Internet Marketing Business Strategies

The mentors of the Affiliate Power Group (APG) have just started a new Internet marketing competition for their members. I think this must be the fourth competition they have held, and the second one this year. The current competition challenges participants to develop good backlink-building practices and the winners will be those who score most points for performing clearly defined backlink building tasks that improve their search engine rankings.

The first APG competition was held in the summer of 2008. In this article, which I’ve just moved from the old HTML version of this website, I talk about the first year of the Affiliate Power Group and about how I managed to win the competition in 2008.

The APG Is Set Up

Back in February 2008 six Internet marketing experts teamed up to form a mentoring group for struggling Internet marketers.

The mentoring group was originally known as the PPG but eventually developed into the Affiliate Power Group, or APG.

As someone who had who was determined to build a business working from home on the Internet, I was very interested to hear about the APG, although I must admit that I was also a bit sceptical at the outset..!

Anyway, the prelaunch lifetime membership offer was so good that I jumped at it and was one of the first people through the doors when they opened!

The APG Works!

Within a few months of joining the APG and applying their training to my business, I stopped LOSING money online and started MAKING money. Sure, it was small commissions here and there to begin with, but my monthly income has continued to go up while I have avoided wasting my money on stuff that doesn’t work.

It’s all because I have had both expert guidance in what to do and what NOT to do, and have been motivated to put in the work needed to succeed.

The First APG Competition

Six months after their launch, the mentors announced the “APG ‘Summer’ $500 Giveaway Competition” which ran for six weeks from June 1st until July 15th.
The aim of the contest was to see which APG member could make most progress with their business in that time.

We had to provide our Alexa.com ranking at the start and finish of the competiton. Other factors that were measured included:

• Backlinks
• Appearance of website – Changes made, etc.
• Articles Written and published
• Blog Posts

The other thing we had to do was to report our activity each day on the competition thread of the members’ forum.

Forty members entered the competition, so the thread quickly grew as people filed their reports each day.

Halfway through the competition the “Current Top 10″ names were announced and I was pleased to see my name on the list. None of us knew our exact position in the top 10 rankings. They were listed in this order:

1. GT Bulmer
2. Johnny Paramedic
3. Ying
4. David Hurley
5. Ros Bott
6. Tanny Lahah
7. Bill Shultz
8. Ina Smit
9. Jim Suzak
10. Matt Helphrey

When the competition closed on 15th July we had to wait a few days while the mentors sorted through the mass of information and boiled it all down to produce the final results, which we received by email.

I was quite sure that my campaign had gone off the boil and that another member had come up through the field to take first place. I expected to see Tanny in second place… But when the results arrived in my inbox and I opened the email I was amazed to see the following:

Drum roll please………

Let’s get right to the point. You want the winners and here we go:

1st prize: $200 or 1 Year Subscription to the APG ($197.00 Value)

DAVID HURLEY!!!!!!

Well done David!!!! This was a very hard choice as there are a lot of deserving people….

2nd Prize: $100 Worth of Site Updates from Suzanne Morrison of your choosing

MATT BELOCK

3rd Prize: 5 Unique Never Distributed Articles by the Jeff Team (Schuman and Casmer)

ALAN THOMAS

4th Prize: 10 SFI Affiliates From Mal Keenan

JOHNNY PARAMEDIC

5th Prize: 7 SFI Affiliates From Jeff Casmer

TANNY LAHAV

Congratulations to EVERYONE!

Wait Just a Minute…….hold on……let me look……oooooooooooooooooooo

MORE WINNERS??? We decided to award even MORE Prizes that were not originally in the Prize List due to such great work by alot of people…..

Who are these extra winners?

JIM SUZAK & INA SMIT

Each of you have won 2 articles written by Cynthia Minnaar. Guess what? She has already pulled your main keywords and will target those when writing these articles for you. They will be unique and you will be the legal owner and copyright holder to these 2 articles per person!

Great job!

OHHHHHHH Stop it PPG! MORE WINNERS!!!! REALLY??

GT BULMER and MATT HELPHREY

You EACH of You have won 3 SFI affiliates each from Mal Keenan!!!!

See folks? We at the APG really do care about your success. We had 5 prizes listed and we gave away 9!!!

All of you did great work on your business these past 2 months and that hard work will be rewarded as we approach the busy season which is fast approaching.

Dont stop working….

Dont stop believing in yourselves

Because the APG believes in YOU!!!

Congratulations to ALL WINNERS and to ALL MEMBERS!

The APG Staff

 

So how did I succeed in winning the APG competition?

