I didn’t plan on getting any further into the topic of the last post, affiliate marketing, just yet. I intended get right into more advanced topics like making your own digital products and designing sales websites and such since that’s what I’ve been doing lately.

But, strangely it seems that pointing my mind towards affiliate sales the other day has ensured that for whatever reason, over the last couple of days… I keep thinking of great ideas for quality affiliate sites that I wish I had shared in that previous post.

So, I made a list and here are some ideas for affiliate sites to help prevent your new affiliate website from looking like the majority of the affiliate sites out there…
You know… those annoying ones that clog up your search results with useless clutter. I don’t think you want to be just another one of those, if you can help it.

Don’t get too excited though. These ideas are just ideas, and only maybe a good starting place or stepping stone, for you… not anything “turn key” or ready to go as they are.
But, they’re still great ideas for anyone who is wondering what to make for their first money-making website.

1. Create an online tool: I see more and more of these sorts of affiliate sites all the time and I love it. It’s nice to find a quick and easy online tool to solve any repetitive or obscure task; like converting an image into a .ico icon file, or helping me choose a color scheme, or quickly getting some basic keywords. I love this idea so much; I plan on making a few online tools just as soon as I have time, even though I probably don’t need to. But, it sounds like fun.
2. Start a free subscription site: Just recently, all I was hearing about was the huge success of this or that free online subscription site which was monetized using affiliate commissions. Seems like a great way to start out as an affiliate. Although, right after that they all seemed to have realized that they could set their own “commissions” by just selling the ad space outright, (I think) but that’s another story and you need to prove significant traffic to make that transition. Also, I’ve always been in pure awe of some of the obvious affiliate websites (I won’t mention names) that are advertised on television for money related things. These sites are brilliant in the way they subtly offer you something of significant perceived value for free (when you sign up), allowing them to masquerade as some sort of public service, all the while simply funneling you (and all your information) on to their merchants who then begin to shamelessly market directly too you. (Hey, you signed up for it.)
3. Blog, blog, blog your little heart out: I mentioned this almost exclusively in my last post, so I really want to qualify this a bit and offer a bit of fair warning. Personally, I don’t like see a weblog created solely for the sake of affiliate marketing. These kinds of sites are often started by beginners and they usually end up looking like a “billboard” type page with nothing but ads as far as the eye can see and even the articles, if you bother to read them, are just promotions for this and that themselves. I’ve never seen those kinds of blogs do very well, even though I hear tales. So, please be careful not to be one of those lazy affiliates. Pages created purely for Adsense or “arbitrage” leave a bad taste in my mouth too and worse, they clog up honest searches and the Internet in general, with pure garbage. (But, apparently those do make quite a bit of revenue for their owners, unfortunately.) The best way to go if you’re looking into blogging for income is to find and read some really good affiliate blogs. They’re somewhat rare and I don’t think it would be wise to mention any names here. But, some affiliate blogs are simply amazing… incredibly helpful or genuinely useful or just fun to read or purely inspiring… these are great websites. At least aim high, please.
4. Start your own e-store: This is a simple revelation that many would-be affiliate marketers don’t seem to get right away but is still a good starting point for many. With a web store you’re not restricted to selling only digital products, or even selling your merchant’s products merely as an affiliate. You can become a reseller quite easily these days by simply installing something like Zen Cart, http://www.zen-cart.com, and choosing which products to sell and which drop shippers you’ll use. This isn’t like affiliate sales at all and is more like opening a “brick and mortar” store, but without having to pay some expensive payment processor, without having to keep any merchandise in a warehouse or even in your home office, without having to be constrained by your commission level, being able to mark up the products you’re selling however you want. One downside to this path, if you choose to take it, is that since you’re no longer “just an affiliate”, you will be expected to field support emails, handle customers directly and deal with shipping issues, just like any store owner.
5. Start a review site: This last one is a sort of hybrid between a blog and an online store, if you ask me. With this sort of site you’ll want to try having either a great presentation of comparisons or detailed product specs and honest reviews, or both. It’s sort of a web-store in the way it navigates, usually, and more like a blog in that you find brief articles (reviews) on each product. If you start one of these, you can have the power of selling multiple products from multiple merchants, and still not have to put up with any of the headaches of actually being a merchant.

