The End of an Era
I know I haven’t been around a lot, and I’m not making excuses for it. A metric ton of bad karma has hit me in the last month, and I’ve spent three weeks digging my way out of it. Although I’m brimming with ideas and motivation, I’ve had to shelve my affiliate marketing plans for the time being.
That doesn’t mean that I’ve given up on affiliate marketing. Far from it. However, I just don’t have the time to devote to affiliate marketing to do it right at this point in time.
I’ve always been a ’set it and forget it’ type of person, and against the advice of all the gurus, I tried to run my first adsense campaigns in that fashion. I was lazy, and pretty much lost my ass, except for one campaign that I literally did about 0% research into, threw up on a whim, set a tiny budget for, and let run. To my amazement, that campaign has brought in money - not a lot, but a lot more than I ever really imagined it would.
This week my hands off attitude came back to bite me in the ass. Google’s billing department is retarded, and always throws up errors at billing time. They kill my account, and after two days or so, I have to reactivate the campaigns, or else they stay off. The last time this happened was when my life basically collapsed on me, and I decided to just leave my AdWords dead. And that’s where I left it.
Until Tuesday, when I noticed a charge from Google on my bank statement. Apparently, going completely against past performance, Google reactivated my campaigns last month. So baiscally I let an entire month go by wtihout realizing it, and had money falling out of my bank account in dribs and drabs. Not sound business sense.
But I digress. The point of this post is to wish Ruck from Cash Tactics a fond farewell. I had noticed a pretty big gap in his posting schedule as of late, and when I fired up SharpReader today, I got an explanation - Ruck had handed over control of Cash Tactics to a friend. I wouldn’t say I was shocked, since in the few months I’ve been reading Cash Tactics, Ruck has:
1) Launched an Affiliate Network
2) Witnessed the Birth of a new daughter
3) Gone back to college
4) And even taken the time to give a shoutout to a complete nobody ranting on a soapbox on the corner of Fuck off and Die
Any one of those would be a plate filler, and to try and juggle all of those at once should be considered grounds for an insanity plea. Throughout it all, Ruck has always been active in the comments on his and others’ blogs, his forum, and probably other circles I haven’t been invited to run in yet.
I’ve said in the past how much I admire Ruck. I’m in the situation he was a couple years ago - crap job with crap benefits, about to lose the wife and kids - in effect, screaming towards rock bottom at Mach 5. He was able to turn his situation around, and by god, so will I. It’s stories like Ruck’s, combined with Paul’s from Uber Affiliate that keep me plugging along. I know it can be done, I just have to find my own path.
I’m looking forward to seeing what Kris, the new Cash Tactics site administrator, has to say. He has some awfully big shoes to fill, but I don’t think Ruck would have tapped Kris if he couldn’t handle it.
The King is Dead! Long live the King!
