Rabs To Riches

Archive for the ‘General Business’ Category

photo credit: BigMcGuire

A couple months ago I was still in a dilemma on this issue and thus postponed posting. It all started when I actually decided to promote a product a colon cleanse product based on its high payout. I actually went and developed an optin page (we’ll talk about my random, pointless action approaches at a later point in time) and then as I was searching thru Google and trying to scope out my competition, I realized that a lot of people who had used it were having not having the most pleasant experience with the product. On top of that, they had next to no luck contacting Customer Service for the company.

I stopped promoting (or my journey to future promoting ) right away. I just couldn’t promote something I didn’t believe in. Now, do you have to have tested and tried everything you becoming an affiliate for? Ofcourse not - especially in the case of physical products that are backed by . But I think especially for ingestible items you have a greater responsibility. There are health factors involved. Even in the case of information products that promise something - they should deliver on that. So at least an affiliate should do a search for user experiences, if they can’t formally review the product themselves.

So in between the traveling, the flu, and the catching up that I’ve been doing, I’ve reached some clarity on where I stand in terms of morality and ethics in this industry:

1. I will not promote something that I don’t think lives up to its claims. This is easier to do with information products since they are easier to review, but even with health related items you can usually do searches and see what the general user experience is. Anything it could have some bad reviews, but if something is predominantly regarded as unsatisfactory, then I wouldn’t promote it.

2. I will not pollute the web with useless content spinned gobbledygook pages. I recently saw an example of this, and even though it was absolutely hilarious, it is just polluting the web.

3. I won’t use blackhat techniques. I guess I’m just a wuss when it comes to this - I am too scared to use them. Even though they may not technically be ‘harming’ anyone, I do believe its wrong because its gaming the system.

Those are the basics of what I’ve come up with and just having this settled in my own mind helps me go forward . Following this mini code of ethics will allow me to at least sleep better at night and prevent any nagging feelings of the conscience.

Soon after my last post a couple months, we started preparing for a visit abroad to visit family and things took quite a down turn in terms of being able to keep up with work.  All that means is that I have about double the workload than normal and I really have to get moving.

Our trip was quite interesting.  We were in Pakistan and the Benazir assassination happened towards the end of our trip.   Between that and travelling to 4 different cities in a span of 3 weeks, along with sick kids made it quite impossible to think of anything work-related. Returned about a month ago but everyone has taken turns dealing with the flu and we’re just about recovered.  Such are the joys of being a work at home mom.

Anyway, I haven’t posted, but I was able to follow a lot of the big launches and have been trying to at least continue my “studying” aspect if not the “doing” aspect so actively.   I’ll be catching up the blog with some of my notes and the reviews of the past year.

So yeah, I’m back

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.

One 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:

1. Spend time promoting big payout affiliate programs
2. Really really do good research about the market demand and competition
3. Don’t spend forever on something. Crunching out this NMOC site should not have taken me this long. Be efficient and don’t be a perfectionist
4. Don’t promote memberships who are not paying you recurring income.

It’s been a while since I’ve written an update.  Mostly because the couple months were busy with both back to school and getting the hang of it, and then Ramadan.  And ofcourse, partly due to procrastination and task overload - because I’m sure I could have meant to write for 5 minutes - after all, I did have it in my planner - up to the topic even.  Anyway, I have a lot of stuff I learned during my Internet Marketing Journey that I want to share, so I hope to be writing more frequently.

We always hear about information overload, and how it leads us into this paralysis of not being able to digest anything and results in the worst possible thing of all - IN-ACTION.  Taking action and flopping is much better than not taking action at all.  This is one thing that I have to start getting myself / pushing myself to do.  Just do it.

I definitely suffer from information overload - I don’t have enough hours in the day to digest and take action on everything that I want to.  That’s why I’ve just started to focus on organization and planning.  Following thru.  Taking things one step at a time.  These are such basic concepts and these are the ones that bear the fruits of success.  I think if we can get some good habits down, some good successful habits, then success will follow.  Being organized automatically leads to a desire to be more efficient and when you start accomplishing things, you start seeing success.

But I think I suffer from something else too - let’s call it ‘task’ overload.  I have so many things to do that sometimes I get overwhelmed and just don’t feel like doing any of them.  The thought of the enormity of the thoughts (which is most often exaggerated in my own heads) makes me want to procrastinate and doing something irrelevant.  This of course leaves me in a worse situation than I started off with.  I think the lessons are the same — just do it.  Think of the tasks as smaller steps and just do them.  I have some tasks on my list that would literally take 5 minutes if I just did them, but for some reason they are there, being passed from day to day — not getting done.  Why? There is no need.  Make that to do list and ATTACK.  That is my plan of action.

When I last left this blog, I was in the middle of typing an SEO tools entry and had to take a break. Went out to eat and my car got broken into with the laptop stolen. I didn’t and don’t care about the physical laptop, but my hard drive must be my most prized possession! I’m a bit more over it now and I do for the most part have receipt for the all the software and ebooks ($5500 worth mind you) that I have bought. It’s just going to take time.

So now I’m really one of those people (well not really, but close enough) that are asked - hey so, what if you had to start from scratch - what would you do? Well I’m going to document my recovery process one by one, including what I’m doing differently and how I’m recovering all the stuff I had before. I’m also going to work out a back up plan to ensure this doesn’t happen again.

Anyway, for now, how I’m going to start is — the Thirty Day Challenge. I had already completed most of the preseason items that were for prep, so it should not take me too long to repeat them again.

So let’s begin!