Do you have what it takes to survive the affiliate marketing rollercoaster?

This last week has probably been the toughest week I’ve had since I started doing affiliate marketing full time in January of this year.  The amount of mental turmoil I went through this week would have made most people turn around and run back to the safety of their 9-5 jobs.

Inspired by the idea of taking my affiliate income to the next level I put my nose to the grindstone and for the past few months I’ve been launching and testing new affiliate campaigns left, right and center.  The last three weeks especially have been the busiest I’ve been in a long time. 

So where do I stand after launching and testing dozens of campaigns in the last few months? 

Seemingly in the same place I started. 

Every single one of the campaigns I launched in the last few months has been met with failure.  Some campaigns failed to get any traffic at all.  Others were able to get traffic but weren’t able to convert at anywhere near the levels required to pay for the keyword prices the marketplace demands.  Some campaigns were slapped with a low quality score by Google, while others sent a whole bunch of traffic but didn’t covert at all.

The biggest challenge I’ve been struggling with, especially in the last few weeks has been trying to wrap my head around a sound, long term affiliate marketing strategy.

It may sound simple on the surface but there are actually a lot of factors involved beneath the surface in this business that not many people talk about.

For example, the issue of ethics.  What do you do when you launch offer after offer and get your ass handed to you by competitors who are displaying absolutely no business ethics or morals when promoting their offers? 

I mean, I’m not talking about promoting automatic re-bill offers that some people consider shady.  I’m talking about blatantly lying on your landing pages, impersonating celebrities, creating fake testimonials, making false statements about your products, and a variety of other tactics that will get your ass sued sooner or later.

I’m not a lawyer, but I’ve been in business long enough to know what’s considered “fair game” by most courts of law, and what will get you sued.  Some of what I’ve seen out there in the last few months is definitely borderline or completely illegal. 

Working Hard at the Wrong Things?

When you work for yourself, it’s sometimes quite easy to get lax with your time schedule and to take it easy and slack off a little.  During such times, when you don’t produce any significant results in your business it’s only natural. 

However, when you dedicate yourself and begin to really work hard at your craft every day for weeks and months with very little results to show for your work, it can be very disheartening. What’s worse is that you don’t know if it’s simply a numbers game and you just have to go through the crap to eventually see results, or if you’re just repeatedly making the same mistakes over and over again.

The Affiliate Rollercoaster

Anyone who’s done affiliate marketing, and especially anyone who’s done affiliate marketing full time will know exactly what I’m talking about when I say that affiliate marketing can be like a rollercoaster.  It’s like you all of a sudden turn into a bi-polar basket case.  One minute you’re excited about launching your new campaign and seeing the initial traffic start to arrive and a short while later you’re depressed because the offer isn’t converting at all and your CPC costs are going through the roof.

You make some tweaks in your campaigns and the next day you get some amazing conversions, only to find out that it was a temporary blip and your conversions suffer every day after that.  You just get a campaign semi-profitable and the advertiser pulls the offer.

Not everyone can handle these types of ups and downs and the stress alone has scared off a lot of young affiliates.

Learning to Persevere

Whenever I hit turbulent times like these in any of my income streams and businesses, my frustration is always coupled with excitement.  I get excited because I know that 90-95% of people who get to this exact same spot in their affiliate marketing career will not persevere and get through it.  They’ll quit and move onto the next “system” for making money online, or go back to their day jobs.

What’s exciting about this is that on the other side of this rollercoaster ride is a place where 95% of my competition no longer exists.  Last week Google went on a banning spree and began to drop the hammer on a lot of affiliates promoting certain types of offers. 

Although a lot of affiliates are pissed with Google right now for their ruthless attitude in banning their accounts, this type of thing can only serve to help our industry in the future.  Just the thought of getting your account banned for doing “shady” stuff on Google seems to have already begun taking effect. 

I’m starting to see less and less ads and landing pages on Google that promote offers in unethical and most probably illegal ways.  This is good news for affiliates that take a more long-term approach to their business and who don’t want to risk losing their business by trying to promote offers in shady ways.

There will always be smart affiliates that find clever ways to promote offers that some would consider “sneaky” or “borderline unethical”, and those affiliates are smart enough to walk the fine line between “clever” and “illegal”, but I think the days of those affiliates who are either too immature or too inexperienced to stay on the right side of that line are numbered.  That’s not to say that everyone who got banned in the last few weeks was doing anything illegal or even unethical. 

From what I’ve heard, Google went on a banning spree and took no prisoners.  Only the affiliate themselves will know if they were actually doing anything wrong, or if they just happened to get banned based on some minor technicality they weren’t aware of.

Either way, my strategy has become clearer than ever.  I’ll continue to follow my intuition and stay on the right side of that line, being an affiliate that makes money by providing value and connecting people with solutions to their life’s problems.  I’ll let Google, the authorities and the marketplace in general sort out those who are so over that line they’d have to be mentally challenged not to realize they’re breaking the law.

Reaching Out to Others

One thing that’s been really helpful to me in the last couple of months is networking with other affiliates and Bloggers on forums, via chat and on the phone.  There are a lot of changes going on in the industry and I’m not the only one who’s had their share of frustrations.

