Who Is Hosting This

We’ve gathered some of the rising stars in our industry and asked them to participate in a series of “roundtable” interviews. Here is the first in this series.

Their Answers:

I wish someone told me that the web would continue to expand at the rate it has. I started building sites a long time ago, but I didn’t think long term.

For a long time I plodded along and made good money flipping websites but long term this wasn’t good as I was selling sites just when they were about to be profitable etc.

Kevin Muldoon
BloggingTips.com

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I wish someone had explained to me what affiliate marketing was. My first year of earning money online revolved primarily around adsense and earnings-per-click, while if I had focused all of my search engine optimizing time on a site that sold merchandise or an affiliate product, I believe I could have been making an insane amount of residual income right now.

Affiliate marketing is a topic that is only recently going public, as there were very few blogs and forums about it over a year ago.

If you are just getting started with making money on the internet, I recommend you sit spend a few hours reading about affiliate marketing and CPA networks, as it could make you a lot of money with the same time and dedication you would be putting into adsense earning websites.

Collin LaHay
CollinLaHay.com

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I wish someone would have pounded it into me that you need to get into your potential customer’s head and take yourself out of the selling mode and put yourself in the buying mode. I heard this from a few different sources in the last 4 years or so, but it has taken up until about the last year and a half or so to really sink in.

Everything you do as an affiliate must be done from the perspective of being a buyer, not a seller. What do you look for in a product, how do you shop online, what keywords do you use when you’re trying to find something to buy, what makes you feel comfortable about buying from some websites and not others?

These are all questions you need to figure out and then use in your online ventures. I made the mistake for probably 3 years trying to sell products through affiliate marketing to customers instead of letting them do the buying. Sometimes it’s important to get into the trenches and figure out this for yourself and see what doesn’t work before you can figure out what does. I see lots of affiliates making this mistake and come across web sites and blogs almost on a daily basis that offer no real value to the web because they’re just filled with banners and links and it’s painfully obvious all the webmaster is trying to do is make a buck.

Don’t make the mistake I made for too long. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes and look at what you’re doing and how you’re positioning yourself from that vantage point, it will make a world of difference in your success.

Alan LeStourgeon
AffiliateConfession.com

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“Build a Business, Not a Job” — I read that a year or so into working online, and those words have stayed in the back of my mind as a little mantra since.

This means creating a business that runs just fine and continues to make money even without your presence.

Toni Allen
Webmaster of Blifaloo.com

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One of my big mistakes was trying to do everything myself. I required many years of struggling to make technology do what I wanted it to do to finalize realize my core skill was not web design, or HTML coding, or CSS or playing with servers.

I had to learn how to get out of my own way, become less of a perfectionist and just get stuff out there or I would never earn a result.

Learning what your core activity is and how to leverage it in your business is VERY important. In order to isolate that, you need to take a good hard look at what your business does and how you fit into the process to deliver that outcome.

Once you find the core value that you create, you can free up time to focus as much as you can on that activity (or activities) by giving the extraneous tasks to other, more talented people in that area.

Yaro Starak
Entrepreneurs-Journey.com

Final Notes:

We’d like to thank the above folks who took the time to share their thoughts with us. Please visit our interviewees’ websites for more of their knowledge and insights.

We are currently putting together more interviews just like this one covering a variety of topics we hope will inspire and educate webmasters and entrepreneurs. Stay tuned.