The BookmarkMoney Blog

It’s time to break my self-imposed silence. I know I haven’t posted in almost two weeks, due to illnesses making the rounds in my household. This cold, damp spring has been killing all of our health, and some days checking my email is a herculean task. I’m on the mend though, and received my first affiliate marketing check yesterday, so I’m feeling revitalized.

With my renewed sense of purpose, I realize that I need to focus on what’s important: making money. As it stands, I need to focus on the prize, and blogging isn’t going to get me any closer to it.

I know I’m not going to make money by blogging, and that has never been the intention. If I want to make money by writing, I’ll do it in a different fashion than by writing about how to make money. There are no ads on this site, and I plan to keep it that way. This is my personal blog, and I have no intention of whoring myself like John Chow, or others like him. Not that I have anything against what he’s doing, but that isn’t me.

This blog is still going to be a dumping ground for information I need to keep an eye on, but I don’t think I’m going to be blogging per se with any regularity, since I feel that my time and energy needs to be focused on making money, not just watching others make money and talking about it.

Last night I watched the 2002 John Leguizamo movie “Empire.” It’s the story of a drug dealer trying to go legit after he finds out his girlfriend is pregnant. The story has some parallels to my life. Although I’m not involved with anything illegal, I want to legitimize my life and what I do.

When I was a kid, I was continually beat about the head constantly hearing about my ‘potential’ and failure to live up to it. I’m smart, testing somewhere in th 140 range on my IQ. I’m not the smartest person in the world, but I am smarter than your average bear.

As soon as my teachers found that out, I was constantly lectured about my potential. The problem is, none of them, not a single one, actually told me how to realize my potential. I later learned that the majority of education majors graduate in the bottom 50% of their college class.

Anyway, I’ve had the onus of realizing my potential saddled upon me for most of my life. The fact that I work in a factory and am wasting my fabled ‘potential’ means that I’ve become the black sheep of my family.

I make decent money, but I have to kill myself to do it. I come home every day bleeding from dozens of sheet metal cuts, metal slivers everywhere, coated in grease and hydraulic oil, coughing out the remnant of burning heavy metals that I’ve had to breathe in for 8 hours.

That’s why I decided to try affiliate marketing - so that I could enjoy life, and eventually rub everybody’s noses in my success. The check sitting here on my desk proves that I can do it, as long as I put my nose to the grindstone.

I’m going to finish this post with a monologue from Empire. The truth in his speech inspired me, and helped me to clarify what’s important.

We all know selling and competition, that’s what this country’s built on.
It’s all about one thing: making money.
Money, baby. Simple as that.
Everything else is just bullshit.
Money is why people come here from every country in the world.
It’s what the American dream is all about.
You think people come here from all over the world to live in East New York…
in Harlem, the South Bronx…
because of the beautiful views, because of the fucking quality of life?

For everybody– everybody– money is what life is all about.
Getting it, keeping it, losing it, holding it…
needing it, living it and dying for it.
You have to look like you got it, whether you do or not.

Tags: Affiliate Marketing, Blogging, Internet Marketing, Movies, Site News by Jotun
1 Comment »

First off, I’d like to extend congratulations to Ruck, at Cash Tactics. This week he announced that his first daughter was born. It sounds like everything is going well, so I’d like to welcome him to a new world of concern. As the old saying goes: If you have a son you only need to worry about one prick. If you have a daughter, you need to worry about every prick in town. My daughter is only 17 months old, and already the boys her age are giving her the eye. I fear that it will only get worse from here.

Now, on to the goodies.

Affiliate Marketing

For those just getting started in affiliate marketing, Sean at the Warrior Blog has a tutorial that takes you through all of the steps - researching, locating, and then finally cashing the checks. I wish I had known about this when I had first started out. Your First Clickbank Sale.

Build a Niche Store (BANS) is something I’ve been looking into for a while. When my wife goes back to work, I may just break down and purchase it, since I’ve heard noting but good things about it. Affiliate Confession has a 7 part series on setting up and using BANS. A very good place to start if you want an easier entry into affiliate marketing.