Having a chat with other affiliates who have launched 30-40 campaigns and not seen any success definitely made me feel a lot better that I’m not the only one with such challenges, and networking with them will definitely help me to find ways to solve these problems.

If you’re currently on the affiliate rollercoaster and feeling frustrated, try finding someone to network with in this industry to help you stay motivated.

At times the rollercoaster may seem scary, but compared to working a 9-5 job full time until age 65, I’ll take my chances on the rollercoaster.

My very first attempt to make money online began in 1995 when I started a website offering small business card type website pages to local businesses for $1/day.  The idea was to offer businesses an online web presence for just $1/day, and I would take care of everything – design the site, host it, etc.  Since it would only take me about 2-3hours tops to complete a single page website for a business, I figured if I could sell 100 of these type of websites I could make $100/day ($3,000/month).

It was an idea I got from a friend of mine (thanks Darcy!) and it was my first taste of “making money online”. 

The reason I mention it is because like many other ways of making money online today, it was a “system” – an idea of making money online in a certain way.  There are thousands of “systems” of making money online out there, each one presenting us with unique benefits and challenges.

I was reading through Bruce Lee’s “Tao of Jeet Kune Do” this evening when I came across this quote from the book:

“Stylists, instead of looking directly into the fact, cling to forms (theories) and go on entangling themselves further and further, finally putting themselves into an inextricable snare.”

By “stylists”, Bruce Lee is referring to the different types of martial art styles that have forms (Karate, Tae Kwon Do, Kung Fu etc.) and the “stylists” who cling onto these forms. 

Bruce Lee believed that the best martial arts “style” was “no style”, meaning he believed that a true martial artist must go beyond the forms of his own martial art to really achieve greatness.

Of course this wasn’t very well received by the martial arts community since the “forms” that they were teaching were the very things that students would line up to pay to learn. 

The challenge with forms, styles and techniques in martial arts is that they work great when applied to a situation with a certain set of rules, but completely break down when applied to “real life”.  It is this distinction between a sport based on rules and “real life” which has no rules that many people fail to make.

Bruce Lee wasn’t trying to teach people “self defense” as a sport.  He was trying to teach people “self defense” based on real life.  There is HUGE difference between the two.

Take the UFC as an example.  So many people out there watch the UFC and naively believe that it is a “realistic” combat art.  It may be more versatile and have less rules than something like boxing for example, but the UFC still has rules and the fighters that train to fight in the octagon train to fight according to those rules.

There is a big difference between defending yourself in the octagon based on UFC rules and defending yourself in real life.  For example, in the octagon you may often see fighters shoot in and try taking down the other fighter to the ground with a technique that puts both fighters on the ground, with the fighter on top in a supposedly better position than the fighter on the bottom.

In the octagon that kind of thing might work, but in real life that kind of thing could get you killed.  For example, you may very well have taken your opponent down and be on top of him, but what if during the “takedown” you end up landing on something sharp that impales both of you?  Or what if your opponent has a buddy that cracks you in the back of the head with a broken bottle while you are in the supposed “dominant” position on top?  Or what if the guy you’re “taking down” has a concealed knife in his pocket and you end up landing on top of it while you take him down?

My point is that as realistic as any sport can get, sports are always based on rules and rules don’t accurately reflect “real life” no matter which way you slice it.

So what does this have to do with making money online?  Well, I’ve been really learning lately that there are a lot of “rules” out there, set out by “make money online” guru’s which a lot of people (including myself) sometimes mistake for “truth” without realizing that these are just theories (forms) as Bruce Lee would call them.

I’m a sucker for “Make Money Online” systems, always willing to shell out some hard earned bucks to learn something new in the making money online world, and it’s paid off handsomely for me in my life but the more mature I grow in my online business the more I realize that a lot of the money I make online breaks some, if not all, of the supposed “rules” that people have out there.

Take for example the 125×125 banner ad so common on most Blogs nowadays.  Who says you have to sell 125×125 banner spots?  Why not make them 250×125? or 125×250? or 387×487?  Now I know some of you may be thinking “Yeah, but 125×125 is a standard and many people have banners of that size already created so if I offer a 387×487 banner spot, it may be harder to sell!”

That’s one way of looking at it, but here’s another.  What if I put the following text on my advertise page:

“After a lot of testing, I have determined that the optimal banner ad size on my website that captures my audience’s attention and generates the most amount of clicks is not the standard 125×125 banner ad.  It is also not the 300×250 or even 250×250.  For whatever reason, I have found the optimal banner size on my site to be 387×487.  It is the best size that generates the most bang for your advertising buck. 

Because I realize that most advertisers don’t have banner ads in that size, I have teamed up with ___________ to provide you with a custom made banner ad for my site in the 387×487 size included in my monthly fee.  Simply send us samples of your existing banners and we will create a custom banner for this site with the design fee already included in my monthly advertising fee of ________”

I mean if I saw that on someone’s Blog advertising page, I would probably want to try it out.  I mean the fact that someone actually put in time to test and find out that 387×487 pulls better than 125×125 on their specific site?  Why would anyone want to buy a 125×125 banner on that site after seeing that?

