the affiliate marketing dojo

95 Pages·2012·3.3 MB·English

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Presents:
THE AFFILIATE
MARKETING DOJO

The 13 Part Crash-Course For Building Massively Profitable Websites
(Without Having To Create Your Own Product!)
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By Jackson Lin & Rob Wiser
About Me… Jackson! =]

Hello there, this is Jackson Lin and I want to congratulate
you on becoming a member of Art Of IM.com. My partner
Rob and I have really gone all-out to create what we feel
is the best and most comprehensive set of free training
materials for Internet marketers who want to start
making money online. And if you’re already earning an
income from your websites, this course is definitely going
to teach you some new tricks and tactics that can help
you take your traffic and your earnings to the next level.
This is the course that Rob and I wish we had when we were starting out. Having this
information back then would have saved us both a tremendous amount of time and money.
We’ve poured our combined knowledge into this course so that you can avoid costly mistakes
and start earning money ASAP—or take your earnings to the next level.
Now before we begin, you might be wondering:
1. Who are we?
2. Why are we qualified to teach you?
I’ll briefly introduce myself to you, and then I’ll let my partner Rob tell you a bit about himself.
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My name is Jackson and I began my Internet marketing career pretty much immediately after
graduating from university. I earned two degrees. The first one was a bachelor of Law (with
honors), and the second one was a bachelors of Banking and Finance.
Now, that may sound impressive – but let me tell you that fancy-sounding degrees often don’t
have anything to do with how much money you wind up making! And they certainly have
nothing to do with how much satisfaction and excitement you get from your work. (I never felt
truly excited, challenged and proud of my work until I become involved in Internet marketing.)
Even before I graduated from university, I had become interested in learning how to make
passive income. I was looking ahead at the next stage of my life, and I knew I didn’t want to
end up in the rat race, where you end up working 9 to 5 for the fat old guy that you call “boss”
and watch him reap all the credit for your hard work… I’d already done that for four years,
before I graduated! During my university days, I worked part time to prepare myself for a
career in law, and after slaving away for years for an unappreciative boss, I’d realized that life
should offer you a lot more than just working for someone else… right?
That’s when I became embarking on my passive income quest.
I spent 9 months studying and learning different ways of making passive income, including
stock trading, property investing and network marketing.
In 2007 and 2008, during the great worldwide bear market, I actually made a nice profit
through my options trading efforts. I was pretty impressed with myself, because even the
great Warren Buffet at the time suffered a significant loss—while my portfolio was up by more
than 100%!
I thought I was on my way to becoming a “trading guru,” and that trading was the way to go…
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Until I realized that I still had to watch the market constantly and put in a lot of hours to make
a profit – which meant the income I was generating wasn’t “passive” after all.
(When I talk about passive income, I’m talking about setting up a business that basically runs
on autopilot. Money streams into your bank account while you sleep, play golf, lie on the
beach, or put together your next passive income stream!)
Then I heard that an old friend of mine (who was an absolutely awful student ever since
primary school) was making a small fortune off Ebay.
I figured if that guy had figured out a way to make serious money online, then there had to be
a way for me to do it, too.
So, I started exploring the Internet and the world of online marketing as a way to achieve
passive income streams for myself. And that was when my internet marketing journey began…
Now, this journey was by no means easy. There was a lot of trial and error involved, and in the
beginning I made some costly mistakes…mistakes that cost me a lot of time and money.
My passive income quest also cost me some close friends and loved ones, who simply could
not understand why I’d turned my back on a safe, “respectable” career path (with a
guaranteed salary) to risk it all on “Internet marketing” (a term which, to this day, they still
can’t understand).
I’m not going to sugarcoat the truth. If you’re serious about making big money online, I can tell
you first-hand how hard the journey is – even though people make it sound so easy. (Usually,
the ones making it sound brain-dead simple are the self-proclaimed “gurus” who are trying to
sell you their get-rich-quick systems—and trust me, none of that stuff works.)
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With this course as your guide, you’re going to learn how to build a solid, profitable online
business. It won’t make you rich overnight, but if you follow the steps I’m about to lay out, and
keep growing your websites and traffic each day, your success will be inevitable.
So that’s who I am…now, meet my partner
Rob Wiser.

