Last week, I started heading over to the library so I could complete my work without distractions. What I realized was that some tasks are time-consuming (and it wasn’t just my distractions). One day last week, I ended up spending about 6 hours straight trying to finish up a product, and left quite frustrated when I wasn’t as done as I thought I’d be.
Then, I started thinking about my days working in the financial industry. I couldn’t wait till 5 and I came home relatively satisfied about putting in my hours (even though it is quite unheard of anyone in the financial industry to leave at 5 - I was just a slacker, I guess). I would ofcourse want things to get done, but my self satisfaction was measured by the time put in, not necessarily the task. For example, I knew that Project A was taking up X amount of hours per day, and it would be done when it would be done.
Now, working for myself, trying to ‘make it’ online, trying to start different revenue streams and create products, putting in any number of hours a day just does not seem to satisfy me. Even worse, sometimes it makes me even more frustrated - “I put in all day today and I’m still not done”.
I was just reflecting on this and of course the difference is that at my J-O-B, I was getting paid no matter what. I was getting paid to be there. Of course my salary and job security would be reflected by my performance, but all in all, I was getting paid to be there. As an entrepreneur, you don’t get paid for the hours, you get paid for the results. The cut is much more fruitful in the end, but for a lazy person, it might seem like too much of an effort without any guarantee (I guess the lazy part of me might feel like that sometimes). However, I see it as a challenge for myself - to push myself, to motivate myself to deliver.
‘Cuz that’s the only way I’m getting paid.
Tags: entrepreneur, wahm, work from homeSince I have an actual goal for November, along with the long term projects I’m working on, I figured I should try to concurrently work on things that will possibly help me reach my goal in the short term as well. I got a WSO on Facebook Flyers last week and I thought I’d try my hands on it this past weekend.
I guess I got on this bandwagon kind of late and Facebook had already put fairly strict measures on affiliate links (etc) and squeeze pages. That was basically what I would have been trying to do for the short term. I put out about 3 ads and all of them got disabled pretty quickly.
Most of what I’ve read from the other forums and feedback from other blogs seems to indicate the same thing. The ads that are showing have really bad CTRs. I think it might be that the Facebook crowd is not there to respond to ads. I mean, I joined Facebook because all my friends were on there - to connect with them, write on walls, etc. I feel the majority of the Facebook crowd is such.
Anyway, it cost me Friday night, but at least I tried it. So I don’t feel too bad. But yeah, the WSO was pretty bad considering that this guy charged $57 for it (yeah I know I’m a total sucker). However, he did make me aware of the opportunity, and I’m horrible with refunds, so live and learn.
Anyway, off to continue on to longer term opportunities and use what I know to reach my short term goal as well.
Tags: affiliate marketing, facebook, internet marketing, wsoYeah, maybe I just don’t get it.
Here’s a comment I made on Lost Ball in High Weeds :
I have to admit I didn’t see all the videos - didn’t have the time. But from my understanding, the software does two things:
1) Find out what affiliates are promoting a product
At least for clickbank, you can really just search for the hoplink in google and you’ll come up with a whole list of people promoting the product. For example for Fat loss 4 Idiots, just search for 4idiots.hop.clickbank.net. It comes up with ~20 K affiliates promoting it.
2) Find out what keywords affiliates using PPC are using
For those who really want to do this, AdSpy Pro does this for much cheaper and without the monthly fee.
I’m sure Affiliate Elite puts this information together somehow but I don’t see how it could be justified by the price + the monthly fee.
Tags: affiliate elite, affiliate marketingOne thing that I’ve learned is that it takes just as much research and time to promote a product with $7 commission as it does to promote a product with a $100 commission. Of course, I learned it the hard way.
Back in April, I bought Niche Marketing On Crack, and I thought it was a pretty well laid out plan and got to work right away. However, instead of doing proper research (that I knew how to do and had done for so many other products), I went into Commission Junction and picked one of the newest programs added - Bob Greene’s Best Life Diet membership.
Bad Move 1: People might disagree with me but at least on sites like ShareASale and CJ, I would NOT recommend people to join brand new affiliate programs. A lot of these companies are just testing the waters. However, because Bob Greene was a big name and backed by Oprah I thought I was relatively safe and didn’t think about the ‘new’ factor too much. It was also paying $18 commission per sale after the 10-day free trial.
Bad Move 2: The competition was just horrific. On top of that, “Best” is a stop word, which means that it’s too common of a word and some search engines don’t ‘record’ it in order to speed up searches. Do not just pick affiliate programs on a whim - just do the research.
I did actually go on to make a couple sales from the site so I know the NMOC formula works. I also got a few additions to my autoresponder. It’ s just it was a horrible thing to begin with. I thought of it like my guinea pig site and spent some time doing different things with it. Looking back, I think I spent way too much time on it.
Anyway, one day I’m looking at my Analytics account and see that the site has gotten a decent amount of traffic and I see people clicked thru to the affiliate link, but for some reason I am not seeing any clicks on CJ. I went to my site and clicked thru to the link to test it.
Turns out they close the affiliate program WITHOUT notifying any of the affiliates! How unprofessional! I was pretty depressed since I had spent quite some time on developing the site. A couple weeks later I saw that this particular program was being managed by another company who were managing other diet memberships. But now they were only paying $12. I went ahead and changed the links because some $ is better than no $.
Recently while just tracking my sales, I went and saw that they had now changed the payout to $7 - once again without any notification, but at least the links were still active. Anyway, this whole thing left such a bad taste in my mouth. You’d think that such a big name program would at least have the decency to notify their affiliates when closing the program.
Anyway lessons learned:
We’re already done with 1/6th of the month but I’ve decided to put in my writing my goal for the month. I have a ton of unfinished products and techniques on my plate and in some way I don’t even know how I’m going to complete them all concurrently (it’s definitely not recommended). But I get bored with one topic and find it refreshing to move on to another task so this mild Adult ADD might actually work in my favor. Anyway, so my goal is to generate $1000 in profit revenue this month. Given that my sales haven’t been exactly reliable, I won’t be over ambitious and say profit.
Another goal is to regularly post to this blog and make it a useful resource for others in the same stage of their IM career that I’m in.
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