Of course this is just an example.  What I’m really saying is to stop taking everything you learn from “make money online” guru’s for granted.  Question things.  Go beyond the “rules” that our industry has created for ourselves to see what really works out there in the “real world”.

Here’s another quote from Bruce Lee’s book:

“Set patterns, incapable of adaptability, of pliability, only offer a better cage.  Truth is outside of all patterns.”

So what does this mean?  Should we abandon all systems and all patterns and everything that people teach in the “make money online” community?  No, of course not.  There is a lot of value in systemizing things and learning proven systems that work.  However, don’t become a slave to these systems.  Realize that this is YOUR business, not anyone else’s and run it the way you want to run it.  Don’t allow other people to dictate every aspect of how you run your business, whether that be your Blog, or your affiliate marketing business or whatever else you’re doing to try to make money online.

Learn systems, but then go beyond them.  Trust your intuition more than you trust any system out there and always be willing to test, test, test.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in all my years of making money online since 1995, it’s that nothing beats testing.  I can’t remember the number of times when I’ve broken industry “rules” to test a hunch I had for something and found out that my real life testing proved the rules wrong. 

I’ve gotten to the point now that when people ask me for my “expert” opinion on what I think might work for their business online, I very often say “To be honest, I have no clue anymore.  The online world changes so quickly that I’m not sure exactly what will work.  I have some ideas of what we could try and what we could test though.”

I have found this attitude present in most of the more mature online money makers, while people who are just starting out are typically very opinionated and attached to a certain set of “this is what works” theories that may have worked once or twice for them and they now treat those things as the gospel truth.

Let me be very blunt.  Goal setting can ruin your life.

Learning to set and achieve goals is a fundamental part of achieving success in life, and that includes making money online.  However, setting goals and then doing nothing to achieve them is kind of like turning on the propane gas on your BBQ and not lighting the burner.  You can cause an explosion.

Whenever I’ve found myself frustrated and depressed in life, it has always been the result of having some kind of goal or desire to achieve or have something in life, but not being able to do what’s necessary to get it.

There are billions of people on this earth who have absolutely no desire to make money online.  They don’t even know such a possibility exists.  They go to work every day, without the frustration of what it feels like to want to make money online and not being able to.  They may not love their jobs, but they also have no entrepreneurial desires like you and I.  Because of this, they don’t suffer.

The secret to properly utilizing the amazing power of goal setting in your life is to set goals and then to achieve goals, not just to spend your time setting goal after goal, and never achieving any of them.  That is a recipe for frustration and disappointment that will slowly chip away at your self confidence and eventually ruin your life.

How to Get and Achieve Things

Here’s a simple truth that warrants being etched into our brains:

Getting and achieving the things we want in life is a result of thinking and acting in a certain way, for a certain period of time.

It sounds very simple, but the application of this simple truth eludes most people.

If you set a goal to achieve something, such as for example to make your first $500 online as a Blogger or Affiliate Marketer or the author of your own Digital Products, you must follow this simple truth in order to achieve your goal.

In order to make that $500, you must think in a certain way, and you must act in a certain way, for a certain period of time in order to reach that goal.  What most people do is that they set a goal such as making their first $500 online, and then they continue to think and act the way that they’ve always thought and acted and they expect to magically get different results.

Let me simply things even further:

People who make money online think and act differently than those who don’t.

Once again this sounds very obvious, but most people (including myself for a period of time) just don’t get it.

The way I think today, and the way I act today is different from the way I thought and acted a couple of years ago when I was trying to make money online as a Blogger but wasn’t succeeding very much.

Once you set some goals to make money for yourself, whether it be as a Blogger or an Affiliate Marketer or some other way, it’s time to start looking at your thinking.  You need to start asking yourself “How do people who make money in this way think?”, “What do I need to change about my thinking to think this way?”

This is not an easy thing to do.  I struggle with it myself all the time.  I’m looking at Affiliate Marketers who are making six figure incomes PER MONTH, and trying to wrap my head around their way of thinking.  I know that the reason I’m only making ~$7,000/month as an affiliate marketer at this moment is because I am thinking and acting like a $x7,000/month affiliate.

I know that in order to get to the $100,000/month mark I need to change the way I think and the way I act, otherwise I’ll never get there.  Being aware of this gives me a huge advantage, because even though I’m not thinking and acting that way yet, at least I know I need to change and I’m looking for those things that I need to change.

Most people have their heads stuck in the sand, and they set goals like “I want to make money online” without realizing that how they think and how they act will have to change in order for them to achieve this.

Magical Thinking

Goal setting can ruin your life if you make the mistake of thinking that setting goals is the same thing as achieving them.  Setting goals is just a part of the equation.  It’s necessary in order to be very clear on your intentions, but it doesn’t do much for you if that’s all you do.

A lot of people will set goals and then sit back to see what happens.  Setting goals doesn’t change anything.  The magic Internet tooth-fairy is not going to magically make your Blog start generating $100,000/month just because you set a goal to do so. 

Don’t set goals and then sit back waiting for something “out there” to change to accommodate for your goals to come to fruition without any change in the way you are thinking and acting day to day.  It’s not going to happen.

