Don’t waste time visiting and reading every single forum and blog – the real learning happens when you actually start trying out ideas.

Here are the four key correlations found between the longest lasting companies, as stated in the book:

Conservatism in Financing. The companies did not risk their capital gratuitously. They understood the meaning of money in an old-fashioned way; they knew the usefulness of spare cash in the kitty. Money in hand allowed them to snap up options when their competitors could not. They did not have to convince third-party financiers of the attractiveness of opportunities they wanted to pursue. Money in the kitty allowed them to govern their growth and evolution.

Make a mental note: spend your money wisely . Here’s a quick scenario for the affiliate marketer. You just made a tidy profit of $60k from your last campaign. You can either a) buy yourself that super sweet sports car you’ve always wanted or b) leave it in the bank in order to fund the future growth of your company. If you want to be in the game for the long run, it’s pretty easy to see which option is truly the best to take for the future of you and your company.

Sensitivity to the World Around Them. Whether they had built their fortunes on knowledge (such as DuPont’s technological innovations) or on natural resources (such as the Hudson’s Bay Company’s access to the furs of Canadian forests), the living companies in our study were able to adapt themselves to changes in the world around them. As wars, depressions, technologies, and politics surged and ebbed, they always seemed to excel at keeping their feelers out, staying attuned to whatever was going on. For information, they sometimes relied on packets carried over vast distances by portage and ship, yet they managed to react in a timely fashion to whatever news they received. They were good at learning and adapting.

Ok, this stuff goes far into history, but the point of this is clear: the companies which have lasted for a very long amount of time have all adapted to their surroundings. For the affiliate, the webmaster or the eBusiness owner, the ‘world’ changes at a faster rate – niches that are super hot can pretty much die in a matter of months. So if you want to stick around, you must look into building a strategy and investing some time and money into long term niches. If you’re a short term kind of affiliate (advertiser, or business owner), remember to keep your wits about you and have your eyes fixated on latest developments. As one affiliate who usually likes to speak in third person once said: ‘Adapt or get paved the fuck over’.

Awareness of Their Identity. No matter how broadly diversified the companies were, their employees all felt like parts of a whole. Lord Cole, chairman of Unilever in the 1960s, for example, saw the company as a fleet of ships. Each ship was independent, but the whole fleet was greater than the sum of its parts. The feeling of belonging to an organization and identifying with its achievements is often dismissed as soft. But case histories repeatedly show that a sense of community is essential for long-term survival. Managers in the living companies we studied were chosen mostly from within, and all considered themselves to be stewards of a long-standing enterprise. Their top priority was keeping the institution at least as healthy as it had been when they took over.

I think this point is far more important to huge companies than it is to the kind of business we do in the ‘internet world’. Affiliate in particular usually work completely alone, and outsource their needs as required. Nonetheless, if you’ve got a business or an established website and you have people working for you then I won’t dispute that the above is pretty important for your success. Infer what you will from the above passage.

Tolerance of New Ideas. The long-lived companies in our study tolerated activities in the margin: experiments and eccentricities that stretched their understanding. They recognized that new businesses may be entirely unrelated to existing businesses and that the act of starting a business need not be centrally controlled. W.R. Grace, from its very beginning, encouraged autonomous experimentation. The company was founded in 1854 by an Irish immigrant in Peru and traded in guano, a natural fertilizer, before it moved into sugar and tin. Eventually, the company established Pan American Airways. Today it is primarily a chemical company, although it is also the leading provider of kidney dialysis services in the United States.

Our business rapidly changes, new ideas come and go all the time, and there’s really no chance of success unless you try out new things all the time in this business. So realistically speaking the above point should already be pretty obvious to you.

I also came across this awesome statement in the text:

Stora was in copper in order to exist; it did not exist to be in copper.

Replace ‘copper’ with your industry and you’ve got yourself a brilliant quote. Try out new things and don’t just stick to one type of business/industry. If you want to last you’ll need to adapt and change over the years, so you might as well get ready now.