Build A Niche Store Tutorials Overview - Parts 1-7
Part 1 - What BANS Does And Does Not Do
Part 2 - Niche Brainstorming And Getting A Domain Name
Part 3 - Installing And Setting Up Your BANS Affiliate Store
Part 4 - Tweaking Your eBay Affiliate Store
Part 5 - Adding Some Content To Your eBay Store
Part 6 - Article Marketing And Getting Links
Part 7 - Using USFreeAds.com For Traffic And Getting More Links

Article Marketing

The Warrior Blog has a tutorial on Article Marketing for promotional purposes. I know that a lot of people recommend doing article marketing, but it seems like a lot of work, that I’d be better off channeling elsewhere.

Mashups

Although it’s over a year old, Paul O’Brien’s list of Mashups created with Yahoo! Pipes is still a pretty good read to help inspire ideas for your own mashup.

I’m not sure of the date on this one, but SEO Book had a nice roundup of specific Pipes.

If you’ve been dying to create a mashup, but can’t program and can’t afford a program, Open Kapow may be for you. Using their simple tools, literally anyone can create a mashup in minutes just by pointing and clicking. Extremely useful if you want to use data from sites that don’t provide an Application Programming Interface (API) or Ready Site Syndication (RSS) feed.

Black Hat

If you have a Wordpress Blog, then Jimmy at Seeds for Wealth has a technique for raping Digg’s traffic. At best this trick is grey hat, at worst it’s black hat, but getting links from Digg is never a bad thing.

Continuing along the path to the Dark Side, Jimmy has tips on getting big trafic from BlogCatalog, and another one for using your avatar as visitor bait.

If you’ve been wondering how certain sellers always rank so high on eBay’s Pulse page, someone placed them under the magnifying glass, and found out that there’s a lot of cheating going on behind the scenes. estreet at Watched Item watched some top sellers on eBay Pulse, and gathered some compelling evidence that there is rampant cheating going on.

Datafeeds

5 Star Affiliate Programs has a pretty extensive list of affiliate datafeeds ready for integration into your website. Affiliate Datafeeds are great, because they help generate a lot of content for search engines to spider, as well as helping to monetize your website.

Extensive Squidoo Lens on Datafeeds

Tools

Marc Ghosh at Weblog Tools Collection posted this week introducing us to Zemanta. Zemanta is a contextual content suggestion engine that works with Wordpress.com, Blogger.com, Typepad.com, and self-hosted WordPress installations.Zemanta is a simple FireFox extension that creates a little AJAX box on the side of your write panel in WordPress, and makes real-time suggestions for related news stories, Wikipedia articles, and Flickr photos. I’m very excited to start using this. You can also keep up to date with the latest happenings at Zemanta’s Blog.

WordPress Plugins

Jeffro2pt0 at Weblog Tools Collection rounded up 10 WP plugins that fight comment spam. I personally use WP Spam Free from Hybrid 6, and have no complaints with it. I do disable it every so often to see how much it actually stops, and It’s amazing how much of a difference it makes.

Freebies

Since I like free stuff, here’s my link to Robbing Craigslist. If you want a free copy, just link to it from your blog too.

Emarket Scout tipped me off the the following: Freebies for Writers, Authors, and Screenwriters., Self Growth Freebies, and Free stuff for Windows Power Users.

Tags: Affiliate Marketing, Blogging, Datafeeds, Gurus, Internet Marketing, Link Building, Mashups, Plugins, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Tools, Traffic, Viral Marketing, WordPress by Jotun
3 Comments »

Affiliate Marketing

Looking to save to some money on your Google AdWords? According to Online Money Dot.com your bids may actually be cheaper at night.

Jay at Online Opportunity has a pretty good tutorial on how to split test ads.

Y! Store Tutorials has a “dummies” guide to building landing pages. If you can’t build a landing page after reading this, then abandon all hope.

Blogging / Writing

If you’ve been writing an ebook, or just thinking about it, Hendry Chang has a laundry list of 18 reasons to give it away. If you’ve been waffling about the fate of your ebook, then this might just push you over the edge on pricing.

Traffic / Search Engine Optimization

The eBusiness Banter Blog has posted a three part tutorial on building traffic to your blog.
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Software Marketing Secrets has a good article explaining why you should be building brands for your products.

