Pieces to a Puzzle

Music for your orgasmic reading pleasure…

I hadn’t intended to post anything until I got home, but there has been an idea floating around in my head for some time that I wanted all the noobies I’m talking to to know. I’ve gotten a lot more comments and hits from various places, ready to get into this marketing game. I’m getting a lot more questions on aim and so on, but I wanted to say this…

I held off on posting this because I couldn’t figure out the best way to say it, but I was having a conversation with my buddy and he said it perfectly, and this is what he said. It sums up what I was thinking just perfectly:

I feel the same way.
Once you are profitable in this industry.
Marketing as a whole.
There’s so many projects that you can run.

THIS is very important. So important. When you start everything is overwhelming for sure, you don’t know where to begin. There’s that feeling like what if I start this and it’s a waste of time and I don’t learn anything because I made the dumb mistake of choosing the wrong route, simply because I didn’t know better.

That… is completely incorrect. When I first started all this, I read for 16 hours straight for like a week straight just absorbing and learning. I distinctly remember reading something, then actually building the landing page/tracking method/campaign… then reading something else which was BETTER… spending another day redoing the exact same thing in a different way, different trackers, different lander styles. This must have repeated 5 or 6 times, and THEN I read a post about wordpress and did the entire thing over AGAIN. From the outside it looks like an entire “wasted” week because I just went in circles, and at the end of the week I still didn’t have any finished item. Let me tell you though, I have used every single one of those things I have learned at LEAST 100 times since then, in the past year, even if it wasn’t that time.

That is the meat of this post, and why I feel it’s so important. Everything you’re learning here interlinks in ways you can’t  even begin to comprehend when you’re first starting out. The first thing you learn, whether it’s ppc, ppv, media buys, seo, etc, is going to seem like the hardest thing ever. The second thing you learn will be hard too.. but after that you start to get a bigger picture and have a lot of ‘ah-ha’ moments.

EVENTUALLY, you will get to a point where your understanding is so all-encompassing that you will have tons of different projects on your plate. More than you will be able to handle! You will ‘actually’ be thinking outside the box. Right now, since making this post yesterday, I had 2 more opportunities come up that are insanely amazing. Big time Travis is in a Maserati amazing. It would be something I couldn’t even SEE in the matrix of life though, had I not known all this other interlinking stuff.

Just keep that in mind when you’re learning… and look forward to the point you WILL reach when you will start to get a massive -flood- of ideas, opportunities, people wanting to network with you, and literally so many chances to succeed. Many of them will fail, but when one fails, 3 more will popup. It’s the most exhilarating thing ever :]

I’m off to buy my shoes now

Whoa Neo

Hey yo!

I just got this comment so I felt the need to force an update

“Where’s the update? You still going to ASW? Still doing media buys?”

I haven’t posted in some time due to being massively scattered lately, knee deep in projects. I’ve sort of reached my breaking point for living in seclusion working on my business (lol). My business did definitely double or triple, but  at the cost of my sense of humor and overall zeal (temporarily!). Let me just say if you ever decide to do what I did, it’s a great idea.. but don’t go longer than 2 months. The first 2 months in seclusion were VERY beneficial, but now being on my 4th or 5th month, I don’t even know, it’s more than what my socially-requiring being can aptly handle.

Let me recap you on a few of my plans and expect a better update soon when I feel inspired.

> Affiliate summit west. FUCK YES. I’m counting down the days.. I’ll be in vegas 16th through 20th. I already have a few networking parties I plan on going to, media buys coach as well as ppc coach meetups. If you want to meetup, I can give you my sexy business card. Just AIM message me: ’solar’, and we can exchange numbers. I don’t get texts after my iPhone was stolen so don’t bother sending them or they’ll disappear into the void, where all the lost socks you have go. Expect a big post about this. I’ve never been to a marketing conference before so I’m looking forward to it.

> After ASW I’m going home for a month to visit my family and hang out with my bro’s. One’s the lead role in a play so I gotta see that, and the other is like on 40 varsity sports teams so I have to see him pwn a few n00bs on the field there. During this time I will have a lot of time to make a better post. Change of scenery always helps.

> Real Estate. My business partner Lee who has been doing real estate 6 years has recently gotten some good juicy contacts, and is helping me to learn the ins and outs of flipping houses. This looks like a great supplement to marketing which has no face-time, and real estate which is all face-time.. something I enjoy. My current big project is related to real estate and is what I’ve been working on non-stop the last week or two

> After I come back in February from my hometown, I’m moving to South Carolina to live with my buddy for some snowboarding, hiking, camping and so on, and also help him with his startup company (which is looking promising so far). I offered to give him a hand and just relax for a bit. After that I am possibly moving to Texas for real estate, we will see.

> More media buys, PPV, PPC. In the last month I’ve had 2 very solid campaigns running $500 or so adspend a day but my server got DDoS’d, I had to change some things around and now it’s not the same. I’m going to work on scaling that to several other traffic sources and trying to get that up. It’s definitely a winner.. I stole $2k in revenue from him in 2 days and got attacked that night. Liquidweb is the fucking bomb though, and did a good job mitigating it. Let me say though that prosper was the one that screwed it up.. the attack on the server itself was handled easily, but all the traffic from the botnet was giving prosper hundreds of clicks a minute, and was overloading my VPS. Because the VPS is uncapped, it actually took down several other sites as well. Oops :p

Anyway Im’ma head to the store and pick up some new shoes for ASW, the ones I have now have been reduced to holey cloth bandages wrapped around my feet like a traveling sage.