One answer might be “by the skin of my teeth”! It was certainly a close competition as all the competitors mentioned above made a big effort and a lot of progress.

My Strategy…

My strategy was fairly straightforward and based on focus, effort, and support. I prioritized the building of backlinks, posting of articles and blogs, and after that, improving my website.

FOCUS: I was determined to do something every day, even on the days when I was busy with other stuff. I therefore divided jobs between “high input” and “low input”:

HIGH INPUT: Article writing and submitting; writing blog posts; improving website

LOW INPUT: Forum posts, blog comments, stumbling and social bookmarking, Squidoo comments, TrafficSwarm clicking.

SUPPORT: I helped keep myself focused by reading books such as Permission Marketing by Seth Godin, and by playing motivational DVDs and CDs. I also went over my long term aims on a reguar basis to keep myself motivated.

I had two days per week which I could dedicate more time to the competition, and on those days I did high input stuff, such as writing articles and blog posts.

I used Submit Your Article to rewrite and distribute articles. Submit Your Article proved to be the jewel in the crown of my campaign.

Once an article was published or a blog post posted I got into the habit of bookmarking it and pinging Blogger.com blog posts.

During the days when I was busy teaching, editing articles for the local newspaper, consulting, and dealing with Japanese-Games-Shop.com orders, I would lower my sights and concentrate on the low input tasks unless I was feeling exceptionally energetic!

With this new-found focus a couple of nice little bonuses came along:

1. I was very impressed with three-times Olympian Ruben Gonzalez‘s presentation on one of the motivational DVD’s I was watching, so I contacted him and ended up cooperating with him on an article promoting his and my website.

2. One of the APG competitors announced that he had won the Evancarmichael.com forum posting competition and that caused me to investigate the forum, which led to my becoming a moderator, and then going on to win the July posting competition!

3. My sales volume increased! Before I joined the APG I had a few people sign up to the free stuff, but virtually no sales. In May I used an APG recommended technique and began to have some success selling affiliate products. Sales continued through June and July, and I also had sales from various other links on my Website and from Squidoo.

It was interesting to see what the other competitors were doing as well. Some people were concentrating a lot on directory submissions. I wanted to answer that attack so I subscribed to Directory Maximizer, but never found the opportunity to use it!

I also wanted to start using another article submission service because at the time of the competition SubmitYourArticle limited subscribers to just 8 articles per month, so I signed up to ArticleMarketer.com and posted a couple of articles… however, because I took out a free subscription everything took a lot longer to process and the articles were not distributed until after the competition had closed! (NOTE: SubmitYourArticle now allows unlimited article submissions per month.)

With less than two weeks remaining, I began to shift the emphasis of my activities towards improving my website.

By now, I was also getting tired, and I noticed that Matt Belock was really starting to produce some good results and that he and some other competitors were making impressive progress up the Alexa rankings.

In response, I drew up a list of nine targets to keep me focused, and then drew a line graph to chart my progress and spur me on.

The nine objectives

1. Publish 10 articles
2. Post 15 blogs
3. Post 30 blog comments
4. Post 50 comments on non-PPG forums
5. Stumble 30 sites
6. Bookmark 15 sites
7. Upload 5 articles to my website
8. Submit site to 75 directories (using directorysubmitter.com)
9. 500 TrafficSwarm clicks

Results

1. 3 articles
2. 5 blogs
3. 30 comments
4. 50 comments
5. 8 sites
6. 0 sites

As you can see, I fell far short of the optimistic targets, BUT just because I had written down my aims and made a graph meant that some nights I would stay up an extra hour just to get one or other of the lines on my graph moving up towards some of the targets!!

However, by the end I felt that Matt, Tanny and some of the others would be ahead. In fact, I was not even sure that I would still be in the top 10!

So, when I saw the result, with my name in the no. 1 spot, I was both delighted and, just for a while, speechless!

The competition has been a great experience for everybody who stayed involved. It gave us a good idea of what is needed to succeed on the Internet, and it also improved our ability to go out and do it.

Without the APG, I for one would not have made half as much progress in 2008 as I have. But I am also aware that there is still a lot of work to be done and progress to be made.

Happily, though, because I am a lifetime member of the APG I have six top-class mentors and a great bunch of dedicated fellow marketers to guide me through to success.

David Hurley

P. S. If you are starting out online and you want to find a reliable way to succeed within a modest budget and are looking for reliable guidance from a team of Internet Marketing experts who really have your interests at heart, then I suggest that you take a look at what the Affiliate Power Group is offering – you can try it out for $1 for 10 days to see if it is as good as I say it is.