Tags: Adsense, Affiliate Marketing, Blogging, Internet Marketing, Linkdump, List Building, Pay Per Click (PPC), Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Site News, Tools by Jotun
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Tools

Icon Interactive has Four Free Tools for your use: Link Popularity, Search Engine Submitter, Keyword Suggestion, and Word Cloud. Of them, I found the Link Popularity to be the most informative, whereas the Search Engine Submitter and Keyword Suggestion tools kept breaking on me. I guess you get what you pay for.

Wordpress

Via Weblog Tools Collection: Blueprint Design Studio graces us with a list of their Top 10 Essential Plugins for Wordpress. I’ve used a lot of the plugins on this list, but TinyMCE always was a pain in the arse to get working properly. Subscribe2 is what all of the big boys use on their sites, but for some reason PlugInstaller breaks it, so I’m out of the loop on that one too. Finally, CFormsII seems to be powerful in the right hands, which are obviously not mine - I’ve never had any joy in getting it to work.

Performancing has a great article on using WordPress to build a web directory which is centered around two plugins; Alex Tang’s Link Directory plugin, and Links Back’s plugin WP Directory. I’m interested in trying this out, but according to Mr. Dash they’re both broken in WordPress 2.3.2, which means they’re probably just going to frustrate me. Still, something I’m going to keep on the back burner.

Search Engine Optimization / Link Building

Blogging Mix has a two part tutorial on how to get Google to crawl your website. They’re full of great ideas, and you’re probably already doing them, but a refresher course never hurts. The one tip that I always do that isn’t on this list, is adding your website feed to iGoogle. I remember reading somewhere that if you add your RSS to iGoogle it helps bump up your place in the queue. If your feed is provided by FeedBurner (a division of Google) then you should be doubly covered, right? Part 1 | Part 2

Build a Blog asks the question “To promote using blog directories, or not?”

Thanks to the post above, I was introduced to Skelliwag’s tutorial on Hansel and Gretel Link Building which is a straight forward guide to getting quality incoming sites.

Do Follow Directory is a directory of sites that have “do follow” enabled.

Info Doorway has a large list of “do follow” sites and forums arranged by Page Rank.

Eric Mitz tells us how he uses forums for backlinks.

Courtney Tuttle has a list of 102 ways to make your site a backlink superstar.

Micro Persuasion opines that we’re like a million monkeys on treadmills. Odd title aside, it’s a thought provoking discussion on channels and internet trends of the past few years.

Affiliate Marketing

Squidoo Lens on using Squidoo for Affiliate Marketing

My Web 2.0 has 5 tips for creating powerful text ads.

AffiliateSeeking.com is a directory of the various programs by which you can become an affiliate marketer.

Paul updated his Affiliate Marketing Guide. Awesome advice from somebody who is making 6 figures a month.

This post has been a week in the making, so I hope it’s not a total deluge. I plan on adding a lot of these links to the main site as time permits this week.

Tuesday I go see a specialist for my hernia and see when they want to perform surgery. I’m praying that it won’t be until after my wife returns to work. I’ve been dealing with this for several months now, another one shouldn’t hurt as long as I take it easy. A little Alieve generally keeps me on my feet, and that’s all I need. If I do have to go in fo surgery, expect posting to pick up dramatically.

I’m currently hatching several mini e-books, and when I finally hatch them, you’ll be the first to know.

Tags: Affiliate Marketing, Internet Marketing, Linkdump, Plugins, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Tools, WordPress by Jotun
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Saturday Morning Funnies: Only in Russia

3 Tips to Optimize Your Email Landing Pages. Pretty common sense stuff, but it’s amazing how rare ‘common’ sense is.

6 Easy Ways to Improve Your Affiliate Offer. How to make your squeeze pages sing like the big boys’.

50 Directories to Submit Your Site To. Another Directory List. All have high pagerank and don’t require reciprocal links.

Free Backlinks on Squidoo. Free is free, and backlinks are backlinks.

Backlink Creation Guide lens located on Squidoo.

Increase Technorati Authority with this link exchange program.

Top 100 Social Video Sites. There’s also a sister post Top 100 Social Networking Sites

34 Sites that Pay You to Blog.

Making Money With Youtube. Similar to this post on Cash Tactics from a few weeks ago. Great minds think alike I guess.

