Last week, I attended the BlogWorld Expo in Las Vegas. It’s a great event for learning about the latest advances in online marketing, and is filled with people who are serious and passionate about learning the best methods for achieving online success. Although only a small portion of the event and sessions are geared towards affiliate marketing, I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to learn more about writing, selling, expanding their sphere of influence, and who wants to make some great networking connections.

While there were a lot of nuts-and-bolts marketing tactics taught at the learning sessions at BlogWorld, there was a recurring theme that popped up in several presenters’ speeches and panels: the importance and power of cultivating relationships.

Without exception, building strong and mutually beneficial relationships with your customers (or potential customers), clients, partners, industry peers, or anyone you’d like to work with, can be the difference between success and failure.

Why You Need to Work on Relationship Building

For a lot of new affiliate marketers, when they first get started, they jump right in to things like writing articles, creating ads, building landing pages, etc. While this is of course very important and necessary, I believe that spending a significant portion of time trying to build relationships can have a far greater long-term impact on potential success.

I’ve met and spoken with quite a few of ClickBank’s top-performing vendors and affiliates, and nearly all of them have connections with other top people in the industry. Some have collaborated on creating a product, some recommend products to their customers from vendors they know and trust, and some form “mastermind” groups to develop strategies and offer each other assistance. Almost no one gets to the top alone, without having received significant help and advice from other people at some point.

Not only is the advice and help you can receive extremely important, but having strong relationships can create opportunities and open doors you didn’t even know existed. It’s the same as it is for job hunting- it’s often not what you know, but who you know. You could end up getting invited to be an exclusive partner for a project, getting tipped off to a fantastic product to promote, or being introduced to other potential partners in your space.

Relationships are About Giving

At BlogWorld, author and marketer Chris Brogan discussed how the only relationships that really work are ones where both parties benefit. This is an extremely important point, and one where I think many people who are trying to create relationships with important people in their space run into problems.

If you’re new to a space, whether it’s affiliate marketing or any other industry with some established experts, immediately begging for help and going straight to the most influential people with requests for personal assistance is probably a bad idea. Best case, you might have someone take pity on you and give you a stock answer they’ve given to a thousand other people and then forget you completely. Worst case, you become a memorable annoyance to them and they do their best to avoid you altogether. Their first impression of you may end up being negative, and it’s hard to overcome this later.

How to Introduce Yourself Without Being Annoying

Instead of immediately asking for help, first become an information sponge and soak up all the information you can about a topic, whether it’s in books or on forums, blogs, Twitter, podcasts, or wherever. If you dedicate a substantial amount of time to just learning about a topic, without trying to first take action, it’s pretty amazing how quickly you can get up to speed and start really participating in the conversation and even helping other people.

Once you feel like you at least understand the conversation and are starting to form an opinion on the topic, starting contributing before you start making requests of people. If you follow an influential blogger in your space, start leaving thoughtful comments on their posts. Give your opinion on the subject, or offer up something you’ve learned in your research that could help others understand the topic better.

As a blogger, I can tell you that there’s nothing more satisfying than receiving comments on a post that show that someone has really thought about what you’ve written and is engaged with your ideas. If your comment shows me you’re really here to participate, and aren’t just commenting to get a link to your site, I’m far more likely to want to know more about you and listen to what you have to say in the future. I’m also a lot more likely to respond if you do ask me a question or make a request of me in the future.

This holds true all the way up from small bloggers to the most influential people in Internet and affiliate marketing. Before you can expect to get anything out of a relationship with people in your industry, you first have to show them that you’re willing to be authentic (don’t pretend to be interested just to get their help) and to give back to the community they’re a part of.

This is especially the case if you want to engage with someone who’s already achieved some success and is too busy to give significant time to every newbie who comes along. You’re going to really have to stand out as someone who’s worth their limited time. A great way to do that is by helping the same people they’re trying to help, and ideally, actually helping them too.

While I certainly can’t guarantee that you’ll develop a great relationship with the person or people you want to work with even if you do everything “right,” your chances of getting respect and becoming an influential person in your space will be much higher. For example, many bloggers and affiliate marketers who are now successful in their own right started out by commenting frequently on blogs or forums in their space. Even if the person you’ve approached doesn’t end up engaging with you, you may find that other people will seek you out and want to work with you, creating opportunities you never knew existed.

If you’re a ClickBank vendor but have no clue how to design your own Pitch Page for your product, this video from Gideon Shalwick of Become a Blogger will walk you through the steps of creating a Pitch Page using the popular free blogging software, Wordpress. It’s one of the best and easiest ways to quickly create a great-looking Pitch Page!

Last month, we told you about HopAd Builder, our powerful new tool that affiliates can use to promote ClickBank products through targeted text ads on their sites, and get the full affiliate commission for sales made to visitors who click on the ads and buy.

The response to HopAd Builder has been great, and several third-party developers have started creating free tools that extend the functionality of HopAd Builder and make it easy to use on certain types of websites.

One example of a HopAd tool is a plugin for the popular Wordpress blogging software, called the HopAd Plugin. It is available for free at www.hopadplugin.com and it allows owners of self-hosted Wordpress blogs to integrate HopAds into a blog in a simple and seamless way.

If you’re a Wordpress blog owner and you’d like an easy new way to make extra affiliate commissions by displaying ads for ClickBank products related to your blog’s content, be sure to check out the HopAd Plugin!

Do you have any experience using the HopAd Plugin? Know of any other great free tools out there? Leave a comment and let us know.

If you’ve wanted to create your own blog but weren’t sure how to get started, Become a Blogger’s tutorial videos will walk you through every step of the blog creation process. Be sure to check them out!

