Some weeks ago, I received a slap on the wrist by my coaches at InternetProfits.
Yep! I didn’t listen to what they taught me!
It’s a careless mistake, my first mistake… entirely my fault!
There are consequences to this I’m going to tell you.
Keep reading and take notes, so that you will not repeat the same errors I did.
I misbranded my business!
A word about expressions
Don’t take it literally though. No one hit me on the wrist. I’m just recalling an expression to emphasize that folks at InternetProfits pointed out some issues with my earlier blog version I had to fix.
The fact is there are some people that may have actually taken this sentence as if I really got hit on the wrist.
Depending on which culture they belongs to, their age, education, and other factors, people don’t express themselves the same way. Thus, this is reflected in the language as many different expressions.
I’m French-Canadian so obviously I don’t understand all the English expressions used by the majority of native English-speaking Canadians.
But there is more.
Branding Using allegories and metaphors
Let say I wish to tell you a story into which I want to describe an abstract idea that I want to make concrete for you.
I will use allegories.
The allegorical story, which often develops throughout a text or a speech, offers two possible readings: the story itself constituting a first degree, and the abstract realities revealed by the symbols, a second degree.
Even inside your own language, the second degree can cause confusion or misunderstanding, depending on the context, or your moods.
For example, I don’t always understand the language my wife is using when she tries to tell me it’s time to take the land mower out to cut the grass around the house. 🧐 I don’t always have the state of mind to “read between the lines”… or maybe… it’s just that I don’t want to? 😉
The fact that allegories can become expressions is nothing to help:
“Tired pushing up daysies? Follow the LittleMarketer and grow your business!”
-Martin Lefebvre 😬
When I first started this blog in June 2023, and other affiliate marketing activities, I did it under “theLittleMarketer” brand name.
I thought this sounded cool, reflecting the concept of the countryside farmer earning a living from his land.
The analogy of a small vegetable stand on the side of the road, with car traffic passing by, was for me an obvious one to illustrates an affiliate marketing business.
I thought also about a logo representing a bucket full of vegetables, that is, the colorful and abundant harvest resulting from the hard labor and dedication of the farmer to his land during the warm days of summer. It was a metaphor that was supposed to illustrate the income resulting from the efforts I dedicate to my business.
However, I learned that what is obvious for me is not necessarily obvious for a majority of people. Many might have thought at first glance that I was actually selling vegetables.
So this was quite a big problem because branding is supposed to give a direction, a personality to a business, or at least something that will make customers remember and become familiar with the business and its products. If I make them remember a bucket of vegetables instead of the actual money they can earn, the concept is doomed to failure.
Because of the nature of the affiliate marketing industry, I don’t want my audience to match me with a vegetable. Clearly, it is not my end product.
They could most likely think about “thelittlemarketer” and then remember they have to prepare their grocery list for the week.
While there is nothing bad with branding, I learned that we must do it with care.
A good knowledge of the niche we are in and its potential customers is essential for the affiliate marketer.
Furthermore, when your niche evolves around the topic “how to make money online”, it could be a bit tricky to properly brand your business without falling in the “look like a scam” category.
Simply said, branding may have a huge impact to the overall success of your business.
Brand your name
If you are a beginner, I learned that the preferred way to brand your business in affiliate marketing is to take your own name, or a fictive name, as your company name.
As a beginner, you may be brought to experience with many different things.
If, for some reason, there is a change in your business orientation, direction, or niche along the way, it will be easier to adapt to this change having your name as branding than something that represents too closely your old niche.
Your name appears to be neutral. With it, people will more easily associate the brand name with the real person: the guy who does money online with affiliate marketing.
Thus, branding your name is just another reason to, as always, stay professional and work with the best interests of your audience at heart. At the end, you don’t want to tarnish your name with a bad reputation right?
Since the aspects of relationship and trust are what drives people to your business, those people will eventually want to see you as their mentor, someone they will learn to trust, like, and follow.
In this sense, what sounds more familiar than the name of a real person?
