In this edition of the Affiliate Buzz, host and Instructor of the Affiliate Marketers BootCamp, James Martell welcomes entrepreneur and online educator Declan Dunn. Declan Dunn explains the concept of attention conversion and how he discovered the first point of conversion wasn’t a sale, it was simply getting, and retaining, their attention.

Introducing Declan Dunn

Declan Dunn is an internet pioneer with over two decades of hands-on experience in online education, corporate performance enhancement, and affiliate marketing. He also taught a course on business development at the University of California Santa Barbara for three years.

Declan is the co-founder of FMG Network which delivers practical and inspiring information to clients, students, and participants worldwide and the founder of the award-winning Remember.org, a community to help teachers and students find the best online sources for educating about the Holocaust.

James begins the episode by talking with Delcan about how he got started. Declan got started while living off the grid. He used a backpack mobile phone and a generator to send research papers over the internet. Having to complete work before the gas ran out was great incentive for meeting deadlines.

Shortly after Declan was introduced to Netscape, a web browser that allowed him to work on something besides CD-Roms. After getting his information online, he had to find a way to drive traffic, a necessity that led to his affiliate marketing career.

From Off the Grid to Online Marketing

Declan points out the irony of how similar the early days of affiliate marketing online were to today's affiliate marketing that targets mobile devices. One thing he says has never changed, and is even more important today, is a killer headline. James concurs and recalls the simplicity of some of the earliest websites.

Declan moved from his educational site to the marketing community by writing books. Although the cover left a lot to be desired, he attended a conference where his book got in leading to a round of introductions with the great names of affiliate marketing at that point which he then interviewed.

The biggest first success Declan feels he had was his Director of Sales book which taught people how to sell websites in plain English. On the other side of the coin, he cites his biggest as a video series. For the rest of the 90s, with the help of some industry professionals, Declan learned to rethink his attitude about marketing, which he claims was his biggest crutch.

By the time Y2K rolled around, Declan says things really got interesting. Declan and his associates took the profits from selling their books and created an agency during the dot-com times, where he worked as an outsource project manager, or OPM, for companies like American Express Network Solutions. Even after the dot-com crash, revenue continued to expand.

James and Declan met again at the 2005 Affiliate Summit where about 500 affiliate marketers conferenced together. By this time, Declan moved on from his agency to work with exclusive clients and projects. That time taught him that everyone feeds everyone else -- in other words, the search engine guy, the social media guy, and the email guy are all connected.

How to Use Multi-Step Marketing

Then Declan segues into the topic of multi-step marketing. He explains that people dislike "marketing speak" and says buying a click no longer guarantees making a sale.

Declan goes on to outline the different steps people take between the first click and the last one that leads to a sale, and says anyone who isn't paying attention to the in-between clicks in the middle is pretty much out of luck on social media.

James then asks Declan to expand on the phrase attention conversion from stories to sales. Attention conversion is a term to describe using things that make customers happy in order...