20 Ways to Get Massive Traffic.

DotCom Mogul has a pretty exhaustive list on CPA Networks.

Two thoughts on affiliate marketing:

Amit at Super Affiliate Mindset posts his tips on how to get started as an affiliate

Paul disagrees quite strongly.

Right now I’m doing Amit’s system, although I’ve been pressed for time and haven’t setup the backend tracking, which I realize is a mistake that I plan to rectify shortly. I definitely see Paul’s point, and understand where he’s coming from. I’ve always been happy to spend money to make money. I’m not making big bucks, but I am making sales every couple of days, and that helps me feel that I’m not wasting my time.

I’m lucky enough that I have the HTML/web design background so I’m not starting from scratch, but my copywriting skills are sorely needing to be developed.

In site news, I’ve added CommentLuv which will append the last post you make on your website underneath your comments here. So comment away!

This post has been about three hours in the making, so I’m drawing the line now. Off to enjoy some kid-free Saturday action!

Tags: Affiliate Marketing, Blogging, Gurus, Internet Marketing, List Building, Pay Per Click (PPC), Plugins, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), WordPress by Jotun
4 Comments »

I woke up this morning to a nice surprise - another $30 in my ClickBank account. In 8 days I’ve made about $50, and spent about $50 on Adwords, so I’m breaking even. However, that $50 is across 4 campaigns. Breaking it down, I’ve spent in the range of $25 on my campaign that’s making me money. So I’m essentially getting a 2 to 1 return thus far. But like the investment companies tell you, past performance is no guarantee of future growth.

I think I’m getting a broad idea of how this works, and I’m looking forward to doing more tweaking and seeing where I end up. I’m looking forward to getting my ClickBank check, since it’ll make me feel like I’m actually an accomplished affiliate marketer.

My first reward - a Sobakowa pillow. Sleeping on buckwheat husks might seem like some kind of hippie practice, but I have never slept as well as I have on those pillows. On a related note, my mom has been going to acupuncture for years now, and she’s started teaching me some of the doctor’s techniques. Some of them work freakily well, which makes me believe a lot of the stuff from the orient has legitimate value. It seems that in Western medicine’s rush to treat the body, the soul has been overlooked.

Speaking of, have you seen the Kinoki foot pads? Basically they’re an ace bandage that you put on your feet overnight that draws out ‘toxins’ and the like. The general consensus on the internet seems to be that it’s bullshit. I had my mom ask her acupuncture doctor about them. He swears that they work, but then said that an ionizing foot bath would work better, and come out cheaper in the long run. That might be treat number two.

Paul has a great post up on How to Scale a Campain. Very good, no-nonsense tips, although I’m doing it in reverse and starting at Google, and then moving to Yahoo (eventually).

Jonathan Volk has an enlightening post on why he Uses Landing Pages. I’ve been trying direct linking so far, but I’m planning on moving up to landing pages soon. The main reason I haven’t so far has been due to lack of time. He also has a post dealing with scaling campaigns as well. I’m trying to condense all of these scaling tips so I can wrap my head around the general themes.

5 Optimization Tips to Create a Good Website. Nothing revolutionary, but good advice nonetheless.

Screw You Google. This looks like an interesting experiment, but I’d still rather dance with the devil in the pale moonlight.

Alt Search Engines is a pretty sweet place to check out niche search engines/appliances.

And now to wrap things up, here’s a cooking tip:

Take one bag stir fry veggies.
Add one can of condensed chicken gumbo soup.
Cook until the water is gone.
Serve.

That’s some good eating!

Tags: Adsense, Affiliate Marketing, Internet Marketing, Linkdump, Recipes by Jotun
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This week I signed up with Entrecard and their webmaster traffic share program. It’s a pretty nifty way of dropping off a digital business card to webmasters of a similar mind. The whole system works on credits. You get 1 credit when you card someone, and another when someone clicks from your site to somebody else’s. You also get credits for allowing other people to advertise on your site, which you split with Entrecard. Your ad rate is based on an average of how many cards you’ve dropped over the previous five days. You can also use credits to advertise on other sites. It’s an interesting system, and I’m having fun with it.

After 4 days, my account is -7386 credits. You read that right, negative 7386 credits.