]]> http://www.Aminology.com/how-to-last-as-an-entrepreneur/feed/ 0 http://www.Aminology.com/prosper202-fantastic-in-house-tracking-tool/ http://www.Aminology.com/prosper202-fantastic-in-house-tracking-tool/#comments Sun, 29 Jun 2008 23:17:00 +0000 Amin http://www.Aminology.com/?p=22 I started using Prosper202 a few days ago, and I’m glad I made the effort to download it and get it set up on my server to test it out.

Prosper202 is a 100% free self hosted tracking tool, designed to be used to track your affiliate marketing campaigns. It takes no more than 5 minutes to install, and once done setting up campaigns becomes a breeze.

Prosper202 allows you to track and identify the top converting keywords and ads, as well as see a live auto-updating view of visitors interacting with your affiliate campaigns. The interface is extremely user friendly, with instructions provided in each step explaining the various actions required from you.

Perhaps the only real downside of the tool is its inability to record your real CPC costs – you have to enter an estimate CPC bid which is hardly accurate considering how click costs always fluctuate. As a result, the ROI generated in the stats also becomes inaccurate and completely useless.

However, this is hardly an issue, as your ROI can (and should) be calculated based on the stats generated in the actual affiliate network and your PPC account. Prosper202 does the job by telling you exactly which campaigns, which keywords and which ads are converting in a very manageable and friendly interface, and for a free tool that is one hell of a good deal.

Ultimately, it is down to the consumer to make sure they read the damn small print. But a major part of this business is to make the lead/purchase occur as fast as possible: landing pages are optimised to convert well and convert FAST. A typical zip/email/cell submit page is entirely focused on getting the consumer to enter their details in the field and hit submit without pausing to read the small print, which is conveniantly displayed at the bottom of the page in a font which challenges you to read it all the way to the end without causing your eyes to water.

If you promote these kind of offers then you know what I’m talking about.

I would personally never fill in a email/cell submit myself, or recommend a friend or family member in debt to apply for one of those debt solution/loan offers, and I’m sure you wouldn’t too.

So why do we do it?

In case you’re wondering, I’m not taking a ‘holier than thou’ stance. I myself have promoted offers I deem as ’slightly shady’ in the past, in fact, I’ve got a few running now too. Heck, I even made a post about one of my ‘debt free’ campaigns last month.

But I’m interested to know WHY we do it.

It seems like it all boils down to greed – those offers pay damn well after all, don’t they?

I was the first person in the contest to hit $1000 in earnings with Advaliant . You can read Nickycakes’ post here .

I made my $1K by running debt relief ads on Facebook. I made and tested dozens of ads. Here are two of the more interesting ones I posted which despite having poor CTRs, managed to get a good volume of traffic without getting slapped with $1 clicks.

This ad did best when targeted at 25-45 year olds in the United States. I had a 0.06% CTR on this ad, which was the best CTR I managed to get in this particular campaign.

This ad was targeted at all college kids in the United States. I had a weak 0.02% CTR on this ad, probably because of the mention of a zip submit, but it converted well.

I kept these going until I won the contest, upon which I killed them and scrapped the campaigns because the profits were eventually simply not worth the ad spend.

I will definitely be working with Advaliant in the future, my account manager Geoff Marcy is a top guy to work with too. In fact, Advaliant sent an Xbox 360 to Matt Marcin who came second in the contest. Matt definitely deserved it more than I did, because he made the $1K in less than 24 hours, while it took me 3 days to hit the $1K through Facebook. Having said that, Facebook did severely limit the amount of traffic I could have potentially done, for the simple reason that lunatics are running their social ad system.

A big thanks to Nickycakes and Advaliant for this contest and for each sending out an Xbox 360 to me and Matt!

Posts like this are important because it gets affiliates thinking outside of the box. The more you promote as an affiliate, the more you experience, and the more you experience, the more you understand about how the whole system works.

