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

Just got a request for an update. Insanely busy but some new excitements/frustrations/flavors.

Several of my campaigns died, and 1 I was forced to take down, that’s like $600 of my income per day taken away total.

I had a media buy that was going well but then they removed the ad placement size, so those are no longer as well. Right now I’m working on pay per lead on several publishers (looks very promising) as well as cloaking on the big 3.

I’ll give a legit update when I see some results

T-Weezy

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 ;]

Edits:
4/6/09 – New questions added
4/5/09 – New questions added
3/31/09 – New questions added

Hey guys,
I’ve been meaning to write this for some time but have been busy with a lot of other projects. I got a little bit of time though before my bacon burns

If you have not read this yet, I highly recommend it as it shows my purpose and passion for writing this, hopefully it will give you the ‘broader picture’ of why what I’m about to tell you is important if you want to “have your cake and eat it to.”

I have had a lot of questions about how I make money online, and how it all works – It’s my job to explain it to you here in the most bullshit free way that doesn’t wreak of that sleazy toaster salesman who’s hanging out with your mom. I’ll be posting an affiliate link or two, but because I am completely turned off by scarcity and secrecy, it’s completely up to you whether you want to click them or not. I’m perfectly happy just being able to help out ;]

The ultimate reason I love affiliate marketing so much is because I think it’s simply awesome that I can spend several hours a day/week on the computer managing my campaigns, at any internet-gold location, and it affords me the time and money to travel to the ends of the earth, worthy of my ENTIRE slice of delicious life pie. I am my own boss, and I don’t have to share the water cooler. Travel is one of my deepest passions, as well as working on my personality to inspire others, so these aspirations all go hand-in-hand and mesh perfectly with my mobility and complete detachment from a place or time.

Here are the most common questions I get – if you have another one, then definitely drop me a line on the contact page, and I’ll add it to this post at the bottom.

What is it?
There are a million and one ways to market a product online. The best part is, in my opinion, you don’t need your own product to make money. You don’t have to write your own book about lemons, or make your own brand of overly inspirational poster to succeed. You are basically harnessing traffic from the internet (mostly Google, MSN, and Yahoo), and you’re redirecting it to -global- markets to other people’s offers. You do this through bidding on keywords that you think people are going to be searching in google for to find the product you’re selling. You’ll be starting off in very specific niches, if you start off in competitive areas like ‘auto insurance,’ you’re going to go mental.

The customer searches, finds your ad, clicks it, puts in their info, and you get paid. That’s just one method of thousands, but a very popular one. Shipping (if there is any) and all that nonsense is taken care of by the advertiser. All you need to worry about is which market to tackle, and what keywords & landing pages you will be using (a landing page is a website that they ‘land on’ when they click your ad). Because it’s global means you can use the entire world as your market, so if for example UK is having a particularly good something or other that you want to tap into, you just set your traffic to target only those people in the UK (so US people won’t see your offer). I actually find UK market is better than the US.

How do I learn, even when I know absolutely nothing?
The best place I have ever found is PPC-Coach. This place is GOD. Unless you have help in some way or another, there are just too many variables that will turn you off to marketing before you even start.

If you spend 2-3 months of solid effort, there’s no reason you shouldn’t have already hit your first $100/day. After the first $100, it’s all downhill.. it’s fascinating. There are so many threads at that website about how they struggled for months making $20, then they hit their first $100 and they go wild, then even a week or months later they’re very quickly moving up to $300, 500, 1000 and beyond.

Basically the way PPC-Coach is set up is you pay monthly (best $40 I ever spent). There are 12 months total, and each month you stay there you get access to a new month. They are laid out in easiest to hardest difficulty, so that they basically hold your hand through the entire process to mastery. It’s not an ebook or any ‘guide’ you have to follow, but rather a private forum filled with SOLID guys that are there for the same reason. Because everyone is paying to be there and learn, each post is very helpful (unlike that hellish Mordor wickedfire or warrior forums). There are tons of tutorial guides and posts about how to go about doing what you need to do.

The best part is you also get personal help from Coach himself, as well as many of the other gurus. He will look at your campaigns and help you with what you’re doing wrong, and everyone is willing to look at your landing page or whatever problem you’re having. You’ll also get to use his tools (for setting up your campaigns) and access to the tracker for tracking keywords and adgroups.

I honestly couldn’t recommend PPC-Coach highly enough. It’s a goldmine if you’re looking for a place where you can go, not knowing anything, and come out successful with the help and support of other people who are already successful. That alone is invaluable. (think of it like that other site you visit… you know what place I mean ). You will have -everything- you need at that one site. Also, PM me on there with your username and I’ll help you out personally as well. I plan on being a member here for a very long time (my name on there is Zesty, check out the newbie guide I made, I took the first 3 weeks of solid learning you need to do for Month 1, and put it all in the guide stickied on the month 1 forum).

How does it compare to real marketing?
Well – you don’t need to wear a tie, and you can watch youtube whenever you feel like it. Hell, you can even do affiliate marketing naked – it rocks. That is the most obvious difference. You are also using technology to your advantage, that’s the huge advantage as well. Now instead of giving a perfect ‘sales pitch’ in person, you need to do it in words and images. Are you going to use an image with emotion attached, or no? What color will you make your landing page? What will your ad say, specifically?

You need to be motivated and carve out a successful mindset. Getting your first $1 will be the hardest dollar you have ever made. Then the hardest $10, but once you hit $50, 100, 1000 per day, I assure you that will be the EASIEST you’ve ever made $2000 in one day (that’s down the road though, please don’t expect this to be easy. That’s the reason online money-making gets a bad rep is because people try it, hoping to get rich quick, lose $200 and leave, talking mad smack about it on the way out). This will require MOTIVATION and PERSISTENCE – but when you get that first check I know you will be tingling with delight ;] Even when I’m failing, or not making much money, I find it utterly fascinating.

