Entries Tagged as 'Authoring'

Return of the (Affiliate Marketing) Jedi

I was poking around on Ooof.com last night, when I saw a post announcing the return of Diorex.

I was first introduced to Diorex at the Uber Affiliate blog, and his writings blew me away. Diorex is an affiliate marketing Jedi, and the tips that he deigns to share with us unwashed masses are amazing and powerful. Be forewarned though, the man pulls no punches, and is as blunt as can be. If you can work past that, then prepare to get schooled.

Visit Diorex.
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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!

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Breaking the Silence

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.

W00t!

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.