I think we can all say we owe a lot to the late Steve Jobs. Without him, we probably wouldn’t have computers that can do what they do today, mobiles that push past performance only seen in notebooks, and marketing tactics that could take overpriced, overrated products and make them bank pure gold. You know he would have made billions selling the iAcai Berry.

Rest in Peace, Steve Jobs

Someone shared this with me on my forums, and it was just too ridiculous not to share. This is a real TV spot that this guy “Willyam” paid for. It’s goofy enough to be effective, but I’m not actually sure it’s performing. I won’t tell you too much about it, because I’m not sure what else to say. It’s just.. ahg.. I don’t even know. Haha.

[youtube width="550" height="400"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jDFj9mHYao[/youtube]

Discuss in the comments.

We all get into these mad cycles when you start making some real money with affiliate marketing. All-nighters, an average of 4 hours of sleep a night, and passing up a night with your friends so you can optimize your latest campaigns. That has been the past 3 weeks for me. What have I done between all the campaign optimization and forum posting and client service? Not a whole damn much. Hell, I only had enough time to see my girlfriend a few times, and I only had one chance to go eat dinner with my friends. Other than that, it’s been some days with my employees and a lot of alone time.

I went out this night, extremely tired and stressed out from the past couple weeks of non-stop grinding. It made me remember that, sometimes, you gotta give it a break. Be social, remember you are still a human being, and that there are others out there that can provide you opportunities to do new things, meet new people, and even open up doors to more money! Hell, sometimes you’ll even find going out once a day helps motivate you to make more money. I certainly found that out at the club – people driving Lamborghinis, surrounded by large groups of people, and just living large because they know they’ve got everything they want out of life.

Now that is some good god damn motivation.

So, give yourself a break. Say yes when your friends invite you out, take that coffee break at the mall instead of instant coffee made yourself, and look around for what you need to motivate yourself. Hustle, rest, relax and enjoy yourself! I think too many of us are forgetting this.

I’ve been gone for about a week now. I had my eyes glued to the TV for the past few dies, fighting my way through Square Enix’s latest installment in the Final Fantasy series. It was, overall, a fun and enjoyable, all be it a bit infuriating at times. For any lover of the series, buy it and you won’t regret it. While it is a very linear game, only allowing for minor exploration in 2 areas, the characters are pretty relate-able, and need I mention the amazing visuals that come with any Final Fantasy?

Anyways, you aren’t here to read my review of the game. While I was playing, I was enjoying my break from sitting in front of the computer all day, but I was still thinking about work. In what ways does this game make me work harder like I would with affiliate marketing. Nerdy thought? Very, but I’m hardwired to work.

Leveling – Sometimes, you wanna take on the big money and hit it hard right off the bat. No can do with Final Fantasy XIII and the same applies to affiliate marketing. Sure you could try and attack the bigger monsters (niches) right off the bat, but when you try and hit that Adamantoise (think like… Acai berry flog on a general media buy), you’ll probably going to get stomped to death (bye bye monies). Enjoy taking out smaller niches and demographics first, slowly level yourself, and then start taking on bigger enemies for greater rewards.

Buffing – You might need to experiment with different effects on your landing pages or ads. There is a few moves the enemies will use that brings up a countdown timer over your head which when it hits ’0′, you’re dead. It certainly made me move faster to get the fight over with. Think about that like an effect it would have to your next possible lead. If they don’t finish ordering/subscribing now, they won’t get another shot.

Grinding – This is a term used in RPG and Affiliate Marketing. You grind hard, you do a lot of monotonous boring work, but the success and grandeur you achieve from that hard work down the road can be well worth it. This is the general idea, at least. The most successful people I know in this industry are working 10 – 15 hours a day non-stop, but I know some have come to me saying they put in the same and just can’t make it work out. I guess this comes down to know what to grind with and where to do it.

Paradigm Switch – Paradigm Switch is basically a system that lets you change up your characters skill set in battle. They can be a Commando (physical attacker), Ravager (black mage), Healer, or a few other types. Many times, you’d have to change multiple times in one battle to see what combination of skills worked out the best for your enemy (your target market). That is something we have to do with affiliate marketing. I am constantly split testing everything, from my landing pages, ad copies, and targets. Some combination of designs and ads work better than others for specific demographics.

