New affiliates like to have everything lined up perfectly. They have tracking all set, very professional landing pages, meticulously researched targets, and hours of planning. While some of those things have importance, they often take so much time that campaigns never get launched.

Below is my plan for being a sloppy (yet fast and profitable) affiliate. This is based not only on what has worked for myself, but others I talk to or work with. This is for launching PPV campaigns but could be adapted for any traffic source.

Pick Offers Quick

It’s best focus on one niche. Having said that, I do still have luck testing random offers. One thing I like to do is pick an offer payout I want to work with (usually in the $2-12 range) and just run every offer I can find that fits that one criteria. I’ve found some really good campaigns doing this actually, and some with little to no competition.

I really don’t do anything more than just pick an offer in that payout range.

Grab Targets

Search Google for a couple keywords closely related to your offer and grab the URL’s from all the organic and paid results (if they are relevant). This is a quick way to get 30-50 initial targets. Even if you do this by hand, it should only take 10-15 min.

Slap Together a Landing Page

I just talked about this here

1460 New Campaigns Per Year

Once you get this process down, you should be able to do a campaign in about 15 min or less. Think about this for a minute; set aside 1 hour per day to build new campaigns. 1 hour a day is nothing…even if you have a full time job it could be as simple as getting up a little early, or doing this on your lunch break.

If you can build a campaign in 15 min, then in an hour you should be able to build 4. If you built 4 campaigns every day,  you would have built 120 campaigns per month. Say just 10% of those worked out and each earned a measly $200 a month (that’s just $6 per campaign per day). That’s and extra $2400 a month, or  for an hour a day’s work.

Over a year, you would have built 1460 campaigns. Applying the formula from above, you can see how this really ads up.  You don’t always need to have that one giant campaign to make great money.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that calculations about campaigns like this aren’t always really accurate. Things happen, and individual marketers abilities come into play. My point with this wasn’t to show you some surefire way to see how much you would make based on how many campaigns you built, but to show you how powerful just setting aside an hour a day to build campaigns is.

This is a lot harder than it sounds. In the forum we did a 30 day challenge where people posted their results. It was really interesting to see who finished and who didn’t and why. I’m sure you can guess the results of the people that did finish. Even if they didn’t have profitable campaigns they were SO much farther ahead of where they started.

So, if you are constantly searching for the latest info, technique, trick, etc. that’s cool…but the people that are basically just putting one foot in front of the other every day building campaigns even when it’s really boring are going to out earn you by a lot even if you know all the latest tricks.

Part One: Services You Can Offer & What You’ll Need

Pretty much everyone would like to make some amount of money from home – whether to replace a day job, to pay down some debts, or just to supplement existing income. In pursuit of that often-elusive income from home, a lot of people consider freelance writing, web writing, MLM, or affiliate marketing – but surprisingly, not a whole lot of people consider marketing consulting.

Part of that may be that many people don’t even know it’s an option. I have a younger sister who works for a traditional ad agency in St. Louis, and she’s had several co-workers tell her that “it’s not possible to go freelance in marketing”. They tell her I’ll be broke and looking for a job in no time. I can’t help but laugh, considering that I’ve been enjoying a better salary and more leisure time than all of them…for several years now.

My goal, though, is not to hoard all the freelance marketing jobs. My time is limited and there are plenty to go around. My goal is to help people learn how to use their marketing skills to earn more income and gain more control over their lives.

Before we go too much further, let me say that this is not a speculative guide written by someone who doesn’t know what the heck she’s talking about. I’ve been doing online marketing in one form or another for almost 10 years (more than 15 if you count a brief incident when I was still in high school back around 1994-95). I started off around 2000-2001 by selling virtual currency in an online game called EverQuest. I didn’t really think about it at the time, but everything I was doing to grow that little mini business was some kind of online marketing. I didn’t exactly get rich off of it, but it was nice to have the extra spending money when you’re in college.

I graduated college in 2005 with a degree in Economics, but I knew all along that the kind of jobs my classmates would go into were not the kind of jobs that would make me happy. I turned down a few very enticing offers before deciding that I would freelance until I found something worthy of 40+ hours of each week.

After 6 months or so, I saw not one, but two jobs in online marketing pop up. I submitted my application for both, and both called me in for interviews. One seemed too corporate and I passed on their offer – but the other one was for a small, quirky company with very little knowledge about online marketing, so I went for it. I like being somewhere that I can make a difference.

