Stat report

Well…as you can see I have been religiously posting since I started this blog. And all my loyal followers probably thought I fell out, gave up, quit & got a real job.

Well, I almost did. But I’m still hanging in there.

So my plan with this blog was basically to post affiliate links on here and then write about marketing stuff, have people flock to my blog and then buy stuff and get me my affilaite commission. The problem was/is, that that made writing the blog WORK.

Not that I’m afraid of putting in the hours, but within the “work”-category there were simply more important stuff to be done. Writing a blog MAY have the possibility of somewhere down the road leading to some type of profit, but it’s a fairly indirect way to go about it. I needed money for rent – so I tried to find a couple of quick-fixes

Like I mentioned, the idea of doing marketing fulltime came to me when a friend asked me to help market his book he was trying to sell with clickbank. Since he’s an acclaimed professional within his field I was this as a very cool opporunity and – being my usual self – got completely and utterly engrossed in the strange marketing world.

The book hasn’t really been selling…the most difficult part has been to get traffic to the site. But for a while we were selling a book every couple of days, and at $60 it seemed like it could be at least some additional income each month.

But then the sales died down, the traffic remained consistent, and I’ve been struggling to find my way back to the glory days of selling 2 books a wekk (I think I’ve sold one in the past month now).

But I’ve also been very diligently working on other ideas…the one that seemed the most promising was a product review sites for men, advertised under certain cheap porn keywords. I built the test site in a day (to see if it had a chance to convert at all), started the PPC campaign the next day and went to the gym.

When I got home I was $10 richer.

I was f-ing ecstatic. I mean, it was only 10 bucks, but it was a ten dollar profit. Did this mean if I bid on other keywords I could see more of that money?

Within a couple of days I had spent $100 on adwords…but I made $300 (gross) in affiliate sales. This really seemed like it – I started thinking that I might have found a decent formula for generating a site that could get me at least a few hundred dollars each month, if not more. A few of those babies up there and I’d be on a gravy train with buiscuit wheels.

But then google gave me a bitch slap. All my keywords went up to $5 or even $10 per click, I’m assuming because of the lack of content on my site. So I undertook an ambitious project to build a massive male resource site with reviews and affiliate links using XSite Pro (Yes that’s an affiliate link). The program is pretty pricey, but genuinely awesome: it has integrated tools for keeping track of affiliates, and basically allows you to create very large affiliate sites with SEO optimization VERY quickly (the same site would have taken me months with Dreamweaver).

I put in about 14 hours a day for over a week straight. I was a zombie – unshaven, unkempt and borderline agoraphobic. But I DID triple my money in just a few days, so this seemed like a venture well worth my time. I worked with such tenacity because I felt there was a solid chance that this site could start earning me some money – even a lot of money.

By the end of my gruelling work-stretch I was completely exhausted, but finally the site was up, the ad capaigns were ready to go and I was ready to find out if this really was my golden ticket.

And then nothing. Well, at least almost nothing. The traffic wasn’t converting enough to turn a profit but, as anyone who has taken a psychology class knows, random interval reinforcement contitions behavior that take a long time to exstinguish. What this means is this:

If you give a rat some cheese everytime it pushes a lever, it will continue only as long as you keep giving it cheese. As soon as you stop, the rat will push the lever a couple of more times and then give up. If you instead give the rat cheese at random intervals, say between every 10th and 20th time it pushes the lever, and the rat will keep going for a long time even after you stop (this along with ‘the gambler’s fallacy’ is why people lose their savings in casinos).

So I kept at it and kept losing money – I was making sales often enough to keep trying, but rarely enough to net me a loss.

I was fucked in so many ways. I had completely neglected everything else in my life, I had no other income and arrogantly assumed that I’d figure it out in time. Now rent was coming up (this was like 2 weeks ago, but feels like 2 months ago), my car had broken down and I was literally broke.

I used to work in a restaurant to make ends meet, and it sucked. My vowe with marketing was to never ever, ever have a job like that where I had to kiss other people’s asses. And now I really didn’t have a choice. It was emotionally the darkest period of my life, hands down. I have a huge amount of belief in my own ability, and to invest so much effort in to something and then have to do a complete 180 was crushing.

It was with a heavy hand I started writing my resume to apply for a job as a waiter. Not to mention I had to crawl back to my old boss and ask him for a letter of recommendation….AND I had to call my parents and beg for money,

But it’s strange how things happen. As I’m writing my resume, the guy who helped me get started with all the technical stuff for marketing – my mentor if you will – calls and offers me a job. I guess he took notice of how hard I was working and also saw a great deal of learning potential in me, so he hired me as a marketing assistant for his company. His business is pretty well established, and his plans are for me to handle all of his affiliates and pretty much take over the time consuming day-to-day stuff that needs to be done to stay on top.

Anyway, that’s where I’m at right now. I’ve been working for him for about a week. I’m currently building his link directory, and in an hour we’re going to some warehouse to get his new DVD course ready for shipping. It’s a strange and exciting thing, but I just may have made it out of the rat race.