Here is a snippet of an e-mail I got today.
……”I was looking at your website and it looks great.
I have to ask man…do you have any recommendations for a internet marketing ‘starter’? I’m sure you get asked that alot but I really really want to do something online, just a little lost on direction.
Any advice would be sooo helpful…….”
Here is a copy of my e-mail response to him. I realized he’s right, and this is what I generally tell folks that ask me where to get started.
“Hi [removed],
I’m sure it might sound evasive, but you’ll need to find something that fits your personality and resources. There are infinite ways to make money online. Also, by resources I mean not only money but skills and time, etc. By personality I’m thinking risk tolerance and interests.
Digitalpoint forums and Warrior forum are good resources for beginners. Abestweb is nice. Blackhatworld is good too. Wickedfire forum is pretty harsh. If you go there, only lurk for several weeks. They tend to be hard on newbies.
I would advise you to keep your money and avoid buying e-books, etc. All the information you can buy is available for free elsewhere. When I was getting started, I stumbled upon something that let me make enough to scrape by and spent about 3 months reading Digitalpoint forums. Like 14 hours per day….7 days per week. Now, I spend almost no time in forums. I just do the shit I know how to do to make money. But if my shit quits working, I go back to the forums.
Good luck bro!
Danger
P.S. When you’re ready to start building money making websites, get some good hosting and sign up for some affiliate networks.”
Now, I’m sure he just wanted me to tell him to do exactly this and that and cash in, but I’ve come to believe advice like that isn’t really practical. You gotta find something that fits you, that you will enjoy doing. Also, the internet is ever-changing and to be successful long-term requires broad enough knowledge that you can reinvent your business models often.
Kaizen is the secret. It’s a Japanese philosophy of constant and never ending improvement in all things, all facets of oneself or one’s business. I had practiced this philosophy for years before I even knew what the word meant. I am always trying to be a better man, a better father, a better friend, and a better business man.
How you can implement kaizen to make more money online?
1. Always be learning.
Expand your knowledge and skill in SEO practices, advertising strategies, web design, copy-writing, analytics, cash flow management, time management, etc.
2. Always be improving upon your successes (and failures).
Constantly split test and improve ads, landing pages, offers, traffic sources, keywords, business relationships, etc. etc. etc. Split test, improve, and track results in everything you do with internet marketing, forever!
3. Aways be networking.
If you can afford it, go to industry events and meet new people. Participate in local events and meetups. Most urban centers have affiliate or SEO meetups. If there isn’t one in your area, start one. You don’t need to be an expert to organize a monthly meetup.
4. Be relentless.
Never give up! Never surrender! If you have a setback, take a moment and try to figure out what went wrong. Learn from your mistakes. Then try again with a different or improved strategy. Live, eat, and breath IMPROVEMENT. As long as you’re constantly improving, you will eventually attain greatness.
In a big business corporate sense, kaizen often refers to aggressive cost cutting which sometimes has negative human impacts. For instance, lower level employees working all night (for free) to correct mistakes or meet deadlines. Cutting employee benefits, or reducing quality to increase profits is not congruent with my philosophy.
Be careful when dealing with people not to “glean the field”. This is a reference to a Christian belief that farmers should leave some remnant crops on their fields for the poor, widows and orphans to eat for free. Use the philosophy of kaizen to improve yourself and your life while continuing to live in abundance with others.
Do you already practice kaizen? Have I left something out? Tell us about it in the comments please!
I live a few hours from Denver and am getting ready to head out this morning. I’ll be getting there about noon so will miss some of the 1st day. Affiliate Convention is a pretty small affair and hasn’t been the best received in the community.
I debated at some length whether I would attend again this year. But decided I might as well. I met a few people last year that justified it. I’m really only going for the networking, but I’ll sit in on a few sessions as well. Sure, you can make friends in the industry long distance, but nothing really compares to shaking someone’s hand in person and sharing some experiences like lunch, dinner, or a drunken bender that lasts into the night.
Sorry, I haven’t been updating my blog very often, frankly it is because I’ve been too busy with my family. We just had our 5th child 10 weeks ago. Also, if I’ve been at my computer, I’ve generally been working on scaling up my stuff. I used to give updates about my income monthly and have really been remiss about that.
Here is a general update: Things have been pretty steady over the last year. Increasing a little bit every month. Last month I made about $8,600.00 net on about $16,000.00 gross. I have a goal of making $30K net in September. Cash flow has been one of the biggest factors limiting the rate I can scale things. I’ve finally reached the point where I have enough business capital to scale things as fast as I can do the work.
