Internet Marketing & Building an Affiliate Business From Scratch

This is to compliment Clayton’s post here

It was May 2007 I think when all this nonsense started. I got myself a beautiful new MacBook. It was sweeeet. At the time it was delivered I was at home at my parent’s house in St.Andrews looking after the cat as they swaned off round the world as part of their extensive round-the-world retirement plan.

To be fair, the cat was my responsibility since I’d saved it from cat prison and certain death 10 years earlier.

So I had plenty of time on my hands to play on my new Mac in between forking out chunks of Whiskas cat-o-meat. That’s when I came across Brian’s site Start Breaking Free

I can’t remember why I was looking for this type of site but I do remember I was extremely disenchanted, bored and uninspired with my ColdFusion web development job. (yawn)

I bought Brian’s book and started having the anti-career-path-wait-for-retirement thoughts that have spurred me on since.

I didn’t start a business after reading the book and it wasn’t until October 2007 that I somehow stumbled across Ed Dale’s Dominiche course “The Art Of Buying & Selling Websites”. I succumbed to his persuasive video sales pitch things and bought the course. Hell! I can do websites! I could do that stuff.

Of course I didn’t. I would come home after work and religiously watch the lesson, take notes and then not do anything. Awesome! I would call it ‘working’. Ha.

Having consumed all of Ed’s information I felt I needed to buy more courses and fell into the “spend and watch” mindset, failing to actually take any action. It’s a bit embarrassing but I bet I’m not the only one. I started buying up internet marketing courses like they were going out of fashion. What a fool!

My Internet Marketing Shopping List circa 2008

• Armand Morin’s Internet Marketing Explained
• The Auction Genius Wealth Plan
• Everything You need To Know (more of a ‘how to get published’ thing. That the fuck was I thinking?)
• Numerous Adwords PDFs and a few other bits ‘n’ bobs that are cluttering up my hard drive somewhere long since forgotten about.

(note: I can’t recommend any of these courses)

Then eventually I settled down a bit after joining PLRPro (don’t buy it yet, they’re soon to relaunch with loads of new stuff) . The difference with PLRPro was that they were trying to get people to simply replace their income rather than make a gazillion dollars. Build 12 sites in 12 months and make $4000 a month. Sounds good to me.

Oh, and they’re straight talking Australians. Seems to appeal to my British sensibilities.

It was round about now that I got The Four Hour Workweek and kept it as a bible beside my bed. The thing about the 4 Hour Workweek is that it really is a kind of metaphor rather than a blueprint. The principles are sound but implementing them is not as easy as it sounds. Tim Ferris is a remarkable guy. Take his principles and ideas but please don’t try to emulate him. It will just lead to disappointment.

So I built about 12 sites, stuck adsense on most of them and started making a bit of money. Not much mind you. About a dollar a day.

Then I stopped building links to them and most of them just died. I am just a lazy git when it comes down to it. I’m still a member of PLRPro.

Then I heard Daniel from PLRPro recommend Mark Ling’s way of building sites. So I joined Affiloblueprint about a year ago and started building sites like www.burnbellyfat.co.uk. I made a few sales and thought cool! This stuff might just actually work.

But by the time summer rolled round last year, I was still nowhere near quitting my job. So I tracked down Sean Morrissy in the Affiloblueprint forums and joined his mentoring scheme.

It’s now coming to the end of my apprenticeship and I’ve learnt a lot. Mainly that you really do need to do a LOT of work for this stuff to work. My lazy ass is getting kicked.  You also need to invest some cash in my opinion. You need a hell of a lot of articles and you need a hell of a lot of backlinks.

Sean has taught me to build quality sites that Google and your visitors are going to like. My Green Guitar Guy site is what I’ve been concentrating on and I’m just now on the verge of starting to creep into the top 10 on Google for some of my keywords.

Then last month my boss asked me to start working part time, 3 days a week. There’s not enough work to keep you fulltime. Fair enough I thought. I really want more time to grow my business anyway. So I’m a bit skinter but more time rich. I have 4 full days a week to work on this stuff.

I’ve started outsourcing my linkbuilding to Offshore Ally (note to self, remember to pay the bill)

So that’s how I got here. When it’s not going well (and once I’ve felt sorry for myself over a few beers) I think of James Corbett’s quote:

“Fight one more round. When your feet are so tired that you have to shuffle to the center of the ring, fight one more round.

When you’re arms are so tired that you can hardly lift your hands to come on guard, fight one more round.

When your nose is bleeding and your eyes are black and you are so tired that you wish you’re opponent would crack you on the jaw and put you to sleep, fight one more round – remember that the mans who always fights one more round is never whipped.”

James J. Corbett, American boxing champion (1866-1933)

Just remember to alter any failing tactics along the way.

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