Last century – and I mean the one that had dreadful 80s music – there was a secret thing that went on right under our noses. And I’m not talking about Smiley’s People and poisoned umbrella tips.

This was a thing that we all took part in. And we still are.

It’s what the Italian philosopher Gramsci called Cultural Hegemony.

Now I don’t want to get all heavy on economic and social philosophy, mainly because I know very little about it. But I do know about Gramsci and I think you should too.

Gramsci questioned why it was that there had been a revolution against the ruling classes in Russia and yet it had never happened in countries, such as the UK, which had an industrial revolution a long time before Russia.

His answer was that the state in a capitalist society rules through force plus consent. The key here is “consent”.

Let me give you an example.

Here in the UK we have the general election campaign going on so that we can decide who our new prime minister should be. There’s very little difference in policy between all the parties.

Why?

Because most people in our country are pretty comfortable. And that means nobody really wants to rock the boat. Most people are quite happy to hang on to their jobs, watch TV on Saturday night and drink a couple of bottles of wine each week. This is pretty handy for the state.

We ain’t gonna question much as long as we get our comfort. They have our consent to carry on as we are.

We consent to the status quo – because basically we’re all pretty comfortable.

I question this.

Yes, I live a comfortable life, especially compared to a huge majority of this world. But I am not comfortable doing a crappy job that is unfulfilling and, frankly, pointless, for the rest of my days just so that I can afford to invest in the stock market and maybe one day pay off my flat.

Gramsci didn’t make it past the 1930s but in the 1970s, another bunch started questioning the system.

Malcolm Maclaren’s Sex Pistols – which I’m still pretty sure was considered an art project for Mclaren – started a band without permission from anybody and said screw you to the status quo.

In fact, they said screw you to doing what you’re told. And we’re all told to go to school get a job, get a flat and be ‘comfortable’. Most of us do. I did (via music college and a few years in the wilderness).  The punks were recognising Gramsci’s hegemony and daring to question it.

And now I feel like questioning it too.

So I went and bought an online course called Question The Rules. I’m going to try and persuade you to buy it too.

My disclaimer is that I’m an affiliate and I’ll get a wee commission if you buy it through my link. But I wouldn’t recommend it to you if I didn’t think you’d enjoy it and get something out of it.

It’s a series of audio conversations with Johnny B Truant and Lee Stranahan. Now I don’t know much about Lee except that he’s a very articulate and smart guy based on what I’ve listened to so far but I do know that Johnny B Truant is a pretty cool WordPress dude who I think you’ll like a lot.

it’s a course about breaking free of the Cultural Hegemony and creating the business and life that you really want.

==> Click Here to Learn More About It

P.S If you buy it before Saturday it’s $97. After that it’s like $397 or something!

Get it now.

This week I’ve reduced my PPC campaign to include just one adgroup for one product. I realise I went in full steam ahead with a dozen adgroups and it was just too much.

So word of advice: Choose one product review to advertise and use only product related names to start with. I can expand it once I have more experience and have optimised my first adgroup.

I’m thinking of investing in Perry Marshall’s book because I’d really like to get good at this stuff.

I’ve also taken the plunge to outsource my link building to www.offshoreally.com leaving my more time to create content and add to my mailing list.

As a side project I’m creating a giant review site as per Mark Ling’s PPC  Domination Plan. Another reason to get really good at AdWords.

I’m about half way through my challenge. With just less than 3 months to go before i need to hit my target income I have been getting a bit negative and hopeless on occasion.

However, the good thing is I recognise this feeling from previous attempts at building an affiliate business and it stems from not getting any results after 3 months.

Previously I’ve given up.

Not this time. Im continuing to build links and build my mailing list.

I’m also working on getting my PPC campaign to be profitable. My totals so far are:

Spend = $853
Sales = $397
Profit = -$456

Following my first week, I expanded my campaign to include non-product related keywords. So instead of just having “jamorama review” or “guitar superstars” I added things like “learn guitar fast”.

My traffic increased significantly as you can see from my Google analytics graph. And so did my bill. It seems to me that the clicks were just too expensive.

http://www.keithdouglas.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/traffic-jan-2010.png

I still think they are a bit expensive even just for product names. I’m paying around 60-90p (british pence) for product name keywords which means I’m not breaking even.

So annoyingly enough I tweaked my ad campaign with misplaced optimism having made 3 sales in my first week. I widened the number of keywords to included non-product based keywords and upped my bids.

No sales.

Argh! Why not?

So I hemorrhaged cash for 7 days before pausing my campaigns.

This morning I activated a 3 of my ad groups with the original low bids and limited product based keywords.

2 more sales this afternoon.

What have I learned from this?