Within a couple of years, I was growing very tired of the 40+ hour work week, and I despised the fact that I was driving huge profit growth while my salary increases were not much bigger than anyone else’s. Maybe I’m silly, but I like being rewarded for my achievements

I decided it was time to quit. Although I was earning a decent amount of income in ad revenue and affiliate sales (I owned quite a few small websites at the time), I wanted to add an extra dimension of stability to my income. That’s when I returned, once again, to freelance work.

I’ve been able to enjoy working from exciting places all over the country, tackling new projects on a regular basis, and dealing with clients all over the world. I’ve had several trips to industry shows paid for, and I get to use free software and check out free courses all the time. And of course, I get all of that while charging anywhere from $50-500/hour (one of the perks of freelance consulting is that you can lower or raise your rate depending on how much you think you’d enjoy the work).

The best part is that it’s surprisingly easy. If you have a head for marketing and halfway decent powers of persuasion, you’ll likely have no trouble getting started in your own freelance marketing business.

Is it possible to freelance marketing services?

YES! Like I said, I’ve earned a very comfortable income doing this for quite a while now. The problem is that a lot of people have watched movies about traditional advertising agencies, so they think of big client presentations, brainstorming sessions where people talk about getting in the mind of a running shoes buyer, and so on. They picture the kind of advertising that is rarely done by freelancers simply because those types of big companies generally prefer agencies.

So what’s available for freelancers? Plenty. Almost every business in existence would like more customers. Most businesses today either have or want a website. Almost everyone wants a good web presence. And the best part – very few entrepreneurs are capable marketers.

A few of the many types of jobs you can do as a freelance marketer…

•Search engine optimization (SEO) – Search engines have to go through billions of pages to deliver the most relevant results for a given search. If your site is the one they deem most relevant for a popular search, that can mean a HUGE amount of free visitors to your website. The problem is that the rules change often, and can be difficult for some people to understand and act on. So, whether a business wants to rank well for “NYC chinese restaurant” or “giant gag underpants”, they might want the help of an SEO expert.

•Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC) – Search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and MSN have advertising platforms that allow business owners to bid on different searches and have their ads appear in the sponsored area along the top and sides of search results. While pretty much anyone can set this up, it takes a certain amount of skill to know which keywords are likely to perform well, to design text ads that get the most clicks possible, and to analyze results for maximum performance and cost effectiveness.

•Copywriting – Compelling copy can make a huge different in whether people decide to buy what you’re selling. Whether you’re describing the luxurious features of a seaside resort or selling the cost-cutting features of a software program, good copy means more money for your clients.

•Social Media – Nearly every company wants at least a basic presence on Facebook, and many more want comprehensive coverage on sites like Squidoo, HubPages, MySpace, Digg, and beyond. A good social media expert can help companies identify “angles” for promoting themselves and avoid embarrassing public mistakes.

•Media Buying – Although many types of companies can benefit from media buys, it’s an especially popular service with e-commerce companies looking for direct sales or other companies looking for branding. A good consultant can help locate, negotiate, and analyze the purchase of advertising through both advertising networks and independent websites.

•Email Marketing – Helping a client build a mailing list and effectively correspond with customers can be extremely lucrative. Even though a lot of mailing providers charge just $20-30/month, there’s much more to it than physically sending out the emails. Businesses need people to help them grow their lists, create professional emails, and optimize for maximum results.

•Marketing Planning – Often, clients have a general idea about what to do, but they want someone to help them create a balanced plan for spending their marketing budget most effectively. If you’re well-versed in many areas of marketing, you could do very well specializing in planning.

•Marketing Training – Sometimes, it’s just not efficient to have an expert carry out all steps of marketing a business. Many tasks are simple, and require minimal training. A marketer who recognizes this can do very well just by training the staff of other companies to carry out marketing tasks.

•Marketing Audits – Often, clients want someone to step in and let them know if they’re headed in the right direction, but they’re not looking for someone to actually take over the work. In these cases, they look for someone who can look over everything they’re currently doing and give them pointers or corrections as needed.

With a little imagination, you can probably come up with even more services to offer. Pretty much any kind of marketing task that a business would need can be accomplished by a freelance consultant.

