I think some of what he is struggling with could very well be what others are struggling with to.

The first thing Alex says is:

“Don lately I feel like I’m caught in a major decision that can impact my whole business. And that question is whether to do offline or online marketing. I don’t know why I’m telling you all this but I just feel that you can point me In the right direction.”

Alex goes on to say that he has made minimal money doing affiliate marketing and has made about $5k doing services for offline companies in about 1 years time.

Yet he is torn about which direction to go as he states:

“My inability to choose which one to focus my business on (offline or online) is causing me to not take action at all. And because of this I jump on every new shiny thing that comes up. Please help!

Each time I pick one the next day I start reminiscing about the other one. And starting off I really don’t want to focus on both. Which one do u think I should do?”

So I decided to answer this via audio… you can listen below.

My Reply to Alex

So while I was doing this conversion I ran into xtranormal. Well I didn’t actually just find it out of the blue. I like most people knew about it. Just happened to run into it again on some searches. So I was playing around with their interface so… TaDaaaa! (If the word ASS offends you don’t press play!)

Is it really as bad as people say? Is it really such an evil thing?

Short answer: No

That really depends on how you use it. There are a lot of people that parrot the opinions of others. That try to sound like the “holiest of holies” and state absolute trash as fact. Those are the people that I can’t even stand to read their posts on forums. Those are the people that cause me not to even post much on forums anymore. Because they speak with no basis of fact. Meaning they have no idea what they are talking about from actually doing anything online. So they tend to just be firm in their (well someone elses opinion that rubbed off on them) opinion that all cookie stuffing is evil.

But what makes cookie stuffing evil?

Cookie stuffing is only evil when you are doing things like stuffing forums, or hijacking pages by injecting code. When you are basically attacking other sites to get mass users of someone else’s web property cookied so you can make commissions.

That is the evil part of cookie stuffing. That form of cookie stuffing is just as bad as click jacking.

It is fraud… and you deserve to get the shit sacked out of you for it. I don’t want to even think about how many clicks I get on my AdWords ads that are click fraud. That stuff just gets me extremely irritated.

What makes cookie stuffing not evil?

When you setup an affiliate site… and especially when you set up a site for something like a typical Make Money online product. You have the right to cookie stuff those people in my opinion.

I’m not going to argue morality, legality, or whatever with people.

If an affiliate site I have for a product is a component in the overall purchasing funnel you go through to buy the product. I have a right to cookie stuff you.

If you are going to search in Google, Yahoo/Bing, or whatever…

• You find my site in the search results
• You visit my site
• I was a direct component in the overall sales process. (I deserve commissions for the traffic I sent)

Period…

So no one will actually change my way of thinking on this… If the product owner doesn’t care if you cookie stuff, and the network doesn’t care if you cookie stuff then do it.

I’m not saying go out there and take a chance of losing your affiliate commissions. You can clear certain types of cookie stuffing up front.

You can also be a more creative on the way you stuff cookies.

For example…

I released the WP POP IT plugin on the Warrior Forum.

One of the specific reasons I had that converted to a plugin was so I could use it on affiliate pages to not only grab attention but to also stuff cookies.

Certain ClickBank products that launch, or WSOs, Things on DigiResuts, or JVZoo… I stuff affiliate sites for those products.

I actually use an old framing tool called cakeslice.

I make an affiliate site for the product… Frame the video on a sales page of the product with cakeslice so it shows up as if it were on my site (Using my aff link) and bam… cookie set.
Or I will do my own audio, or video and still set the cookie.

I am actually releasing a rather extensive product on some of this called Commission Jacker. That mentions cookie stuffing and some examples. However it is not as evil as the opt-in form makes it look lol. Actually not evil at all… But will definitely be an eye opener for some.

Not to mention… often when I have affiliate sites setup for product launches I give things away on them. So I have even more right at that point to stuff the visitor.

Frankly… it boils down to this in my opinion.

• Using other people’s sites in evil ways to cookie stuff is a no no.
• Using my own sites to cookie stuff for the product I am promoting is a go go…

What are your thoughts?

I think the big problem some people have with affiliate marketing, or any type of marketing is when it is based on you wanting to rank for a certain phrase or phrases and sell a certain product.

Typically if you are going out to target… well let’s look at something on clickbank and do it right here.

Here we look on cbengine.com and actually see a high gravity paid survey offer. What is the first thing someone typically does when they look at an offer like this, or for weightloss, diabetes, make money online, etc? They go out and try to find keywords based on what the offer is. So in this case maybe they start researching various keywords and phrases related to paid surveys and might even look for one they can get as an exact match domain.

That is great and all… but do you think you may be wasting time trying to target keywords and phrases that are already loaded with competitors? Don’t get me wrong… the more competition the better the niche in my opinion. I have always said that competitive niches is where you want to be because the money is already there and you know it is there.

But what about taking the approach of thinking lateral when searching for keywords we want to target?

My way of lateral thinking, if you have ever heard the term before… isn’t exactly the same as some other marketers.

Many times when I approach CPA, or any type of affiliate marketing product I am likely to put the offer on a site that is completely unrelated to the offer.

{{GASP!!}} Did Don just say put ads on sites or pages that are completely unrelated to the ad?

Some people are probably going, “What the hell are you talking about Don that makes no sense.” Well in the typical stuff you hear out there it may not make sense… AT FIRST.

We are all wanting things like our AdSense ads to be extremely targeted to the content of our site. We are used to making an information site talking all about weightloss and only having weightloss offers on it.