Hey, this is Rob Wiser. I come from a different
background than what you might expect of an Internet
marketer, and I’d like to tell you my strange but true
story—about how I transitioned from a career in
Hollywood to discovering Internet marketing and using it
to unleash my creativity and build wealth through
passive income.
Growing up, I was a highly creative kid who loved to
draw comic books, write stories and make short films
with my video camera. I went on to earn my degree from NYU (New York University), where I
studied at their prestigious film school. My goal was to make movies—to write and direct my
own screenplays.
I figured I’d try to break into the business on the strength of my writing abilities. So while
studying at NYU, I cranked out a bunch of “spec” scripts (samples of my work) and sent them
out to agencies that represent screenwriters. The film business is extremely difficult to break
into; there are a lot of different gatekeepers you need to get through. And for starters, in
order to sell your screenplay, you need to have an agent. You’ve got to get in the door with an
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agent who will agree to represent you, and then use their connections to get your scripts seen
by the movie studios and the important producers. Without a good agent, your scripts will
wind up in the trash bin.
An agency agreed to represent me, and they sent me into endless meetings with producers
and film production companies in New York City and out in Hollywood. This is where I learned
the art of “pitching” my screenplay ideas, which means verbally presenting your story in the
most compelling and concise way possible. Many producers have short attention spans and
they hear ideas from writers all day long, so when they grant you a few moments of their time,
you’ve got to hook their attention and help them to visualize how your idea, your characters
and story, could be their next big hit movie. You’ve also got to be prepared to answer any
questions they throw your way, so being able to think on your feet is essential.
Mastering the art of pitching would serve me well in the world of Internet marketing. I’ll
explain why in a moment. Right now, let me tell you how I made the leap from Hollywood to
Internet marketing, because I think my personal journey—and the life-changing opportunities
that I discovered online—are going to get you very excited about your own possibilities.
In my early 20s I was able to achieve some success as a screenwriter. I was beating the odds,
since making a living in that industry is brutally difficult. Very few screenwriters, even super
talented ones, ever catch a break. I sold a couple of my scripts. One of them became a film, a
gritty crime-thriller which was theatrically released and sold a lot of copies on DVD. I
“optioned” several of my other scripts (which means a studio or producer pays you a sum of
money for the exclusive rights to your script for one year, and you only get the big payday if
they actually make it into a film). I was also hired to do rewrites on other scripts that needed
to be fixed up, which is how a lot of professional screenwriters pay their bills. In fact, a large
percentage of professional screenwriters never see their work appear onscreen. They make
their living from selling and optioning their scripts, and doing rewrite jobs, but they never get
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the satisfaction of seeing their hard work come to fruition. That’s one of many harsh
discoveries I learned out in Hollywood.
I realized I didn’t want to be one of those writers. I wanted to see my ideas come to life. I
wanted to get my work out there and seen by the masses. Unfortunately, writers in the movie
business—aside from a handful of A-list writers who have box office smashes and Academy
Awards on their resumes—wield absolutely no power. You’re the low man on the totem pole.
Once you sell or option your script, it’s completely out of your hands. If you’re extremely lucky,
the studio or producer who purchased your work will try to attach a director and actors, put a
budget together, and push to get it made. But this is an extreme longshot, and it’s only getting
more difficult to sell them original ideas.
As the costs of making and distributing a movie climb higher every year, the Hollywood system
becomes more risk-averse. Rather than gamble on making a movie that tries something
different, they’d rather make “Transformers 7” or “Pirates of the Carribean 14,” or remake a
movie that was a hit the first time around. A lot of their product is regurgitated crap.
It was exciting at first to be a part of the Hollywood system, but over time, I grew frustrated
for several reasons. For starters, out of the 20-something screenplays I wrote, only a few of
them got sold or optioned. And that’s actually a really good batting average for a young writer.
When they did buy one of my ideas, I then had to enter into the whole Hollywood
“development” process—which means they give you a bunch of notes and tell you how to
rewrite your script to their specifications. Often, this means they want you to radically change
your story to make it more like a movie that recently did well at the box office. So then you
come in for more meetings, they give you more notes, and no matter how ludicrous their ideas
are, you’ve got to incorporate them if you want to see another paycheck. And then, after you
put in months of hard work, chances are they’ll just stick your script on the shelf along with
the hundreds of others that will forever be stuck “in development.”
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If your script gets made into a movie, that’s the brass ring—you get a big fat paycheck. But the
reality is, very few movies actually get made compared to the thousands of screenplays that
get submitted each year and the dozens that get bought or optioned.