November was OK. I didn’t scale up too much, but did make a little more money than last month. I’m only working on campaigns that I feel will have a long stable life. I want to be in a position to take months off as my wife is due to give birth on about April 5th.
November money spent:
$5,179.30
November money earned:
$13,153.32
$151.76 referral income from Market Leverage
=$13,305.08 total gross profit
$8,125.78 total net profit for November
Looking forward to December my goal is to net $15,000. My strategy to achieve it is to focus on increasing ROI….specifically I’m working on reducing my CPC and using the surplus to fund new campaigns. Also, I’m working on increasing CTR and Conversion rates.
Go back in time and see my affiliate marketing profits for July through October 2009.
I got a phone call a couple days ago from a good friend of our family who is interested in making some internet monies on the side. They have a busy life, family, and career but want to make a little extra every month.
I’ve received similar requests from various people who have varying levels of knowledge of the internets. My responses tend to vary to try to match what I think that person’s level of expertise might bear, but generally, I’ll help anyone I can.
First I try to figure out what that person wants to do from these 3 choices.
1. You can sell your labor to others for nearly guaranteed income. (write articles, sell stuff on Ebay)
2. You can trade your labor for free traffic. (SEO)
3. You can pay for traffic. (PPC, etc.)
Then, most of the time I tell them to go to digitalpoint forums or to warriorforum. (Google it if you need to. I’m too embarrassed to actually link to them.) If someone is already making money online and is new to the affiliate space, I’ll send them to wickedfire.com with a few words of warning. Here are micro-reviews of these 3 resources:
1. Digitalpoint forums. Great for newbies, but you don’t need to ever buy an e-book. There are many 1000′s of participants, but the problem is that most of them are newbies too. When I was a newbie, I spent a fair amount of time here but no more. I feel like I’ve outgrown it. Still, because of it’s massive size, it’s worth mentioning.
2. Warriorforum. Back when I was a newbie visiting digitalpoint, my wife was a newbie visiting warriorforum. I personally have spent less than an hour on the site, but 2nd hand I’ve learned that it’s a great site for women or people new to making money online who want to SEO their way to free traffic. The folks at warriorforum are ‘nice’. Which leads me to our last mini-review.
3. Wickedfire.com. From the perspective of a newbie, woman, or anyone with much of a sense of decency, wickedfire is hostile and offensive. Nudity and hostility are celebrated. Newbies are not welcome. That being said, it is the place to be if you are into affiliate marketing and want to read what people who make $1K to $100K+ daily have to say. For what I do, this is my first stop when looking to get a question answered. Well, maybe I’ll ask a friend first, but you get the point. If you are a new affiliate I’d advise you to lurk only. Try not to speak.
So generally, if someone asks me how to make money online, I’ll try to pass the buck to one of these 3 resources. If someone knows nothing about how internet money moves around, they can get a good feel of it from these forums and along the way probably make a few new friends of their own with similar interests and skill levels.
What advice do you find yourself giving to marketing newbies?
1. Liability. #1 You need to protect yourself from liability as much as possible. A LLC can protect your personal assets from lawsuits while allowing your business income to pass through to you. Having an LLC is only part of it. You need to use your LLC. Have your domains, CPA accounts, PPC accounts, bank accounts, everything used for your business, in the company name using the company tax id number. Note that an LLC will not protect you from criminal liability. Also note that I am not a lawyer and that laws vary one place to another.
2. Taxes – Several US states have no income tax. You can save some money on taxes with an LLC but to justify it for this reason alone, you probably need to be making $10K or more per month. You still need to pay federal taxes and if you live in a state with income tax you will generally still be paying taxes to your state for any salary or bonus you take. If you are making big bucks, there can still be tax advantages but you should be talking to a tax planner to set it up right. If you don’t do things right, an LLC can be a tax liability putting you in the position of paying taxes twice. Be careful with this. But if you ARE making big bucks than it will be worth it to set yourself up properly. For example, if you are banking a $million per year, you can leave the assets in your company which may be taxed at a lower rate than you. The company can also do clever things like own your home and car or pay for your health insurance and have an “employee” retirement plan.
3. Stability – It’s a big temptation to spend your money in the good times and be broke in the bad times. Personally, I live on a fixed salary which I draw from my LLC. Anything over my salary stays in the company accounts and is building up to become a warchest I can use when it’s time to take things to the next level. My plan is to have my LLC own rental properties which will provide hedges against inflation and loss of income.
