Escape the 9-to-5 and live the lifestyle of your dreams by transforming your life's passion into an extremely profitable internet business—Start your Online Business now.

Brought to you by: FreeAudioGift.com

Sterling: This is Internet Business Mastery episode 86.

In a world where bosses control your life, and thoughts of escape fill your mind, where inspiration seems dead and cynicism rules the masses. You have the desire to break free; you feel the need to take control. Now there exists a place where the secrets of freedom and wealth are given to those who believe. Internet Business Mastery.com – free your mind!

Sterling: Hello, and welcome to Internet Business Mastery online at Internet Business Mastery.com, I’m Sterling….

Jay: And I’m Jay….

Sterling: And we’re here to help you escape the ‘9 to 5’ and live the lifestyle of your dreams by turning your life’s passion into a profitable internet business even if you’re just getting started today. Now on this episode of Internet Business Mastery, we talk about how to choose affiliate programs that will make you money, and in the Quick Tip we explain why we plan to stop using Google Docs and will share the service that we plan to use as an alternative.

We’d like to remind you that if you’d like to get a jumpstart on creating your own profitable internet business using our proven system, you can claim your risk-free trial membership to the Internet Business Mastery Academy by going to freeaudiogift.com. So Jay, what’s been going on…actually I almost said since we’ve been back from Salt Lake, but I guess even then if that makes sense?

Jay: Well since we’ve been back from Salt Lake, a whole heck of a lot. I mean that was awesome getting together in Salt Lake and just doing that kind of beginning of the year in person strategy meeting, eating all the yummy food that we like to eat while we plan in all of our favorite places.

But yeah, I think that’s something we’ve talked about in the past, how at least once or twice a year we get together in person and there’s just more effective brain power and mastermind’ing and planning can go on when we’re in person together, and eating.

Sterling: Well I think most people don’t realize that we actually don’t work together and we only see each other just a couple times a year even though we have this business together.

Jay: That’s true, even though we talk like every day and things like that yeah, our business is entirely remote, I mean it’s funny the number of times that I see somebody that actually works in or on our businesses pretty much when I see you, since most of the people I never see.

And I’ll see you probably twice a year, but yeah, that was awesome. Lots of great plans, and we’re excited. I know we’ve been saying that a lot and people are probably just like, “Get on with the plans already!” but there are definitely very cool things coming. But here’s one lesson I really pulled away from what we were doing, because of this new business model we’re going to be rolling out is based on something that we learned from Ryan Deiss and Perry Belcher.

And I’d mentioned this to you while we were in Salt Lake and I’ll mention to the listeners how at the time I remember both of us; that was actually one session that I sat all the way through just riveted. Normally I have a hard time sitting still in those conferences, my attention span has a really hard time with it all.

Sterling: And you’re talking about the conference that we did in June of last year.

Jay: Of last year, yes so we were in Austin and got invited down to that and most of the time I was up and both of us we would be chatting with people and doing other networking and stuff. I remember being riveted by that one but my mind kind of pushed it out because I knew at the time we weren’t ready and that we hadn’t kicked it back up to a full forty hours again like we have at the beginning of this year.

But it was really cool so we were planning a new business model and things, and you kind of mentioned oh well, I remembered they were talking about such and such and it was like well let’s pull the CD out. Let’s watch it now, and we did. We had him there and we popped the DVD in and we had popcorn and stuff that we’d gotten from the snack store there and in the living room of the suite we were in we watched that video, an hour long training that they had done.

And it was a reminder to me of the power of just in time learning meaning the most effective learning happens when at the time you are ready to implement it. And sure there’s some bits of learning that should happen maybe to open your mind to the possibilities, but I think one thing that we get hung up a lot especially in our marketing space where there’s lots of fast new shiny things always coming along that hits our email box or we see it on the blog or somebody says, “Oh guess what I’m working on right now?” and immediately we’re like oh my gosh, I should be doing that! Oh my gosh, I’ve got to read this blog post! Oh I should be writing down notes of every piece of this thing, I might need this at some point in the future!

But ask yourself how many times have you actually gone back and done those things or looked at those notes and going along with information diet which we’re very big proponents of. And asking yourself, do I need to read this blog post now? Am I actually ready to implement it, do I really need to attend this conference now, do I need to watch this CD or buy this course right now?

It’s going after that information, consuming the information that you actually are ready to implement now that really is the most effective and it was just I guess a very profound evidence of that happening. It just felt so cool, it was like wow, we’re watching this and now we’re putting into action rather than watching and then being oh, that’s awesome and then feeling anxiety that you’re not doing it and then just hoping someday you’ll get around to it. It was just in time learning at its finest.