About ten minutes after I signed up for my account, I figured out how to break their carding system. I’m no programmer - not even a talented amateur, but 4 hours later, a little hacking on a MySpace whoretrain script, and a little help from Yahoo Answers, and I had cobbled a script together that would automatically collect my 300 drops a day. Without thinking, I uploaded it and started playing with it, trying to fine tune it.

After an hour of putting the script through its paces I logged into my Entrecard account. At which point I noticed I was almost 7900 credits to the negative. Let that be a lesson to you boys and girls: always clear your cookies before you try out any black hat tactics.

I went back and looked at my script, and figured out what I did wrong - besides trying to cheat the system - and adjusted it so that it would work right. But, considering how far my curiosity dug me into the hole, I’m going to back shelf it, since it’s going to take me a month, or $50 on eBay to dig myself out again. Still, I did learn a couple things about programming, and I finally got to actually test out my observations on system weaknesses. Plus I gave it a cool name: ForcedEntre.

Speaking of scripts, Online Business Life released scripts to make your Entrecarding much easier. They’re both white hat tactics, but they do speed up the process immensely. Script one lets you quickly build a list of people that card you, and script two dumps out the list of a certain category. Both are excellent at what they do.

Walt debuted a new site this week: PowerDropping.com. PowerDropping.com lists the 300 fastest loading sites with the Entrecard widget on them, which helps the dedicated EntreCard droppers achieve a nice shotgun effect of coverage.

Finally, today is my third day of missed work, and I’m really not missing it at all. I called in Friday for shits and grins. Sunday we got hammered by almost six inches of snow being tossed around by 40mph winds, my adventure in which I detailed in a previous post. My dad was stranded here in town, as was my cousin, who is a delivery driver for a beverage distributor. He wasn’t aware that we lived in town, but in a lucky coincidence the godmother of our daughter was working at the only hotel in town, and was able to steer him in our direction. We had a full house last night, although my dad ended up sleeping at my brother’s house.

When I woke up this morning, the weather was still pretty putrid. Every major road around here was flagged Travel Not Advised, and every school within 30 miles was closed, so I decided to call it a day at 6:30 am. My father called me around 8 am, and told me he counted 55 cars in the ditches between here and the halfway point of his commute. My brother went to work today and said the drive wasn’t too bad. I had thought about pulling a half day, but lost track of the time, and missed the point of departure.

Anyway, I’ve put a lot of work into BookMark Money and this blog over the last few days. I’ve done some decent networking, and I’m starting to get noticed in the blogosphere. I have a contest coming up that I think people will find exciting. My RSS subscribers went from 2 to 13 in the space of two days, and I got my first user on the main BookMark Money site.

My first week of affiliate marketing is over. I made one sale of $18, and spent about $25 on that campaign. With all of the other campaigns I’m out about $50 for this week. Not an auspicious start, but now I’m getting ideas on what works and what doesn’t, and I’m starting to refocus and attack this beast from another angle.

Oh, and if anybody’s interested, I’ll sell them a copy of ForcedEntre for $6.95.

Tags: Affiliate Marketing, Entrecard, Pay Per Click (PPC), Site News by Jotun
5 Comments »

The following is advice I posted on Ruck’s blog post “I am Going Back to College”, which after a little bit of thought, decided to post here too. Take everything with a grain of salt, since I am at best a talented amateur, not an accountant.

When it comes to education, the best advice I could give anyone is to get somebody else to pay for it. Have the businesses you own set up an employee tuition reimbursement plan. That way you can get a tax credit for paying the out of pocket tuition (Lifetime Learning Credit), then as the business owner you get credit for paying for tuition.

Something I’ve been planning for when my endeavors actually amount to something is to set up an employer sponsored 401K with a match program, then plug the maximum amount in. Once again, tax benefits on both sides of the equation. I think the maximum you can kick in is $15,000, and with a dollar for dollar match, you can put away $30,000 in your account. I think that your business can also contribute directly to your account. Set some arbitrary savings goal, say $1000 a month, and then every time the employee (you) hits that the employer (you) can reward the employee (you) with a bonus directly deposited to your account. Same idea with sales bonuses and the like.

