That subject line yesterday made no sense

Just a heads up that the site I listed for sale yesterday is sold. Thank you to everyone interested in it. Also, I'm finally opening enrollment for my course bundle next week Monday. It'll be available for a very short time then closed again. Affiliate marketing thoughts Now to yesterday's bizarro email subject line that probably confused a few of you. Yesterday I was going to write an email about affiliate marketing. I typed in the subject "Does affiliate marketing even make sense?" then started writing the email. Somewhere along the way, I ended up on some detour to such a degree that the subject line no longer made any sense. I apologize. I didn't intend for clickbait but that's what you got. I got a little trigger happy and clicked the send button before checking the subject line. Since I brought up the topic "is affiliate marketing worth it?" I guess I should address it. Here goes. Yeah, affiliate marketing is worth it but how much it's worth it depends on how you go about choosing keywords. Info keywords do not generate much affiliate commissions. No matter how many fancy product boxes you pepper throughout your content, conversions will be low or nonexistent. You're better off slamming in ads and earning per 1,000 impressions. But if you do publish keywords with buyer intent and rank it, affiliate money can be plentiful; very plentiful. You don't have to rank for all that many good buyer intent keywords to earn a great living from commissions. Long before Google's recent affiliate updates and before I jumped into the display ads racket, I earned reasonably well from affiliate sites. I grew it to five figures per month by ranking a very small handful of buyer intent keywords. I get why affiliate marketers put so much into ranking buyer intent keywords. They can be ridiculously lucrative. A handful of such pages can out-earn hundreds of info articles. And yet I hold steadfast with info articles. Publishing info articles is easy for me. Ranking buyer intent content is hard for me. I'm not interested in the tasks involved. You might be thinking that I'm leaving money on the table. I might be but in the short term but I don't think so in the long run. I've developed a lean and efficient workflow for getting info articles published. Affiliate content has more moving parts. It falls outside of my well-oiled machine. Some business "experts" suggest focusing on your strengths and scale up. My strength is publishing lots and lots of content. That's it. It does not include conversion rate optimization, off-site SEO and all that stuff that's the foundation for excellent affiliate earnings. I don't even do all that well on the affiliate commission front with Fat Stacks. Admittedly, I don't try all that hard. An experienced affiliate marketer could do well with Fat Stacks. In theory, every email should promote something. But I don't. I should be careful though because readers become accustomed to the non-promotional format. When I do a promo, some readers get ticked off. It's kind of perverse in a way. I've heard other email marketers talk about it. Some choose to send mostly good info and then get skewered with the odd promotion. Email marketers on the other end of the spectrum blast out promotions non-stop and no reader bats an eye. I guess it comes down to how you condition your list. Keep that in mind if you run an email newsletter. Figure out your well-oiled machine Whether you dive full tilt into affiliate marketing or not, whatever you do, work to create a well-oiled machine that excels at whatever its objective is. It could be writing killer articles yourself. It could be making videos. It could be ranking lucrative affiliate pages. It could be cranking out tons of content. Once you have your well-oiled machine running, focus on making it bigger, faster and better (BFB). It's not every day you stumble across a working business model. You only need one in your entire lifetime to do well so when you figure it out and set it up, go all in. I'm all in on content. Jon Fatstacksblog.com [Unsubscribe]( | [Update your profile]( | 2016 Hill Drive, North Vancouver, British Columbia V7H 2N5