Sterling: Yeah, I definitely agree with doing that. I’m getting now to the point where if I start something and even two minutes into it I realize that I can’t do this right now, I turn it off. Including we were there actually for a mastermind group and after the first day we started talking and all of a sudden we realized we have to do this other thing, we’re not ready for this other information.

We’re at a 100% of what we need right now, we know what needs to happen next. So it was just like well let’s pop in that thing and just do what is next right now. And we ended up not going to two more days of that that we were there for because we were like we just have to actually do what’s right dead in front of us now.

And I remember when I actually got started with internet business, for months I actually became kind of an expert at the basics of all aspects of internet business and still really didn’t have a whole lot to show for it. So I could have taught stuff even then based on what I had learned, but I didn’t have any actually experience doing it yet because I just kept thinking I’d go off on some tangent and they’d go, “Okay, now here’s the best way to do a sales funnel!”

And I’m learning all about sales funnels when I don’t even have a website up yet, or know what niche I’m in. So I guess kind of the thing to take away with this is, if you’re absolutely at scratch it’s like well find what the first thing is and do that now instead of suddenly you realize you’re reading twenty-five blogs about internet business doing nothing about it and the blogs are all over the place and you’re going through a course. It’s like pick one thing and just go step-by-step through it.

Jay: Absolutely. And you know, I guess I’m trying to think if there’s any time but I guess even then it’s just time learning. I mean sometimes there’s things I listen to just because it gets me amped up to hear about those things but I guess that’s a different type of listening. It’s not like I’m listening to a traffic CD I’m ready to put in, it’s like just certain types of shows, and audio books, and things that I’ll listen to that will kind of give me that motivation like oh yeah, I’m cool, I’m ready to go.

So I was trying to think if there is a time that I don’t do just in time learning but really in that case it’s still just in time learning because I know it’s like hey, I kind of need something to pump me up this week, I’m going to go listen to this Dan Kennedy segment or whatever because I know it will get me pumped. And hopefully our show is something that does that for people, some of the stories we tell and the things that we talk about, and the principles that we teach are the kind of thing that you get that recharge of your battery, but that I guess is another form of just in time need or just in time learning.

But I guess with that said, today’s topic is about affiliate programs, which came up recently because actually our platinum group has been asking about it quite a bit. So we thought it would be great to talk a little bit about that. So let’s go ahead and dive into that segment.

And now, the featured segment…

Jay: Affiliate programs – a great source of income, in fact for us it’s one of our top three sources of income. Obviously the Academy makes us the most money, then followed by the platinum group, then followed by affiliate programs. We get regular influx of income to our Paypal account, to our checks that show up in the inbox, or our mailbox. What do you call that thing, our mailbox?

I forget because it seems like so rare that I actually go to a mailbox these days. But I can remember having that feeling when checks starting showing up, even when they were only like $10, and then $20, and then $50, and now it’s crazy to think that we get an affiliate payment of thousands and thousands, or tens of thousands of dollars.

Sterling: Yeah $26,000 was one we saw recently!

Jay: That was one we just got recently, and it’s an income stream not to be ignored. And a lot of our platinum group are to the point where they’ve got their following kind of starting to build. They’re starting to think about that product that they want to create, but they’re still wondering man, how can I just get to that first dollar just so I feel like I’m a professional, I’ve done this for money now.

And we were talking to them on the mastermind call recently and said well start looking at affiliate income. That’s something you can get up and going pretty quickly, and what was awesome was one of them wrote us back a few days later and said, “Guess what guys? I just made $20 as an affiliate.” I was like, “Sweet! There you go! You’re on your way!”

And that was exciting for him and exciting for us so let’s talk a little bit about that. And I guess that would be the first question to ask, and we’ll talk through this. When should you start an affiliate program, and then we’ll give several tips for kind of choosing which ones you should promote, and then we’ll talk about how to evaluate different affiliate programs and that will give you some ideas on how you can implement them.

So when should you start promoting an affiliate program? Really I would say right away, I mean as soon as you’ve got people that you would call ‘followers,’ people who have opted in to whether it’s your Twitter, following your Twitter stream whether it’s an email list, whether they follow you on your blog, if you’ve been producing content for a while and people are starting to pay attention and interact with you, then you’re ready to make your first dollar.

If you match the right message, the right affiliate message, the right affiliate product with that market that you have, even if it’s five people, or ten, or a hundred, or five hundred, there’s no reason why you can’t make money off of that now. And certainly making your own products is going to be the way that you make most of your money, but affiliate income is a great place to start while you’re making up creating your own products.

