Today is big, beacuse recently it didn’t look like I was going to make it til the 9th. I couldn’t even conceive of a possible way that I could make it all the way til the 9th, too many things were stacked agaist me. But I got saved in the final hour, and my months of hard work suddenly paid off in an unexpected manner. I guess the moral of the story is never give up.

So this basically means that I’ll have enough money to fix my car. Finally. This feels like me getting my life back. And soon my first affiliate check will come from my fiddling around with google adwords (I think I broke it even in cost/profit, but it’s money I didn’t have in my pocket), and that will place me back in the betting game again.

Onwards & upwards.

Another word of warning: don’t use cracked programs. I was testing out an amazing link directory builder, and to my great joy I found there was a crack available on the internet later. 12 hrs of work later, my save file is all of a sudden corrupt. And my backup files. Words can’t explain the agony went through me, I had worked pretty much 12 hrs straight that day.

But here’s the funny part: I could send the files in to costumer service, and they could probable fix it. But I’ve used a cracked version of their program so I dare not send in the files (some of the dll files etc. have been overwritten). So I guess I learnt my lesson. I’m going to pay the $99 AND redo all my work. But it’s worth it, beacue this program is genuinly awesome

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.

Mind you, this is not the first time I’m infiltrating an internet community…I love the feeling of coming in as an outsider and almost be overwhelmed by the information available.

I think it’s this that scares a lot of people off; you click a link and find a site with five more interesting links. You click one of those and you find ANOTHER website with five interesting links. And it just won’t stop, instead of reducing the number of questions you have they’re increasing – exponentially.

And to be able to make a good informed decision on ONE single marketing product can take hours of reading and research (not to mention the time you have to put in to grasp the key concepts of whatever it is the product is referring to). And the depressing part is when you reach the informed decision that this particular marketing product is, literally, a waste of time…and you’re back at square one with a good portion of your day gone.

I swear, this stuff is turning me into a type A personality.

So it’s always good when you can find a good forum or a blog that can work as you starting point – the important thing is that it’s not too niche so it can give you a good birds eye view of what’s out there.

And wouldn’t you know it, I stumbled on a post about creating affiliate sites with wordpress and I found a pretty decent starting point for my research. After spending the day reading, reading, reading I actually have some solid things to follow up on, and I think I *might* be ready to shell out a couple of bucks for my first marketing course tomorrow.

Got to sleep on it first.

Well, I finished my last final and I have to say I kicked ass. Especially considering how hard it is to memorize the names of generals from the Civil War when you’ve already officially made a decision that renders all such knowledge completely useless.

But the motto I’m trying to follow now is to keep as many options open as possible, which means NOT screwing myself over by ditching the finals.

My condition for doing this is that I have to leave school in such a way that I can pick it up again whenever I feel like it. But that day feels pretty distant right now.

For the whole background story check the Jackie Chang inspired “Who Am I?” section. But the current situation is that a friend of mine has written a pretty solid ebook and I volunteered to make a website for it since I need practice with this stuff anyway (and it may actually bring some money).

I have three main projects right now that I want to focus on:

1. The website for my friends ebook. He’s a writer and an expert in his field, but he just doesn’t know how to get his ebook out there. Incidentally, neither do I but I’ve got enough time on my hands now to figure it out.

   So I’ve agreed to help him and we’re going to split whatever money we can make from it. I’ve actually been working pretty diligently for the past two months learning this stuff, and we made our first sale on the website last week (but we had to temporarily pull the site to settle some legal stuff).

2. A product of my own which is currently still in development (= doesn’t exist). I will start by writing an ebook, and my gut is telling me that it should be about 80 pages long. So after I get back from visiting my hometown over New Years I will make a serious effort to churn out 10 pages of draft a day.

   This way I should have it finished in two weeks in theory, but my gut is saying it will take at least three.

3. Finally, this blog. I figured it would be a good way of getting the hang of this blogging business, and since I’m big on keeping journals for future reference, I could kill two birds in one stone.

I’m hoping this blog will be the dark horse of the race. For now it’s just a way for me of learning the ropes while venting, but my long-term hope is that this is going to turn out to be a great resource for anyone else who wants to start online marketing from scratch, and that people who visit this blog will sign up for some of the sites I recommend so I can get some of that action too.

So whatever site you see linked on here click it and, if you like it, sign up for it – I’m only going to recommend sites that I find useful, and most god-honest marketing sites let you try their product out for 30 days or more with hassle free returns. So you’ve got nothing to lose, and a chance to put food on my table.

If you’re getting in to the online marketing thing you will more than likely want to check these sites out at one point or another, so you might as well do it from my awesome blog.


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