Hey guys,

Just briefly, I’m officially moved out of CA right now. I’m hanging out in SC with my buddy rock climbing, bouldering, hiking, camping, etc. All that good outdoorsy shit that attracts girls that need to shave their legs.

My wonderful business partner and I are working on an offline/online business, and this is going to be epic. It could be what my entire marketing ‘career’ has led up to. She is a super great person, with tons of knowledge. Having started a few companies herself, and having done nothing of the sort myself, there are a lot of valuable things I can learn from her. She is eloquent with her tongue too (muahaha). If you talk to me on AIM or something I can tell you about it if you’re interested.

In the meantime I have a few things running that are making a little bit of cash but I don’t really care about them — This is going to be fucking EPIC, and I spent like 100+ hours programming the backend, only to realize it needs to be more efficient and it must be done over in a more streamlined way. Good thing that came out of it was I learned an entire programming language in the process :] PHP is the shit… everyone always told me I should learn it, and up to a certain point in my career I had never needed it so I put it in the back of my mind. Now that I’m quite good at it (or at least I could do what I need it to do… not at the level of making the next wordpress or anything though).. it is THE best thing ever. So many problems I had before that I thought were ‘unsolvable’ … problems I didn’t even look into solutions thinking there was just no way, turns out are easily solvable by PHP. Here is a VERY awesome tutorial section, although to actually learn it you gotta write some of your own scripts.

We have tapped only a fraction of the market share, and made a substantial amount. All that’s left is to work out all the many kinks and then release the floodgates of this extremely targeted, wonderful traffic .

Time for more sushi.

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

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.

I went through some sort of crazy mental breakdown + rebuilding like a week ago and now I’m back in the game.

It was tough after all my campaigns were taken away for reasons outside my control (literally, 80% of them all in the same week). My income basically when down to 2 figures a day profit. I tried tons of new stuff and nothing worked, got tripped up for awhile, and had to regroup and think about my goals and purpose, skills and abilities and so on.

After meditating on it for hours before I went to sleep + a lot of fucking golden grams cereal, I had some major enlightening moments, and already I’m at 500%. All my income is starting to flow back (with much higher potential this time around) and a lot of my ideas are working. I just had to relax and let it flow, and not get really caught up in the ‘here and now’ of “I have hardly any campaigns to my name that work.” After 3 days I basically said FUCK THAT! I went back big, 3x as hard, got up like a TON  new campaigns, 2 are already taking off very well and I got my mastermind group and I working on another very excellent project that I’m extremely excited about. That goes live as soon as my biz partner adam stops getting food poisoning like a fairy boy and mans up.

I haven’t posted much lately, but I definitely will say I’ll have some good stuff very soon

PS. I’m going to ASW, that should be exciting. I’ve never gone to a marketing conference before – make sure you hit me up if you see me there.

Just got back from an amazing vacation with my family and a detour to Hilton Head Island to visit my dad. Had a wicked time and it totally inspired me to look into getting a yacht or at least a nice catamaran to cruise around on the ocean. Can’t afford em yet but it’s around the corner The scenery in Michigan is meh, cause I grew up there, but Hilton Head was so inspiring… the houses, the beaches, the wildlife, the marina’s. I unearthed a new love for marinas… totally didn’t see that one going.

In other news two new AWESOME sites have been released by the owner of PPC-Coach as well as various partners for each site.

I signed up for MediaBuysCoach.com right away, a fantastic resource for learning media buys. This is very advanced and each campaign requires $1000 in testing alone, but this is the top of the top. If you have money this site is a MUST… it’s absolutely incredible, and the creator Carl is a great dude who is very helpful. These are the types of campaigns where you bank $200k/month. My new goal is $10k/day within 3 months, and $1 million+ profit within 1 year. As soon as I get back from Vegas I’m gonna throw up 3 or 4 media buys and see where they go. I’m shooting for $500/day with my first ones and then I’m going to scale them up and shoot for a few bigger buys.