Sterling: Yeah I was going to mention that my first business that I started on the internet, I actually the moment I had an opt in on my front page and I was in there designing the emails, I was trying to remember I think the third email that went out to them was an affiliate offer.

So maybe I don’t know five to seven days after they got on my email list they were hit with an affiliate offer. And I set that all up before I had one person on the opt in list, so I just wanted it there and I already knew something that would be awesome for them to be able to check out after they bought the first thing I had set up. And so I was definitely right away…

And I got to the point where that particular business, my peak at 46% of my income was from affiliate sales. So definitely don’t overlook it, and start right away.

Jay: And that gets me thinking about the first affiliate income that I made, and I know I had mentioned on the show before my very first ever product was, I did a seminar and I recorded that seminar and turned it into a product. But at that seminar I was teaching real estate investors how to market well, to find buyers and sellers.

And I knew that I was going to at the end be able to sell them on having the recordings of the event but I was trying to think well, what else can I sell them? By then I had learned enough about having a back end offer and I had been to enough of these seminars and things to know that they always had something else to sell to you if you wanted it.

And that’s when I got the rights to sell some Dan Kennedy stuff, and so at the end I had like these three packages I had put together of ‘here’s some stuff I’ll give you and you’ll get this Dan Kennedy product as well,’ and I’m sure that increased…I can’t remember the exact numbers but roughly it at least increased my income off of that event by 25% just because I had the additional stuff to sell as an affiliate.

It wasn’t like I had a huge following, I had enough of a following because of being active in the head of the real estate investors association, but there was about 25 people in that room and so I had an audience, I had a following. I had people who were there who were ready to listen and follow what I had to say, and so I had an offer, and some of them bought.

And that’s true of anybody listening to this, if you got any kind of a following however large or small, you’re ready to make that first dollar. So your first dollar should probably come from an affiliate source. It’s really probably the fastest way to your first dollar and a very easy formula is go out and start getting that following on Twitter and it’s a topic for another day but Twitter is one of the fastest right now to start building a following even before you’ve got a site, even before you’ve got an email list up.

Then get that Twitter following going, maybe you’ve got a bit of a blog, and as soon as you’ve got some interaction on a blog and/or on Twitter, promote a couple affiliate programs. It’s really kind of that easy because at this point if people have been engaging with you for some amount of time, even a few weeks or a month, or two or three, an amount of trust is going to have built up.

And so you’re ready to leverage that trust and say ‘hey, I’ve been delivering great little content, and links, and ideas to you…and by the way, something I recommend is this product over here,’ and you make a commission off of people who buy that.

So when should you start promoting an affiliate program? As soon as you’ve got any kind of a following at all is the answer to that question.

Sterling: So about, I don’t know, about eight months ago, I started a Twitter name to promote some affiliate stuff to a particular niche that I was interested in, wanted to see how it would do through Twitter and I just looked up as you were talking there, how much that I made with two launches that I did through Twitter, and then finally through Twitter I was able to get a little bit of a list as well.

And I also emailed to the, but with Twitter as my main source I was able to make $17,000 with just something I was testing out to see how it would go, and it was purely affiliate programs. So definitely I just wanted to be able to give a little bit of numbers so you can kind of get an idea.

Obviously we can’t say how much you’d make, depends on the niche and all that stuff, but I was able to try that just to test doing some affiliate stuff and that’s some decent extra money for sure.

Jay: Alright, hold on just a second. I’m registering a new Twitter name right now based on that information that you just gave.

Sterling: Oh great.

Jay: Yeah that’s awesome; those are some good numbers.

Sterling: Well, and since then I’ve actually done two or three more names just trying other markets out and that’s the exact same way. So yeah, it’s definitely something to try and test.

Jay: And if somebody goes, “Okay, awesome! I’m just going to do that and I’ll just keep starting Twitter names!” That’s a great way to get started, now here’s the thing is – you don’t want that to be the sole basis of your business because obviously you’re not in control and that Twitter following could go away suddenly tomorrow.

The terms of service for Twitter could…so you definitely yeah, that’s a great place to start but it immediately like you said Sterling, you started getting them on your email list, or getting them on your blog. I mean you need the whole infrastructure that we teach, but it’s a great place to start.

Alright, so let’s talk about a few tips when it comes to choosing, let’s see we’ve got one, two, three, four, five, six specific tips to give you on kind of choosing the right affiliate programs to promote. And the first thing that we point out is that you need to remember that you’ve got to balance the influences that count.

And let me explain what we mean by that. We all have checking accounts that we have to balance, we have to make sure that we don’t write more checks or use more debits than we have money in the bank or else you go into deficit and you can bounce checks and that’s a real headache.