That bothered me—the thought of pouring my heart and soul into a screenplay, meticulously
plotting out every page of the story and every sentence of dialogue, and at the end of it all, it
doesn’t get made—for reasons completely out of your control—and you’ve got nothing to
show for it.
This is why I decided to shift gears and try writing books. I figured that if I could get a
publishing deal to write a book, at least my work would get out there. Getting a book
published is pretty straightforward. It’s not easy—you’re still up against long odds, and book
publishers can be as fickle and risk-averse as movie studios—but I felt I’d get a lot more
gratification from being a published author than I would from taking endless meetings out in
Hollywood and trying to sell scripts that stood very little chance of getting made.
Plus, as an author, I would have control over the content. As a screenwriter, I had no creative
control over anything once I sold my work. While I’m proud that one of my scripts did get
produced, the director took it upon himself to rewrite a bunch of scenes, change the ending,
and alter it in other ways that shocked me when I saw the finished version. This is typical in
the movie business. They never shoot the original script that you sell to them. It gets passed
through an entire committee of people, all of whom think they have better ideas and want to
put their own stamp on it.
In order to get a book deal, I needed a killer idea. Well, late one night in Las Vegas I was
hanging out at a bar at the Hard Rock casino, and inspiration struck. I happened to meet a
really cool, incredibly charismatic guy who had a “way with the ladies” like I’d never seen.
When I first saw him, he was holding court at the bar and he had three of the most beautiful
girls I’d ever seen hanging on his every word.
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When he excused himself from the girls to get a beer, I struck up a conversation with him, and
we started chatting. To my surprise, he told me he was a cop; I told him I was a writer. We
were intrigued by each other’s occupations. Many of the screenplays I’d written were set in
the world of cops and criminals, and he told me he was taking writing classes in the hopes of
writing his own screenplay. So we hit it off and became fast friends. He showed me the Vegas
nightlife scene, and everywhere we went, he had the ability to chat up with most attractive
women in the place and have them eating out of the palm of his hand.
Now, here’s where the story gets interesting…
My cop buddy, as it turned out, had a background as a Hostage Negotiator. He’d been the
youngest Negotiator in the history of his police department. And I realized from watching him
in action with women that it was his particular skill set—the ability to influence a person’s
emotional state and “bond” with them, to steer the conversation towards the outcome he
wanted—that was the secret of his success with women.
So I contacted my agent and told her I wanted to pitch a book idea. I was able to get meetings
with several major publishers, and one of them offered The Negotiator and I a $30,000
advance to go ahead and write the book I’d dreamt up. I decided to call it “M.A.C.K. Tactics:
The Science Of Seduction Meets The Art Of Hostage Negotiation.” It would be the ultimate
how-to guide for the modern guy who wanted to elevate his confidence, dating life, and verbal
skills with the opposite sex.
I spent the next few months grilling The Negotiator about his strategies and tactics, and using
them to craft a book that explained how these same methods could be applied to attracting
and seducing women. Before the end of the year, it was on the shelves of bookstores across
America.
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Like all first-time authors, I assumed that my book would be a priority for my publishing
company; I expected them to throw their full weight behind it and promote it like crazy.
Unfortunately, they did virtually nothing. It was up to The Negotiator and I to pitch the book to
magazines, newspapers and radio and TV shows to try to get exposure. I learned the harsh
reality of the book publishing business: unless you’re a Tom Clancy, Stephen King or the writer
of the “Twilight” books (i.e., you’re a proven money-maker), you’re rarely going to get much
support.
For the publishers, it’s a numbers game. If they have two or three breakout blockbusters per
year, it compensates for the hundred or so books they publish that fizzle out and go nowhere.
And although our book M.A.C.K. Tactics sold a respectable number of copies, it wasn’t nearly
enough to turn a profit once our publishers applied their own accounting formula. When I
received our first royalty statement in the mail, I saw that even after selling thousands of
copies of the book, we would need to sell many thousands more just to break even.
I don’t recall the exact numbers or the details of our book contract, but basically as an author,
you get paid a few pennies as a royalty for every copy of your book that gets sold. But before
you see any profits, the publisher needs to recoup the advance that they paid you. So if you’re
getting a few pennies per sale, and you’re starting off $30,000 in the hole, it’s going to be a
very long time before you ever break even according to their math.
In the end, our $30,000 advance was all the money we ever saw. And I’d split the money with
the Negotiator, so after deducting the commission that our agent took from the deal, I’d made
a whopping $12,000 for a year and a half of hard work (writing the book, rewriting it to
incorporate the publisher’s notes, and then trying to promote it).
But there would be a silver lining. During that time, I had taken the initiative to get a website
built for M.A.C.K. Tactics. Our publisher wasn’t willing to shell out any cash for this, so I hired a
web designer and paid him out of my own pocket. After it became clear that we weren’t going