Check Out My Latest Video of My Affiliate Marketing Venture

Check out my weekly video update below.  If you prefer to read there is a full transcript beneath the video

TRANSCRIPT

Hi there, Steve here from, I’m a down here in The Gambia, on my veranda as usual.  I promise next week, next week I’m going to take you to the beach. Yeah, I was going to do it today, but I’ve got to hang around here today because I’ve got a mechanic coming to have a look at my car.

So, anyway, next week we’ll go to the beach, I promise. It’s only around, I don’t know, 20-30 minutes that direction and, yeah, next week. Anyway, welcome to my regular weekly update on my ventures, my toils in trying to establish a profitable affiliate marketing business.

As always, turn me up to one and a half times speed. I sound much better, I think, and it takes less time for you to run through it.

So just following on from last week from the company liquidation, company closure. Yeah, we appointed liquidators Monday last week. There’s still a lot of faffing about to do with that job to finish things off. They want all sorts of paperwork, all sorts of information, etc, etc, etc.

I think during the week we’ve got everything sorted out, all the letters of appointment done and all the sort of red tape, UK company law, sort of red tape and, you know, procedures that are years and years old that you have to go through. To legally close the company down, basically. So going forward with the window blind business, which I’ve been in for 25 years, obviously I know a little bit about it, maybe?

I’ve got a few of my long-time customers, want to sort of follow me. I’ve decided that I’ll help them out to sort of buy their blinds. So it’s a little bit like an affiliate marketing business, really, where I use my experience and the power of buying as a little group to go to my suppliers, long-term suppliers and say, look, you didn’t have a problem with me, I don’t owe you any money, let me trade with you on a customer order basis and I’ll bring this business to you, you pay me, give me a small discount and I’ll support the customers, you supply them and hopefully it’ll go forward and do that.

I will keep running my little book, my little e-book, how to start your own window blind retail business. I think in the UK here, if you do a search on starting a window blind business, that actually comes up the first organic link on Google, that’s after the sort of sponsored, after you go to the top of the Google search. So yeah, it’s well worth it.

I think for that alone we get, we average one enquiry a week from that, so if I put it also onto a Facebook advert, I know I’m going to get several enquiries per week and just see how it goes. And that actually also, the business that goes with that also entails a Facebook advertising special offer, if you like, where instead of people paying an agency $1,000 a month just for the management of their account, they get the leads in their area for maybe £5, $5 each, and 5 or 10, maybe to start on 5 and go up to 10, and then they get the leads and then it’s up to them to, obviously they have to pay for the advertising in their area, but they get the leads and then it’s up to them to provide the service for the customer that eventually gets the sales. I think somebody said, I heard someone say this weekend that leads, advertising leads are not sales.

Sales are what the company makes from the leads, so it’s down to your product, your service, your service levels and the customer experience as to what you actually sell, not the leads that you’re getting from your adverts. Adverts do not make money, it’s the whole package that makes the money. That rang something in my brain that everything must work together, not just a very good advertising system.

Anyway, going forward then, well no, this week sorry, we’ll cover what was done last week. So yeah, I’ve been mindful of the new regulations or rules, regulations, guidelines, whatever, that Google and Yahoo are bringing in or brought in this month regarding sort of spam and sort of quality of mailing lists. I’ve been basically looking at my own email list this week.

It’s currently in ConvertKit and I am now moving it into the new Affiliate System. So what I’ve been doing a couple of times this week is sending out an email to about 1,400 people on the list in ConvertKit. Now most of them in there, at least 900 of them I believe, are double opt-in, so they are confirmed subscribers.

The ones which are imported, which could be up to 500, I don’t know, I can’t tell how many of the 500 I imported that came from my previous autoresponder which was Aweber. I can’t tell the number of those that actually unsubscribed since they’ve been in ConvertKit. So I do know that since September every single person on that list has opted in.

Little did I know they were doing it, but they have been doing it and due to the way I set it up, which I thought was incorrect at the time, but it turns out it was correct, you know. Funny how these things happen. Anyway, yeah, we’re moving those across.

So of the 1,400 I think, with the figures down here somewhere, I think I’ve moved over 250 in the first week. So what I’m doing, I send out an email, an email broadcast, yeah, a couple of days later I resend it and then all of the, I go into ConvertKit, all of the people who have opened that email, I tag them, I export them to a CSV file and then upload them into Affiliate Systems contacts list where they get a tag, I give them a tag that they’re sort of from ConvertKit, something like that. So I know they were a bulk import somewhere down the line/

So now I know that everything going into Affiliate System is, everybody going into Affiliate System have double opted in, plus they’ve also opened an email, so they’ve engaged with myself in the last 30 days, well in the last week really. So then sort of going forward, everybody, it’ll be checked somehow, I’m guessing there’s some sort of automation in there that will signal if somebody hasn’t opened an email for 30 days and they will automatically get removed, basically get unsubscribed, whatever, however it works. Obviously there’s no point having somebody on your list who isn’t actually opening the emails, there’s nothing in that apart from vanity, sort of the size of your email list is vanity and it’s the number of people opening your emails which is sanity, which combined with the rest of your package, you know, is where your profit is.