I hope this helps shed some light on at least a handful of the many options available to any would-be affiliate (or reseller), or even the experienced Internet marketer, when formulating ideas for new websites.

Even though I don’t do much of it anymore, I owe a great debt to affiliate marketing. Prior to making my first sales as an affiliate, I had no idea that that the kind of freedom or self reliance of being able to make an income from anywhere… at any time, just by doing the right things on the Internet, could even be possible. I would never have believed it if someone had told me. In fact, I think someone did tell me and I didn’t believe it. But lucky for me (and probably for you too if you’re reading this), I was curious enough that I started looking into it.

At first I was only casually interested in any of it and I didn’t really want to start a business. I just wanted to make some extra money online, maybe even working for someone else… some kind of “work from home” employment maybe… that was, if it was possible without having to spend too much time money or energy doing any of it. Some of you can probably relate to that.

But, that, I later learned, is the worst attitude with which to approach discovering how to make money online because at first all I found were things that attracted me by what I thought I wanted; something easy that made sense to me at the time. (Back then I thought any “business opportunity” was a scam having been raised around that whole “poor people” mentality and I was really looking for some job, some form of employment that I could work from home or totally online.)

Well, I quickly exhausted my searches at the main job search websites, getting little more than offers for business opportunities disguised as listed jobs. And then I even tried everything from SMC (I fell for Mr. C, Tom Bosley, because I used to watch “Happy Days” as a kid.) to SFI (one step away from a pyramid scheme) and nothing worked for me even after following all the steps and everything. After months of earnestly trying everything I could find I began feeling like I was getting ripped off right and left by bogus opportunities like that paid surveys racket or people that thought I’d make a good mystery shopper if I paid them for some list of places to apply, or even multi-level marketing moms, if you can imagine that. Those marketing pyramids never worked out and I’m still waiting around for those free plane tickets I was promised by those survey people.

Just as I was about to announce that it was all a joke and every “make money online’ product was a total sham and end my quest for Internet riches for good… a dear friend (one who had a “Rich Dad”, to use Robert Kiyosaki’s term) did me a favor in pointing out my biggest misconception about the world.

“Look Mark,” he said, “Those things are a scam and a waste of time for most people… not because there’s not some legitimate opportunity, however buried it may be, in there somewhere for someone to keep it seeming legal, but because most people don’t even look at the opportunities in the correct light in the first place. Any stay at home Mom, or Dad for that matter, that thinks it’s a good idea to give up even more of their already scarce time filling out surveys online for peanuts and change, just doesn’t have the right mindset to ever do very well with money in the first place.”

I began to listen to him explain how much more awesome it is having your own online business, instead of just making a quick buck somewhere or by working for someone else. To make a long story short, suddenly a whole new world opened up before my eyes, the clouds parted and the radiant light of inspiration shot out of the sky and shone on me and I’ve never the same since.

He also pointed out to me a truth that still blows my mind every time I think of how misguided I had been before that realization: that trading your time, “the one thing there will never be enough of in your life”, for money, is the worst deal you can make in this world.

“Now, don’t get me wrong.”, he continued, “Unless you’re starting out with considerable seed money, enough to pay other people or other companies to do all the actual work for you, you’re going to have to put in a lot of time and sweat equity to get the ball rolling. Plus, there’s a lot to learn and it can take awhile to get your business legs. But, the potential gains and future freedom of a small Internet business far outweigh the relatively miniscule investments required to give it a shot. So why not try it?”

“Sounds good to me,” I said, “but how do I get started? I don’t know jack about business or even the Internet right now.”

Well, my friend was more of a “brick and mortar” type back then and was just getting started online too… But, he had a really good suggestion: that I look into something called affiliate marketing or becoming a partner or reseller of some company I liked and try my hand marketing other people’s products while I learned my way around the business world and the Internet.

Needless to say, it worked. I started out doing nothing more than promoting Clickbank products through Adwords without a website or anything and within a few months I was able to quit my job. I came to realize on my journey that you can earn money, really good money, before you know much of anything… and while you learn if you’re an Affiliate! Another amazing thing is these days you can get started for pretty close to free! Back when I started out with Adwords you had to be prepared to risk quite a bit of money on your ability to write decent ad “haikus”, but that’s another story.