Unless tax laws have changed once a year you can gift your wife, children, and parents $10K tax free. That’s something I plan to do when I’m rollin’ with the big boys. Gifting my wife and kids the whole amount (for the kids it’ll go in their college funds), gift my parents, then have them turn around and gift me back $9000 or something, and do the same with my brothers. It’s all a big shell game, but legal, I think.

Years ago I came across a concept that really struck home with me. It’s called ‘F*** You’ money. Basically it’s the amount of money you need to be able to tell everybody in the world to F*** themselves and still be able to survive comfortably. For me, that’s basically in the 2 to 3 million dollar range. Once my mortgage is paid for, newer vehicles bought, and childrens’ college funds are secured, I don’t really need much to survive on.

Basically I plan on banking as much as possible, then just living off of the interest. 5% interest on 1 million dollars is $50,000 a year. That’s $20,000 more than my base salary currently. So, extrapolating outwards, the yearly interest on 3 million dollars is $150,000 a year. I can be comfortable on that. I don’t need flashy cars, and my wife doesn’t like jewelry. All I want is to be able to buy the books I want and actually have time to read them. To buy the DVD’s I want and watch them. To just have time to enjoy life.

My wife and I don’t like to travel. GenCon is the only roadtrip we ever make, and now that the kid is here, it may be a while until we go again. When we go out to eat it’s just the Texas Roadhouse. I’ve eaten at a 5 star restaraunt that my ex-brother in law cooked at. For three shared appetizers and drinks for 6, it was around $100, even with his discount. I’d rather drop $35 with the tip and come home with leftovers.

My one concession to wealth will be a re-creation of a medieval castle somewhere here in Iowa. Towers, parapets, the whole shebang. The great hall will feature a full sized movie theater with seating for 20 and a THX sound system. Movies are my number two passion. Books are my number one. And with that in mind, I plan on having a giant library full of books.

Although it sounds expensive, I plan on doing it responsibly. I don’t want a drafty fieldstone castle. The whole thing is going to be poured concrete with a thin veneer of rock plastered on over the foam forms. Sub-floor radiant heat, as much solar power as is feasible, proper window alignment so that I can open a window on one side and have the breeze blow straight through the house.

Sure, it’s a stupid dream, but nobody ever got anywhere by thinking small.

Tags: Site News by Jotun
3 Comments »

Some days the world just seems to crap on you. You wake up in a bad mood, which fades to black in a hurry. No matter what you do, you just can’t find your way to the light. Somehow as the day goes on, the darkness gets darker, and the blackness gets blacker, until you finally hit rock bottom. Days when it seems there’s a boil on your soul, that fills and fills with psychic pus, until you’re sure it’ll kill you.

That was my yesterday.

Somehow, overnight, the boil burst, and I woke up today in a much better frame of mind. Even though I had just finished a three day weekend, I was kind of looking forward to going back to work. I braced myself for the ungodly weather, and disembarked.

Stopping at the gas station on my way out of town, one minute into pumping gas, my hands went numb to the wrist in the driving sub-zero weather. The credit card slot didn’t work. I went inside to pay, and one of my friends from high school was manning the register. He warned me that the road crews weren’t even attempting to clear the roads, and that travel was suicide. I shrugged and decided to attempt it anyway, since I called in sick Friday, and I don’t want to burn up my free time within 3 weeks of getting it.

Leaving town was hard. The highway was about half drifted shut in the westbound lane. The roads were icy from yesterday, and the wind was whipping the snow into white-out conditions. Still, I soldiered on. I passed a compact car stuck in a drift as I turned the corner to head to the neighboring town where I work. As I passed the stranded vehicle, I noticed two of my co-workers, volunteer firemen, helping in the rescue. I would have offered to help, but I didn’t have anything like the cold weather gear they were wearing.

As luck would have it, I was following a DOT truck, so I felt moderately safe. A quarter mile down the road my optimism faded into a dull, aching dread.

Eyeballing the northbound lane to my left, I noticed that it was solidly covered with at least 16 inches of snow and no tire tracks. The road in front of me, plowed only minutes before, was already filling it, and visibility was limited to about 20 feet in the good spots due to the snow in the air.