I invest most of my time and money into creating and marketing my own informational products. My marketing campaigns in the CPA area are primarily for me to gain a greater understanding of affiliate marketing so I can in turn apply it to my own business, and gain inspiration for future projects.

There are certain types of offers which are prevalent in almost all the major CPA networks out there. Ringtones, cash loans and weight loss products would be a few good examples. While I personally don’t like to promote the more shady and ethically questionable offers, there is an abundance of good quality offers that can not only be promoted, but also replicated.

Let’s use a health product as an example.

Green Tea Extreme is an offer that you can find on the NeverBlueAds network. The payout for this product is $25/sale, so it’s pretty clear the advertiser is making much more than this with each sale.

After spending huge sums of money into marketing the product, an inquisitive affiliate marketer would start to think beyond the payout and reflect more on the actual business model itself:

“If I’m making so much money as a single affiliate, how much is the owner of the business making?”

That’s certainly the question I asked myself soon after I got into affiliate marketing, and it is the reason I prefer to have affiliates working on my affiliate program rather than be an affiliate and work on an advertisers program. You have got to remember that the advertiser has many affiliates promoting its product, so no matter how much you’re banking on that particular product, the advertiser is banking at least 10 times harder.

So how do we go about replicating this specific business model?

I’ve only just pulled this offer out of NeverBlueAds, and I’ve never promoted the product before, but I still have a basic idea of how I could go about doing this myself.

As we are not dealing with digital and informational products here, the product creation stage becomes much more complicated. Which is why we avoid it altogether.

I would go ahead and import the product instead. And the easiest and quickest way to do that would be through Alibaba.

So I go on Alibaba and search for ‘green tea pills‘. The search generates more than a dozen green tea pill products to choose from.

Here’s one item that looks interesting:

Green Tea Soft Capsules

Because I am using this is an example, and have no interest in promoting and selling green tea pills (at the moment anyway), I haven’t gone ahea and asked the supplier for a quote. But I know for a fact I can get the pills MUCH cheaper than the commercially available ‘Green Tea Extreme’ pills.

In fact, I did a similar search some time ago for weight loss pills, and discovered that weight loss pills can be imported very cheaply, no where near the prices they are being marketed and sold at right now.

What’s even more insane is that we can find many suppliers that offer ‘private labeling rights’. This means that the actual goods will be sent completely unbranded, with permission granted to you to label it under your own company brand.

‘Green Tea Extreme’ could just as easily be one of the cheap green tea capsules we found on Alibaba.

With the goods and branding completely sorted, we come to the real meat of the action. The marketing process. I need not go into this any further.

Why?

Because as an affiliate, that’s where your real skill lies. You’ve worked with the networks, you know how things roll, and you know how to market anything.

Seasoned affiliates can market practically anything on offer in the networks.

What most should realise is that they can use their affiliate marketing expertise to push their own product even better than the advertiser they are working for.

If you’re promoting a product as an affiliate or even as a product owner, then make sure you continue targeting not just the well converting keywords, but also the actual URLs that are displayed on the organic search results from these high converting keyword searches. Many people still mistakenly enter a website url into a search box, and since many web users set Google (and still Yahoo) as their home page, it would be a waste to not actually bid on competitor URLs as keywords.

This technique is particularly effective for ‘product review’ sites. For example, if a user searches for www.guitarguide.com, then an advert for a review on the actual product would typically yield a high CTR and healthy conversion rate. You will of course need to create many ad groups, with each ad group targeting a different product.

You don’t even have to be an affiliate to do this.

If you own the URL in question, then go ahead and set up an ad campaign targeting the site. My recommendation is to go with a (seemingly) independent review site, as opposed to sending the user directly to your site as they intended. This is because sending visitors through an intermediary site which strongly endorses the product (while appearing as neutral as possible) greatly increases the conversion rate, increasing the possibility of a sale or lead.

What I like in particular about the network is how they call up each new applicant, it’s their way of making the affiliate/network relationship more personal.