What do you need (personality and actual STUFF) to be a freelance marketer

Becoming a freelance marketing consultant is actually much easier than becoming a lot of things. You don’t need a special degree, you don’t need a huge amount of startup capital, and as long as you have access to basic office supplies and internet access, you probably won’t even need to buy any equipment.

That’s not to say that you’re going to have a ton of luck if you start going up to clients and saying, “Hey, I’m a high school dropout with access to the computer at my local library. Will you pay me $100/hour to do your marketing?” Remember, you’re in marketing now – it’s all about putting things in a good light and enhancing positives.

Your career as a freelance marketing consultant is going to be easier if you have a college degree of some sort, but it’s definitely not a requirement. Results matter more. If you have a degree, then by all means, include that information in your pitches and on your website if you decide to have one. If it’s from a prestigious college, mention it once by name (and only once…let’s not be obnoxious). If you didn’t go to college or didn’t finish college, just ignore the topic completely. There’s no need to apologize for something that doesn’t really matter. Just focus on experience and results instead.

You will need some amount of experience to get jobs, but that’s not nearly as bad as it sounds. The next section will cover a variety of different ways to build a portfolio, and you can also dig into your past jobs to find instances where you’ve been involved in marketing. For example, I worked in a bank in college, and you’d better believe that my first few clients heard all about how I presented customers with the benefits of different investment and deposit products in a way that improved the success rate, or how I coached other tellers on presenting products in the same ways. Part of being a marketer is about being creative and recognizing marketing opportunities in situations that aren’t necessarily “marketing jobs”.

As I said before, your equipment needs are going to be pretty basic. I’ve included a list of what I use below, and I’ve starred the items that I would consider absolutely essential. Remember, of course, that you don’t necessarily have to OWN every item. Reliable access is usually good enough for a beginner.

•Computer* – A laptop is handy if you work and travel frequently, but don’t run out and rack up your credit cards to buy one if you don’t have it and your lifestyle doesn’t absolutely dictate that you need it.

•Internet Access* – Not only do you need access, but you should have some form of backup access with a second provider. There’s nothing worse than carving out a block of time to work on something for a deadline, only to find out that your ISP is down for some reason.

•Printer / Scanner / Fax* – You don’t have to have both a scanner and a fax, but you should at least have one or the other – or a Kinko’s nearby. Although you can do a lot online, you’ll almost definitely have cases where you need to physically scan in a document and send it to someone’s fax number.

•Telephone* – Most clients will want to talk to you on the phone at least once. Skype can work, too, if your computer is on most of the time and you have some kind of solution for mobile access.

•Notebooks / Pens / Pencils* – This is just basic office stuff that you should always have around. You never know when you’ll need to write down an idea and you won’t want to wait for your computer to fire up (or when the power will go out and you’ll feel like laying out a project on paper).

•Data Backup* – An external hard drive can work, but I prefer Dropbox because it’s completely offsite (and free for the first 2 GB).

•Microsoft Office* – Although it’s possible to get by with OpenOffice, MSOffice products have made my life considerably easier. They run faster, all of the odd little features work exactly as you expect (like notations that people leave in long documents), and you don’t have to worry about files not opening up and looking exactly like you left them in OpenOffice. Given the time it has saved me, it was worth the minor investment.

•Software Specific to Your Specialization* – It’s hard to be too specific here (we’ll talk more about this later), but most types of marketing can be aided with the use of software. If there’s a software package that will allow you to be more efficient and better serve your clients, make it a priority to buy it early on. At the same time, don’t just buy everything in sight. Make sure it will truly help your business.

•Mobile Broadband – It’s not a necessity, but I do love being on long car trips and being able to get online through my laptop and get a bit of work done. It has also saved me quite a bit during the months that I travel, since I no longer need to pay for hotel wifi.

•Business Cards – If you do much face-to-face networking, you should have a set. I like Moo.com Cards because you can make them really unique and people always want to talk about them.

•A Website – I used to have a website, but I shut it down years ago and I haven’t ever really felt like I needed it. In fact, for SEO clients it was almost a bad thing, since they expected my website to rank #1 for the search term “SEO”. I didn’t have time to worry about ranking for SEO – I was busy getting my clients to rank well. The same could be said of social media if they don’t see your site getting actively promoted.

