July :: 2009 :: Thinking Home Business | Practical Tips For People Who Work From Home

Affiliate marketing as a business concept makes complete sense to me, especially for someone who has or wants to have a home-based business. That doesn’t mean that my attempts to earn income from affiliate marketing have been successful. On the contrary.

I do make a little money from affiliate links and a couple of services I used to pay for each month are now covered in advance – and will be for as long as the people who signed up for them via my links continue to be customers of those services.

But we’re not talking serious income. And definitely not in the millionaire league.

There are, however, some people who can talk very serious income from affiliate marketing – as in “millionaire” and even “multi-millionaire” income – as evidenced by a very interesting blog post by my friend, SEO wizard Stephan Spencer.

In A Conference for Self-Made Internet Millionaires Stephan – a thoughtful, analytical guy who is in my experience not given to exaggerated utterances – writes glowingly of a conference at which he spoke earlier this year, where a number of participants were, he reports, Internet millionaires.

The Elite Retreat is organized by Jeremy Schoemaker – a.k.a. Shoemoney – who I can’t actually say I’ve *met*, but I was *that* close to him in a group of people chatting at the first BlogWorld Expo in 2007 and he seemed a very happy chap: Stephan says Shoemoney is a multi-millionaire, so even though money isn’t everything I guess that helps.

The next event is in New York in October and the speaker lineup (including one of my heroes Gary Vaynerchuk and also Stephan Spencer himself) looks very impressive. At $5,000 a pop it ain’t a cheap outing, but Stephan reckons that this “truly remarkable” event is worth the money. If you are inclined to be skeptical of praise for an event at which the praiser is to speak, I reiterate that Stephan is a very considered guy and no smoke-blower. But the information on the event website seems to bear out Stephan’s depiction of the quality of the presenters and style of event.

A couple of things which, in the value for money stakes, impressed me in Stephan’s account were:

cap of 35 attendees, with apparently the opportunity to get some one-on-one time with presenters
an alumni system with weekly phone calls – a mastermind group

They look to me like elements of a good value proposition. Personally, I still don’t know if affiliate marketing is an area I want to put a lot of energy into and if I were to consider going to an event like this I’d surely get more value from having put in some hard yards in the field than just going as a virtual newbie. Those who run the event may disagree.

But for someone who has already learnt at least the basics and is looking for a turbo charge in the company of some high achievers, this event sounds like it’s worth some due diligence.

By the way, the event is described on the website as “very exclusive” and “by invitation only”.

I have to say that, as I was about to save this post, I went to the event website to check a couple of details and noticed a few items there which gave me pause, and which would surely be in the organizers’ interest to clear up:

on the About page there are two different figures for the cap on attendee numbers – 50 and 35 (some old copy not completely updated?)
the Contact page (I was going to let them know about the previous point) produces an Uh oh! “404 page not found” type page
the statement is made on the About page that “We will only have ONE retreat each year” (emphasis and caps original); as there was an Elite Retreat 2009 in San Francisco in February this year I assume that is – in corporate speak – a “forward-looking statement”, but it is potentially confusing, wouldn’t you say?

Nevertheless, the Elite Retreat still looks like a very interesting proposition for someone looking for a quality event in this field.

I’d love to hear from anyone who has attended or presented at one of these events or is thinking of attending the one in New York later in the year.

I’m currently re-jigging my business presence on Facebook and finding myself on a new learning curve about the platform and how it works.

I don’t mind going through that learning process, because I believe that understanding how Facebook works and being able to manage how we use that for our brands and how it can affect our brands has now become – for the time being at least – an essential part of basic social media literacy and competence.

I had been pretty slack about Facebook

I had been aware for a while that I needed to “do something” with Facebook, but it was on the “I’ll get around to that soon” list not the “priority to do” list. And I have to admit that although I routinely include favorable reference to Facebook in my presentations on social media for business, my own involvement with Facebook, while lengthy enough, has been pretty much to the lyrics of “Will you won’t you, will you won’t you join the dance?”

And insofar as what I post about here on Thinking Home Business is a reflection of what I’m currently focusing on, you could be forgiven for thinking I haven’t paid any real attention to Facebook. And you would be right, as is evidenced by the fact that the last time I posted here about Facebook was just a month short of two years ago, about how careful we need to be with our online identities.

Although I have just checked and found from a post on my Des Walsh dot Com site that, as far back as eighteen months ago, I was at least thinking seriously about Facebook as a social media platform for business.

The land rushes for URLs woke me up

The recent “land rushes” for Facebook profile username URLs and for “fan” page (or “vanity” page) username URLS finally focused my attention more seriously on the question of where Facebook fits in my business planning.The immediate task was to get my own preferred username – deswalsh – for my Facebook profile page.

Profile page URL

Having a name that is not very common, I was not unduly anxious about scoring my own name for my personal page on Facebook, although I did make sure I was on the case as soon as the flag fell for the land rush. I registered mine in the first five or ten minutes, so I now have the convenient URL http://www.facebook.com/deswalsh: and the cognate versions /DesWalsh, /des.walsh and /Des.Walsh work equally well as the /deswalsh one.

Page URL

Then there was the option of having a Facebook “fan” page and a related URL. I was more anxious about that, for the fairly basic reason that I didn’t yet have a fan page, although knowledgeable colleagues had told me that was a good thing to have for business.

Setting up the page was initially a challenge but I was able with a bit of help to figure it out. if you have yet to do that, and to save you the “mystificatiion” phase I went through, the steps are: 1. find at the bottom of your profile page the word Advertising (in blue) and click on that 2. On the page that click takes you to, find the word “Pages” at the top (there is a little orange flag) and click on that 3. Go through the instructions and then when you are ready click on the green button with the words Create a Page 4. Follow the steps set out there.

Note: it is not required that you take out a Facebook ad to help you find new fans; I skipped that step.

At first I wasn’t too anxious about getting the username I wanted, because once the gate was opened, so to speak, I would need only 20 fans to be able to register a preferred URL. Then there was a hitch: when I got to just over 20 I found that Facebook had changed the rules to require a minimum 100 fans. I launched a “fan raising” exercise – as did many others! – and within 24 hours, with the help of friends old and new, I had reached the requisite minimum. During the intervening time I was optimistic, although nervous. But the wait ended well: I now have my Social Media Roadmap page set up with the URL http://www.facebook.com/socialmediaroadmap

Coming up

For the next post on this topic I intend to look at the experience of making the Facebook page more functional and hopefully more helpful to the community that is forming there.

If you have any tips on what to do or avoid with a Facebook page, I hope you will share those in the comments section below.