CPA Success - REQUIRED Affiliate Skills

As an affiliate or CPA publisher, you will need to master several critical skills. I’m breaking this list up into skills that CAN be outsourced, vs. those that CANNOT. If you are not willing to master the skills that cannot be outsourced, you will NOT be successful in this industry. I will list them out, then describe each one in a little more detail and point you to the resources I’ve found to be most helpful. Here they are: Skills that CAN be outsourced:

• Website / graphics design
• Copywriting / content writing / ad writing

Skills that CAN NOT be outsourced:

• Goal-setting
• Budgeting
• Market Research
• Pay per click mechanics
• Tracking and Analysis
• Outsourcing

Website and Graphic Design: I believe that you CAN and SHOULD learn some of the basics of making simple changes to webpages, uploading those changes, and creating a simple blog.  With this knowledge, you can have someone else build you a nice looking site (very inexpensive), but still make changes/updates to it later without having to pay for each update. With today’s WSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editors, making changes is very simple. I don’t have a recommendation for doing basic html (just Google what you need to know), but the product I’ve found the most helpful in learning to set up a blog (which is NOT hard) is my friend Alex Sysoef’s Expert Worpress.  Writing  - Writing in its many forms CAN be outsourced, but as with websites it is a good idea to know some basics yourself. If you have your own product to sell and want a professional-grade sales letter written, that is going to cost thousands to do. (But will be well worth it if you have the money to do so.) Simple 300 word articles, used to drive free traffic to your sites, can be outsourced for as little as just a few dollars each.  The most inexpensive, but high quality, copywriting course I’ve seen is Lorrie Morgan-Ferrero’s Red Hot Copy. John Carlton is the guru here, I would definitely read his blog for ideas, but his programs are more to train professional copywriters who are looking to freelance for a living. In other words, he is training the guys that you will outsource to, not necessarily training you per se, unless you want to go down that route yourself. Goal-setting - I include this here because it is CRITICAL to your success. You need to create a clear plan of action, know what you are trying to achieve, and create intermediate goals to achieve and hold yourself accountable to deadlines. Missing a deadline is not the end of the world, but you must always be moving forward. This also includes educational goals and timelines as well. The key is to measure and track your progess, and hold yourself accountable. I don’t have specific recommendations here, but also include in this area personal growth. In that regard, I stronly recommend anything put together by Anthony Robbins or Brian Tracy. In addition to that, although not specifically related to goal setting, I’m currently learning from a great program put together by Bob Proctor called The 11 Forgotten Laws. Market Research - The ability to quickly, yet thoroughly analyze a market for: viablility, competitors, demand, etc is critical to your success. The advantage of being in an internet business is that there is a tremendous amount of research at your fingertips. The free tools that I would recommend are Google’s own keyword research tool, Microsoft’s Adlab, Yahoo Buzz and Lycos 50 to see what is hot now, and cbengine to analyze hot products being sold at clickbank. In addition to that, competitor spy tools are becoming essential in the affiliate marketing space. I actually don’t have a recommendation here because I am a member of Chris Carpentar’s Google Cash Detective, which is state of the art world-class stuff, but is unfortunately closed to new members. For SEO purposes, the best tool out there is Market Samurai. (And they will be adding in some adwords functionality soon too, so that is absolutely a program you should get if search engine traffic will be a component of your business.) Pay per click  - Since this will be the initial source of all of your traffic, you MUST master this. Your goal should be to not only learn HOW to do it, but how to do it quickly and efficiently. Campaign management will become essentially impossible to do at a large scale without using automation in some ways. The top 3 sources that I recommend here (other than Google’s training itself, which is actually quite good) are: Perry Marshall’s Definitive Guide to Adwords, Mindvalley’s Adwords Exposed, and Chris Carpenter’s Google Cash. For automation, you need to learn how to use Google’s adwords editor. You can use that to export campaigns to Yahoo and MSN with a .csv file, but Microsoft has their own desktop editor, adcenter editor, (very slick in my opinion) which you should also learn. Being able to work with the templates and quickly add and modify campaigns in excel is also a huge help. Tracking and Analysis - You MUST track results down to the keyword level, or you will be working blind, which is obviously no way to build a business.  Further, you must carefully analyze these results and take informed actions quickly when necessary. I have two recommendations here. First off, the best tracking software I’ve used is called Affiliate Prophet. Fairly easy to learn, and very powerful. Next, just to give you an idea of how to track many simultaneous campaigns in a quick snapshot, go to Gauher Chaudhry’s site here and download his spreadsheet. He has a video on how to use that as well. Outsourcing - Simply put, if your goal is to build a large, profitable, and largely automated online business, you MUST learn to delegate. You don’t necessarily have to hire full-time employees (I don’t), but you must learn how to use outsourcing services. You time should be spent researching new markets, running tests and scaling profitable businesses. You should NOT be designing blogs or writing hundreds of short articles for free seo traffic. Outsource that work and create virtual employees instead. Some places to outsource work to are: rentacoder.com, www.elance.com, www.scriptlance.com, www.getafreelancer.com, www.odesk.com, and there are many others. A note here: "split test" your outsourced work by hiring 3 people to do the same (small) job. Hire the best person to do a larger job, and if they perform well you’ve got a "virtual employee" that you can hire on an as needed basis.