This reminds me of a really well known blackhat seo guy I used to be friends with and what he told me one time; Apparently tons of people would come to him for help with questions about site structure, indexing, etc, etc, etc. and he said his answer 99% of the time was just that they needed to build more links. That was it, forget everything and build more links.

Going back to Adam’s advice above…I agree 100% that simply building more campaigns will make you progress faster and further than almost anything else. I’m not saying don’t ask questions or anything at all, just not matter what build new campaigns every day.

So, I want to see how many of you are up for a 30 day experiment. For the next 30 days, commit to building at least 1 campaign and up to 5 campaigns each day. A new campaign could mean simply taking a campaign you already have running and moving it to a new traffic source, or doing the same campaign in a different country. It doesn’t always have to mean building a totally new campaign from scratch. A campaign should not be taking you days to launch. If it is, let me know and let’s talk about your approach.

Don’t over complicate this…the point isn’t to make perfect campaigns, just to make campaigns.

If you want to keep track of this yourself that’s cool..get a calendar or something and cross out every day you build x amount of campaigns every day for the next 30 days. We started a thread in the forum where people can post each day the # of campaigns they make (myself included). It’s going to be really interesting to see how many people follow through with this. I will report back on that one!

I don’t know if many people will do this but it is probably the one thing I can recommend doing that would take you to the next level.

Part 1 – Can you be a long term affiliate?

Some people think that affiliate marketing is a get in and get out type of thing. Jump on the hot niche, ride the latest hot traffic source, etc. I don’t want to say this isn’t a viable business strategy because some affiliates make a ton of money doing this. However, more affiliates end up just chasing the successful affiliates and don’t hit it big by doing this. Affiliates who build their business this way can have long term success; you just need to keep in mind that each lucrative period you have, it is not always going to be sustainable.

So what about using different traffic sources, niches, etc. to diversify? Yes this works well, and will be more stable but there is a downside. The downside is that you are working on so many different things that it becomes difficult to really scale and ramp up one traffic source or niche. Even worse, you end up jumping around from one thing to another because it can be difficult to manage multiple campaigns across multiple traffic sources.

“Ok great so you’re telling us it’s not the best to just do the hottest thing, but it’s not good to diversify too much either?”

Jeez! Hang on…let me continue…

When I first started I focused on one thing at a time and once it became profitable, I figured out how to outsource it and start diversifying. My advice is that you first get proficient at one thing, it doesn’t matter what it is. Don’t get fooled into thinking PPV is the best, or that POF doesn’t convert, or whatever. People are making money with all these traffic sources and if someone tells you it doesn’t work, its B.S.

Pick one traffic source that you enjoy working with. Not one you think everyone is making a killing on, pick one that you see potential in and you know people are having success with and something you know people are making money at. Don’t go hunting for some obscure traffic source or anything though. Don’t try to build your business by mastering 7Search. I mean you can if you want, but you need to pick something with some volume and decent traffic.

Now, I know sometimes because of budget you can’t keep going with a paid traffic source. If you are going to do paid traffic, you need to have some cash. I talk to a lot of people who want to turn their $200 they have for advertising into enough to make a full time income. You can start with a minimal amount of cash yes, and I have known people who have done this, but you also have to plan for what happens when you run out of capital.

Just a side note – consider yourself very lucky to be able to start an affiliate/internet marketing business. By any standards the amount of money required to start is very low compared to other types of businesses. A lot of people want to build an affiliate business but don’t even want to spend $1k on advertising (let alone $2k, $3k, etc.). Do you have any idea how much $$ you would have to sink into a brick and mortar business to get that going? So when you get scared about spending money, just keep that in mind.

If you feel you really don’t have money to spend on paid advertising, think about this;

* You can use coupons to pay for some advertising costs
* You can go through your garage and Ebay or Craigslist some stuff (most people have at least a few hundred worth sitting around they wouldn’t miss)
* You can freelance and earn money to pay for advertising costs. Do you have any writing skills? Web design skills? Bid on some Elance jobs or post your qualifications here http://www.ppvplaybook.com/forum/for…Buy-Sell-Trade
* Don’t have any skills? No problem! People need all kinds of button pushing grunt work. It”s out there if you want to do it.
* Get some clients on Elance. I know people who became very successful affiliates after getting to ‘play’ with clients money and campaigns for a while.

