Bankruptcy to Millionaire

Well gang,

I must apologize. I have not been updating as often as I should, and when I do it’s more “fluff” to keep stuff fresh on the page.

Quite honestly I haven’t been inspired to write here. Which is a lame-ass reason, I have been caught up in a number of projects that I took on all at once–maybe wrong fully so. Have been spending every spare moment trying to get started with my Local Niche Blog Tacoma Downtown . A new niche affiliate site that will be promoting a fantastic offer. I plan on scaling some Pay-Per-Click soon.

I am also attempting to grow my offline business. Coupled with a full time job, and quite honestly, with this site not making much money, it’s been unintentionally (and wrongfully) put on the back burner.

Also, I am slacking when it comes to my own personal development. I am not reading ANYTHING, even though I have a stack of books I’d like to read. (I did take on a personal development challenge recently, which I’ll explain tomorrow.)

So, I promise more in depth, read-worthy ads. Until tomorrow,

Cheers,

Tevin

Ok, well the moment of truth is here. These are the results from my Two Week Cash Challenge:

(I didn’t realize the numbers were so bad. I guess I wasn’t tracking as well as I should have. This is a true confession.)

Adwords Statistics

30,000 Impressions

464 Clicks

1.52% Overall CTR

$132.55 (*cringe*) cost

Landing Page Statistics:

46 Initial Opt-Ins

20 Confirmed Double Opt-Ins

Clickbank Statistics:

251 Clicks To The Product Sales Page

1 Sale (+24.55)

Total Two Week Cash Challenge Results:

20 newsletter subscribers

-$108.00

There you have it. My confession. I’m not buttering things up here. I did NOT meet my expectations, or my financial goal. Some may look at this as a failure. I do not. It was a great learning experience for me. I know many areas where I went wrong, and what I can do better next time.

What went wrong?

There were a number of things I did wrong. I did not optimize my ad groups enough. I just broke them down in to basic categories. This was a small issue, but it did effect my quality score.

My biggest issue was:

I did not optimize/split-test my landing page/opt-in form. Looking at my statistics now, I realize how truly terrible they were!!! It started out great in the first two days, and after that I kind of ignored that number. This was a huge mistake! I shoud have paused my campaign as soon as I noticed I wasn’t over 50% and started optizing the landing page.

If you are starting in affiliate marketing. DO NOT MAKE THIS MISTAKE. Constantly track your numbers.

Which has inspired me for my next challege. Stay tuned tomorrow. I am going to challenge myself, and YOU. If you can keep up, there is something in it for you.

If you challenged yourself, what were your results?

I find myself at times having trouble “pulling the trigger”. I’ll so often get 90% of the way there. But that last 10% can seem so arduous. So time consuming. So difficult. That I’ll get stuck. Stalled. Or worse: Give up!

YUCK!

I hate it when I do this…

I just need to pull the trigger! I have an adwords campaign that’s 90% completed. All I basically have to do is upload the page, and pull the trigger. But I keep stalling. I keep putting it off. I keep “forgetting” to get around to it. I put the campaign together about 3 days before I launched this blog. And it sits there for close to two weeks untouched. 90% of the work done.

I haven’t implemented something on this blog like I wish I had by now (opt-in reminders, specifically) .

It isn’t for lack of knowledge. Lack of time. Or anything like that. I think it comes down to one simple reason.

Fear of Failure.

Because if I don’t pull the trigger. I can’t fail.

YIKES! Lets stop this today!

From now on, I’m going to pull the trigger. I can’t be paralyzed by the fear of failure. To become a success I must, overcome this fear. Because logically I realize that if I take ACTION and I FAIL… SO WHAT!?

Not only am I no worse off than I was before I failed. I’m one step closer to finding success. And that by definition is a success to me. I have then succeeded in finding out what doesn’t work!

Are you paralyzed by the fear of failure? Are you scared to take the plunge? Just decide. Today! You’re going to stop putting it off. And TAKE ACTION NOW.

Building self discipline is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.

Skating by. Do as little as possible to get the job done. Cutting corners. Easily Distracted.

These used to describe me perfectly. The still do alot of the time. But I have a great ambition to break these. And MUST break them and soon. I must FORCE myself to do the things I do not want to do to become successful. Breaking these habits and character traits is tough, but not impossible.

I feel improvement everyday. I’m getting to sleep earlier, giving myself more energy in the day time to be productive, and less time wasted at night on late night useless TV. I’m improving the amount of work I’m getting done everyday. And I’m keeping this blog up to date (not everyday quite yet, but still often).

I still find myself mindlessly surfing at times on information on blogging. And then with the magic of the internet and Wikipedia, I’m all of a sudden studying the chemistry behind converting switch grass to a viable source of fuel for the world. When really, I should be getting productive profit making work accomplished.

This week I broke a couple promises I made to myself. I did not read for the full hour everyday, I instead watched an extra episode of Prison Break season 2 Box Set.

And I did not even make it out for a full day of cold calling for the advertising agency.

THIS IS NOT ACCEPTABLE TO ME. I MUST SET NEW STANDARDS.

In an effort to bring about change in myself I’ve taken a few extra steps. The first thing, I’ve arranged to have a meeting every Saturday evening with my boss, and owner of Creative Image Advertising (conveniently also my father) to discuss exactly what is expected of me to accomplish in the coming week. We will discuss exactly which days I will be calling. Who I will be calling. And other projects I should begin and finish work on.

This will help me gain a little more traction at work, and keep me on task a little better.

I’ve also MAPPED OUT MY ENTIRE WEEK. My time management skills they… well they SUCK. At times I’m so easily distracted I may get lost for several hours in something completely pointless. So I spent about an hour today developing exactly how and where I am going to spend my time.

I then printed out a work book and the put a comb binding on it. My worksheet looks similar to:

Then at the begging of each day I look at the list of goals I’ve set for the week, and pick the (up to) three most important to accomplish Today. Those will be my Major Accomplishments.

Then a bit of relaxation with TV Time, or personal time. Whether that’s going to the bar, or sitting on my ass watching TV, that’s my zone at veg time.

I’ll follow that up with my B2M Book Club reading (Still on Think and Grow Rich). Then I’ll pop in Halo 3 or Brush up on some web surfing studying and see what’s going on in the blogosphere. Finally, my daily dose of the Daily Show, then off to bed.

This helps me realize where my time is not only spent. But wasted. Once I put this together, I realized where my time is being wasted when I could be enjoying being productive instead of lazy.

The Big Lesson

Nobody is ever perfect. And I don’t expect to stick to this 100%, 100% of the time. But it will help me realize where my time SHOULD be being spent.

And not only that. I realize where my weakness is, and I’m making a valiant attempt to reconcile it, and adapt to it to find a system that WORKS FOR ME. No two peoples minds work exactly the same. So find the holes in your productivity, and figure out the best way to plug them with a system that works for you. Don’t just ignore them. Or worse accept them.