Sophie's Success Shortcuts

Did you miss me? :-)

I haven’t posted on this blog in a while. Not because nothing was going on… au contraire… too much was/is going on.

I don’t know about you, but just like no one is a prophet in their own land… you are never going to be able to see the value of your stuff like other people do.

Even if you think a lot about yourself, familiarity breeds contempt, and your work is going to be “just what you do”, even if it is/would be of tremendous value to others.

This is why I value what has happened in the past 2 weeks.

You may not know, but the bulk of my income comes from marketing affiliate products.

One of the things I have been marketing, ever since I first started to use it some 2 years ago, is the Healing Codes package, a unique energy product where you use your innate energies to heal the cause of disease… I had a cancerous growth fall off my right arm after a few days of using The Codes… so I am a believer.

I signed up to be an affiliate. I made a few sales here and there, but every month I learned a little bit more about marketing, google adwords, etc. and every time I learned something, I immediately put it into practice with the Healing Codes affiliate program. I watched a webinar 5 months ago, and the rest happened:

The past 4 months the commission, grew $400 every month. Why always 400? Beats me. So I have gotten accustomed to the income, they paid directly to my checking account… until the 8th of this month, when, instead or the money, I got an email telling me that my affiliate status was withdrawn and I wasn’t even going to get my last commission.

Why, you would ask. The answer came right in the email: I violated the affiliate agreement: I did not get my ads reviewed by the 3 people assigned to review marketing material… But the email said, my violation was that I used the product name in my advertising… hmmm. How am I supposed to sell something I can’t name?

I made a quick calculation, and saw that I lost $35K just in the first year (calculating the growth trend also). They lost 140K net, for the first year. Interesting. I wonder if they have heard of the expression: “Do you want to be right, or do you want to be rich? Choose!”

Anyway, let’s see what I have learned from this incident that is worth for you to read:

1. Before you invest so much time and energy into marketing a product, check if the company really wants you to market their product, or secretly they hope that you will share with everyone, but they will buy from the company directly, cutting you out of the loop.
2. The processes I employed to go from zero to substantial income could help a lot of people out there… so maybe I should find a way to tell people. If I had had a roadmap like that two years ago, I could have started to make money much sooner, and that would have been worth for me to buy. I forgot to say that I used exclusively PPC advertising, my return on my investments was consistently 10-fold, i.e. with a $3500 a year budget I could turn a 31,300 dollar profit. And some of my keywords ran at $5 a click. Which means: this market is competitive, baby.
3. It will be interesting to watch how the Boomerang Principle will play out.
4. I’d love to train an army of affiliates for the Healing Codes company… if I could do it, anyone can do it.

Another thing that happened since I last wrote, is that I did my first “Craft Your Public Persona” presentation. It needs more work, but I am over the hump. I have worked with a client today, who was praising the knowledge he gleaned from our session, and that felt really good.

I am just wondering how to reach all the people who would be interested in that: coaches, consultants, bloggers, marketers, realtors… anyone, who makes a living selling themselves first, an product second. Everyone, who need repeat clients, repeat sales, etc. Everyone, who needs to influence people. Any ideas? If so, please write a comment. I would appreciate it.

And a 3rd thing: I have built a small video sharing site on blogging but you can put the topic in a search box and it finds videos for you… really great… want to check it out? It is at http://www.mavencentral.com/videos

That’s it for now. Please give me your ideas about how to reach my target audience, and if you have any idea what to do with my lost affiliate position story, so that it can make a difference for others.

So long.