And just like a checking account, the influence and relationship and trust that you build up with a following through Twitter, or email, blog, all those channels, it’s an account that builds up over time and whenever you ask those people to take action whether it be to sign up for your list, whether it be to click on an affiliate link, whether it be to buy your product, you’re making a withdrawal from that kind of influence account.

And so there’s a limit to how much you can do that obviously, and you do not want it to go into deficit, it’s something that has to be built up before you need it and then you have to keep it in balance as well. So just keep that in mind, every time you promote a product, the quality of that product, how well it works out for those people that follow your advice, even if you think it’s the awesomest product ever, if the perception ends up being that it looks like it’s not quality to them that’s going to affect…I mean that’s happened to us as well.

Sterling: Yeah, I was going to mention that a little later for sure.

Jay: You’ve got to respect that trust that you have built up and remember the most valuable asset you have in your business is that relationship with that following that you have. So make sure that at all times that you’re keeping your influence account in balance through the quality of things – the quantity and quality of affiliate programs that you promote to them.

Sterling: Alright, the next one is only promote what you use and trust, and this is very, very important because one of the big goals with even sending out an email or an offer for an affiliate program to your people is, the way we design our business is very much based on trust so we want to absolutely preserve that trust. So that’s why we’re very, very big on only promoting the things that we use because then we can know, not only have we been through that person’s system to see how they deal with customers because we are one but we can also see if what they deliver has value and is a real product that actually does what it says it’s going to do.

So preserve trust is very, very important and it also keeps you ethical because we get offers all the time to promote this or that and if we haven’t seen it how can we tell people that it’s a great product, and how do we stand behind that? It’s a tough thing because we definitely see a lot of people just throwing out offers constantly.

Now if you already know the person that you’re sending something out for and you haven’t seen the product, I guess there’s some level of you know the person, you know they give quality stuff but we’re definitely very big of having gone through the stuff ourselves again for that trust and to keep it ethical.

And you know, it also avoids conflicts of interest. Did you want to say anything more about that?

Jay: Oh yeah, I was just going to say it kind of…I mean something that’s coming to mind is that thing that people sometimes say about art. I guess really the Puritan approach would be well is this thing, shouldn’t it just come organically from somebody. And the artist that now sells their art, are they now compromising their art because now they’re having to appeal to other interests and what people want and is it no longer something that really came from them?

And I certainly think that’s silly to take it to that degree because obviously the artist needs to make money off of this talent that they have. And in what we do through Internet Business Mastery and what we encourage you the listener to do is to become this source of trust information, this go to expert. And obviously that takes time and effort for us to build up that brand and to go through all the information, to have the connections, to use the things, to learn the lessons that then we want to share with you so that you don’t have to go through those same lessons.

And that’s something that we want to be paid for, and some people might argue it’s like, well there’s this huge conflict of interest the moment that you’re recommending something that you’re benefiting from. And obviously that’s a line that we all have to draw for ourselves, that line of ethics and things. But the line that we’ve drawn for ourselves is that we want to at the very least know who the person is and have that experience with them and their products in the past or ideally have looked through the product ourselves and even more ideally have it be something that we actively use because we do want to avoid those kinds of problems.

I mean we know that that’s going to hit the influence account hard if we’re just very…just think of any guru or expert out there, even at the level of somebody like Oprah, I’m sure she can only mention and ‘promote’ a fraction of what people would like her to, but that’s because she has to preserve her brand and the trust that she has with the people that follow her.

Number three is I guess a pretty obvious one but you’ve got to meet your followers wants, I mean there needs to be a good message to market match if you’re building up a list of mountain bike riders, then you should know who those people are, the kinds of things they want. And there’s the obvious things like bike parts, and bike books, or biking trail guides, or biking membership community, or all those things.

But then there can definitely be those secondary things; I mean a biker might just like outdoor things in general. And so it could be that other outdoorsy type and sports type things, tents and things like that might appeal to that group too. One thing that’s nice about something like Twitter is that because Twitter, you can get a very focused niche of people but then there’s also a lot of general interest just bouncing around on Twitter.

So every once in a while you can try some other things as well, but for the most part you want to get a good sense of what your followers want and then just match up well to that, pay attention to the pains that they mention, the questions that they ask, especially if you are a member of your market, then you’ll have a good idea of well what are the things that I’ve used, what are the things that I have needed in the past or that I need right now?

Any time that we personally find a new product that we love or we’re out searching and we’re like man, what’s the right solution for doing such and such thing with our site? And then immediately once it works out well for us we’re like wow cool, I bet our followers and our listeners would enjoy finding out about this as well and you can bet that we always look for that affiliate program link at the bottom of the page to go well, we might as well make a commission off this as well. But matching your followers wants is an obvious but important one and hence worth mentioning.