People are lazy. They don’t want to work. They want an endless pool of money sitting in their bank account to be able to test traffic with. Great if that’s the situation but I hope my above points make it very clear that there is no reason you can’t have money for testing. I am always pretty baffled by people who ‘want’ to make money online, build a business, etc. but look at me like I’ve just said the craziest thing when I suggest they sell some stuff on Ebay or do some grunt article writing to get some capital. In case you’re wondering – yes this conversation happens regularly.

If you still feel you don’t have any money for testing then you need to focus on free traffic sources like SEO, Youtube, article marketing, etc. Yes, I know it can suck but if you really don’t have money to spend (even after reading everything above) then this is what you need to focus on. I guarantee you could make money doing this…I have. Yes it will be boring, yes it will suck, and yes it’s probably not something you are going to make $100k a month from, but it is something you can do to make decent, steady money with very little cost.

Ok are we out of excuses on all fronts now?

Now what to do when you decide to focus on one traffic source.

Say you decide to focus on POF. You would work on learning POF traffic inside and out. Figure out what offers work, what types of landing pages work, what type of targeting works, what countries work, etc, etc. This isn’t something that is going to take you years or anything; you can learn a ton in a short period of time by really focusing like this. Where a lot of people will fail is when they aren’t making money on a traffic source after a while, they will just jump to the next thing. This is exactly what you don’t want to do. This happened to me when I started doing PPC way back in olden times. I just honestly couldn’t get it working well at first. What kept me going was that I knew people were making money doing it, and I knew if I moved onto something else I would just be back at square one again. So, I pushed through and eventually ‘got it’.

Once you start to feel some stability in one traffic source (or technique as in the data feed sites) you can move on. What does ‘stability’ mean? I would say being able to know what works and how to consistently make money from a traffic source. It certainly doesn’t mean every campaign will be a winner. It does mean that you know enough of what to do that it becomes more a matter of just testing enough campaigns rather than wondering what to do or if something is ever going to work.

At this point you will have a good understanding of running offers on a particular traffic source. You will also know a lot about split testing, tracking, and selecting offers. All of this knowledge will make the next traffic source you decide to work with easier to master. Many of the techniques and tips you learn will just need minor tweaks to make profitable campaigns on other traffic sources.

Please note this is just my personal opinion on setting goals and what works for some will not work for others. We all have to learn how to motivate ourselves and stick to our goals in whatever way works for us.

You see, I think most people fail to reach their goals because they set them too high. What!? Your not supposed to say ‘ I want to eventually make $2000 a day profit’!? Well, that’s fine but you have to remember there are a lot of steps in between where you might be now and your ultimate goal. That kind of thinking reminds me of the South Park episode ‘Gnomes’ where the gnomes explain their plan for reaching financial riches by collecting underpants like this :

Phase 1: Collect Underpants
Phase 2: ?
Phase 3: Profit

What works for me is setting smaller, easily attainable goals that seem almost easy to reach. It’s fine to have a big goal in mind but you have to map out how you are going to get there.

I have seen a lot of affiliates get really excited about a new niche, technique, or system they bought and make this grand plan to launch 10 campaigns a day for a month. What usually happens is they might start off good for a couple days but then they get busy one day, make only a few campaigns the next, and all of a sudden they have ‘failed’ at their goal and get discouraged.

I like to set smaller stepping stone goals that I know I can reach without a problem. It makes it easier because I keep having ‘success’ at reaching my goals which motvates me to keep going.

To give an example, say I had a goal of launching 5 new PPV campaigns per day. Instead of starting with 5…I would want to make sure I could launch 1 a day successfully for a while. Now some some days I might not be able to launch even 1 campaign and that’s ok. What I’m looking for is consistency so over the course of a week I would want to make sure I launched 7 campaigns.

I would want to do this (1 campaign per day) until I felt like it was really easy and routine. Only at that point would I set a goal of launching 2 campaigns per day. From there is just a ‘rinse and repeat’ process.

I’ve always managed to lunch more campaigns over the course of a month this way than just arbitrarily saying ‘I’m going to do x amount of campaigns per day now”. If I do that, at the end of a month or two I always realize how many more campaigns I would have launched if I set a small, easy to achieve goal.

Anyway, that’s my thoughts on setting goals. More PPV stuff after the New Year…