You’re just going to find yourself frustrated, depressed and annoyed with yourself because you set a goal and now you desire it’s fulfillment but you’re not making any progress towards it.  Very quickly you’ll find yourself a grump that nobody wants to be around.  If you weren’t serious about reaching your goals, you probably would have been better off not to even set them.  At least you would have saved yourself a lot of frustration.

The Universe Moves With You

Now, once you set some goals and become really committed to achieving them, you will find yourself willing to change your thinking, willing to change your actions, and willing to be patient enough to keep thinking and acting in that certain way until you produce the result you wanted.

When you’re in that space, you will find that almost magically things "out there” seem to shift and move in accordance to some kind of universal system that does bring about the achievement of your goals in ways you never dreamed of when you started, but to tap into this universal movement it must first come from within you by changing the way you think and the way you act.

In other words, don’t set goals and then sit on the sidelines waiting for them to appear in front of you.  Grab the bull by the horns and really start to dive into refining the way you’re thinking and the way you’re acting, in order to get what you want.

Life is not a passive form of entertainment like watching TV or a movie.  Get off your butt and do something.  You’ll be amazed how powerful setting and achieving goals can be in your life when you actually implement both sides of the coin, instead of just setting goals and sitting around depressed and frustrated waiting for them to achieve themselves.

I logged into my Prosper202 software today and I saw a banner in there for Revolution202.  I clicked on the link to see what this new thing could be from the “202” guys, and it turns out that they’ve launched their own affiliate network. 

I must say, I didn’t really expect them to do this.  Of course it seems like a natural progression for them to expand out into this from their toolsets, but this could spell bad news for some of the other affiliate networks.

The reason for this is that a lot of affiliates use the Propser 202, Tracking 202, and Tracking 202 Pro tools that the “202” team created, and in the case of Tracking 202 and Tracking 202 Pro it does give the “202” team access to affiliate data from the other networks.  I could be wrong, but at first glance this does seem like it offers the Revolution202 network an advantage being able to see which offers and which affiliates are doing well on the other networks.

Not only that, but I’m sure the Revolution 202 network will integrate much more seamlessly with the 202 tools than any other network, which is great news for affiliates but could spell bad news for other networks.

In the coming weeks and month’s we’ll see how this plays out, but it does show that the marketplace is always evolving and it’s not only affiliates that must stay current and evolve, it’s the networks as well.

It’s going to be interesting to see how the 202 team continues to differentiate itself from the other networks in the coming months.  If the ultra-useful toolset they’ve come up with so far is any indication, this is going to be really good news for affiliate marketers.

If you haven’t yet signed up for Revolution202, hop over to their site and get signed up as an affiliate.  Also if you haven’t been using their tools to track your affiliate marketing campaigns I definitely recommend at least using their Tracking 202 or Prosper 202 toolsets.  They’re very useful for helping to run profitable affiliate marketing campaigns.

This week I have reached a number of new records in my online money making ventures.

New Subscriber Record

Firstly, after the release of my newest eBook “The Three Pillars of Making Money Online” my reader count has hit a new record.

As of today my reader count is now at 1,915 subscribers via RSS and Email.  I’ve been hovering around 1,800 – 1,850 subscribers for a while now and I know a big part of that was due to the fact that my personal passion has become more focused on making money online, but until recently that wasn’t totally reflected in the theme of my blog.

I’ve evolved my topic from “how to make money doing what you love” to focus more on “mastering the mindset of making money online” as that is really my passion now.  Making that change has helped me a lot because it’s given me something more specific to focus on with this Blog.

My new eBook fits in nicely with my new theme, more so than my previous eBook “The Passion Project”.  The other thing that I also added in was a Lightbox that pops up when a person first visits this website, offering them a free copy of my eBook.

When I first saw a Lightbox like this on a couple of other sites I found it a bit annoying because on those particular sites I had already downloaded their eBooks, so when the Lightbox showed up after they first installed it I didn’t like it.

However, I didn’t think of it from the point of view of being a brand new visitor to a website, in which case I do like it when right away I’m given the option to get something for free.

I recently watched a video by John Chow where he talked about his conversion rates jumping quite drastically ever since he installed the Lightbox on his site.  So I decided to do the same thing myself and test it out.  So far I’m really happy with the results.  The numbers are still not big enough to be totally accurate, but so far the Lighbox is converting at a rate of 12.2% which is quite high compared to my numbers before.

The coolest thing is that this Lightbox functionality is built right into AWeber so I didn’t even need to install any third-party scripts or software to make it work.

New One Day Affiliate Income Record

Yesterday I had a record day for one day profits for my affiliate marketing campaigns.  Here are my stats for yesterday:

Total Revenues: $926.66
Total Costs: $379.48
—————————
Total Profit: $547.18

This is a new record for me for one day profits.  I can’t wait to be doing numbers like that and higher every day.  If I did that much profit every day, that’s about $16.5k/month or just under $200k/year in income.  (Not a bad wage for working from home!)

Of course I know that every day isn’t going to be a record day, but the cool thing is that every time you hit a new record your belief levels grow and it becomes easier to hit those kinds of numbers or higher again in the future.  My next record goal is to hit $1,000 in profit in one day.