So I closed the domain named “theLittleMarketer.com” and registered “martinlefebvreblog.com” as my new domain name, referring to my blog and identifying the business to my real name.
That’s it, simply.
It was better to do it now while almost nobody knows this site exists rather than doing it later in six months if the game is to change.
If you read this, there is a chance that my business have already got some traction since the moment I wrote these lines and that’s a good thing.
Disclaimer: the following text may have some misplaced or incorrectly used expressions. I put them in italic for better identification. I apologize for this. 😊
I chose the wrong tools!
Blogging on the wrong platform
I didn’t learn from one mistake.
The second mistake I did was that I didn’t take straight from the start the right tools for blogging. To make it short, I started my blog on the wrong platform.
I started my blog with Builderall’s Cheetah Builder, buying their basic package, which is good if you want to create great landing pages and other simple websites but for serious blogging, it is not ideal.
Again, I didn’t listen.
My strategy is blogging, I’m not paying for ads so I need more than a simple landing or opt-in page.
Because of the nature of blogging, I needed to have the tools that go together with blogging, in order to express my content and creativity without too much limitations.
Hence I invest my time organically: I was “theLittleMarketer” with plenty of vegetables remember? Organic…Vegetables… you got it?
Using the right tools
Here comes WordPress.
WordPress is to blog like a good quality cheese is to a good wine.
You may be able to build your website faster with a non-WordPress platform, but you will feel the limitations as soon as your blog will start to grow.
WordPress offers the possibility to install plugins to increase your available resources and tools. You have also a greater freedom to customize the appearance of all the objects you can use to construct your blog.
A full open, “Comments”, block section is one such example of an important blog component that can suffer from such limitations.
By default, the comment section I was stuck with in my Builderall’s blog application was closed to visitors. This means that they had to sign-in and login to the website in order to be able to leave a comment.
There are pros and cons to this, I mean, for closing (asking to sign in with a password) or opening your comment section.
If you already have fans and a large audience, you could limit spammy comments and save time moderating on past blog posts if you close your comment block.
If you are just starting your blog like I am, I would say it’s preferred to leave that door open.
Having the comment section closed by password is an extra-step to do for any guest who wants to leave a comment. Usually people facing this situation would just take the easy way out and decide to go away.
When trust isn’t there yet, not all people are willing to leave their email and sign-in to an unknown website. If you want to build a good relationship with your audience, you must first remove the barriers between you and them.
Builderall upgrade to WordPress?
Builderall offers the WordPress installation as part of an upgrade. Then why not just upgrade my account would you say ?
I can of course upgrade to have the WordPress installation as part of my Builderall package but the cost, for me, was just too expensive compared to most other WordPress site hosting providers.
You have what your pay for would you say?
Right but for my needs, the deal wasn’t there.
If I wanted more flexibility and less frustrations working on my blog, I needed to make a move.
Go for the change
I finally decided to change my website hosting for a new, cheaper hosting provider. This time on a full WordPress platform, I started over a brand new blog under a brand new name, …I mean, a new brand name 😁.
For me, this experience was like a big spill of my best morning coffee all over my work. However, I took the challenge and I clean up everything.
It took time and efforts, but now I got my blog like I wished it was,
and I’m proud of it!
Mistakes never come without consequences
I forgot something important
The above modifications I realized on and around my blog did not happen without some hurdles.
Changing the brand name for a new one, when nobody knows you, is relatively smooth. I’m glad I did it in the right time though.
Last October, when I changed my blog to build a new one on the servers of another hosting company, I was faced with several technical problems I had to solve.
First of all, I couldn’t migrate directly my old blog on the new servers. My old blog wasn’t built on a WordPress platform so I didn’t wanted to venture myself on a journey of site migration over two different kinds of platforms.
So I capitalized on the fact that I had to ride again the WordPress learning curve to build a new blog from scratch.
Since I have already some experience on the WordPress platform (see “How I Started Affiliate Marketing“), I thought it would be a no-brainer so I could do it fast.