In my job, I speak to our largest publishers and affiliates pretty much every day. Just the other day after a conversation with one particularly successful publisher, it struck me that there is a common thread that runs through all successful publishers.

While their businesses may be different and the areas of their specialization may be diverse, they all have very similar habits. As I continued my conversations with these publishers, I jotted down the common habits that distinguish these successful people, and here they are for your enjoyment and edification:

1. Stay close to your passion: The most important thing is to create a product about which you are passionate. That passion and commitment to the subject matter will show through, as will the lack of depth and insincerity if you are merely recycling material you may have found elsewhere. Being passionate about your topic will also help tide you over in lean times when sales of your product suffer a dip, as even the most popular products do.

2. Work hard: Contrary to all the hype you hear about making money in your sleep, the most successful publishers will tell you that they work extremely hard at their products. Whether it’s creating updated versions of their products, staying on top of their customer service or putting together material for affiliates, it is serious work. The good news is that you’re working for yourself; you can usually choose the hours you work, spend time with your family and devote time to your hobbies and passions. And the rewards for the hard work are handsome indeed – not just a pat on the back by the boss.

3. Don’t be afraid to pick an obscure topic: Passionate about the migratory patterns of the monarch butterfly? Write an ebook about how to attract them to your garden. Consider yourself an authority on the arcane topic of growing miniature Bonsai trees? Write an ebook on the best how-to tips for cultivating a Bonsai garden. The beauty of the long tail ClickBank model is that no matter how obscure your topic, there are affiliates who would like to promote the product and customers who will gladly pay for it. You don’t have to write another Internet Marketing ebook – unless that’s your passion.

4. Collaborate: An amazing number of our very successful publishers collaborate with one another, offering suggestions and helping each other. Internet marketing is not all cut-throat competition, it would appear, as the successful publishers have proven that it is better to collaborate constructively than to compete destructively. Consider joining a Mastermind group in your specific area of interest or subject matter. There is a lot of good information that is shared at these groups.

5. Price your product right: Top publishers have figured out that a lower price is not necessarily more attractive. In fact, one publisher told me that his product converted much better at a price of $67 than at $37. In the digital product world, with no other cues to the quality of the product, price is often seen as the indicator of value. How do you figure out the optimal price for your product? That brings me to the next habit of successful publishers.

6. Test relentlessly: Another trait common to successful publishers is that they test everything extensively. The price of the product, sales page copy, the colors used on the site, the size and color of buttons, testimonials, audio, video – everything. Seemingly something as trivial as the font used on the page or the color of the ‘Buy Now’ button has a significant effect on conversions.

7. Be generous with your commissions: Successful publishers realize that affiliates make the difference between success and failure for publishers. Since publishers have no fixed costs, and only pay commissions when their products sell, being generous with commissions makes business sense. The most successful publishers seem to offer commission above the 50% mark with a good number of them at the very top end at 75%. See Bob Dunlap’s post on offering generous commissions for more detail.

8. Provide impeccable customer service: Our most successful publishers tell us that they will usually go to any lengths to provide exceptional customer service. And if the customer is unhappy, give them a refund – no questions asked. Affiliates quickly discover publishers that have excellent customer service and line up to promote their products. As it is often the affiliates’ reputation that’s on the line, they tend to guard their reputations,and will shun products if they feel that the publisher doesn’t have satisfied customers.

9. Believe in yourself and your product: Another common trait amongst the top publishers is their passion and near fanatical belief in, and enthusiasm for, their product. That kind of belief and confidence is inspirational and infectious, and comes through in whatever you attempt. People can’t help being moved by it. After all, would you buy something from someone who isn’t completely sold on it himself? Enthusiasm sells.

10. Do not be deterred by failure: Every one of our top publishers will tell you that before they hit upon the product that made them successful, they had a few (or more than a few) that were duds. But they learned from their failures and figured out what not to do. And undeterred, they picked up and went on.

By emulating the habits of the most successful publishers, you too can belong to the growing group of ClickBank success stories.

This past weekend, Bob Dunlap, our director of marketing, and I had the pleasure of attending the BlogWorld Expo in Las Vegas. The event has grown tremendously since last year. Attendance was great and many important figures from the blogging world spoke at the sessions. Sessions covered a wide variety of topics, ranging from blog widgets to SEO to using blogs for affiliate marketing.

One topic that many of the sessions addressed was how to more effectively make money from blogging. After attending several of these sessions, it became clear how mainstream blogs have become, and how they are an effective tool for anyone wanting to make money online, regardless of their niche. In fact, many of the speakers focused on how blogging in a niche is actually more effective for traffic generation and monetization, because niche visitors will be more motivated to buy a product you recommend, especially if you provide valuable content and information to them.

In addition to reinforcing the potential effectiveness of blogs, especially for small businesses who are looking to get more traffic and highlight their brand, many of the sessions talked about how bloggers can take advantage of social networking to drive even more traffic and increase visitor loyalty. We learned some impressive, often free, tactics for achieving this, and plan to share them with our ClickBank clients in the months to come.

If you haven’t already created a blog to highlight your product or products you promote, you’re missing out on the ability to communicate directly with your target audience. There’s no better time to get started, and soon you can be marketing more effectively than ever, often without spending much money at all. If you already have a blog and want to find out more about how you can use ClickBank in conjunction with your blog to dramatically increase your profits, check out our ClickBank for Bloggers page.

In addition to being able to help our ClickBank clients more effectively use blogs to boost their business, we’ll be using what we’ve learned to improve the ClickBank Blog and make it as useful as possible for our readers. Please comment and let us know if there’s anything you’d like to see more or less of in the blog. We hope to see you next year at BlogWorld 2009!