Weird post, right? I’ll be back on track and working harder than ever to bring you some awesome posts this week. Stay tuned for Freebie Friday (sign up to the list if you aren’t already to get free stuff each weekend). I’ve also got some free time to do some consulting. Read more about that here.

Is affiliate marketing any more stressful than building a regular, physical business? Let me help you get this straight for you – affiliate marketing IS a physical business… you’ve got your storefront (your landing pages), stock and inventory (offers), a supplier (affiliate network), and employees (designers, copy writers, programmers, etc). Put simply, it is as stressful as any other business you can be in.

I was there while my father was building his restaurant up. It was hard… stressful – very much so. He’d come home and talk to me about budgeting and how he couldn’t take a paycheck just to pay employees on time (testing your affiliate offers, you usually break even or go bust). We’d go over how expensive some items were getting to produce (click costs, any one?) and we might have to bump the cost of our sandwiches (it was a Roly Poly franchise place). We never got the place profitable over about 2 – 3 years, so we had to let it go (offer died out, traffic too saturated, competion moved in, etc).

There are no easy, stress-less ways to make money. I know millionaires that get stressed when they lose a couple thousand testing a campaign. What differentiates a good marketer from a great affiliate marketer is ones ability to see through their stress, find a solution, and turn things around. Whether it be stock investment, real estate, brick-and-mortar shops, or affiliate marketer, we all deal with a ton of stress on a nearly daily basis.

Bryn Young’pimp’ brought this to attention for me. The movie Yes Man, based on the book by the same name, was a pretty entertaining film, making Jim Carey unable to say no to anything someone suggested to him. Obviously, this put him in a tight spot and made him face some challenges he would otherwise just avoid.

Now the guys at 100 Days of Yes have taken this to the real road. So far, there haven’t been any extreme endevours other one of the two bloggers having to drink a little spit-up, chicken, alcoholic beverage, but it just goes to show that you don’t have to always be afraid of saying yes to the unknown.

I think this goes hand in hand with what I said the other day. So I guess I’ll be the copycat and try it out. As long as what I say yes to won’t cause harm to me, my property, my business, or others, I’ll try saying yes and following through with everything I do. I’m sure I’ll get nailed with things I won’t want to do, but it should help me crawl out my shell.

Sorry for the lack of affiliate marketing posts lately. Ask me some questions, and I’ll try to answer them with a fully fledged blog post!

Someone said something to me yesterday. I was telling him about how poor my work ethic is, and about what a shy, quiet person I am. I was born that way, and it hasn’t been an easy process to change. This guy was several years older than me. He is a real socialite, going to whatever parties he can, meeting with lots of different people on a day to day basis. But he told me he hasn’t been very social until recently. In fact, at my age he was just like I am now with a very closed circle of close friends and not very open to new people.

He told me something along the lines of the following:

“I wish I was the way I am now at your age. I go to all these parties and meet all these people, but my body can’t take it at my age like the way yours could.”

He was basically telling me to suck it up and have a kick ass life now while I can really enjoy it. And he is completely right. While he was talking about my social life and my honest inability to really converse with someone I don’t really know well, it can also apply to my work ethic, too.

The reason I haven’t blogged here as often as I used to was because I have just been lazy. I could lie to you and say I’ve been building new campaigns all day long, that wouldn’t be the full truth. Sure, I but in at least 3-4 hours of work a day, but I know I could do more. What I’ve really been doing is playing Borderlands and Dragon Age, and while they are both great games, they’re time wasters and in the end I don’t get anything productive done from it.

So I’m not really sure what to say other than if you are going to change, change now. If you are going to work hard, work hard now. If you are going to build a kick ass campaign, build it now. If you are gonna do anything productive, do it now. Your future self will thank you.

I know what it’s like to feel like you’ve fallen off the track from making thousands of dollars a day to struggling to make enough to cover rent. It was bad for me, especially when it happened with Facebook. Lately my personal life has been all over the place, too. I wanted to take the time to write this post about how to get back on the tracks you were on before. This doesn’t have to be specific to affiliate marketing. You can take the basics and apply it to other aspects of your life. Yeah, I’m gonna go Buddha on you!