For better or worse, the days of just throwing up an Adwords campaign without a website and watching the profit roll in without doing much more than occasionally adding some keywords or writing a new ad, are over. (It still is, in rare cases, possible for someone to just put up some ads and use their affiliate link directly and still make lots of money, [or just test something out] at least for a little while.) I still manage a few long time clients’ Adwords accounts and I highly recommend everyone try it at some point. But, I don’t recommend it to people who are just starting out because of the huge risks and pitfalls I encountered along the way, and these days it’s even harder and there’s more competition, not to mention the click prices are through the roof lately as huge companies come in with the intention of dominating certain areas even if they have to operate at a loss.

If you’re just starting out, it’s not a bad idea to find yourself a little “niche” at first, that your comfortable with and where you can earn while you learn… in a target market that’s either you ( because you’re part of it already ) or one you’ve thoroughly researched (See Part 2) and find promising or just some area of interest of yours, a hobby maybe… by starting a website right out of the gate. Yeah, you heard me right. Just start a website. It has never been easier.

“But, what kind of website?” you ask. Well, that’s the kind of question held me up for a long time when I first realized I needed websites. What kind? How should they be organized? How should they look? How in the world do I write all this code myself? Well, I ended up spending years learning HTML, CSS and PHP, but I have good news for you. You don’t have to learn any of that. All you need is Wordpress and it’s free.

How to blog for profit is a big enough subject to fill several e-books so I’ll get more into the actual mechanics of blogging and promoting products in another series of posts.

However, just as affiliate marketing is a great way to get a crash course in, and also earn while you learn about, Internet business and marketing… Wordpress is a great way to get set up with a website instantly and easily even if you don’t know anything about code or computer languages or servers or any of that. If you know absolutely nothing, the hardest thing you’ll do is set up your database in Cpanel and that’s not hard at all.

In a nutshell, a blog is a great way to build yourself a sort of marketing platform, if you will, where you can inform and educate your target market, giving them the knowledge they seek to make informed purchases, while trying out many different merchants to see which ones work best with your audience and which products are really the best. At this level of marketing you’re free to just be yourself and have a good time and get to know your customers. I’d say it’s definitely the easiest way that just about anyone can get started. Just start blogging.

To get started right now, head over to Wordpress.org and download the free software. If you need a domain name, any registrar will do, I use Godaddy.com myself. But, never get hosting from them or anywhere you get your domains. Get a separate hosting provider. Any shared hosting package will do when you’re just starting out. I do have two suggestions about hosting however: 1. Don’t host with anyone that doesn’t have larger plans you can easily “grow into” if your site suddenly takes off. And, 2. Don’t get a Windows server, make sure the hosting provider has up to date versions of Apache, PHP, MySQL, and Cpanel.

P.S. Did you know? You can also use a blog to debut your own products when you have product ideas of your own, much like I plan on doing with this blog here. That’s actually why I haven’t posted in a few days. I’ve been working night and day on a program that I use to run my online sales and paid subscription websites. I’ve been getting requests since last year to release my system, so I’m finally touching up my scripts, polishing my code and making video tutorials to get ready to launch this baby into the stratosphere. I just know everyone is going to go all ga-ga over this one and I’m excited to say the least.

I’ll explain more in part 4 and 5 of this series where I’ll get into product creation and web development and how best to start selling your own products or services online.

So you think you might want to start some sort of Internet business. Whether you want to start out as an affiliate selling other people’s products or you’d like to jump right into selling your own products online (or both), one of the first things you should do is some serious market research to find out where to focus your efforts. Today I’ll be briefly going over a few ways to do figure out what market is right for you and then how to find out what sorts of things people in that market want to buy from you.

If you’ve been reading about online business, Internet marketing or affiliate marketing for any length of time you’ve probably heard that brilliant sounding over-simplification, “Find a hot target market. Then find out what they want to buy. Then sell it to them.” Well, that’s true enough, but hardly tells you anything useful about actually doing it. First, let’s start with, “Find a hot target market.”

Method 1 – Keywords

A quick and easy way to get a general idea of the supply and demand and competition for various markets online is to simply find out first how many searches are being performed vs. how much businesses are willing to pay per click for those search terms, or “keywords”.