Before closing my old website, I picked up some of my posts, refreshed them, and brought them inside my new blog keeping the original publication dates.
To this stage, everything went relatively well; its fair to say that the final results worth the candle.
However…
While I was focusing solely on my blog, struggling with the details, I was forgetting something really important.
My email services, including mail automation, mailing list, forms, and several opt-in pages were still on the Builderall’s server systems!
Aaaargh!!! I didn’t see this one coming!
I have no mean actually to build a mailing list!
I started to panic a little bit…
When in panic, you don’t take the most glamorous decisions.
In order to keep things simple, I thought that the best way was to migrate everything on my new host servers…
Doing this would have allowed me to close my Builderall account and save money by having all my tools in one place.
So I took the bull by the horns and I worked at starting over my email system looking around for help while digging inside the different plugins for WordPress.
Desperately searching for email marketing solutions
My first attempts of finding a FREE package of email marketing tools that would include email automation services while offering the possibility to trigger an email sequence from an opt-in form, was of course, unsuccessful.
So I resigned to pay a small amount to have the tools I needed properly to build my email list.
I subscribed with a company that was offering a very nice email marketing platform with a very well-looking, user-friendly environment, for even cheaper than my actual installation at Builderall. Fantastic!
I thought I was out of the woods.
😒Not yet!
I learned that you should never put the horse before the cart… huhh…. I mean the cart before the horse!
Indeed. Some minutes after I registered with the email marketing company I received another slap… right at the face this time:
“Your (..) account, login name (…), has been closed because it violates our Prohibited Content policy (…).
Please don’t take this personally; the industry in which your business operates unfortunately matches an industry associated with higher than average abuse complaints which causes deliverability concerns. We hope you understand that this is not a reflection of your individual business or list collection practices, but an effort on our part to avoid the possible risk and exposure to spam associated with your account.”
That is, I was banned almost immediately after having registered. They said that their policy now excludes affiliate marketing, and related activities, because of the higher risk for SPAM.
OK I said. No panic again. Don’t take it personally they said.
I tried another company… Same results!??
I was banned because I’m an affiliate marketer??!
What the heck???! 😲 I even didn’t have time to do something wrong!
UNFAIR!!! Something is going on for sure!
In order to keep my email automation system list intact, I finally decided to leave that service in my Builderall account. I learned also that Builderall has a plugin form, very limited by default, but it works well to link my opt-in form embedded in my WordPress blog to my email account in Builderall.
Now it remains for me to prepare a new download page and to connect to it. I would have liked to find a way to re-use the ones that were created by InternetProfits in Builderall but I couldn’t.
I realized that WordPress has its limitations too.
Unless you pay for good plugins, Builderall is far better when it ‘s time to produce quick standalone pages and forms of all kinds.
Hence I was stuck again with the system limitations on one side, and the new email marketing company’s policies that appear on the horizon.
What I was supposed to do then? No mailing list and no solution yet to build one.😕
A wind of changes
Things changes and you have to adapt to it. On my side, the wind of change is blowing hard.
Soon, another opportunity was being presented to me. All those hurdles are going to get down with this one big solution.
Time is coming now where I can say:
RIDDIKULUS! (see Harry Potter)
to all those issues that came to haunt me.
The 2nd of December Dean Holland invited the IP partner’s community to a huge presentation I had a chance to assist.
I was flabbergasted! This new approach is supposed to solve all the problems I’m experiencing!
A coincidence? …or rather the natural flow of people experiencing the same things at the same time from an evolving market?
Nevertheless I was presented a solution that has the power to change the life of all beginners in affiliate marketing.
Something so big that I can’t tell you right now. I’m not allowed to.
Wait until January 2024.
Success has never been so close, and I’ll be there at the forefront ready to tell this story.
For you.
On this, I wish you all great holidays and may you meet with success in 2024!
See you there!
Martin
Ho! Before I forget, please leave me some comments below. Have you ever started a blog? Did you make mistakes? How did you manage that? I look forward to read from you.
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