All posts in Philosophy

Lessons on business and life that I’ve learned in my short 20 years here, I’m in that sort of mood.

• Trust nobody but yourself. No matter what you think, there’s a little bit of devil in everyone. The bigger the issue, the less you should rely on other people to trust.

 

• In regards to business, think a long time about big decisions. Whether it be ethics, investments, cash flow, time, etc. Just sit down and think about it for a few days. Acting on impulse can lose you a lot of money.

 

• There’s always an excuse. Another trust issue I guess (can you tell I’m having them? lol). No matter how much somebody promises you something, there will always be an excuse out of it. When you go into something (business or life) be prepared for all excuses, no matter how lame they may be (because sometimes they can be very, very lame).

 

• Always take risks. 9 out of 10 times you’ll fall on your ass and it’ll hurt, but the 1 time you succeed you’ll forget about the other 9 times. Even if you fail, over time you’ll end up at the same place you would if you hadn’t taken the risk at all.

 

• Friends are important (as well as family), so make sure to have either. They can be the one to pull you out of a rut, stop you from losing money with a poor business decision, or just help you pick yourself back up.

 

• No matter how horrible you feel about having something bad out there happen to you, it happens to other people too. And they pick themselves back up and get back to life, so why shouldn’t you?

 

• Listen to music (actual music, not rap).

 

• Surround yourself with happy people, it really does rub off on you. Likewise, stay away from depressing and mopy people.

 

• If you think you know you’re at the bottom, know that the only way to go from here is up. Life and business have the same cycles I think. The cycle can be controlled though, and you alone determine how long you stay at the peak, and how long you stay in a recession.

 

• Don’t be afraid to be alone. Whether it’s quitting your dayjob or moving out by yourself, you’ll end up amazing yourself at what you alone can accomplish. It’ll always be a struggle in the beginning (ie quitting your job), but unless you truly think you’re horribly weak, you’ll notice that things will just start clicking. You’ll find a way.

 

• Understand that nobody will ever understand Google Adwords.

 

• There’s a 95% chance Facebook will disapprove your ad.

 

• I didn’t really lose 44lbs in 3 months with acai.

 

• Be crazy. Most successful people are.

 

• Never feel like you’re “settling”. We only get 1 life here, you should be taking advantage of every second you have.

 

• Never give up on something you truly believe in. Giving up is settling, and we don’t settle.

This post isn’t over yet. If you have a blog out there, MAKE A POST LIKE THIS. Share your experiences with everybody so they can learn from them. I’m only 20 so I still have a lot of life to get through and have plenty more to learn, so make a post and let me know what you’ve learned. Don’t have a blog? WordPress.org.

Don’t be a pussy either, it’s the internet nobody cares about you on here anyway. I’ll even blog about it and throw you a link if you do, so get your blog some traffic and make a post already.

Popularity: 13% [?]

The title of this post is simple and straightforward enough : be unique.

A textbook way of looking at affiliate marketing is “look at what everybody else is doing, if it’s been up there for a while then it has to work, so I’ll just model my campaign/landing page after that.” There’s nothing wrong with that and most times there’s truth to it. But sometimes also you can find greater success doing something unique, something that everybody else isn’t doing.

When you decide on what campaign you want to run and work on, the question is “what offer am I going to promote?” Once you pick the offer, you build a landing page for it and add some keywords into Google or whatever and just start tweaking the LP. Before the building phase ask yourself another question : HOW can I promote this offer?

Are you going to just making a landing page, or would a review page work better comparing other products? Do you want to collect their email before they go to the offer so you can hit them up every few days and try to sell them? Instead of just selling one offer, do you want to introduce a “succession” of offers and cross-sell? What about the demographics of your offer? Should you build a page just for women?

The biggest guys in the industry are the biggest guys because they were unique. They were the first to come up with an idea how to promote an offer, and then everybody followed them. Last year I was one of the first guys to have the True page with the big pink “enter chat rooms” button. I was #1 for chat terms for maybe a month before everybody and their mom had that page. If you went into Copyscape and typed my site it, it was crazy how many duplicates spawned so fast. Nobody was really doing it, we started doing it, and soon after everybody was doing it.

Same with the acai berry blog pages, I remember seeing the first couple guys that did it. Now there’s probably 500 pages exactly like it out there. He was unique, he raped and pillaged the towns and left them with acai berries to eat, and then everybody followed suit.

What’s the next offer you’re going to be unique on? And let me know so I can be one of the first ones to copy it :p. Kidding.