Still, I soldiered on, if only due to the fact that the other lane was impassable. The flashing light on top of the blaze orange DOT truck was my beacon of hope, and I was determined to follow it, even though I had no other choice.

As I crept southbound the drifts got higher and the roads got worse. Two and a half miles down the road I came across a stopped semi. It wasn’t in the ditch, just stopped in the middle of the road. That’s when dread turned to outright fear.

I called my supervisor to warn him that I was going to be late. He told me flat out to turn around, and not even bother. All of my coworkers who live in my town had all called in. All of them are burly man’s men who drive 4×4 pickup trucks, compared to my late model sedan.

As I was talking on my cell phone the DOT truck drove around the semi and continued down the road, me tailing him at a distance of about 15 feet. We had proceeded about 1oo feet past the semi when the DOT truck’s reverse lights came on.

I stopped, but he kept on coming. Panicked, I threw my car in reverse, and started backing up. The truck wasn’t stopping, and I was actually forced to speed up. We backed up for about 80 feet before I decided I had had enough.

Backing around the semi, in white out conditions, I kept moving knowing that there was a crossing 200 yards to the north.

Suddenly there were headlights behind me. Another semi! I swerved into the other lane, and we missed each other by inches. Terrified, I kept going until I reached the gravel road, and did a three point turn.

I entered the southbound lane and started heading home doing 45 mph in the wrong lane with the snow whipping around me at gale force.

I called my father to warn him of the road conditions, only to come upon him at the end of his gravel road, waiting because he had seen me. He pulled out after me, and suddenly we were a convoy.

We made it to the blacktop heading into town without incident, and I called my brother to warn him not to bother. Right now he’s getting drunk and watching movies with his friends. Lucky.

I got home, got changed and let my wife know what was going on. Then I went downstairs and fired up the computer.

Consigned to the nothingness that awaited me, I fired up eBay, expecting both of my auctions to have ended with no bidders. Again.

Instead, I was greeted with an alert that I had actually sold one of the things I had listed. It wasn’t for a lot of money, but I hadn’t expected to sell it. The day was looking up.

Next I logged into my ClickBank account expecting to see the same old zeros that usually greet me. Instead, I see the total $17.98. One of the AdWords campaigns I had thrown up on a whim last Wednesday had generated a sale. Awesome!

I know this has been a long post, but it does have a point. The saying that “It’s always darkest before the dawn” has never really meant much to me. However, considering how this weekend went for me, it does ring true.

I’ve passed through the long dark night of the soul, and come out the other side stronger for the ordeal. Now that I have results in my marketing efforts, I’m doubly determined to get better at it and make a living at it.

Three good things have happened to me today:

1) I was specifically told not to come to work.

2) I made a sale on an eBay auction.

3) I made a sale using Adsense.

Events, both good and bad, seem to come in threes. I intend on making this streak last as long as possible. Persistence is the key.

The best advice I have been given personally is from Ruck, in his response to me in the comments to one of his recent posts: Keep on keepin’ on.

And that’s exactly what I plan to do.

Tags: Adsense, Affiliate Marketing, Music, Psychology by Jotun
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I’m starting to make things happen, and it feels good!

I talked to someone at Neverblue Ads, and got accepted into their network. This is the first ad network I’ve belonged to since eAds.com went belly up in the crash of ‘00. I’m really looking forward to starting to monetize ReverbMadness.com as a stepping stone to bigger and better things. Most of the big boys in affiliate marketing started at Neverblue, and I’m excited to belong to the network, if not their club yet.

Started my fourth AdWords campaign today. So far it’s my priciest with the clicks averaging in the $.79 range. The two campaigns I launched Wednesday are $.31 and $.10 per click respectively. As of today I’m out $10.89, or just a hair less than what it would take to get myself and the wife into an afternoon matinee. I’m seeing a marked difference between campaigns 3 and 4.

Thus far none of my campaigns have made a single sale, but number 3 is getting almost a 1% click thru rate. Not a great number, but it tells me what is working, which in this case is fear. I’m definately going to have to play that up.

Not having much success on eBay right now. Probably going to have to find some other way to pimp stuff.

I’m focusing on crawling right now, since I’m a baby when it comes to making money online. Next up, walking.

Tags: Site News by Jotun
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