In other news if you can’t quite get the hang of PPC-Coach, or you have a very low budget, check out AFTCoach.com (Affiliate Free Traffic). This is another site that was just released and this is for beginners because it doesn’t involve PAID TRAFFIC like PPC does. You get your traffic for free doing article marketing. So, if you’re looking to just get your feet wet, have a low budget, or just want to see if you can actually make money online, this is a great place to start. Then again there’s always PPC-coach which is intermediate.
I talked to Coop, the guy in charge of setting up AFTCoach. I asked him a few questions regarding it as I’m interested in showing this to my family and brothers to get them warmed up to making money from your desk, and gaining full freedom to do what you would love to do…
He basically told me that when you do article marketing for the most part, it’s hard to make it take off unless you have the technical setup correct, with a few secrets that make banking money a lot easier. Even if you suck at writing you still can get some nice pocket change doing this. He said his goal is to have everyone making $1k/day within 6 months. I’m not sure how feasible that is, as I’ve never tried article marketing before, but I also asked him what the average noob can expect to make within the first month. His reply was $50-$200/day if you do it right. He also has tons of tutorials that are very basic step by step to help the new guys along, considering the site is meant for beginners. It’s a great start and while I haven’t tried it, it sounds great! Enough for me to get my family involved… I have another close friend who’s signing up and when he gets through I’ll ask him how it is and give you an honest review if I think it’s worth it.

I’m takin off for Vegas, PEACE!
PS. Black 13!

When I say this, I mean it!… Scuse’ my 1st year french but when things start going in your favor, watch the fuck out!

About 2 weeks ago I hit my first $1,000 profit day, and since then things have been snowballing very quickly that it’s actually a new challenge focusing on my current projects with so many opportunities and possibilities floating right in my. Things that were never there before or that I never even realized…

I feel like it’s just like when Roger Bannister ran the 4-minute mile in 1954, and then only 6 weeks later multiple other people broke the same record. Once a level of achievement is reached, opportunities fall in place which are more akin with this new level of development. I always heard people say this, but I never really experienced it in my life until the last month or so. After breaking my 1,000 day, my entire reality has shifted into this being common-place, so now when I look out I start to perceive opportunities and chances that I just never even considered before. My current focus is that I’m going to start doing media buys.

I made a post on PPC-Coach about networking, and then there were a few comments on my blog asking me to write a post about it. Well about about I give you one better, chum. This post is here to inspire you, not just to tell you about networking, but to truly try to convey what’s in store for you when you start to meet your own expectations of what it’s like to actually ‘really succeed.’

Everyone starts at the same place, and I was no exception. So I might have read this same blog post and it would go in one ear and right out the other… but let me re-emphasize that this WILL happen to you.. look forward to it! These are the little tidbits of experience that I have gained in the last month which have actually changed my mindset.

1. When people see you are successfull, THEY WILL BE WILLING TO GIVE YOU SO MUCH FOR FREE. Yeah this one’s a doozie.. When I was flat broke or didn’t have really any success to speak about, I was in the grind trying my best. But as I’ve learned and experienced more and more (and I still have so far to go ), the more I REALLY see how people that see you’re successful are willing to just give you things. It’s the weirdest thing… It really lets you just RIDE the coaster rather than always trying to climb a mountain. From what I’ve seen in my own life things pick up exponentially, and you’ll be able to survive on just your opportunities alone. I wish I could convey the intensity of this as well… I was on both sides of the fence and I remember having the exact thoughts..
“blah blah everyone says that but it will take forever for me to be successful.. and what really COULD they give me?? honestly .. how much could they really give to me, probably not much. Either that or I wouldn’t have enough success experience to even use that to my advantage.”

Now that I ACTUALLY am here, and I’m not trying to perceive this place of being through a lens which is NOT in the same place of growth (trying to perceive what it’s like to be ‘here’ from being in a place of ‘there’), it’s VERY DIFFERENT. The limitations of your old awareness prevent you from even comprehending what it’s like in your new place of growth. It’s like literally trying to look through a glass monocle when half of it is covered with black tar (okay that was out of left field shut up I would wear a monocle if I had to). The momentum of my life right now is being carried on opportunities alone, and I’m taking all the juicy ones!

2. NETWORK! A lot of it. Build relationships on AIM, in person, at conferences, on forums, WHEREVER. Try to make friends with everyone (and watch out for people who try to pull the wool over your eyes or manipulate). I don’t mean just start talking to everyone or be a needy creep that always bugs people on aim… you want to offer value to people so they remember you. Want a hint? Sure. For fucks sake.. BE UNIQUE. Probably 50-100 new people hit me up on AIM a month, and they all say the same thing. DO you think I remember those people? Hell no. Same with all the PM’s I get on PPC-Coach (ironically about networking that all say the same thing.. boring.. “hey I’m here to network with you.. so.. uh… yeah..”). The people I DO remember are the guys and girls who stand out and offer me something, whether its humor, creativity, ideas, or just an interesting and refreshing presence. The guy that sends me $5 for absolutely no reason “to go get a beer,” or the guy that the very first thing he says to me is a quote related to my favorite book, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (he got the idea from my screen-name which is named after the character zaphod in the book). THESE are the people that I find interesting and I will be willing to help out and go the extra mile to make sure they succeed (as long as they continue to put in equal or greater effort. Putting in greater effort I greatly appreciate and that makes me want to help more… synergy baby). By the same token, the dynamic between me and the more successful people that help me UP is exactly the same way. It’s just a cycle that will suck you in when you get close enough to it When the ball starts rolling so to speak…