Twitter Followers

Although this one isn’t a huge deal compared to the numbers of followers I’ve seen from other more serious Twitter ninjas, my Twitter follower count has also hit a new record of 672.  I figured I’d take a screenshot and report it today anyways so when I look at this post a year from now I’ll know where I was at.

eBook Typo Fixes

As I’m sure anyone who’s downloaded my new eBook so far has noticed, there were quite a few typos in the eBook.  Now here’s a quick little story of what happened with that.

I’ve been working on the concept of that eBook for a while now and finally on Saturday morning I woke up and decided that I’m not going to bed until I finish and launch that eBook.  I had a whole bunch of other things to do on Saturday as well, on top of watching Zoe.  I was also supposed to go to a birthday party, but because I decided to finish the eBook I elected not to go.  There just wasn’t going to be any way I could finish the book if I went.

I had most of the book done by midnight, but I didn’t have anyone to proofread the eBook as my wife had already gone to bed.  I proofread it a few times myself, but it was starting to drive me nuts because every time I went to proofread the content, looking for spelling mistakes and typos and such, I would find myself wanting to add to the content instead.

So finally I just decided to release the book “as is”.  I went to save it as a PDF file and then I realized that none of the hyperlinks in the eBook were working.  I had to upgrade to the new Online Adobe PDF writer software and then I ran into more problems due to Adobe formatting the pages slightly differently than MS Word.

I then had to spend three hours of messing around with design and the table of contents to make it look ok once it’s converted to PDF.  Finally I had the eBook finished and ready at around 4:30am.  I put it up and went to sleep. 

This morning I received an email from “Ebele” from the UK.  Although it wasn’t her original intention, Ebele ended up proofreading and highlighting all the typos in the eBook as she read through it and sent me a PDF file with all the typo’s highlighted.  Nice!  Thanks Ebele!

So now I’ve gone ahead and fixed all the typos and I’ve uploaded a new version of the eBook so that thanks to Ebele, you guys no longer have to read all the typos.

So what’s the lesson here?  Get out of your perfection mind-frame.  So many people fail to make money online because they are afraid to release “Version 1.00” of something and then fix the typos and bugs later.  Take a lesson from Google.  Don’t be afraid to release beta versions of things.

The eBook covers what I believe to be the three pillars of making money online – Mindset, Strategy, and Execution.  While most “make money online” courses and products focus and teach the exact strategies of making money online, very few ever take into account the mindset of making money online or the need for proper execution of the strategies being taught.

The eBook dives into the three pillars, focusing mainly on the introducing the exact mindset I personally use to make money online.

I have used this mindset to make money online as a blogger and as an affiliate marketer.  It’s actually the same mindset I’ve used for the last 15 years to get ahead in the corporate world as well, but it works even better when applied to the online world.

I’m releasing this eBook out free of charge, so if you’d like to grab a copy of yourself just fill out your name and email address in the boxes below and you will be instantly emailed a copy of the eBook.

If you’re already a subscriber to my newsletter, you were emailed a link to the new eBook on the weekend.

The eBook is a nice, short read, only about 40 pages long and I hope you guys enjoy it.  I’d love to hear your feedback on it after you’ve had a chance to have a quick read.

Enter your name and email below to receive “The Three Pillars of Making Money Online” delivered to your email in the next 3 minutes:

Enjoy!

When you go to the grocery store, do you stand in front of the liquid dish detergent isle trying to make an informed, conscious decision of which detergent would be best to buy or do you just grab the brand and type you always buy?  When you walk over to the bread isle, do you look at all the different types of bread each time, or do you just buy the regular one you always buy?

At some point during this month, did your telephone company call you to try to sell you on another month of telephone service, or were you just automatically billed for another month?  What about your cable or Internet service?

Universal Habitforce

I first read about the term “Universal Habitforce” in Napoleon Hill’s book “Think and Grow Rich”, but I’ve since adapted my understanding of it to mean something different than what Mr. Hill talks about in his book.

To me, Universal Habitforce has many faces.  It’s easier to understand the power of it if I give you a couple of examples from my life.

Weeds In The Garden

The property that I live on has some of the most amazing soil I have ever seen in my life.  All of the plant life around my house is huge.  All the flowers and bushes grow and flourish in this soil.  Unfortunately, so do weeds.

A month ago I decided to rip out all of the plants and flowers that were growing in one section of my front yard.  Every year they’ve been spreading and basically taking over the patch of grass that separates my house from my driveway.

When these plants are nicely trimmed and groomed, they look nice but when I get busy and have no time to do any gardening they take over my front yard and grow like nuts.  Essentially, they employ universal habit force to thrive.  By default, I don’t normally have time to cut these plants back so by default they grow bigger and spread.

When I decided to rip the plants out, I also had to make a decision as to what I would have to do in order to get rid of all the weeds that have grown in between the plants as well, since the last thing I’ve got time for right now is ripping out weeds. 

So, here’s how I used “universal habit force” to my advantage.  After I ripped out all the plants, I leveled the ground a bit and then I dropped down a whole crapload of grass seed and then I let the universal habit force do the rest of the work.