4. Security – Got PPC accounts? CPA accounts? An Adsense account? Well if you have an LLC, it has it’s own tax id number and can have it’s own accounts separate from your own. If you lose a critical account of some sort, having an LLC in place can offer you a way to get your foot back in the door quickly. If you’re smart you’ll have backup accounts ready to go before you have a problem. Be careful here. Lots of people use this as a technique which may violate user agreements with some companies. For increased protection from loss of critical business accounts, you might want to use a registered agent service which gives you a different (forwarded) address for the business and further isolates it from you. This can give you access to credit cards with multiple addresses which you may enjoy.
5. Trust – If you live in certain countries you may find it more difficult to get approved for CPA accounts etc. If you have run into this problem and want to avoid it in the future you can set up a USA based LLC and legally it is as if the company is a US citizen. Your company lives here, pays taxes here, and can get in trouble with the law here. It can be sued or even fined for criminal offenses. The Limited Liability Company gives you a US presence. With a registered agent service, you have a USA based address which will forward all mail to you wherever you may be.
6. Estate planning – If you have kids like me and plan to be mega rich, you have to figure out how to set up your estate. My “Wyoming Close LLC” allows me to make my kids members of the company. The company can own assets like real estate. When they inherit the estate, the Wyoming Close LLC will reduce their tax liability by about 50%. It also provides a form of protection you’d never think of but which I like. Should one of my 5 kids get divorced after inheriting their membership in the company, their ex-spouse cannot touch or acquire any share of the company. It essentially functions as a bulletproof prenuptial agreement for all my kids.
THE ULTIMATE PROTECTION: If you are a big affiliate and are playing chicken with the FTC, or consider yourself at higher risk of lawsuits, you might want to consider having businesses set up overseas which in turn operate in the USA. I can’t provide any advice to this end. Remember, I’m not a lawyer. But if you have a foreign company structure like this, then if anybody wants to sue you or come after you, then they’ll have to pay for lawyers in the USA and in whatever country you’re based out of. Of course so would you but you’re rich right? Anyway, it is possible to have multiple jurisdictions like this which increase the barriers for legal actions against you. Personally, I’m not operating in a very high risk fashion at all and a USA LLC is good enough for me.
Can you tell us another good reason for having an LLC or do you have experience with foreign entities? Please let us know in the comments.
So I didn’t have any children until I hooked up with my wife about 6 years ago. I’m now 37 years old. When I married her I married her 2 children also. They were 7 and 10 years old. We have been married about 4.5 years now and have a 1 year old and a 3 year old. Now she is pregnant again! I’m very happy about it. I love my kids so much.
So we now have a:
boy 16
girl 13
girl 3
girl 1
? 14 weeks pregnant
So with her being pregnant she can’t do anything. She has gestational diabetes and suffers from terribly frequent fainting spells. Through each of these last 3 pregnancies she is on bedrest. I have to walk with her even just to the bathroom because she faints so frequently. It’s very stressful.
Therefore, in addition to earning a living I am doing the cooking, laundry, grocery shopping, chauffeuring of teenagers, etc. It’s a good thing I’m able to eek out a living on near autopilot. I’m not growing my business as fast as I’d like but am very happy that I don’t have to abandon my family for some clock punching job somewhere.
This recent shift in my personal duties is my excuse for failing to blog or tweet lately. I usually do my best work at night in the wee hours, but now I’m getting up with the babies at 7am and when I have time for work I’m usually too tired and distracted to focus my energies properly.
I’m starting to adjust to the new schedule and expect to get caught up with some blogging and such. Thanks for your patience 
This is the follow up to the Challenge to make $15,000.00 net in June.
Well, I only made $2761.50 net this month. I squeaked by my competition with a slightly higher net income for the month. I enjoyed the challenge of it, but hitting $15K net was pretty much a cash flow impossibility by the 22nd or so.
Still, I’m happy to take on all comers. Eventually ALL internet traffic will pass through my servers. Mooowhaaahaaaaa! That’s what makes me ‘Dangerous’. You’ll be allowed to stay in business, but your traffic will have to flow through me.
I haven’t really expanded campaigns, but have improved the ones I have.
June 2009
Money spent:
Adwords $4,947.28
Yahoo Search Marking $448.08
MSN Adcenter $84.74
Ad buy $320.00
Total money spent $5800.10
Money earned:
Hydra $8,196.00
MarketHealth $5.00 (second tier)
Adsense $360.60
Gross money earned $8561.60
Net money earned $2761.50
So, it’s OK, but I’m not satisfied with my efforts or my results. At least I won’t have to get a job.