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One thing you can relate an affiliate campaign to is having a baby. First let’s look at what having a baby is like…

You’re all excited you’re going to have one. You get the baby’s room all ready and primped up, there’s cute crap all over, you’re telling all your friends about your baby that’s coming. You’ve invested all this money in your baby and pumped for it to come. Now after all this setting up and waiting, the baby has been born. Your first initial thoughts are “awe it’s so beautiful”, but you know that sucker is mangled and bloody when it first pops out. For the first month or 8 weeks or whatever (I haven’t had a baby yet), it cries, poops, keeps you up at night, and makes you a wreckless mess. It suckles from your teet (or your wife’s), and drains you of milk. Finally it starts to learn, optimize itself, and starts pooping in the toilet. We still have accidents, but it matures and eventually gets better. If you raise it right, you have a nice kid on your hands that grows up well, gets a job, and then takes care of you when you get old. If you raise it poorly, your child sucks and continues to wreak havoc on your life.

Now let’s compare it to affiliate campaigns. You get all excited when you first hear some good things about an offer, just like when you hear about having a baby. You invest money designing a page, getting content written, programming the tracking and everything in; all before the campaign goes live. Maybe you get excited and tell your friends you’re pumped about this new campaign you’re launching soon. Now it’s time for the campaign to go live. The first day it goes live, although you love the potential it has, it’s going to probably *look* like a mess. You’ll be testing out a ton of keywords and ad variations, and if you do it right you’ll be losing some money because not everything is going to convert. Now it’s time for you to become a good parent. You’ll go sleepless nights working on the campaign and it will stress you and keep you up. It suckles from your teet of wealth, and drains your cash. You need to spend time optimizing the campaign and making sure it grows and loses less and less money over time. If you optimize correctly, you have a great campaign that makes you money into your elder years. If you don’t optimize properly or the niche is a dud (ok comparing that to babies would just be mean lol so I didn’t), you’re out of luck and it does nothing but lose you money and cause chaos and depression in your life.

So what does any of this have to do with you? Well aside from a slightly comical comparison, the above is true. You’re going to lose money when you first start a campaign, and you need to realize that it’s just like having a kid. If you get through all the pooping and crying your campaign is going to do and optimize it right, you may just end up with a winner.

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When things just aren’t working out for you, remember…

• There are countless other affiliates in the exact same shoes as you are. Sometimes affiliate marketing is as simple as putting a few random keywords in and having the offer work out huge. For most, this isn’t the case. For every super affiliate making a lot of money, there’s 200 other affiliates struggling to get out of the red. It’s not always easy and it takes dedication. Some people get lucky their first try, others have to try 50 times to get lucky. But it’s the ones who try 50 times that end up becoming 1 of the 200 super affiliates.
• There are many many ways to make money online. Now I’m certainly not telling any of you to give up, but if you’ve lost thousands and feel like you gained nothing from it, maybe marketing just isn’t for you. There’s guys that make boatloads of money from SEO, programming, design, etc. Honestly. Making money can be as simple as saying you’re a content creation company, then just outsourcing all of your work. Sell articles for $8 a piece and outsource it for $5.
• There’s always tomorrow…literally. I’ve had days where campaigns are doing horrible, things are only looking worse, and then the next day it’s like a light switch was turned on. They’re back working well, end up making more money than ever, and I’ve been taken on yet another emotional affiliate roller coaster ride. Tomorrow could be your lucky day…
• Notice how I keep saying luck a lot? Yeah, most big affiliates got lucky in some way, shape, or form. I’ve gotten plenty lucky before and it’s worked out great. So don’t feel so bad because you think you’re trying your hardest and you’re not getting any results from it…keep trying and eventually you’ll stumble upon something.
• Know that once you get it…you pretty much got it. I was pretty stagnated for months not earning that much, and then I just “got it” and my earnings skyrocketed. Once again all it takes is one niche…one offer…one group of keywords.
• Know that it’s definitely possible. I hope one of the things this blog does is serve as an inspiration to those who are struggling to make ends meet. It’s most definitely possible to make a living from affiliate marketing, if some super affiliates can make millions in a month, it can’t be that hard to make a few thousand.
• Know that you’re trying to do something pretty incredible. Try telling someone that you’re starting up an online business that makes money 24/7 round the clock on autopilot and allows you to work at home whenever you want. Most people out there don’t even believe that it’s possible and will laugh it off (trust me I know from personal experience), and what everybody here is trying to do is totally respectable – even if it doesn’t work out.

Alright just some motivational words from Dr. Phil—-err Dr. Paul for my brothas who are having a rough time making some money. And now for the true message.

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