Just as a quick hint for number 2. When you’re talking to people try and feel out the give or take. You will feel it and your intuition will guide you whether or not to bring them in with your private information (that you don’t want everyone knowing), or slowly pushing them away by politely ignoring them. It’s sort of a mutual thing, and you will feel that same feeling when a homeless person asks for change when they’re ‘taking’ too much, or if you don’t trust them. Likewise the people that seem to give you way too much too quickly it will feel like something is fishy… there’s a perfect balance in there and when you find it that harmony is what creates awesome relationships. Then when they’re good and weak thats when you begin plan for world domination or .. uh.. wait nevermind.

3. Form a MASTERMIND group. Don’t burn bridges or try to selfishly keep everything to yourself. Now don’t get me wrong you don’t want to be giving away all your secrets, but if there’s someone you really trust and you feel like you could both hit a home-run out of the park with 2 minds rather than one, by all means do it. Right now I have a mastermind group with 3 awesome people, and it works out great. They all feed me olives and fan me while I relax on the beach err by that I mean we all work together to achieve a common goal. 4 minds can crush an opportunities where 1 mind would just be overloaded. That doesn’t mean we all feed off eachother like leaches, but it’s a “symbiotic relationship” that is pretty much the essence of synergy. We each hold our own independence, our own campaigns and so forth, but work together for tackling new marketing techniques, offers or challenging methods. Where do you find these people?? STEP 2… Don’t forget

The final point I would like to make is, it only takes ONE success for you to really feel it. All it took was waking up one time and seeing my account and thinking holy shit… from then on everything just falls into place. For the most part, it seems like if you hit a new PEAK, you won’t be tortured with nonsense all that much ‘lower’ than that. You will definitely fail and have challenges, but your whole level increases with each new breakthrough.

Rove you rong time!

A recent comment inspired me to make this post about efficiency when coding.

I’ve been wanting to redo my site for awhile now with trendier graphics and today I bit the bullet. Many hours, and x Redbulls later, I feel I have accomplished a fair amount tastier eye-candy.. it almost makes me want to lick the new header graphics. Tell me what you think, or if you have any suggestions/improvements you see shoot me a comment.

I edit single lines of code an awful lot – alt+tab to the browser to view it – make desired changes – edit – re-upload – wash rinse repeat. When you’re doing this for hours on end it’s crucial that your setup facilitates the ease, speed and efficiency of a turtle with a jetpack. This is to keep time wasted as low as possible and prevent excessive going back and forth trying to find files, or uploading your old work over your new work (god only knows… if you’ve made that mistake. before.. you’ll never want to make it again).

Here I will try to explain the most efficient way I have found to navigate the workflow of viewing things that need to be fixed, downloading files to edit, editing, uploading, testing, and so on.

First, download Firebug. I can’t recommend this enough… I use this CONSTANTLY.

Next, I recommend you get EditPlus 3. Depending on how you feel about torrents, you can just download it. This step isn’t essential, you could use notepad (or jokepad) after all if you wanted to. EditPlus infinitely better however because it color-highlights different segments of code depending on what language the file is. This helps you easily spot if you forgot a pesky ; mark somewhere and need to find out where the error is.

Once you have that, go into FileZilla (client) and go to Edit > Settings > File Editing.

Make the appropriate changes according to the image below.
If you don’t have EditPlus, change this to c:\windows\notepad.exe

This is where the meat of this post comes in: how to go back and forth from Firebug, to EditPlus 3, to Filezilla so you can find changes, make changes, and upload changes (in that rotation) as quick as possible.

FIND CHANGES

Now you’re all set up and ready to go to start editing. In the process of making this post actually I found a good example to use. I noticed that the image border of images within a post (when I previewed it) come up as a very ugly 3px border for some reason. I want to change that to a nice 1px blue colored border.

There are several ways to do this.. first of all I obviously need to edit style.css (specifically for me, styleBlue.css). If you’re intermediate level, you won’t need firebug to know you simply adjust border:1px solid #46b0e5; in the img property, but for more advanced things it makes a big difference. I’m going to use it anyway in this example.