Sterling: Alright, number four is listen to feedback, and this is definitely very important and the other side of preserving trust. If your people don’t like something that you’ve offered for whatever reason even though you trust it, you’ve gone through it or whatever, if they don’t like the offer then you pull it.

And for example, we did a launch for somebody that teaches traffic, and they’re a big person in the traffic world. And we’ve even interviewed them, a lot of the big guys use him as their help with traffic, but for whatever reason people thought his offer looked what was it ‘scamy?’ Or it didn’t look right…or…

Jay: Yeah, we got emails people saying, “This looks shady,” or “I just don’t like the look,” or all of a sudden just all this feedback was coming in. We’re like wow, well that’s strange….

Sterling: Yeah, and it was a lot!

Jay: His interview was really popular and people loved it and we knew all these great things about his stuff, but for whatever reason the perception was it just didn’t match up well with our market. And so sadly we missed the mark there; it definitely caught us off guard a bit.

Sterling: Yeah, even though we liked what he was offering and have several of his products, it’s just like if everybody’s thinking that it’s looking shady or whether obviously for us it’s not true. It wasn’t shady, but if it’s looking that way and it does anything against the trust that you’ve built up, we decided not to offer that any more, just to continue with that trust.

Because if one person says it, you go well maybe they’re just seeing it a certain way and we can actually email them back and say something about it to help with that. But if you start getting a lot of people that are thinking that, it’s definitely time to consider pulling that particular affiliate program.

Jay: Yeah, it’s a balance because some of the things that we promote, like so many people use them, they’re bound – somebody’s going to run into a problem with it and go…well hosting is a great example right? I mean hosting is an obvious thing for us to promote and it’s one of the things we make the most money off of as an affiliate. All hosts have their problems, it’s like a mobile cellular phone plan, there’s not a cell company out there that you can’t find somebody who hates their guts.

So naturally we now and again get somebody going wow, I don’t know why you recommended this hosting program because it just doesn’t work out for me, and this and that and the other. But of course we know we use it, and we know lot of people who use it and have had it fine, but that’s fine, that was their experience.

It’s bound to happen, so it’s definitely a balance between okay, two or three people have said something or wow, we’re getting a lot of feedback and it’s clear that for whatever reason the perception is such. And perception is everything, even it’s not necessarily what we believe to be true, perception is everything and so hence to preserve the trust we followed that feedback.

Alright, so how do you go about finding some affiliate programs to promote? And the first place you should look is products that you already use. And that’s the large one, that’s the large source for us. I mean pretty much the stuff that we promote just organically comes out of wow, that was a cool product or it really worked out well for us, so I bet our listeners would like to know about that.

So let’s let them know about it, and then we take it from there. That’s the number one place that we…so just think back through…like what are the products, and places, and sites that I frequent, and buy stuff and let me go see if they have an affiliate program.

We put this question out just asking what questions people had about affiliate programs and Bruce Baker got back to us on Facebook and he said the following. He said, “Well I know about Alan Jardine’s site as I recall it included some reviews of companies, and products, and payment plans. Are there other perhaps better sites that do likewise? I’m interested as well in knowing which affiliate program companies have good products, and pay plans, and are reliable both in distributing product and in paying affiliates.”

I mean yeah, that goes to the trust factor. You want to know that the program is not only going to pay you, but also fulfill the product and treat your customers right. So here’s’ some other ones – so he mentioned Alan Jardine’s site which I’ve been to several times in the past. It’s AssociatePrograms.com and we’ll have that in the blog post back on the site at InternetBusinessMastery.com.

And they have a lot of great information about how to choose affiliate programs, and they have some reviews and a directory of different programs by niche there. So that’s one place you can go and look. And then there’s lots of other reviewing and clearing house type programs out there like Commission Junction, it’s not my favorite.

I think their site is really hard to use, but it can’t be denied that they have a large amount of programs to choose from. So CommissionJunction.com is another place to go. ClickBank.com, tons of e-books and digital products, and entry level type prices, so that’s a great place to go to find a first thing to promote.

And we’re not just talking internet marketing niches, we’re talking dog training, and martial arts, and Forex, and whatever else. At ClickBank.com you should be able to find something there.

And then just hitting Google searches, I mean for instance I mentioned the example mountain biking because we have a person in our platinum group that’s doing that. And so out of curiosity I went to Google and just searched for mountain bike affiliate programs and immediately some interesting things started popping up. So that kind of a Google search can definitely turn things up as well.

