Weekly Video Diary of My Exploits in the Affiliate Marketing Niche – 27 February 2024

Here is the latest video where I report what I’ve been doing in my business the past week.  If you prefer there is a full transcript beneath the video

TRANSCRIPT OF THE VIDEO

Hi and welcome, welcome to my home down here in Gambia. Sorry, apology for a start. I did say last week that I’d go to the beach today. It was my intention, but hey, I’ve got the mechanic coming again. Yeah, there is a saying in these parts that we run on GMT here. Which, although the timing is GMT, the GMT here means Gambian Maybe Time.

So, if somebody tells you a time for something, it’s maybe. Maybe it’ll be today, maybe at 2 o’clock, maybe at 3 o’clock, maybe at 6 o’clock, or maybe it’ll even be tomorrow. This is the way of Africa, I believe.

Makes for an interesting life sometimes, yeah. Anyway, back to business. And, yeah, I’m thinking I had a very productive week of progress in getting things set up for what I believe is going to be a new era in the online marketplace.

So, we’re moving from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0. Web 3.0 is a more inclusive place where it’s going to be more about communities and things like that, I believe. More about that later. I have a little post on my blog as well about the difference between Web 2.0 and Web 3.0, if you want to go have a look at that just look at the previous post

Anyway, I’m rebuilding my business, my email list, and all my marketing within an Affiliate System at the moment. So, the past week, I’ve been actually moving my email list from a different auto-responder. I was actually with ConvertKit, where I had just about 1,400 subscribers.

They’re all mainly double-opt-in subscribers. So, what I’ve been doing is sending a broadcast email to them, to the whole list, and then I go in a couple of days after the broadcast, re-send it, and the 30% or so that have opened the email, I mark them off on the list, and download them, and they’re downloaded to a CSV file. Then they go across to Affiliate System, the contact database in there, as double-opt-in and engaged people.

So, so far I’ve done that a couple of times, and I have, I think at the moment, in Affiliate System I’ve got around 500 people. Some of them I’ve come in actually to Affiliate System from my blog, from the newsletter link on my blog. But most have been imported from ConvertKit.

And in ConvertKit at the moment, I think there’s around about 1,000 people. So, the last email I did, this last email I did was, I think on Saturday, to the, what I call the squeaky clean list now. And that got an open rate of over 50%, which is, you know, I’m used to sending one email, if I send a broadcast out from ConvertKit, I was getting 20, between 20 and 25%, or something like that, between 19 and, say, 19 and 25% is what I would expect my opening rate on an email to be, the email obviously that’s gone out, went out on Saturday, went to double opted people who had engaged with my emails in the last 30 days. So, it’s going to be built that way, it’s going to be maintained that way. The email list will be people who have double opted in, and also have engaged in the last 30 days.

In some way. I continue to go to ConvertKit as well, to the people that’s left in there. My new people are still going in there as well, so they will obviously be current, currently engaged people, because they’re getting emails all the time, and will have responded in the last 30 days.

Anyway, at the moment I’m getting, I think the first email that went out on Saturday to the whole list, 1,000. Opening rate was amazingly, down to 6%, which is sort of weeding out the people that I don’t really want on my mailing list at the end of the day, because if they’re not opening emails, they’re not buying anything. Although it’s nice to say, I’ve got an emailing list of 1,000 whatever people.

If they’re not opening your emails, that’s just vanity. At the end of the day, it’s just vanity. You need people on your mailing list these days, who are gonna open emaild, and are gonna engage with you.

I had 1,400-ish just over in ConvertKit, and I’ve now got 500 in Affiliate System, which is my core email list now, and I expect to add maybe another maybe another 100 I’ll get from that. I don’t know. I’m gonna keep obviously emailing that list every week for the next month, I would guess, until nobody’s engaging with the emails, basically, so we’ll see at the end of the day how many unengaged people I had in there.

Be interesting now. Anyway, Affiliate System’s also got a social media manager, so where you can prepare your posts in advance. Now, I’ve been doing that for quite a while now.

I’ve done it for two of my companies, one of them no longer here, so I’ve got one company, just my affiliate marketing business now, and to a lesser extent, I do my Facebook ad agency as well. Anyway, so I post every day to Facebook business page, a Facebook groups page, Instagram page, a Google My Business page, a LinkedIn page, and a Twitter or X page, more or less the same post, but you can sort of think about them individually anyway. The system I’ve been using was Viral Dashboard.

It actually cost me $60 a month. I don’t know why, because I think it should have been $30, but I seem to have been paying $60 worth. I don’t know whether I upgraded it to something that I didn’t really want, so I don’t know.

But anyway, I’ll cancel that, because I can now do all of that scheduling in Affiliate Systems, which saved me at least $60, but maybe it should have been $30, but I don’t know. But yeah, it’s quite simple. You just write your posts for each day, copy and paste them into place, upload your media, your pictures, and just link them across and schedule them for each day.

It’s simple. And then you just obviously check just to make sure everything’s running okay. Occasionally.

And yeah, a couple of hours once a month. You can schedule a whole month’s social media posts if you so want. I so want, because if I’m not available for anything at any time, I know I’ve got one social media post going out every day.

Whether I put anything else on top of that, I can decide that as we go along. So yeah, that long term, that’s going to save me quite a bit. The next thing I want to look at in there is the linking of… the way it links with Facebook lead forms.

Using Facebook lead adverts as one of my traffic sources. It’s obviously of great interest how that actually works, how the linkage between the two actually works. So hopefully I’ll get that looked at, I don’t know, the next week I would guess, and then go from there.