Go to Firefox and enable Firebug by hitting the little bug in the bottom right hand corner. When the window pops up, hit Inspect. Mouse around and you will see in real-time firebug highlighting all elements on your page. On the left you will see the XHTML associated with that element, and on the right is the CSS style associated with it.

Here you can see exactly what line of code I need to change. When you change any of the XHTML/CSS code in firebug, it updates it on the page in real time as soon as you type it in. This is a fucking fantastic feature, and it’s how I do the majority of my coding to make it look perfect. If you mess up, just hit F5 to refresh and your page will be restored for you to edit again. Once you have the page looking how you like it (in this case, I ‘inspected’ and then found where I need to change the border. See the bottom right where I changed the border code), It’s time to put it back in the actual CSS file so the change is permanent. As a sidenote, firebug works best for fixing margins and padding so you get to visually see how it will look, and there is no trial and error involved.

MAKE CHANGES & UPLOAD CHANGES

Now browse to the correct directory location within your FTP server, right click the file and hit View/Edit. This step is important; see image below.

After you do this, EditPlus (or jokepad) will open up and you will see your CSS code. If you remember from firebug, you will know exactly where to go to edit (click the previous image): you will see on line 780, for p img { }

Make your desired change, and hit CLOSE on EditPlus. When it asks you if you want to save, hit YES. Now, go back to FileZilla and immediately you will see this message:

Once you hit Yes, the file will reupload to the location you viewed it from. Filezilla takes care of the temp files as well as the location you originally opened it from, and knows where to re-upload it. Even if you change the folder you’re viewing in FTP, it will know the location the file is supposed to go into.

That’s it! Go back to firefox and hit F5 to refresh. You should see the changes you just made show up, all while spending only about 15 seconds. Once you get the hang of this, you can do these steps in order very quickly over and over and start to make massive amounts of edits. I generally work in groups. I’ll edit a few things related to images, remember what they are, change them on the FTP server, go back and edit a few more things related to something else.

There are many other ways to do this, including the FTP setting within Dreamweaver, however I like the light weight of EditPlus, as well as the ability to leave multiple files open (like header.php and style.css), edit both back and forth, and have filezilla keep track and upload them as soon as I hit Save.

That’s it, go get em’ tigre.

Just got back from an awesome 2-week trip to San Diego gas lamp area… totally awesome. I’m moving there for sure when this lease expires.

It’s time for work again, I’m a bit tired right now but tomorrow I’m starting on a whole slew of campaigns I’ve been thinking about the last month.

I also updated the About section with a more specific writeup of what I am going to achieve with this. Cheers

The other day my buddy roundhouse kicked my old ass busted phone right out of my hand, and it smashed into a million pieces in the taco bell parking lot. Epic.

Karma got him back though a few days later when he tried to be a hero and throw me in the pool, came in with me, and forgot his phone was in his pocket. Owned.
He actually got his phone working again, saved all his numbers, and I bought an iPhone so you could say it worked out for both of us.

I have been seeing increased success, I’ve made about $12,000 from my campaigns in a few months, and this is just the beginning. I quit my lame-ass job and basically started to do this full time. My next goal is to hit my first $1000/day, although keeping it steady is going to be the trick.
As a side note… get ready for all the mischief you’re going to get into when you start working for yourself and have the luxury of time, and freeballin at your desk (if that’s your style that is). Side effects may include chasing your friends around the yard with a hose and a bag of flour, fighting them while they’re sleeping, or taping them to the wall with duct tape

My joint SEO site I’m doing with my friend is also doing quite well, we’re ranked #1 for an awful lot of search terms, and we get about 60 hits of natural traffic a day. We’ve made a few sales, and this is only one blog for one niche.. next is to make a whole swarm of 20 or so blogs.

Yeah… now all I have to do is wait till iPhone releases their update so I can record video and send picture messages. What kinda shite is that Apple!

I feel like a lot of people that have a lot of money become bored easily, simply because they aren’t creative. I thrive on being creative, and it makes me feel alive – I can’t imagine sitting around, unmoving and stagnant watching 45 DVD’s of House on your 62″ plasma 24/7.

I was out for drinks with my friend the other day and I had the idea that I’m going to use my funds that are now automated to allow me to travel to meet each person on my Facebook, and then I’m going to make a section on here and write about all my ridiculous adventures I get into – Meeting 1000+ people sounds like a fantastic source for content to write about… especially considering wherever I go crazy things are always bound to happen ;]