Take time to reassess your goals. I keep my goals on a white board, so they are always there for me to look at it. This is a short list of long-term goals (retirement, buy a house, financial freedom, etc) and a longer list of short-term goals (daily – monthly goals). I’ll also throw in some things that I need to do before I die. This acts as my motivation and helps me focus on where I’d like to be headed. I also keep work tasks along side all of this.

Read motivational books. I can’t tell you how many times reading one of these books for an hour has put me in the mood to make some money. Some good recommendations I have are “Eat That Frog”, “The 4-Hour Work Week” and “Rich Dad, Poor Dad.” Even dating books like “The Game” have gotten me to want to get off my ass and work a little. These books are good during your break hour in the day, and it is more productive than playing Halo on your XBox.

Take a look at what you are good at and apply it. Specialization is how most businesses made their big climb to the top. For me and affiliate marketing, I knew I was good at demographic targeting with my Facebook skills. I used this to find other networks that allow me to target by demographics. This led me to a few other extended options like site targeting with PPV or Media Buying. And once you can master these, you can eventually move on to other more broad options. Master one thing, get to the top, make lots of money, and then work on opening up to other options.

Don’t forget the finer things in life. You will have to work hard to get back on track, 10, 12, even 16 hour days are common for me, but I never forget to appreciate everything else I have in my life. Friends and family, food and fun, and the ability to not really have to worry about having a budget. You can’t go out partying every night from 10 pm to – 2+ am, but no one says you can’t go out with your friends a couple times a week, visit your family for lunch, or take out your girl/boyfriend on date every once and a while. Making money is important… but having things to spend that money on though, is more important.

As for me, things are starting to run back to normalcy. I took off the whole week to reassess everything I have and look at my goals, go out and have fun with my friends I literally haven’t seen for months because I’ve been so busy, and spoiled myself with some shopping. Tomorrow is Monday, which means back to work, but I am ready and waiting for it. Hopefully the return of daily blog posts will return here as well. It is on my to-do list.

I think one of the biggest problems I have is simple lack of motivation to get off my ass and upload those 10 landing pages my designer made, or submit 500 more Facebook ads that will probably just be declined. Actually, its not the lack of motivation because it is always there. Money, money, money. I’m always making money 24/7. But I could be making more. A lot more.

The real problem is that motivation isn’t always in my face. So, in order to better keep up my hard work, I had my designer make a few desktop wallpapers for me with a couple of my goals on them. One, I want a Nissan 370z. In America, it’s a decent car that is priced under $40,000, but here it is over $100,000 due to taxes and duties on automobiles (307 mother-$&#&*$ percent). I also want a penthouse condo that I purchase, not just rent. Another few hundred thousand to 1-million USD dropped there. Well, he came up with a couple neat designs which you can use for yourself if you don’t mind having my name on your desktop. Haha. (They are both over 1 MB files, so I’m linking to the files, not posting them here.)

Wallpaper – 1

Wallpaper – 2

I think next time I’ll tell him to use pictures of a condo with a bunch of half-naked Asian women. Now there is some real motivation!

So, after more than a week of suffering from the flu (could have been Swine Flu, but not confirmed. It is an epidemic here in Thailand so let’s just assume I was a statistic in this case), I am back on my feet. I’m still suffering from very sore muscles and a strong cough, though. It’s been well long enough and it’s time to get back to work.

Yesterday was a pretty interesting day. Nickycakes, the posterboy for affiliate marketing, came down to Thailand so I paid him a visit on his first day here. I knew he was always a big baller, but never realized the level he was actually at. When he started talking about dropping 20k on a watch and showing interest in buying a very expensive car, I got a damn good idea of what kind of volume he’s pushing everyday. Now, I make decent change, but I’ve got a long way to go before I could even wish to be around Nick’s level. That was some big motivation.

We chatted, talked about the Thai ladies (good stuff), bought some shit, and the Nick told me to buy an XBox360, which I did. The XBoxes here are all modified to play copied games, so I got about 15 random titles. I’ll mainly be using the machine for Halo 3. And if anybody wants to hit me up and make me waste more of my time, my ID is: HyperionSTi. I suck at Halo, but its good for exercise. I actually sweat by balls off playing the damn game. Yuck.

I’ll be back with more updates for tomorrow, because for now I’ve got a week of work to catch up on!