Spelling errors might be costing you half of your sales.

I’ve been a closet spelling/grammar/punctuation nazi for years. When I read a blog post or sales page with what I consider significant errors, my mind is completely sidetracked. I stop thinking about your message, and start thinking about what needs to be fixed. If you have grave errors on your page, I think you are stupid and sloppy and won’t consider buying anything from you.

I know lots of affiliates with poor skills are successful, but you’d be more successful if you eliminated these mistakes.

I’m not the only one. This article from the BBC inspired me to finally say what I think. The article alleges that in one case, they saw sales double after correcting an error on a sales page. Of course, one split test is inadequate, but I’m confident that there is truth to it.

What are you going to do about it? If you want to improve yourself and your sales, follow my affiliate link here and educate yourself.

Amazon book: Grammatically Correct: The Essential Guide to Spelling, Style, Usage, Grammar, and Punctuation

P.S. I don’t claim to be perfect. I overuse commas and I know I sometimes make other writing mistakes.

February has been the worst month yet for me in a long time. First some numbers:

Total Spent:  $6,580.07
Gross Profit: $10,242.92
Net Profit:       $3,662.85
ROI:                        55.7%

I really hate posting numbers like this. It’s embarrassing. But I made a commitment to share my results on this blog.

The 3 main reasons my income sucks right now:

1. I’ve been lazy

2. When I did work, I neglected my active campaigns to work on upcoming projects.

3. I have 5 kids and our 11 month old and my wife haven’t been sleeping well at night. So I wind up babysitting until 1 or 2 pm while my wife gets some shuteye. After that, I have trouble getting motivated feeling like the day is shot already.

I spent several days looking into and studying new niches and new traffic sources. Basically, it’s like I’ve been going back to school.

I spent about 7-10 days side-tracked working on developing a board game. Probably sounds silly to some people…. I’m a born entrepreneur and have always been easily side-tracked by whatever new idea infatuates me at the time. I’d put this as the #1 reason I’m not rich yet. A person really needs to focus on one thing to achieve great success in life. Learn from my experience. Focus on only 1 or 2 traffic sources and 1 or 2 niches.

To your success!

Danger Brown

My income is in the shitter. I’ll probably only net about $4K or so this month.

There are 3 reasons:

1. Normal cycles. I’ve been pushing financial related offers like payday loans. They always perform badly this time of year so I expected this to happen.

2. I’ve stuck with doing paid search and have started having trouble with MSN slapping campaigns or inexplicably not giving me volume. So I’ve had trouble scaling my campaigns.

3. I’m not building out new paid search campaigns right now. I’ve decided to switch to alternate traffic sources and new niches. Because I’m getting into doing completely new things, I’ve been spending time trying to figure out this new stuff and not doing things that will make me money today. Also, there will be a learning curve that’ll probably eat into my profit margins.

So you ask, “What is Danger going to do next?”

I’m thinking I’ll try some dating offers with small targeted media buys on individual sites. Later, after I understand media buys better, I’ll scale up with network and larger media buys and make a mountain of cash.

Why dating? Because it has the potential to go massive but also has low payouts which should allow for more efficient optimization of creatives, offers, etc. Example: A $30 payout diet rebill would require me to spend a bare minimum of $30 to test each new ad variation, but a $3 payout dating offer would require a minimum of only $3 per creative. So I figure with dating I’ll be able to throw a lot more shit at the wall and see what sticks.

Why small media buys? Because I’m sick of having a lack of control over my traffic. Most traffic sources involve a wildcard element. With search engine dependent traffic you can get a slap and be out of business in the blink of an eye. I know dating is big on Facebook, but they love to disapprove ads and even ban accounts over there. I figure that media buying gives the maximum amount of control over traffic and most especially traffic volume.

If you happen to know something about pushing dating offers via display, I’d love to hear from you (please comment). Right now I’m struggling to figure out the best sorts of sites to target.

January has been crap for me. It’s the worst month I’ve had since about 8 or 9 months ago.

Here are the totals for my January 2011 Affiliate marketing efforts.

Total Spent:  $6662.13
Gross Profit: $12,837.00
Net Profit:       $6,174.87
ROI:                        92.6%

Though I can make the excuse that my niche (financial) tends to crap out in the winter, I’d expected to scale things up to compensate for that. My MSN campaigns have suffered from several slaps and I’ve been trying to adjust my landing pages to keep MSN happy. Just about 7 days ago I implemented a change that has slightly hurt my ROI but has so far kept the slaps away.

I’m getting sick of these slaps and unpredictable volume. I’m getting real interested in moving into other traffic sources.

The first four clips are from the Affiliate Ball and the last video is from Shareasale’s party.

I rolled with some friends to a few other locations but didn’t think to take pictures most of the time. But of course, during the Affiliate Ball, there were something like 15 parties all at the same time. I shot these videos with my Motorola Droid X

An impromptu interview with Shoemoney at the airport in Las Vegas. It’s a nice overview of the newly launched Link Control. Initially, I messed up and uploaded the unfinished file with crappy audio. This version of the video is much improved.

The legendary Jeremy Schoemaker AKA Shoemoney has a great contest going on right now. Here is my video entry: (spoiler alert:….if I win I’m going to shave my head! and give away up to $4000)
UPDATE 12/31/2010:

I’m listed in the top 10 and need votes from you to win! Please GO HERE to VOTE for Danger Brown right now. You have to scroll down to the bottom of the post to vote. Thank you so much! PLEASE vote for Danger Brown!!!

Final Update: 01/04/2010 I didn’t win. But placed 4th out of 90+entries. The winner got most of his votes using Amazon Mechanical Turk to pay $.05 each for people to vote for him. Some people might cry foul, but apparently there were no rules. I predict that next year either the rules will change, or it’ll just be an MTurk war between finalists.

It was fun to participate and overall has been a great experience.

Check out what the winner of this contest wins:

A platinum pass to Affiliate Summit West.
2 nights hotel accommodations paid for at the Wynn.
$500 Airfare Reimbursement.
$2000 to gamble on 1 hand of blackjack
Roll with Shoemoney at Affiliate Summit.
A pass to the Epic Advertising Playboy Mansion Party this fall.

When I read that, here is what I heard. “blah, blah, blah, Playboy Mansion Party!!” OK, this is a contest worth entering!! Thanks Jeremy!!! See you there!

UPDATE: I really need your vote to win this thing! Please go vote for me now! Thank you.

See more of Logan at www.LoganThompson.me

We shot this at Shareasale’s Thinktank at Half Moon Bay CA at the Ritz-Carlton. Below the video are links to everything we talked about.

What are you waiting for? Sign up for Affiliate Summit today!

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Visit Geekcast.fm for some great podcasts and more!

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Internet Marketing From The Real Experts

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Shot these videos yesterday. Needed to rent a backhoe to tear up my front yard and put in a new drainfield. I also tore out a foundation from an old outbuilding and dug a new trash pit.
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I spent the last 2 days on this thing. Man, I really need to be working on my campaigns.
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