It was interesting being without internet for 7 days, but I lived. I’ve finally moved into my new house and everything is set up for maximum profitage.

Here are a few pics of my room… specially zen-i-fied for the most enjoyable work environment that I feel. I’m thinking of getting 3 or 4 very large plants and placing them around the room, along with a few bonzai trees. Maybe even a pink flamingo.

Click on them to see full size.

Yes… my socks don’t match. Sue me.

My room at night. Thank god it’s not actually that orange. iPhone camera fails again.

My sex panther lamp, graciously donated by my dad. Not sure where it’s been, not sure I even care to know. As well as my illegally soft and comfortable bed.

The view out of my window at night. I wish I had a better quality pic of this, because it truly is spectacular. You can’t make them out but there are mountains on the horizon.

My bathroom counter-top. Not quite sure what to do with 2 sinks, but I’ll figure it out.

Pic of shower and tub. Exciting.
I hate to say.. but, I wasn’t sure what to do with a bath, so I took a bath in it. I haven’t taken a bath in like 20 years, so I mixed up some epsom salts and made a balancing bath. Pretty relaxing =)

Of course, then I had to put on my boosie robe and walk around with a pipe in my mouth, talking about ’shedules’

Cheers!

This is how I feel right now…

You should add me on twitter. I’m just now seeing the incredible potential of it. Here are two other great resources for mass following 100 people a day in your niche/unfollowing the punks that don’t follow you back, as well as for tracking your tinyurl’s.

I gotta admit I feel extremely gay posting on twitter from my phone… I mean really really gay. But, it has grown on me.. and it’s not so bad when you actually have followers. I think the first time I realized it was when I posted a funny pic from my roadtrip and got 40 people to click on it in about 8-10 seconds, and then a few commented on it and one retweeted it. My fellow partner in crime, miss leebo, has 15k followers, which I guess is really the pinnacle of creepiness, but that’s cool. Maybe some day I shall attain creeptweet status. To leverage the gayness I just say that I gotta ‘oh snap dude let me twat that.’

That brings me to the topic of my roadtrip… well it can’t really be described. I’d show you the videos but it’s best those not got out. It started off in vegas for my birthday, where I had some . We gambled a bit, fought some strippers, base jumped off a few casino high rises, had some more . The weather there is so freakin hot I don’t even know what to do with myself. The only thing I could think of was drink mojitos, sit at the dollar slots and shovel more fun fun down the hatch. I must have drank so many Gatorade’s that you should invest in their stock if I go back. On the way home in my friend’s Jetta, we saw 4 other Jetta’s on the side of the road because they broke down from heat. That was omen number one. The second omen was the temperature gauge on H. Omen three was the vultures flying after our car with laser precision for several hundred miles. Luckily our car died in a gas station where beef-jerky-trucker-voice-janice very kindly sold us antifreeze.

After that I returned home (but I hadn’t slept in my own bed yet) when my friend told me that they’re going on a 2 month roadtrip from the East to the West coast and all the way up and back again. They were stopping through Los Angeles for awhile, so on a whim I said I’d tag along with my buddy. We ended up going to San Diego for some time… good times a plenty there. I’m plenty tan now, I’ve almost reached Nigerian status. I can’t get enough though… Polish skin loves sun.

After that we hit up Hollywood (yawn), Venice Beach (wtf!), and more subways than you can shake a $5 meatstick at.

Yesterday and today I finally started my new business partnership with my good friend… he’s already spearheaded several projects that I’m helping him work on. I’m extremely excited for that, as well as a lucratively delicious business operation I’m currently working on. Today he informed me that he’s a “domain kingpin.” I thought about it, and I really like the ring of that… so when girl’s ask what I do, instead of telling them I do online advertising, I’m just going to tell them I’m a kingpin and leave it at that.

I should start writing more although I honestly I can see why writers go through writer’s block. There’s SO much that I can put in a post that you simply will never know, it’s kind of daunting to fit a 10 day experience into an inspiring post. I suppose that’s where humor comes in, as well as excuses to use delicious pixel art icons of cake. I’ll try posting more actual PPC tips too, I guess that’s why people come here. There’s a million other sites for that though… and generally they’re boring as hell – I try to keep mine leaning towards the adventure side.

That’s all I got.

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 ;]

Wassup!

While my PPC campaigns are going, I’m going to throw up several SEO blogs. I’ve spent the last several days designing a template for a story aggregator that I like at http://discountmedinsurance.com/

When I finalize it I’m going to get a new domain, throw some special offers on there, then use various tools for backlinking to get it optimized.

I’ll keep you posted how it goes

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.