Hello, My name is The Bum and I’m a Lazy Affiliate Marketer…

1. We admit we are lazy and have our minds constantly thinking about the quick buck.  Our theology is making us poor and living with our mothers.
2. We have come to believe there is a Power greater than ourselves that can put us in our place.  Lets just hope Mom will still make us dinner.
3. We have made a decision to change our ways, to stop the endless night of e-whoring and other black hat methods that have no future promise.
4. We have sat down and searched for the reasons we are lazy and have come up with answers besides “waking up at 2pm keeps me refreshed”.
5. We have admitted aloud that we are lazy and have not done ENOUGH to reach our goals of being a successful Affiliate Marketer.
6. We are entirely ready to have our mothers pick on us for being lazy and making us realize that these are all defects we can be rid of… by nagging us further.
7. We humbly ask others for help and actually LISTEN to the answers instead of looking for the shortcut in their answer.
8. We have made a list of all the things we have done incorrectly over the years and are taking the necessary steps to learn from them as well as fix them.
9. We have correctly identified and fixed all shortcuts we have taken over the years.
10. We never stop evaluating and  learning about ourselves so that we do not start to fall back into old lazy habits.
11. We take the necessary trips to the golf course, casino, or bathroom to take a little time away from the computer to really think about what we are doing.  Using the time to really be creative without the answer right there in front of you and a few keystrokes away.
12. We  receive our first honest check and realize that these steps have given use a base to start from.  Something solid and long lasting that you can build around…..and we also see our mother’s hand out to collect her monthly living fees :-/

I’m pretty sure I am at step 7.  Definitely had my mother give me enough “encouragement” to change the way I have been over the last 2 years.  Can’t wait to get my first real check so i can give her some cash from it….. ugh

Ok ENOUGH screwing around. The whole point of this blog was to document a money making journey from start to finish. Have I done that? NO… I had the idea, but didn’t have a plan. Which is a good lesson for anyone who is reading this blog right now. All of us have a lot of ideas, god knows I have had a LOT of ideas which I have thought up and left on the back burner. The idea is not nearly enough. We all have ideas, but the only way to make an idea reality is to sit and plan out all the proper steps to complete your goal.

I’ve just blown your mind with inspiration right? No? Well I am going to try a little harder. I was working at a job I didn’t like much and finally got away from it. Now, I find myself in a unique situation where I have a little freedom to take a little time and get things rolling for myself. I have some time, but not a lot of it and need to make sure that I use it wisely. See if I can’t figure out a way to make some money on my own, then I will have to go and find a job that I really don’t like…again lol.

I spent the last week reading and came across a few helpful articles. One article I read in BlackHatWorld.com was extremely helpful to me because it mapped out a plan over the course of 2 months and answered a lot of questions people had about the plan he was attempting ( READ HERE ). He is a guy who already knows what he can do and knows what it would take to achieve his goal. Over the last couple weeks he has answered questions that other forum members asked and has given updates on his results. Seeing his plan got me to think about this whole idea that I have tried to get across to all you readers. This is a guy who is running a side project just to see how it goes. He isn’t doing this to make a living, so I know its not out of desperation. He knows what it takes to get going on the internet on his own. So, over the next few weeks I am going to follow his lead where I actually DO and not just talk. I promise you all that I am going to have a FEW different things going on over the next couple weeks and we are all going to experience them together. Stay Tuned

Ive let my readers down. I gave up and I went on to more boring and lesser profitable ventures. Yea that’s right, I GOT A JOB… Yea one of those real things where they pay you a salary and you work a certain amount of hours during a specific part of the day. It’s been about 3 months now and I can honestly say…. I MISS YOU GUYS. Yea I can’t give this up and I promise you all that there will be more to come on this website from me. I have not made enough money to call the journey a success yet, but I am learning a little something about how business should and shouldn’t be handled. At the moment I am an Internet Marketing Consultant / Salesman. Mainly helping local businesses improve their visibility over the internet. I love talking to the people about what I know and why it is important for their businesses, but the sales part of it (hardcore cold-calling) is just a pain in my ass. Everyday calling people and having them listen to me talk and telling me they are not interested after letting me speak for 10 minutes. Shoot me. A good day is when I get to go to a clients place and break it down. Talking websites and marking makes me a happy boy.

So what brought me back? Well 2 things really got me back into the marketing mood. First, the incredible amount of readers who have signed up to my blog over the passed 7 months. Seems like every day I am getting a new member to the site which makes me feel like a real ass since I have done nothing to earn it for the past few months. Second, I am looking for something else to do to make money. I’m not active on the net with the job I have now. I want to be the one designing or blogging. All I do is talk and I know I didn’t get into this to talk for a living. I belong on the computer and not the phone. This is why I am going to do my absolute best to bring you more and more content every week. I have some plans in the next few weeks where I will be doing some PPV advertising so that will be great and I’ll make sure to share everything I think will help.