The mindset is learning how the big 3 networks work (where your traffic comes from), how bidding works, when to cut your campaigns. You’ll also need to think about keywords and the mindsets of your customers. Outside-the-box thinking is best. For example (and this example always fascinates me), why do you think it is that MSN traffic converts better (in certain situations) than Google traffic, yet there is not as much of it?

It’s because so many computer un-savvy people who buy their computer at Walmart turn on their computer, MSN is their homepage, and they don’t know much better. There are less of them, but they are more likely to fill out a popup thinking they are a winner (thank god we never approach any methods like that though).

How much work at first?h
It’s a bit daunting at first, simply because there is SO much information on that forum it’s kind of cyclical. You have to know one thing before the other, but to know that thing you need to know about this thing. It really is simple though when you make it a point that you aren’t going to stop until you understand. Hell, It took me 2 weeks of learning, setting up websites, applying to affiliate networks, and so on before I really got the swing of things. After that I made a that newbie guide so that’s there to help you out and give you a jump start.

To be making $100 a day (I use this as a generic benchmark) you probably will need to manage your campaigns 1-3 hours a day. It completely depends however on what type of marketing you are doing, that is an extremely broad generalization but the best one I can come up with. Sometimes you will need to do more (in the beginning, tweaking), and later on you won’t need to touch it. I have a campaign running for this month that I’ve made $1,800 off of without touching even for 5 minutes (I set it up 3 months ago).

How much computer experience will I need?
Heh, this is a tricky question. If you have trouble finding your start button, you’re going to have more difficulty than most (probably a lot more). It’s not that big a deal if you’re motivated, there are tons of threads on ppc-coach where pretty much any question you could ever ask is already answered, but you will still need to have some computer savvy. This is not to say it’ cannot be learned. I’ve helped 2 of my good friends out who didn’t know anything about how a webhost even worked, and within a short time they’re sailing (like I said, don’t hesitate to PM me on PPC-Coach, I’ll be glad to answer any questions).

It’s good idea to have a basic knowledge of navigating windows and the internet. You will need to edit HTML, although you don’t have to write your own at first (you will learn it as you go). This is where Coach’s tools also come in handy – there are landing site generators and tools that do the work for you. You will also need basic knowledge of editing index files for webpages, how to FTP files to a webserver, and how to edit an index.php file when it says to. You will need to know only very basic functions of PHP, but those are already written up so it’s not like you will be programming. It’s great to know about wordpress, as that’s starting to become very popular and is my lander of choice.

olio asks: So besides the 40$/month sign up fee what other costs would I be looking at before I dive into this?
It’s actually $50 a month Canadian, which is about $38-$40 US depending on the conversion rate. Aside from that monthly fee, you will need to buy a .com domain which is about $15 for 4 domains for 1 year (you will need a number of different domains), as well as hosting. If you sign up for Hostgator hosting, it will be .01 cent your first month if you use the promotion code wordpress. After that it’s $7.95 per month (choose the ‘Baby’ plan). You will need to buy your domain first before hosting, so you can put your domain in when you register at the host. Domains can be bought from GoDaddy.

Eddie asks: So basically, you create blog/website with links and hope people click the link and order a product? What is most important to be successful at this…copywritng skills, getting traffic, etc.
That is generally what you do with SEO, not PPC. SEO is getting natural traffic from google organically and slowly over time. You make a page that Google ‘likes’ and after a while you will start to get people searching for information that is on your blog or website. Eventually you will get a trickle of money coming in each month. Make a bunch of these and you have a solid stream of cash coming in. With PPC however, it’s a lot more active and you can make a lot more money.. it’s just that campaigns require work rather than passively letting them run. Instead of 5k a month, you might that in one day with PPC. Pay Per Click involves taking affiliate offers (from affiliate networks) and marketing them with a landing page or direct linking. Acai Berry offers used to be really popular and made people a killing to begin with, but now they have died off. Search ‘acai berry’ in google for a super-saturated market of what you will be doing. You of course wouldn’t pick such a general competitive market, and may focus more on specific niches, say ‘disc golf’ or a certain brand of mountain climbing gear.

The thing I also like about PPC is you don’t need to write your own content (as with SEO blogs). You can use scripts that take content, convert it through babelfish and you end up with ‘new’ unique content. Caffeinated Content is a good example of this. You also won’t really need to write tons of sales copy as you would if you were selling eBooks.You will have to write ads, but that’s cake. The main part is learning BIDDING STRATEGIES. You will have to learn how the search network works for Google, and how you will need to manage your campaigns. PPC (to me) is basically all about traffic and keywords, SEO is more about making content and landing pages that Google likes. PPC is more active, and SEO is more passive, although as a result SEO allows you to make money without touching your campaigns, you just need to make a shitton of them.

Gallo asks About how long will I have to work before I’m consistently pulling in $100/day?
If you really put effort into reading and doing your work, there’s no reason you won’t be making that much (on average) in 2-3 months. The first dollar is the hardest dollar you will ever make, but once you start to achieve the mindset going from 100-200 is a lot easier than going from 1 to 100. Keep in mind that’s only month 1. In later months, all that needs to be learned is how to use the search network and how to make proper keyword lists.. to me these things are fun so it’s not like when I’m learning I’m not enjoying it.

Cheers guys, Imma go cop some eats ;]

If you have any questions, send them in the contact form and I’ll add them here.

-Travis

Hey guys,
Recently a lot of people have started asking me questions about affiliate marketing, what it is, how much you can make and so on. Not to mention, I wanted a personal site to log all my marketing awesomeness in my journey on this wild vegabonding experience.

Keep on rockin’ in the free world.