For the first week or so, nothing happened.  There was just this spot of dirt in my front yard that looked somewhat ugly.  The following week is the week that we got Zoe so there was no way I would have had any time to do any gardening.  Luckily, I didn’t have to.  The grass seed began to sprout on the second week.  At first it was just in a few patches here and there, but by this morning the patch of dirt is now 90% covered in grass. 

See, all I did was plant the seeds and then left it alone as I was busy with Zoe and my affiliate marketing.  I didn’t sit there and have to motivate the grass seeds to grow.  I didn’t have to feed them nutrients, they just fed themselves from the ground.  I also only watered them twice.  The rest of the time they got water from rain.  Some of my weeds came back, but the majority of them have been replaced by grass.

This is an example of utilizing universal habit force.  Leveraging the power of nature to your advantage.  Aligning with natural systems that already exist to accomplish something you want.

Housetraining Zoe

Here’s another example of using universal habit force to my advantage.  This is something I learned the hard way with my dog Kobe.  You see, house training a dog can be pretty difficult if you don’t know what you’re doing and you try to force it, instead of utilizing universal habit force to do it for you.

What do I mean by this?  Well, the premise behind house training a dog is that you want to teach them to pee outside, not inside your house.  So, the idea is to create opportunities where the dog can go outside to pee and then praise the shit out of them for peeing outside.  This helps them to associate peeing outside = praise.  At the same time, if they try to pee inside you can interrupt them and sternly say “NO” and quickly take them outside and wait for them to pee out there and then praise them again.

That’s the basic premise anyways.  Now there are some problems that arise out of this.  Firstly, young puppies can’t hold their bladder for as long as an adult dog can.  Also, they don’t like the feeling of having a bladder even half full, so what they do is they just want to pee all the time – anywhere they can.  This means that if the puppy is inside you have to keep a constant eye on them at all times, which can be pretty challenging when they want to pee every hour.

Not only that, but they don’t like peeing when people are watching, so they’ll often run into another room and pee before you can chase in after them.

So, how can we utilize universal habit force to help us in this situation?  Well, firstly there is a habit that dogs have that prevents them from peeing close to where they sleep.  So, if instead of letting your dog sleep on the floor you instead put them in a properly sized kennel that isn’t too big for them, they typically won’t go to the bathroom inside the kennel where they sleep.  This isn’t foolproof as sometimes puppies will still have an accident in the kennel for a number of reasons, but 98% of the time they will not go in there.

So, if you put them in the kennel when they go to sleep you eliminate the chances of them peeing while you’re sleeping.  Then, when they wake up if you take them out of the kennel and take them straight outside to pee, they begin to form a habit of going outside to pee.

This is an example of utilizing universal habit force to our advantage.  I don’t have to teach Zoe not to pee inside her kennel.  It’s already bred into her DNA.  I just use that knowledge to make it easier for me to create opportunities for her to wake up, go outside to pee and get praised for it which reinforces the good behavior.  I found this method of housetraining much better than putting out newspapers in the house for the dog to pee on.

Default World View

Another example of utilizing universal habit force is to learn and study the default world view of a society or a demographic and utilize that to your advantage.  For example, let’s say that 80% of my website visitors use Internet Explorer as their browser.  Now, let’s say that I personally don’t like Internet Explorer and I use Firefox instead. 

Now, what if I had some kind of feature on my website that only worked in Firefox?  Well, that would mean that 80% of my visitors would not have access to that feature.

If this was true, I could utilize two solutions to this:

1. Write some code that checks if my visitors are running Internet Explorer.  If they are, proceed to try to convince them that using Internet Explorer is inferior to Firefox and that they should switch.  Ask them to install Firefox to enjoy the full benefits of the site.
2. Modify my software to work in Internet Explorer as well.

Which one of these do you think utilizes the universal habit force more? Obviously it’s #2.  If you want to make money online, learn who your customers are and understand THEIR world view.  Then, build value and services for them and their world view, not yours.

Affiliate Marketing

The world of affiliate marketing is tremendously influenced by this.  Those that understand the existing natural habits of human behavior stand to make millions, while those that try to get people to act like some ideal scenario they imagine in their heads will go bankrupt.

In large quantities, people are very predictable.  It’s absolutely insane to see just how mathematical trends can be.  Once you become attuned to these subtle details that make the difference in being able to connect and influence people, you open the doorway to another world.  It all starts with understanding how universal habit force applies to people.

Look at the continuous success of diet offers and make money from home offers.  All these diet offers promise to help you lose 20 lbs in 20 days, and all the money making offers promise to teach you how to make money from home working 2 hours a day.  It really doesn’t matter if it’s possible or healthy to lose 20lbs in 20 days by taking some supplement pill and sitting on the couch.  The point is that the average person out there wants that to be true and they’re willing to pay for product after product until they find that solution.

The secret is to figure out how people are already thinking, and then to find ways to automatically make money by offering value to those people who think that way by offering them the solutions to the problems they keep having.