I cant write a blog and not share something with you, so I am going to give you a helpful link that I found tonight. I was looking at some jobs that were out there and I submitted a few resumes to SEO Expert listings. I know I have done a lot with SEO in my life, but what is considered an “Expert”. Well in my search for this answer, I looked up some tips pages where I could kind of brush up on the basics since I have been out of the game for a little bit. I came up on this one site with 54 tips. I wanted to share it because I went to about 4 other websites previous and all of them gave me 10 tips and pay for the other 47. Don’t you just love it. Thank god I haven’t been out of the game too long and know to KEEP SEARCHING. I did so and found this http://www.searchenginejournal.com . Take a look if you are kind of unsure about how SEO works. This will help you A LOT with PPC campaigns and relevancy. A lot of it is pretty standard stuff and if you are well versed in SEO then you can skip it, but it was a nice little refresher for me.

ALSO!!!

Seriously take a look… amazing read.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-Q9KsSmKWs

     I have a dilemma. I might be afraid of making money. I said MIGHT BE. It is either that or my pride is getting in the way of earning an income with CPA marketing. In my case, I have been trying to start legit and by the book in order to make a nice steady income, but the truth of the matter is that its tough as hell to do that when you have no cash to back up your mistakes. Coming to the realization that my lack of funds is ultimately causing me to be scared to test the market, I ask myself I should start smaller and cheesier. In order to make a few bucks now, should I go and try E-Whoring or run Craigslist Job scams? This questions has been nagging at me for some time now and I feel like my pride is basically the only reason why I haven’t been subjecting myself to a less than respectable means of making money.

     First I would like to describe my thoughts on why it is so difficult to remain honest with no money to back it up. Real marketing consists of tests, research, leads, and statistics. You have to be able to use all the information given to you and put it to use for you in such a way that would give you the best opportunity to make a little profit. testing takes money and time. If you believe what they say then time also equals money so you are just getting hit twice there too. You may have a flawless method that has a lot of potential to make you money, but if you don’t put it to use in the right niche then you are screwed! Takes time to fine out what niche will serve your method the best and time is expensive. Now I feel that knowledge is a use factor in this time equals money formula. The more knowledge you have about marketing then the less mistakes you will ultimately make in the long run. Less mistakes equals less time spent looking for the right formula to make money. I kinda like to think of this like how I was in high school knowing I had pretty good grades so a good SAT score wasn’t as important to me as it was to a person with sub-par grades. Knowledge and money kind of counter balance each other. More knowledge you have less cash you need and vice versa. I fall in the category of needing a little cash to get something going.

     Now that I have identified myself in the “need cash” category, I have to make a choice. Do I stay legit and struggle or do I make a sacrifice and go after horny people for a living? It’s a good questions right? well maybe its not. Maybe there is something I am missing in all of this. Well there is. What is blackhat? My definition of blackhat may be different from yours and I may be lumping a lot of things into one category. Think about it when you read these blogs from “superstar” marketers. You think they are blackhat guys? Do you think they are totally legit? HELL NO! These guys are for the most part fallowing the rules, but they are stretching the rules as far as they can without getting caught. Some people like to call this grayhat marketing. Over the past year I have come to the realization that nothing is really as nice and clean as it seams. There are always little loopholes that people use in order to take advantage. This is where I need to be. There is a line between fraud and legit. Luckily that line is really thick and isn’t straight because different companies and different people have conflicting views on where the line is drawn. Most affiliate networks will look the other way as long as you are bring them some cash. If the advertiser comes to the network then there may be some disiplinary action, but until then you can get away with the little stuff that may give you a nice edge.

     You might have just read this and thought,” Is he done yet?” or “If you knew this was the case, how come you wrote about it?”. The simple answer to that question is this. We read the success stories about people making five grand a day and they think one of 2 things. Either the guy is cheating his ass off or he is a genius with a great network of methods. Truth is that most of these guys are no smarter than you or me. They just grew a pair and took the extra step. They learned the rules and figured out how they could be skewed in such a manor that would help their cause. Anything wrong with that? not at all. You aren’t sitting there talking to half naked 50 year old men trying to get them to fill out leads all day and you are not stealing from innocent people. Simply using the system to your advantage and raking in a little extra cash.

     So, I guess the question has changed. To be or not to be…legit? No… more like, when you gonna get off your ass and just do it?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=auGxky799cA

     Well it has been a few weeks since I last wrote a post and I was thinking… IT’S ALL YOUR FAULT!!! HAHA … I’m Kiddinggggg, I promise. I have been a little bit wusy starting up my last year of college. Trying to get into all my classes and get settled. I haven’t been doing too much marketing, but I haven’t totally ignored it. I have kept up with the Twitter stuff. I now have 10 accounts and a total of 25,000 to 30,000 followers. Making about 3 bucks a day with that only promoting RevTwit and gettiong like 30 clicks a day or something like that. Not a lot of money by any means, but it’s posting the ads for me so there isnt much work involved.