I’m not entirely sure but I’m happy to leave it running like this for a week because it’s only costing me a few pounds a day.

I was surprised and delighted to get a sale within the first 24 hours of my PPC campaign running. From only 5 click throughs I sold a copy of Guitar Superstars.

I’m guessing this is not going to be typical but I had a little celebratory dance anyway

I am assuming it came from my PPC campaign because the vendor hasn’t added my tracking code to the sales page yet so I can’t tell for sure.

Well I’m in week 10 (or thereabouts) of this project and at the moment there’s not much happening.

When I say that, what I really mean is that I don’t have much traffic to my guitar site. However, I shouldn’t really expect much since I’ve only been doing SEO on it for a month or so.

So this month I’ve set up my ad groups in Adwords and I’m starting my PPC campaign. It’s a bit scary because I know you can lose a lot of money doing it. However, you have to be willing to invest a couple of hundred to test which (if any) of the ads are profitable. As my boss likes to cliche, you have to speculate to accumulate.

Being the beginning of a new month I’ve also refreshed my link building schedule, pretty much exactly the same as last month. More article and directory submissions and more AMA and more content for the site.

I was thinking of turning my spreadsheet of daily link building tasks into a web based app. Is that something anyone else would be interested in? If so leave me comment below.

So I finally got my 6 part mini series up and running at www.greenguitarguy.com. I’m glad I finally got it finished as it was quite an uphill struggle being that I’m not used to editing and rendering video.

I finally got the files small enough but with good enough quality by using Camtasia to save them as .flv files. However, afer i had done  3 of them, Camtasia refused to render anymore – some kind of bug in Camtasia meant that the video was rendered as a black rectangle and so was useless.

I resorted to the iMovie software on my mac to save as mp4 files which seems to have worked.

Then I uploaded them to my Amazon S3 account and got a wordpress .flv plugin to easily add a player to my blog pages. Remember to change the permissions on you files at Amazon so that they are readable! That one had me puzzled for a few hours.

It’s  all over now although I will be doing more videos for the site.

This week I’m going to finish of writing reviews of products that I recommend people check out then I’m wading into the exciting (and possibly costly) world of PPC to get some more traffic.

Currently I’m getting about 10 visits a day which according to some stats I’ve read would result in 1 sale every 3 months. That’s no good!

I’m also looking to get 20 sign ups a day to my mailing list until I have about 1000 subscribers.

This weeks tasklist

• Upload my 6 Part Mini-Course lessons that I’ve been recording this week. They all seem to be too big even when they’re compressed! It’s driving me nuts!
• 2 blog comments and 2 forum posts
• 5 new articles for my site
• 1 Ezine article
• 3 articles into AMA

Here’s my traffic snapshot for this month. A weird spike on Friday. Not sure why that was. Could be because I posted about the site on my other music blog.

Last week I felt overwhelmed by the amount of tasks that I could be doing. But as the saying goes, I have only one pair of hands and I can only focus on one thing at a time.

The problem with that is your subconscious mind is constantly analysing the opportunity cost of spending time on a task.

Let’s take an example: Should I

a) Write a new article for my site

b) Participate in a forum thread

c) Spend an hour on article marketing

Now, I have no way of telling which activity will benefit my business more. I’m pretty sure all 3 are worth doing but which one is worth doing the most? It’s impossible to say.

in addition, there will be no feedback once I’ve completed the task as to how useful (or not) it was. Our (western educated) brains are conditioned to expect some feedback from every endeavour we engage in and if there is no feedback then we regard it as a waste of time.

The trouble is, may brain is trying desperately to work out which activity is more valuable. And since there is no answer, it leads to a state of anxiety accumulating in paralysis and avoidance of doing ANY of the tasks. Ouch! That’s not going to get me anywhere.

So what do I do?

I’ve decided to create a simple task list for next month that details exactly what I should do on any given day. You can download my schedule for this month here

It’s pretty simple but it is my guide out of the paralysis of choice. If I engage a little faith in the fact that it’s going to work long term then I can allow my brain to stop attempting to analyse the opportunity costs of each task and I can, without too much thought, execute the required tasks.

This weeks tasklist

• Change the Guitar Superstar banner on GreenGuitarGuy.com to a Jamorama banner
• Consider adding GreenGuitarGuy to paid directories as recommended on SEOmoz
• Start considering PPC AdGroups. I’m not going to do any PPC at the moment but I can start putting AdGroups together for future use.
• Think of a good video to create as link bait. I might do a version of Dolly Parton’s “9-5″ on guitar and create a lesson on how to play it.
• Post some helpful comments or tips from my experience on internet marketing forums such as Warrior forums and Digital Point forums.