So it’s a whole bundle of things all together and which you’ve got to work together to make your business the best it can be.

So that’s starting,  I’ve got 1,400 that I have in ConvertKit, I hope that I will get maybe 500 good leads so.  I’ll be running this process for  the next 30 days I’ll be running, well no, maybe a little longer than 30 days because I’ve got new people going into ConvertKit still from my Facebook advertising, so I will actually stop the process of emailing from  there, I don’t know, 20, maybe 30 days after I change over the, change over where people are going from my Facebook advert into affiliate service, affiliate system, sorry, there’s a couple of things I need to work out in there because affiliate system actually links directly to Facebook lead ad forms somehow that is probably on the list,  it’s definitely on the list of things to do next week, so yeah, I’ll be doing that, I’ll be looking at that next week and put it, see if I can put it into practice and get it moving,

So yeah, we’re talking numbers there so yeah, I’ve had a look at sort of how the business is growing in terms of followers and yeah, I’m quite happy.   This YouTube channel,  has, 21 actual subscribers/followers, that’s totally organic and I think I started in sort of earnest on YouTube in November really, last year, mid-November maybe last year, so yeah, I’m happy with that, happy with the way it’s growing and yeah, more than happy, yeah,

So on my Facebook, the three places I’m sort of concentrating on really at the moment are YouTube, Facebook and TikTok, which are the places I believe that my target audience are, maybe Instagram as well will come up fairly quickly, but yeah, at the moment that’s the places. I did think that TikTok was maybe for a younger generation where I don’t really think are my target audience, but I do believe that the sort of older generations like myself are actually going on to TikTok, which yeah, that’s fine, so yeah, so YouTube I think I’ve got seven, sorry, yeah, 21 subscribers on my YouTube channel.

Facebook, my Facebook business, yeah, my Facebook business page has 720 followers, which I must confess are, a lot of them are people who will not become customers, they are from a like building campaign, which sort of built several hundred people onto my list in a couple of days basically, so basically some mentors do teach it, some don’t like it, but it’s completely above board, it entails doing a paid advert to a country where you’re going to get a big click rate, basically a good number of people are going to like your, like your page, so yeah, sort of 10, 20 pounds,  10, 20 dollars, whatever, over two days you can get several hundred people in sort of places like India, Philippines, who will like your page, you may think it’s a bit underhand, but you know, and not very transparent, but people do look at your number, number of followers and, and if the number of followers five, they’re going to think, oh no, the number of followers is only 700, they’re not going to check out where they’re coming from, so  it’s manipulating the system if you like, but you know, Facebook will let you do it, so you know, it doesn’t affect your ratings on Facebook, so I decided to do it and, and if you want to do it.  If you want advice on how to do that and get a load of, load of followers on your page, let me know if you need any help and I’ll, I’ll be glad to give it.

Anyway, I’m a little bit behind on the Affiliate System, homework, or tasks or whatever, don’t like homework, I never have liked homework, when I was in school, so yeah, so I’m a little bit behind on that, I haven’t got my Linktree done yet, that’s, Linktree is just a page that, you know, you link, you put in your bio on all the, on the social medias and, you know, it gives people a brief, brief overview of what you do and with a link to, to all of your social and your social media sites and your blog, so they can go and check you out on, on, on all these places, so I’ll be doing that this week.

So I’ve got other things I want to do this week.  We’re, Going to move the place that the Facebook lead prospects go to, from ConvertKit to Affiliate System

I found a new AI system for converting sort of audio to text, so it’s (supposed to be) 98% accurate, there’s a free version which is totally suitable for what I’m doing, so I’m going to test that out today for when this actually goes on to the on to my blog tomorrow to see, test it out, see how it goes and I will be doing a report on that in my blog during the next week. I also have this week to do.   I have got to do my Linktree page obviously and yeah, just generally keeping up with everything and making sure we’re on track.

So I think that’s about all for this week. I meant to check the book sales, the book sales from last week, I don’t know how its doing, I’ve been doing a little bit of marketing during the week to, to the sort of Facebook groups of people who sort of visit the country here, as you may remember the guide was on, or the book was a guide to The Gambia, so I don’t know if there’s been any sales, I should, I guess I should check that but I would hope there will be because I hope that some of the people who, some of the businesses I’ve mentioned in there will, will download, will download at least a Kindle copy and leave a comment because at the end of the day if we get more sales it’s good for them, good publicity for them, so yeah, we’ll see how that goes. Other than that, it’s just  keep moving the business along and yeah, so I hope you enjoyed that and I hope it’s been informative for you.

So next week I promise we will go to the beach, I think there’s a beach,  I haven’t been there for a couple of years, so yeah, keep tuned and I’ll see you on the beach next week.

Okay, thanks for joining me and have a brilliant week.

Thank you very much.