After attending Affiliate Convention this month I’m pretty pumped up and want to take my wife to Affiliate Summit East in NYC in August 2009. It’s gonna take an earnings bump to justify the expense of a big trip like that but I don’t want to miss it. I figure if I can at least double this month’s net earnings I’ll go to New York.
And what’s the deal with people in forums posting gross earnings and talking about their best day ever. Gross means nothing. It’s a silly ego number. Net means everything.
This month (July 2009) I’ll be pushing into new areas and building out new campaigns. Things will certainly be interesting. I also am going to be coming more into compliance with my landing pages. So that might cost me some profit. I hope not.
Feel free to comment. I could use the encouragement.
My 1st month
My 2nd month
Affiliate Convention was certainly an experience. First I’m going to post about the daytime convention activities. Then I’m going to tell you about the parties. I have a series of pictures covering both. Warning that some are not safe for work. Take a look at the photos page at top right if you’re interested.
You’ll certainly have heard people complaining that it was small, but I feel it made networking a more intimate experience. I made some wonderful new friends and really loved the whole thing. I’m certainly glad I went.
The talks I attended were useful but available on Webmaster Radio. So I tended to not worry about attending them and focus more on networking. I was too hung over to make it to any of the early talks although they were probably the best ones.
I sat in for:
Super Affiliate Marketing Techniques: with Heather (awesome) Paulson, Steve Schaffer, Hamlet (supercool) Batista, and Jessie Jones
All intelligent speakers giving out good advice but just like any 1 hour talk they didn’t have enough time to go into enough detail to really change things for me. It served well as an introduction to a few concepts. A person would need to get some one-on-one time with these geniuses to really benefit from their experience.
Managing Search Campaigns that Scale: with Dan Boberg, Marc Barach, Mark Ziler, and Brian Lewis
All nice guys with good services to sell, but these things are geared towards large companies. After sitting through a long talk discussing strategies for using up to millions of keywords and how it can make you super rich, I asked a question of the panel. “How much do your services cost and how are the fees calculated?” The answer was about 5% with a $5,000.00 per month minimum. These services are not really intended for small time affiliates. But it might be worth considering for very large affiliates. Had I known what I was getting into, I wouldn’t have been in the room.
Black Hat vs. White Hat: with Scott Polk, David Snyder, Frank Watson, and Marc Lesnick
Fun to attend. Fun to listen to. Mostly it was entertaining. Should make for a fun listen over at Webmaster Radio. There were lots of clever ideas being thrown out there. Go check it out.
Legal Matters and Affiliate Marketing: with Steven Richter and Amanda Berry
Definitely worth attending. The short of it is that if you are an affiliate marketer, you probably aren’t compliant even if you think you are. Your TOS won’t protect you if the rest of the site is a huge scam. It is critical that you actually treat your visitors in the way your privacy policy claims you do. I asked him about LLC’s and offshore companies as defensive strategies and Mr. Richter emphatically recommended having a good lawyer set things like this up for you. He added a small disclaimer that setting up offshore entities can work against you by raising suspicions of the IRS and other investigative agencies. In other words incorporating goes without saying, but going offshore may make you look guilty. But it makes it much more expensive for people to come after you.
Final Panel Debate: with Heather Paulson, Beto Paredes, Phil Maher, Charles Mui, and Hamlet Batista
Free beer and potato chips with no limit on the beer. Everyone attended this one. Just a big, fun wrapup to the convention. Prizes were given out, people were thanked and the general feeling was pretty warm and fuzzy.
Meals: I had the opportunity to meet and socialize with some wonderful people. On day one I grabbed lunch with some serious SEO types, Jim Kreinbrink of Hyper Dog Media among them.
For dinner on day 1 I was honored to share the table at Maggiano’s with Ricky Ahuja, and Cathie Terry of Affiliate Venture Group, Wes Mahler and Roland Navarro of Tracking202 fame, Mario Girard and Julia Smart of CPA Underground and Rishab Verma and Richie Gill of Elite Commision. I wish I had a recording of the conversation.
On day 2 I skipped lunch and wound up having dinner during the evening party at the Lure Lounge with Augusto Ellacuriaga of SpanishSEO and Jim Kreinbrink of Hyper Dog Media. Both of these gentlemen are multi-faceted in their diverse knowledge of internet marketing techniques.
The parties were legendary and impossible to forget but hard to remember for some reason. I think they deserve their own post. I’ll try to get to it soon.
I came home with some great pictures but sadly there are several awesome people I met and somehow failed to get a picture of. I’ll have to do better next time.