Sorry, I’ve got a child looking for dinner money. One moment, see if I’ve got any. Nope.

Sorry about this. Okay. Bye.

Yes. Sorry about that, one of my stepchildren on the way to school wanting the fare and school lunch. Anyway, where was I? Yeah, started looking at the Facebook leads and how they interlink with affiliate systems.

See if there’s any benefit in using that rather than what I’m using now, which is linked with Zapier, or actually I use move, so it’s linked in there somewhere. I know how it’s done, but I’m not going to go into it, not on this video anyway.

Anyway, yeah, last week we actually started, I’ve joined a mastermind of people in the affiliate marketing scene. They’re all about the same sort of level as what I am, they’re all about the same level, and we decided to check in once a week. We have a get-together on a Wednesday evening, and sort of go on a Zoom and sort of compare notes, see what we’re doing.

I think if you’re able to do so, I would highly recommend getting into sort of a small mastermind group. We are five people, so we spring ideas off each other. Some people know something a little bit more about other things than others do, so it’s a sort of it’s a joining of knowledge.

Although we’re all pretty much starters, we all have some knowledge about specifics, which is good, yeah, so we can bounce ideas off each other. We can generally see how each of us is doing, and more or less hold each other accountable, if you like. I would think that is one of the benefits, and yeah, it gets you able to speak to like-minded people.

So that is, if anybody, yeah, if anybody’s thinking about sort of building a business in affiliate marketing, I would say, get yourself somebody who is on a similar level, see if you can form a little mastermind group. It can be two people, four people, five people, whatever. But yeah, I think it’s very, very, very, very beneficial, and it can be mutually beneficial and rewarding for all the members.

On to, actually, we went to Friday. I had a very interesting webinar by my other mentor, Paul O’Mahoney of Rethink, where he was talking about the move from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 and how we’re sort of moving from the influencer era, if you like, the influencer era to the more, what would you call it, the more, if you like, group and community, sorry, I’m getting it right, groups and communities culture where people join together in communities online, a bit like we do in real life, basically. Yeah, so I think communities of some description are going to be very, very vital in the future, and I think everybody, many people are going down that route now, so yeah, it’s pretty new to me, and there is a post on my blog about it, and I will update more information as I go along with that.

So that was followed by a very interesting training or webinar, whatever, on mindset by a guy called, what was he called, Robin Banks, now a strange name, I thought, sounds more like a dodgy profession rather than a name, but yeah, very lively character, very zany man, but he talked a lot of sense about mindset and the importance of a positive mindset for any business person. It’s something that I’ve discovered myself, obviously, that if you don’t have a positive mindset, if you have some negatives in your mindset, it can stop you achieving your goals. So I think, as we all know, everything begins with a thought, and the thoughts and the way you talk to yourself needs to be positive, so it’s a big advocate of positive self-talk, which I’ve been I’ve been actively using now for about two, three months, which I believe I’m benefiting from.

The underlying message was you can be what you believe you are, so yeah, I think it’s time to realise that we need to be positive and to make sure that we’re talking to ourselves the best way we can.

Yesterday, at the end of the week then, we finished yesterday brilliant, brilliant day. It was, we’re on football now, sorry, it was the Carabao Cup final here in England.

That’s the soccer, football, whatever you want to call it. Carabao Cup, it’s the EFL, English Football League Cup, sponsored by Carabao, that’s the energy drink, not the not the Filipino, Water Buffalo.

Anyway, my team, Liverpool, won against all the odds, really, I suppose, because I think there were 11 first team players injured, including sort of three world-class players, so they had young kids playing, well, young kids, they were sort of 17, 18 year olds, a lot of under 20, under 20 year old boys playing sort of people with big reputations.  But yeah, they won 1-1-0 in extra time or overtime, whatever you want to call it, wherever you are.

So yeah, really great day for the team that I follow. Right, what else to say?

Yeah, one negative this week, I’ve been pulled up a little bit about my spelling. Yeah, and looking back at some of the things I’ve put out recently, I’ve made a few spelling mistakes, I admit it, and I’ll go back and I’ll sort it out.

It’s maybe something I need to sort out big time because it’s sloppy, but it’s not the end of the world. I don’t know how I lapsed into these things, but because I used to be pretty meticulous about it, it did actually irritate me that some of the English language is being changed I don’t know about the rest of the world, but here in England the sort of words are being changed to different words, like should have has become should of have has become of should have should have S-H-O-U-L-D apostrophe V-E has become should of even,  on the BBC they do it. It used to irritate me to death, but I thought well, come on it’s all it’s all evolution of the language I guess but yeah spelling isn’t the be all and end all I guess, but it does give a good impression if most of your words are spoken correctly I guess.

Lesson to make read proofread your stuff a little bit better Stephen because it does irritate some people obviously in the marketing game you don’t want to be irritating people. So on to next week what we’ve got going on well obviously it’s going to be the end of the second month of the first quarter so we’ve got to look at what we had planned for this first quarter what the goals were and all this and see what we’re going to pull a finger out and get done in March so we’re on track.

So yeah, first quarter was very important first quarter of the year was very important I’ve got some very big plans for March which I’m very excited about hopefully we’ll get some things new things launched by about mid-March I’ve got a birthday in March so something to I don’t know look forward to or dread or what,  I don’t know.  the numbers keep adding up these days but hey they’re only numbers,

Yeah, so that’s about all for this week and I’ll see you next week and I hope we’ll be coming from the beach that is my intention I need to get to the beach because I want to film some creative for Facebook adverts actually on the beach so yeah so join me next week from the beach.

OK, thanks for visiting and cheers.  Bye.