Now a real obvious one is Amazon, and I know that’s one of the quick and easy ones to put on your site. Our experience is that there’s not a whole lot of payout that comes from it, but maybe we just haven’t been in the right niches yet. The commissions are so low that sometimes you have to have such a huge volume to make much money out of it at all.

That said, we do use it now and again if we promote a book, it’s an obvious place to link to and say well go buy the book here. So keep that in mind, it’s not the highest paying out thing, but it definitely is one of the easier ones that you could get started with. Now that’s just based on our experience, I know there’s people who made lots, and lots, and lots of money through Amazon. And I think it’s mostly because they know how to play to the holidays and Christmas time and this, and that, and the other but there is money to be made there. It’s not going to get you like a $200 or $300 check in the next couple of months, at least not in our experience.

Sterling: Yeah, I think that one of my Twitter names that I was using to do some tests in the bio I actually had a link to a main book that referred to what I was talking about in that particular niche, and I had a lot of people looking at it. And I think I sold hundreds of dollars worth of this particular book because of that link, and all I got in the end was about $86 and that was mostly because one of those people that bought the book actually bought a DVD player or some sort of electronic during that same time so I ended up getting a percentage of that sale.

But it’s like 4%-6% is kind of the average of what you make off anything, and there’s all these little rules and stuff that they have. So $86, which is cool – I bought a bunch of books with that $86, so they ended up with the money back anyway. But that’s just not a lot. You’re not going to live off of that kind of money.

Alright, so the next and final tip actually is about evaluating affiliate programs, and actually we’re going to jump to a question on Twitter from Ronald Yow. He asks, “What’s a good process checklist in evaluating an affiliate program?” Okay well it’s actually very simple the way we do it, but we actually that even this simple plan is very, very thorough.

And number one is, does it meet the needs of my followers? And that of course is one of the number one things right there. Is it something that’s going to actually benefit them, that’s the top thing certainly when you’re going to be sending emails or sending it out to your people is, does it meet their needs?

Number two is, does the ROI make sense? You want to know what the payout is and especially every time you go to your list and offer them something, you’re taking a little bit out so you definitely want to make sure that the money is worth being able to bring that to the people and take a little out of that influence account.

Jay: You know and another thing that kind of goes back to what we were saying about the Amazon, I know there are some times where I’ve mentioned a book in a post and I’m like oh man, the ten minutes it’s going to take me to go over to get the link isn’t worth the $7 we’re going to make off of this. You know what I mean?

So yeah, it’s definitely knowing and putting your effort into…I mean clearly we know the top three, or four, or five things that make us money and we put a lot more effort into say promoting Product Launch Formula because we’re going to make a lot of money off of that versus an Amazon book where going and putting a bunch of Amazon links isn’t going to get us much back.

So what’s going to make sense for your time, ROI as well as the trust account ROI as well as…I mean and that said, a lot of these programs, or there are directories out there that rate and review different affiliate programs. And a lot of times they’ll have statistics of what is, so you know how well it converts and how well it pays out, and you can kind of get an idea of how much money you might be able to make.

And honestly, we’ve never looked that much at those numbers. I mean I guess it’s just that if we think something’s cool and we promote it, we go ahead and try it as long as it’s not too much of a hassle. I mean the first time we promoted Product Launch Formula; we did it just because we thought it was a cool program. We believed in it but we actually didn’t know.

We didn’t put a whole lot of effort because we didn’t know what to expect. And then all of a sudden we saw it’s like wow, there was a response, and people liked it. And since then, we’ve started putting a lot more effort into that program and make a lot more money off of it.

So but if it had flopped, I mean flopped in terms of money but still everyone really appreciated hearing about it, at least then we made it…I mean really we’ve ended up depositing in the influence account because we just told everybody about a cool resource, but it ended up making us a lot of money. But yeah, there are all some of those things I guess that we weigh, even though we actually don’t look a whole lot at those…not that you shouldn’t.

I mean I don’t know, that’s your decision, but we don’t actually look at a lot of those…I don’t even know what they call some of those metrics. But there’s definitely some metrics out there, like this program on average pays so much money per thousand clicks that you send them. I don’t know, I can’t remember exactly how they measure it.

Sterling: Yeah, we do just little tests and that shows us the metric for ourself.

Jay: Yeah, because really that’s what it comes down to is testing on your own list to see how they’re going to respond.

Sterling: Alright, and the last process in evaluating an affiliate program is have I used or tested this product myself? And of course we’ve talked about that already but that obviously is the final thing that we do to keep that trust and keep it ethical.

Jay: Easy three point checklist, how about that? Alright, so the last thing is…I guess we actually already mentioned this, but there is some interesting lessons here. So our top three affiliate programs that we make money off of just as an FYI for people listening – number one by far is Product Launch Formula. And there’s a few reasons for that.