     I began writing this post as an update to what io have been up to. I wanted to make sure that all 9 of my faithful readers didn’t feel like i forgot about this and forgot about them. I realized a lesson I learned as i was about to write down the next thing that I had been doing the last few weeks. I bought an E-Book a few days ago ( I KNOW! I said don’t waste your money on E-Books, but it was 10 bucks and promised it wasn’t a blown out method) and well it was a good Idea. I went with it for a few days and I actually made a few bucks without putting any money into the method at all. I was only testing it, but i made $27 in 2 1/2 days. I thought I found something to hold me over for the next few weeks which was nieve of me to think. After 2 1/2 days it seems that the website that had the loophole that I exploited FIXED THE LOOPHOLE and rendered the method useless. I am not giving too much detail to the method for a few reasons. I bought the book and don’t have permission to give information about it, it is very blackhat, and it doesn’t work anymore so why bother LOL. The point I am trying to make is that affiliate marketing is not stable or steady. You may find a method that will always work and not get saturated, BUT you will always have to adjust the niche or the lead in order to keep your conversions up and the money the same. Always moving on to the next best thing and keeping up on what is popular now. Don’t get comfortable and don’t be satisfied with anything that makes you a couple of bucks at the start because it will most likely become saturated and non-profitable in the long run.


     I hope that isn’t being interpreted as me saying there is no method that will ever work for long periods of time. That is not what I am saying. For example, PPC/keyword advertising is something that will always be popular and be a money source. What i am saying is that those people who do PPC for ResV ( Diet Pill ) will fail in time when the ad has been out there for a while. Those people need to take advantage of the method with that niche for a while and then use that same method and find a new hot lead in order to make good money. See the method is good, but the product gets old. There are methods that are long term, most are not, but either way you must not become satisfied. Try to remember how long it took for you to find the current method you are using and then imagine if it became totally non-profitable and you had to look for another method. Get the start on it when you are making money. This will allow you to do more research and more experimenting rather than waiting till you don’t have a method or money and not having the funds to find a new method to go with.


     Ok I am done rambling on. I really try to make these posts entertaining for my readers. I have a feeling this one may be one of the less entertaining, but I think it is one of the more important lessons I have learned in all the years I have been in the internet business.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkPJGUguJDA

Here is a little video getting you caught up with the things I am working on right now. AdWords giving me headaches, Adcenter making me pull my hair out, and I refuse to say anything bad about Twitter anymore.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFKnyPx8h40

Well I was just letting you guys know what I have been up to lately with all the stuff i have been trying out. Twitter is working ok and I can see the advantages of creating these accounts. I don’t have many followers yet and the sites have seen a rise in traffic. This is good since I am able to target the people I am following.

     Well it is Saturday and you know what I realized. I need a life. I’m kidding though. I am just frustrated with Affiliate Marketing right now because I am having trouble finding my niche and my method. I realize that I am going to need many different methods to be successful in the future, but when you are starting with no seed money, you need to take it one step at a time….and I’m tripping!

     This brings me to a little motivation or advice for people who are in my current position. Frustration is a big part of the process. We are going to fail a lot before we get to something that works. The important thing for us to remember is that you pay attention to what fails and what works. Don’t look at it as you failed, but look at it like “why did this fail”. When you can do this sort of thing, you will be able to take positive things that did convert well, continue with them, and put a twist on the things that failed to see if you can make them work. I am currently failing a lot and not finding things that I am willing to do. I have a few morals and at the time being I can’t afford to be sued – HA! So I am sticking to things that are legit and not “scams”. Of course I do feel there is a difference between scams and tricking people. I’m not trying to E-Whore or tell people on Craigslist that they have a job waiting for them.

     I guess the real point of this post is to encourage people to keep going and not give up. The start is the hardest point, but once you are able to generate money with one method then you can start scaling it and make tons more. It gets easier once you have an idea of what direction you are going. It also allows you to take more risks when you have something steady going. Your method will be bringing you cash while you are out trying other methods that may or may not work. Unlike when you started, if something fails then you won’t be so pressed to make something happen with it. You will already be generating money with your first method and all the are purely extra money revenues. Sounds nice doesn’t? NO? Well think of it this way then… Ever have a girl you know really likes you, but you are able to keep her around without committing to her. Friends with benefits I would say. It’s just like that. Go play the field with other girls to find a girl you really like and if you hit a dry spell with the ladies then you got that one girl you can always call up and chill with. Always nice isn’t it. Get a method and make it steady. Go out and gamble on other bigger methods that may end up bringing you twice as much money. You will lose some cash in the process, but you won’t worry about it because you know you have a steady method running every day.