That is great when you actually rank for the highly searched phrases, or target the high CPC keywords with PPC.

But the way I have been doing it for sometime now and with great success in both organic and PPC is completely different.

Let’s do a search for “Paid Surveys” in Google.

Some of the top sites that came up when I typed in that phrase was: yellowsurveys.com, surveyhead.com, bestsurveysformoney.com, getpaidsurveys.com, surveys4checks.com, paidsurveyslive.com, maximumpaidsurveys.com

Now let’s head over to quantcast.com and take a look at whatever info we can get about these sites.

See any common denominators here?

I sure do…

• The vast majority are female
• The vast majority are 18-49
• The vast majority is between $0-$60k a year income
• The vast majority never went to college
• And except for 1 instance… Asians were smart enough not to fill out the survey lol.

You just learned a lot about your potential audience here.

So now let’s start thinking lateral here… What else does this audience search for? Where could we put offers in front of the same audience but rank easily, or pay a really low CPC on PPC traffic?

You see,.. So many marketers and people in general that are trying to make it in affiliate marketing or PPC don’t think in this way.

They try and always make the ads on their site specific to the content.

What I am doing is making the ads specific to the visitors. So yes the conversions can be lower, yet the traffic can be higher so you end up with a happy medium. You also can end up with a lot less competition and scale it to your hearts content.

Ways you can find what these same people search for and are interested in is additional information you can get from Quantcast, and also Google’s ad planner.

That will give you some good ideas where to start searching for those other niches that are easily ranked for. Then you can set up your ads – CPA, affiliate products, lead generation, and your own products to a still targeted audience.

So let’s have some fun with thinking lateral everyone!

Later…………….

I don’t use it… I only use pop email accounts from my own domains. But it seems more and more people everyday just keep joining up to gmail.

The thing I hate most about Gmail is that they can literally destroy your contact with customers. They can let one email in and the next 30 from you will get sent to spam. So tomorrow I have to speak with Aweber. This is getting out of hand now.  When Gmail makes up 39% of your email list and is completely unreliable for delivery into the inbox… well it just starts to really piss you off.

I can’t tell you how many support tickets are raised or customers that get ticked off because Gmail sent a message to the spam box. You let the list know about an update to a product or a issue being resolved with a product and many of the Gmail users never hear about it.

You find a cool product being sold as a dime sale and you can’t let people know so they can get it at the lowest price cause it goes to spam.

You release a product that will increase in price and you can’t let your list know to get it at the lowest price because it doesn’t get delivered. If you release it somewhere like the Warrior Forum you can’t send it back out to your list at a lower price to make up for that, because it is against the rules of the WSO section.

Then they also scan your email… Yeah I am not kidding you. Make a new site that Google has never seen… Send yourself the links to that site via Gmail and see how fast Googlebot shows up. That part has always worried me. They scan things they have no business scanning. But then again… any service like Gmail that is free is going to have some type of marketing research and data collection behind it. The sole purpose of giving these services for free is collecting data to sell or use for a profit.

When a customer buys a product and is added to the list, or voluntarily opts-in to a list… All I ask is that you let the email arrive in the inbox GMAIL!

What will you do to hit the next level in your business? Did you already set goals?

I have set some new goals and I have some possibilities… but they mainly are:

• To double offline marketing efforts
• To go back to killing CPA more aggressively (I’ve been slacking a bit)
• To start doing more with Paid Traffic again
• To triple my efforts on creating even more sales funnels
• Toying with the idea of starting an Ad company
• Start building and selling off a lot more internet real estate
• Finish the next 3 products (because I need them to use) within the next 2 months
• Start being a lot more vocal then I have been in the past on certain business issues and issues with the Internet Marketing industry

I have always been a person that would come up with an idea, work that idea and profit from it. Get bored and come up with a new idea and profit from it. Even though I myself have been setting up solid foundations over the years to basically sell off and retire. I am still going to change the ways I approach things and try and control my chaos brain.

There are many times the ideas I profited from I never even scratched the surface of. The fact is, if I would have stayed focused on them then I would probably be retired now. But my brain has always been out of control with ideas and I have to try them all or I just don’t feel right. What I mean is… Have you ever known people that were such neat freaks they see a piece of lint across the room on the floor they have to run right over and pick it up? I even knew a girl that ironed her bead spread when it was on the bed every day cause it had to be perfect.

That is sort of how I feel with ideas… I have to try them and I have to test them. I’ve been lucky enough that a lot of them succeed on a much higher percentage then I would have actually thought possible. But the big problem is I left many of them unfinished when I walked away from them. They were never truly taken to the next level, and the next level, that they were capable of reaching. Many times I actually sold them off in their infancy.

Now I want to control that and make the challenge pushing those ideas to the next level and making them produce to their full potential.

I’m a person that rarely sleeps more than 4 hours a day. I have been known to stay up for days in the past (however hitting 40 has slowed that down a lot). The reason I can’t sleep is the chaos brain. When I lay down it often takes me 3 hours just to fall asleep.

This chaos brain activity, I want to harness in 2012, control it and redirect it. I want to control it in a way that when I have several things performing well that I am testing… I focus on them to get them to their full potential. I may still sell them off… but for a lot more lol. The part of being bored with the same thing, or working on the same thing will never go away. So I still have to keep my mind entertained.

How about everyone out there?

What are some of your goals?

What are some of the problems you seem to be facing and want to change?

Leave a comment let’s discuss it.

I also want to wish everyone reading this a crazy money making New Year!