All posts in Outside The Box Thinking

Be A Stumbling, Bumbling Idiot Like Me

by UberAffiliate on November 18, 2009 in Outside The Box Thinking, Philosophy with 21 Comments

Boy, when I look back into my past, it’s funny to see what I said and did. From the rise and fall of UberCamp, to my multiple admissions to “blog less” or stop blogging, I’ve been able to see quite a bit of indecision in myself. And it’s helped me learn about myself, a lot.

See while maybe most people would think making a public ass of themselves all the time isn’t professional or conductive to real business, I would say overall that it’s helped me. By constantly throwing my ideas out there impulsively as I think them, I get an incredible amount of negative feedback. And while it may also seem uncommon, negative feedback is what I thrive on. How can you make yourself as close to perfect as possible without first knowing your flaws?

Believe it or not this wasn’t just me venting impulsively (okay, mmmmaybe partially), this can have practical application in your life and work. Couple points :

a) Don’t be afraid to pursue any idea that comes to your mind. Even if you get all the negative feedback in the world, you’ll still never really know until you try it.

b) Throw every idea out to as many people as you can (while being confidential if need-be). So maybe you have a killer product idea and you don’t want to reveal it, but you want some type of feedback from fellow marketers. Give away as much information as you can, talk about general strategies you’re thinking of employing, and get advice! Practical example :

Determining a rebill price for my product was one of the toughest things to figure out. I wanted to have a legitimate value for the product being sold, so I came up with a pretty low price. Shot that idea out to a bunch of my biz friends, and pretty much got all feedback that said “Not going to work dude.” They were right. The numbers just didn’t work out. Eventually I got the idea that instead of charging $100 for a bottle of 16oz Pepsi, I could add perceived value by shipping them 2 bottles of 10oz Pepsi, at the price of $50 per bottle. It increases the cost to me a bit since I have to ship 2 bottles, but the end value to the consumer will (hopefully) feel like they are getting a much better value at $50 per bottle instead of $100. Obviously all of these numbers are highly embellished, but you get the picture. Ran that idea by the same friends, they thought it was a much more practical idea then what I originally had planned.

If I hadn’t asked my friends with experience and looked like a newb (which is what I felt like), I probably wouldn’t have come to the eventual conclusion that I did.

c) Keep putting yourself out there. Just because you ran into a tree and fell down doesn’t mean you can’t get back up and run right back into it. Things will fall off the tree every time you hit it, and that’s how you learn.

Not really a post about much here, but if you have all these ideas bottled up and just don’t want to look stupid…look stupid. Who cares?

Popularity: 6% [?]

Using Current Events to Make Money

by UberAffiliate on September 25, 2007 in Affiliate Tips, Outside The Box Thinking with 25 Comments

So most conventional ways of doing affiliate marketing are either PPC or organic. Pay for an ad in a search engine (or content network), get clicks, go to the merchant, that whole thing. But as displayed with my Facebook article, there are other ways to make a decent coin with affiliate marketing. This small tip will hopefully open up some more doors in your minds. If you can start thinking outside the box, you’ll have an advantage over the majority. We already know that the top level affiliates (small number) makes most of the industry money – it’s time you become one of them.

You can bank in on current events, either via Adsense or affiliate offers. I’ll just describe with an example, because that’s the easy way for me to explain, and easiest way for you to understand. Back maybe a month ago or so, the huge VOIP company Sunrocket went bankrupt. They just closed the doors out of the blue on all it’s users, leaving them screwed. The first thing that came into mind was “how can I profit from this?”. I thought search volume in the next weeks would be high for this news, people searching for news. So I thought of what people would be searching for. I ended up registering the domain names SunrocketBankrupt.com and SunrocketGoesBankrupt.com. I made a really simple SEOish webpage with title and header tags about Sunrocket and VOIP. Then I just wrote a very small paragraph just explaining that Sunrocket went bankrupt and closed the doors on people. Above and below the paragraph I placed a few large Adsense blocks. That was the extent of what I did right there, it took about 10 minutes to do. After a couple days, I started getting decent traffic and Adsense clicks. Then I thought, well most of these people probably used Sunrocket and were screwed, so maybe an affiliate offer for an alternate VOIP company would work. I did end up getting a few leads (which are big $100+ leads) before I had problems with my server and the site ended up going down. I haven’t put it back up because it’s just kind of been in the back of my mind and I didn’t really think to.

I didn’t even attempt to SEO those domains for good organic rankings, I probably just got traffic by people searching “sunrocket bankrupt” in their browser bar and it redirecting to the .com or something.

Keeping up with the times and buying good keyword domains can end up bringing in some extra cash for you. If I hadn’t been so busy lately, I probably would of thought to register SenatorLarryCraigIsGay.com or domains like that and just spam them with Adsense.

Popularity: 4% [?]