting something else.

5. Pump more money into what you know works and keep on doing it until the well runs dry.

If you are still in a mindset that you are afraid to invest money to make money then you have forgotten the cliche “It takes money to make money”. The thing about cliches is a lot of them are true. Your web presence simply cannot grow naturally as fast as it can if you are investing money into it.

Take PPC for example - many top PPC affiliate marketers spend thousands of dollars which they KNOW they are probably going to lose at first. They just want to see what works and what doesn’t, gather more information, etc. They know that once they figure out where to put the lion’s share of their money, the losses won’t matter anymore. Then it’s like they can cheat because they know it’s going to hit black every time so they bet bigger and bigger until it finally hits red again and they back off still up thousands. That’s the name of the game, because at the end of the day affiliate marketing is a numbers game.

Unless you’re the luckiest horseshoe in the world you will inevitably lose some money while trying to find what works by yourself. I don’t care if its a CPM un-targeted mass buy, PPC campaign using long tail keywords, CPA ads or promoting poker portals - Once you find your own little spot that nobody else has found you can milk it for all it’s worth. If you are still thinking you just can’t risk a loss and couldn’t stomach and ad campaign that didn’t make you money, I do wish you good luck and hope I don’t hear you one day saying “Do you want fries with that?”.

Cool Random Site: data conversion service provider

I am really excited right now because as I write, we are less than 1 month away from Cap Euro in London England. As much as I love my new place in Toronto, I have always wanted to visit London and I am definitely in need of another conference. The last one I was at was Cap Spring Break in Bahamas, which means I have missed a couple in between. I am mostly excited to meet new people and hang out with old friends. Just take a look at my “Respected” list on the left to get a good idea of who I’m talking about.

Cap Euro is shaping up to be a huge event. Just taking a look at their lineup of speakers the other day, I noticed Neil Patel was being flown in for the conference. Even though it’s an “introduction to social networking”, I will be in attendance to try to pick up some gems and hopefully ask him a few questions. I’ve been a big fan of Neil’s blogs and radio show “Rush Hour” for quite a while now. He is definitely the social media guru right now.

Someone is going to Cap Euro Free - and I’m a Judge

In an exciting announcement by Jeremy Enke, Greg Powell, Cap and Chipleader , somebody is going to win a free trip to London for the conference. It is a fully paid trip which includes a ballin night on the town. The 4 judges are Nick Kisberg,Brandon Berndt, Graham Rowlands and Myself. You can read the full contest details here. You only have till Dec.31st to get in your entries.

TIP: Read Graham’s blog on how to win an affiliate contest: here - How bad do you want this? I know if I wasn’t a judge I’d be putting in my best effort. Then again maybe that’s just because I know how sick these things actually are…..

Tomorrow morning Clickbank will start releasing a new and supposedly much improved order form (and methods) to increase product sales.

This is exciting news for affiliates. Here are some of the upgrades:
* New Look & Feel
* Reorganized Product Content
* Emphasized Security Features
o Secure Payment
o HackerSafe
o Verisign
* Improved Payment Method Selection
* Clear Order Total
* Better Error Handling
* Reorganized Terms Of Sale
* Enhanced Confirmation Page

Read the rest of the Press Release below

https://www.clickbank.com/account/news.htm#102

1. Many affiliates are guys, and we love our women! Models at your booth will attract the initial attention to the area where you are pushing your product.

2. Sex Sells

3. If you don’t do it, and all of your competitors are, your booth will look half naked – and not in the good way like their booth babes do.

4. Branding – You initially get your logo/slogan out there with the actual affiliates/ VC’s who are at the conference. The second wave of branding comes when the conference is over and everybody starts posting pictures of the booths/girls or themselves with the girls, thus further promoting your company to affiliates who didn’t attend the conference.

5. You can get creative with it and boom instant link bait and more precious exposure.

6. Shoemoney will probably stop by

7. Guys like me will appreciate it !!!

John Chow made his first ever podcast this week and it can be listened to here . He filled in for the regular host Shoemoney on the “Shoemoney show”, formerly “Net Income”.

Listen in as John Chow talks with his guests about private ad sales, copycats, the lost rankings he had in Google, and how much money he made from his blog last month. The archives at WebmasterRadio are a very strong resource I’d recommend as well.

I have been using Keyword Country for the last week to find niches for new sites. I guess there is an evolution in every SEO’s life where eventually they have to go after the creme of the crop keywords and test their skills.

The reason I like Keyword Country is because I can find how much the average click in a particular niche is going to be as an adsense publisher. Most similar tools only show the advertiser CPC, which is often drastically different than the publisher’s share.

You can also enter a price range like $10 - $20 and it will bring back all the high paying keywords for that price range. There are a ton more cool features too, check out a video here . I can honestly say this is one of the best keyword tools I have ever used, and it’s worth every penny.

I now use KC in conjuction with Wordze, and my research ability has never, ever been so strong. I also have other programs such as SEO elite, but the KC + Wordze combination is what I would recommend to anyone.

And they will always matter. You see, for every person that says tool bar pagerank or alexa ranking doesn’t matter, there is somebody who says it does. And those people tell other people it matters and there are always new breeds of people coming in obsessed with pagerank or alexa.

Many of us agree that it in fact pagerank and alexa doesn’t matter when trying to rank our websites. Much more important is the perceived authority of your website in the eyes of google, much of that resulting from the quality of authoritative links pointing to your site. There is so much more than just ranking, however, in a web entrepreneur’s life. There is of course (gasp) selling links on our high pageranked sites and high traffic alexa ranked sites, whether through private sales or text link brokers.

More importantly, many of us are in the game of buying websites or developing them from scratch, building them into revenue making websites and selling them off for a profit. In my opinion this is why pagerank and alexa ranking still matter alot to webmasters. I have sold many sites in the past. Some were high earners that I never should have let go of but did due to various circumstances, while others were sites I just didn’t have time for and leveled off to a point where if I didn’t start maintaining them, the money would start going down. I can tell you the number of times is high that I’ve had buyers shy away from a site because they were a) suspect of high alexa ranking not “matching” the analytics or b) turned off by a low pagerank.

Now I know you are thinking they just don’t know what they are talking about, but it does work both ways. I’ve also sold webmaster related sites for far more than they are worth because a couple of bidders obsessed with the pagerank and more importantly the alexa rank that the sale went through the roof. Of course we all know that webmaster related sites have inflated alexa numbers due to the high volume of alexa tool bars or accompanying firefox extensions that people have on their browsers.

The bottom line is people are still lined up, opening up their wallets for reasons based on pagerank or alexa ranking - and savvy webmasters are still cashing in off of it. As long as this cycle continues, I don’t see why sellers shouldn’t capitalize on it. The debate between whether or not alexa and pagerank matters has been going on for years and that debate isn’t going away anytime soon. So until the people who think pagerank and alexa is important run out of money, it still matters to me.