Product Launch Formula is really nice, it’s got a great commission – 50%. It’s a high ticket item, and so we make $1,000 off of every one that’s bought. Now again, we wouldn’t promote it if we knew it was a cruddy course. It’s a course that we refer to often and why we are glad to promote it in the way that we do because it’s been very impactful in our business.

But the lesson learned there is that it’s always nice if you can find some of those high-ticket, high commission items because they have potential to pay out. And usually those are going to be found with information products just because those have the kind of obviously a margin on that is huge. So Jeff has no problem giving away 50% of the price because it’s not costing him hardly anything to create that product whereas a physical product, it’s like there’s all of a sudden this thin margin already and they’ve got the cost of their goods, and so that’s probably one reason why Amazon is so low.

It’s because by the time the book’s been produced, and shipped, and everyone’s gotten their slice of money; there’s like nothing left to give the affiliate. So finding some of those high-ticket information product items is going to be really helpful for the affiliate’s revenue.

Hosting is nice because automatically every time somebody signs up, you get…I think the one we promote is like $75, and there’s ones that we would make even more than that if we promoted, but again going back to we’ve never used those programs, we don’t promote them, or we have never used the hosting. We don’t promote the ones that we could make more money on, but that one’s nice.

Again, so finding those programs that it’s like well if you just get somebody to sign up – kabam, there’s a chunk of money right away. So if hosting at all makes sense for your list, it’s a great affiliate program to promote.

And then the last one is GetReplaceMyself.com, which is John Jonas’ virtual assistance site where he teaches you how to work with and hire virtual assistants. And the nice thing about that is it’s a recurring income. Again, that was one where we went through it, we’re like wow, this just completely changed our mindset and our business, and we hired virtual assistants using his system and it just changed everything for us.

And so again, we’re like well, we may as well promote this to our list because we think they’ll like it too. And I didn’t even expect it, but it’s turned out to be one of our top earners and again, because one of the big reasons is because of recurring commissions, meaning because it’s kind of a membership site type model is people stay on and month to month they are paying, we are making a commission month to month off of that as well.

So finding those kinds of affiliate programs is also profitable. So anyway, it’s just interesting to note, it’s a high ticket item, a nice payout on acquisition through hosting and then the recurring income are the three that just so happen to be making the most money for us. So there’s a little FYI on that.

So there you go, that’s some of our tips and ideas about finding affiliate programs, how to choose them, and of course we could talk a lot more about that but I think that gives a lot of people something to go off of. So give that a try, and by all means let us know how that works out for you.

If you have some success with Twitter, or promoting any kind of affiliate program and you make that first dollar, or get a check for $20 bucks, or if you get a check for $1,000 bucks, let us know how that worked out for you. We’d love to hear about that success.

Alright, just a quick breakthrough that we wanted to share with you. We got a…we get all kinds of great emails and comments through Facebook, and Twitter, and blogs, and the forums in the Academy and stuff, but here’s one that stuck out to us this week. This came from Tom from Chicago sent us a photo of his Internet Business Mastery mastermind group that he helps organize.

And he had the following to say, he said, “There are currently nine members, only six were at our last meeting. If a member misses four meetings, we remove them from the group. We removed three people last year. We only want serious people that participate. All the members are from Internet Business Mastery Academy. We are pretty much all at the same stage in development of our products and websites. Three members are beginning to make money now. We hold monthly meetings in a conference room with internet and projector at a public library.

We stay in touch and support each other using Google Groups. Our Google Group has a Rolodex for websites, books, marketing swipe file, and an area for storing e-books, articles, members, contacts, stuff, and my favorite – a monthly worksheet. A monthly worksheet must be filled out before coming to each meeting. The meetings are two hours, we critique two members websites the first hour, the second hour we go over everything in the worksheet for each member.

Thank you Sterling and Jay for turning me on to mastermind groups.” Oh sorry, he said, “Thank you Sterling…” I threw my name in there because I wanted to be thanked too. “Thank you Sterling for turning me onto….” I’m just so used to saying our names together, we’re one entity, one being right? We’re the same! “…Thank you for turning me on to mastermind groups, without this group I would be stuck in the planning stage for a long time.” –Tom.

I just wanted to point out that we’re going to be interviewing Tom for an upcoming episode. He’s going to be talking about some of the success he’s had with his business as well as more about this mastermind group because clearly he’s made it work for himself but there’s just a lot of really great tidbits. I listened to that email again right there because if you’re trying to start a mastermind group because he just gave a great framework.