Of course this is easier said than done, but here are some examples of ways people have utilized universal habit force to make money online:

• Forced continuity membership sites that sell you once, and then keep charging your credit card until you cancel.  They don’t have to resell you on the product / service every month.  They sell you once and then by default you keep resigning up each month.  You actually have to take action in order to cancel, which is why most don’t.
• Creation of auto-responders that take new visitors through an email newsletter sequence that gets sent out to them automatically with no intervention from the site owner.
• Users who communicate on your Blog by leaving comments to each other end up creating valuable content for your site pretty much by default
• Forum communities where people leave posts and generate content for you automatically
• etc.

Making Money Online with Universal Habit Force

I know this concept is somewhat abstract, but if you become aware of how universal habit force plays itself out in your life and how you can utilize it to help you make more money online, you may surprise yourself with just how quickly you begin to see results.

Some of the questions that you may want to ask yourself to apply universal habit force in your life to make money online may be:

• How can I structure my online business in a way where by default my income grows each month?
• Am I seeing this from the point of view of average client I want to attract, or am I just looking at it from my biased perspective?
• If there is something that I need to do each day in order to produce some type of result that turns into income, is there any way I can automate it?
• How can I help others to provide more value to themselves and others like themselves?

If you’re totally stuck and don’t know how this could apply, here’s an example.  Go find an Audio CD training course that will help you make money online, but that you haven’t had time to listen to.  Now, go to your car with that CD and pop it into the CD player.  When it starts to play, turn off the engine (you may or may not need to press stop on the CD player) and lock the car back up and go home.  Now, by default, the next time your drive your car somewhere, you’ll be listening to that Audio CD.

Find ways to set yourself up to win by default and you will.

The reason for this is because I want to be able to start writing more health and fitness related articles, but I want to make them much more extensive than just a blog post which typically gets buried in the archives a few days or weeks after it’s written.  Both my blog posts and articles are going to be much less time sensitive than what I’ve written before, so I wanted a design that could feature more content on one page.

I’m not finished with everything yet, but here’s what the design looks like so far:

It’s a neat little concept that allows you to take a little piece of wisdom that’s sitting in your mind right now and monetize it.  Let me explain.  Essentially, MindBites is a website that allows you to create a short little video lesson teaching people how to do something in life and then sell that lesson on the website to make money.

The lesson you teach are only limited by your creativity.  Some of the lessons already up there range from “How To Teach Your Baby Sign Language” to “How To Cut Hair With Clippers”.  Pretty much anything can be made into a lesson, and you get to set the price for your lesson.

So, for example if you like gardening you could make a series of video’s on gardening and sell them online.  If you have a killer lasagna recipe you could make a video teaching people how to make that lasagna and sell it online.  I mean the sky is the limit here.  Pretty much anything can be made into a MindBite lesson that can be marketed on this website.

Learn

The website is already starting to fill up with different kinds of video lessons.  There is a main section for all the paid lessons, as well as some free lessons.  Authors of each lesson set the price of each lesson based on the number of credits each lesson costs.  One credit is equal to $0.99, which is the minimum price for a paid lesson.

Here’s one video I clicked on.  After watching the intro to this, I totally want to buy this video and watch the rest of it.  It’s only $1.98 and I also might order that book too.  It looks like a cool way for me to start an organic garden in a small way to begin with.  Check this out:

Isn’t that neat?

Teach

The teach section is for authors who want to create video’s for sale on the website and to make money online by selling these video’s. As I mentioned above, you have full control over how much you want to sell your video for. The only restriction is that your price is determined by the number of credits it is. Each credit is $0.99, so if you wanted to sell your video for around $5, you would charge 5 credits which would be $4.95 per video sold. If 100 people viewed the video, that would be an extra $495 in your pocket right there.

The teaching section also has a bunch of resources that teach you how to make MindBites video’s. Here’s an example one:

Community

The site also features a community section with a forum and a way for people to register and request the types of video’s they would like to see made. Check out the wanted section for video’s people have already requested. Maybe you’ll find something you know how to do and you can get started on making money online with your first MindBite.

What I Really Like About This Idea

About five or six years ago I had this idea of creating a website where ordinary people could capture something that they know how to do that most people don’t know how to do and sell it online. At the time my idea was to make a website where people could create eBook reports of their particular skill and then sell them to others. I did a bit of brainstorming on the idea and even registered a domain for it. I never did get the project off the ground as I was busy working on so many other projects at my job, but I always thought it was a solid idea.

At that time it wasn’t very easy to create online video’s and things like YouTube and Flip Video camera’s weren’t things many people knew anything about. However, with today’s technology I think that the idea of using video as a medium for sharing the wisdom hidden in ordinary people’s heads is brilliant.

I don’t think I have ever met a single person in my life that didn’t know how to do something interesting that most other people don’t know. Of course most people probably take what they know for granted, so they may not be aware of the fact that they know things that most people don’t, but if they really sit down and think about it I’m sure everyone could come up with a few dozen video’s to share with the world.

Suggestions For Improvements

As much as my first impression of the MindBites site is very good, I do have one strong suggestion for the creators of this site.

Here’s what I think they could improve on:

Affiliate Program – This site could have HUGE potential for an affiliate program. For example, let’s say that I visit the MindBites website and participate in the community and I find out that someone is looking for a video on dog training. Well, if MindBites had an affiliate program, and I knew a friend of mine that was a dog trainer, I could send a link to the MindBites site to my friend and if he registers and creates video’s that make money for him and the site, I could earn an affiliate commission.