And the Google Group he did is an awesome one, the worksheet he did, the rules for letting people in or kicking them out, I mean that’s great. And I’m just super excited to hear that there’s this nice conclave of Academy members mastermind’ing together in Chicago. And so please keep us informed about the continued success that you have.

Sterling: And Tom, you’re welcome from me, Sterling and Jay. And one more note that he did, I know at one point I talked about how when I was in Salt Lake I had a little mastermind group that we actually met at a public library, that’s a really good place to be able to go and it’s free.

I think I was actually booking the room, and it’s like they give you a week in advance to actually book the time. And I would just call in once or twice a month whenever we’d meet, call them and book the room for the specific two-hour time. We did two hours as well. So that’s yet another tip for people that want to do that. And I just love, love hearing that people in the Academy really do what we wanted it to do – the mastermind community was to do this and they’ve got nine members. That is amazing!

It’s time for the Internet Business Quick Tip…

Jay: So Sterling, I think we should stop using Google Docs.

Sterling: Yeah, I’m with you on that. Especially after….

Jay: WHAT?!! We’ve been using it for three years, what are you talking about?

Sterling: Especially last night as I finished this massive…it’s taken me months and months to do this – procedure lists for how to put up the show notes correctly, and how to do all this stuff involved with pictures, and everything we’ve got on there. I thought, what if something happened to this?

I was like, if this went away…and think of all the procedure lists we have as Google Docs. I was just going, if all of that suddenly disappeared for any particular reason, what the heck would we do?

Jay: Yeah, that would be painful. And it’s easy to go oh, it’s Google and they’ve got huge computers and backups, and they’ll never have…and if anything happened then they’d have a PR nightmare on their hands, and people would stop…but I was actually just talking to a mutual friend of ours, Jeremiah, when we were in Salt Lake.

And he was going, “Oh I hate Google Docs,” and I’m like, “Why?” And he said, “Well one day all of a sudden, all my permissions just switched. So certain VA’s had access to different VA’s docs and I didn’t have access to the docs I was supposed to have access to.” And I was like, “Oh my gosh, you’ve got to be kidding me.”

And similarly recently I had to let a virtual assistant go, I mean she was fabulous but just because of consolidating my business with IBM, we didn’t need her anymore. But there’s lots and lots of documents that she had created and was the owner of inside of Google, and I found a program to go in there and pull them all down to my computer to make sure I had them.

But yeah, it’s just those questions of, what if these things happen? And so, it became clear to me, I was just like this was not as critical as this information is that we keep on Google Docs we need to stop that. And the epiphany came to me because I’ve been using a program called Drop Box with my wife. We share just some different spreadsheets and things that both want to have the latest access to, stuff that we budget and financial plans, and goals, and things that we keep in there.

And I was just like well why won’t we just start using that for…we’ll just have Word Docs, and Excel spreadsheets, and Powerpoints, and whatever we want and we can just share…I mean Drop Box allows you to create bunches of different folders, kind of like you’d have tags on Google Docs and share only certain folders with one VA, and another folder with another VA, and then of course we could have access to all the Internet Business Mastery stuff, and then have the separate stuff for my wife and I.

And that way it’s always automatically backed up and synced on everyone’s computers, and if any one of us – our computer fries, somebody else is going to have it, and in fact it’s still all on their Drop Box server. So if you want to access it from anywhere, you still can do that. So it just seems a lot smarter to go about it that way.

Now somebody might be listening and completely disagree with that, but that’s the approach that we’ve decided to take. It just seems a lot more prudent and it so turns out that for the basic level, Drop Box is free anyway for an amount of data I think it will be a while before we surpass that.

And even if it was a nominal charge it would be worth paying honestly. So there’s our recommendation is to be careful what you store on Google Docs, and to consider something like DropBox.com as an alternative to that.

Sterling: Now if you’d like dozens of other resources such as this one, you can find them in the Internet Business Mastery Academy along with video tutorials showing you exactly how we use them. To get a 30-day no risk trial membership to the Internet Business Mastery Academy, visit freeaudiogift.com. That’s it for this episode of Internet Business Mastery, until next time we wish you ultimate success in your internet business.

You’ve been listening to the iconoclasts of the 9 to 5, and the purveyors of freedom and fulfillment – Sterling and Jay. Sterling and Jay invite you to discover one of their most popular audio programs ever – The 3 Pillars of Designing Your Ultimate Internet Lifestyle. Visit FreeAudioGift.com now and sign up for the free weekly Internet Business Mastery email newsletter and you’ll get instant access to this life changing audio presentation pulled directly from the content of the acclaimed Internet Business Mastery Academy membership community. Go now to FreeAudioGift.com. Internet Business Mastery – free your mind!