Having an affiliate program like this, where Bloggers or Affiliate Marketers can promote the site to people and then earn a small % of all the earnings created by the people who they refer to the site could totally make this website explode with content.

Final Words

What do you guys think of the idea behind this site? Are any of you going to try making money online by creating MindBites?

For some reason I really like this site and I might sit down and brainstorm some ideas to create some lessons on something to see just how much money can be made with this site.

Click Here to Visit the MindBites Site

One really neat way to work on improving your affiliate marketing or blogging results is to utilize the unique forms of expression present in each one of the elements.  For example, you could make each weekday one of the elements with Monday being Fire, Tuesday being Water and so on.  Or you could simply approach each individual challenge, milestone or goal using one of the five elements.

Allow me to explain a little bit about the different elements and how they could relate to something like affiliate marketing or blogging.

Firstly, let’s start with the element of fire.  Some of the characteristics that embody the behavior and being of fire are:

• Spreads very quickly.  Moves fast.  Explosive.
• Very direct.  Fire burns through things, it doesn’t go around them.
• Utilizes the very thing it’s burning as fuel to burn it.
• It envelops things from all sides.
• etc.

So, how could we utilize the strategy of being like fire in making money online?  Well, a “fire strategy” would be a quick attack from all sides, so as a blogger you could create a lot of value from all sides very quickly to completely overwhelm the competition.  For example, imagine writing 100 blog posts without publishing a single one, and then scheduling them all to be published at a rate of 5 posts a day, every day for 20 days straight.  At the same time, imagine launching a banner campaign driving traffic to your blog on the top 25 blogs in your niche, or something to that effect.  That could be one way to utilize the feeling of “fire” to plan out your strategy.

Another example could be to use a viral video that spreads on the Internet.  That’s using the very thing that you’re marketing to as fuel for your marketing.  Basically a viral video properly executed targets a group of people and then those same people you targeted end up fueling the next wave of people to see your campaign and so on.

Another element we can look at is water.  Here are some characteristics of water:

• It flows in and out in waves of increasing / decreasing magnitude.
• It’s patient, waiting and looking for a way to flow through something.
• Seems week, but in reality can create a lot of momentum and destroy things with it’s power.
• If it can’t go through something it will go around it.
• etc.

So, a water strategy could involve working on things like improving your affiliate campaigns or blog by testing, surveying and responding.  For example, putting up a survey on your blog asking your readers for their opinion and then utilizing the information gathered to improve your blog in waves.  The same thing can be done with affiliate marketing.  You could think of each day as a wave cycle and each day you log into your AdWords account and check the stats and make a tiny improvement to your campaign, and you let it run for another day and gather data.  This flow of gathering and interpreting data and then improving slowly over time is a very water-like strategy.

Another element is earth.  Here are some characteristics of the earth element:

• Steady and strong like a large boulder or a mountain.
• Heavy, dense, impenetrable.
• Unmoving.
• Stable and slow.
• etc.

Utilizing an earth-like strategy could involve things like backing up your data and websites  to maintain long-term security, or employing a long-term pay-per-click strategy where you put yourself in a position in Adwords for a particular keyword or keywords and not moving from that position.  The stability and constant visibility of being in one place all the time is an earth-like feature.

Another thing in an earth-like strategy would be to focus on improving an existing affiliate campaign, instead of runing off to start another new one the minute the first one gets a bit profitable.  Another thing about earth is that it’s stable and long-term, so maybe in terms of affiliate marketing, employing an earth strategy might be to build out a long term site with a tonne of content on the niche topic you’re in.

The next element we’ll cover is Air / Wind.  Here are some characteristics of this element:

• Invisible, yet all around us.
• Can also come from all around, enveloping from all directions.
• Likes to spin things, move things.
• It’s light and quick.
• etc.

So, what would a “wind/air element” strategy look like in terms of affiliate marketing or blogging?  Well, it could be to launch a whole bunch of “light” websites that aren’t so extensive at first.  For example, you could put together a strategy to launch one landing page per day for 25 days.  Each landing page / site will be unique, but similar and you could attack your niche market from all angles with all these small websites.

Another thing you could do is test your affiliate offers across multiple networks, jumping around from one to the next to see which network has the best converting offer and why.  You could learn a lot from doing something like this.

The final element is Void.  Here are some characteristics of this element:

• Void is nothing, yet at the same time everything.
• Void is tricky, deceiving.
• Void is invisible.
• Void is distracting.
• etc.

Employing a void strategy could involve employing tactics to keep your affiliate campaigns safe from competitors, or utilizing misdirection to focus your competitors attention on one thing (something neat and shiny), while you make money somewhere else.  The tricky / deceiving part of the void element could involve using some kind of clever link-bait tactic to get more traffic to your Blog.

There are just very rough and beginner level descriptions of the five elements and some very brief ideas on how they could be applied to our business of making money online, but I’m sure you get the gist.  If this speaks to you, I would suggest getting familiar with each of the elements and then trying to see ways in which you can implement the feeling of that element to your online money making efforts.