The simplest way to get a general idea of the demand for anything online is to just type in search terms related to what you’re researching and look at the number of results. It will look something like this “Results 1 - 10 of about 105,000,000 for…your keyword”. It’s not a gauge of how many searches were performed for that term but it shows about how many websites contain information related to your search term, which can give you an idea of how popular something is.

To get the actual search counts per month for any given keyword, you can also use sites like the keyword tool at Digital Point Services, http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/?keywords , or the old Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool which still seems to be online, http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ , or the new free Wordtracker suggestion tool at http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/ .

By the way, I use the paid Wordtracker yearly subscription and I love the service. They make keyword research a joy.

Next, to see how much people are paying per click for your keywords, you’ll need to sign up for a Yahoo Search Marketing account and use their bids analyzer tool. Using that, you can see the bids per click that the guys in the top search results are paying for your keywords. This will give you a general idea of how much merchants in that market are willing to pay, and so earning, from that market or niche. It can also give you some insight into exactly who may be your future competition, if you decide to pursue that market.

Here are some extra links to helpful keyword research tools:

A keyword Map of the Internet:
http://www.kwmap.com/

Google’s External Keyword Tool (No Adwords Account Required)
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Webmaster Toolkit
http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/keyword-research-tool.shtml

Shopping.com Top Searches
http://www.shopping.com/top_searches

Method 2 – Stats and Data

To get a more in-depth look at what is going on in a particular industry or market you can use sites like the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, http://sec.gov/ to find out how much money public companies are making in each industry among other useful things. For information about private businesses, there are services like Hoover’s Online, http://www.hoovers.com/free/ , or Forrester Research, http://www.forrester.com that compile industry and marketing data on just about everything under the sun. Those services offer some pretty cool free tools and newsletters. However, most of their services can be on the expensive side, so you’ll probably want to start out with sites like Yahoo Finance, http://biz.yahoo.com/ic/ and Web Marketing Today, http://www.wilsonweb.com/research/ , that are free and also incredibly in-depth.

I realize that I called this a separate method, but you’ll still usually want to do the keyword research mentioned in the first method also, after you get your target market nailed down.

Method 3 – The “Average Joe” Approach

This last method of doing market research and finding your target market is slower, but a lot easier than the above two methods and can actually be more effective and economical in the long run. You simply take a close look at your own interests and hobbies and skills, or even just things that you would like to learn more about… be sure to write it all down and make a list… then pick one or even a handful of things you’d like to pursue that you think have the possibility of making money (some keyword and regular market research can help here) and then simply join online groups for whatever it is. You can do a search on, for instance “Your Keyword + forums” to find online forums related to your prospective market. You can also do the same search for blogs or groups.

A good place to start is Google Groups, http://groups.google.com . Just sign up to any groups that pertain to the market you’d like to get into and become an active member. It won’t take long until you have a good idea what that target market’s likes and dislikes may be and also what they’d want to buy if you were selling it.

This last approach, unlike the other two, seamlessly leads into the second part of the above phrase, “Find out what they want to buy” without doing anything else. In fact, after you apply either keyword or general market research, it’s not a bad idea to also apply this final method and get to know your target market personally.

Once you get a feel for your target market you can either, A: proceed full steam into either becoming an affiliate or creating products for that market, (or both), or B: You can step back and try another idea if you find out your initial choice of markets don’t look that promising after all. Either way, you save yourself lots of time and money by doing your research, whether it’s keyword research, more traditional market research, or just my “regular guy” approach, before you do anything else. (Tip: Save yourself even further time and money by never stopping your market research.).

“And what about the final step?”, you ask, “Sell it to them… How do I do that?”

Well that’s a huge topic and it will have to be broken up into several parts. Stay tuned for part 3 of this series where I’ll be showing you how to become a profitable affiliate and part 4 where I show you how and where to create your products, or have them created, for your chosen target market.

I know it’s not a pleasant topic. Neither does anyone wish to hear that they don’t know enough to succeed right out of the box. But, for me to be completely honest with you may require that you try and accept that most of these “gurus” (these days they like to call themselves “mentors” too) are lying to you by omission.

I’m not saying you’re stupid, or even ignorant, for goodness sake. All I’m saying is maybe you don’t know everything you need to know to do your own market research, then sell like a madman as an affiliate until you know where you fit in the grand scheme of things, then create your own digital products, or maybe you don’t know where and how to best sell your existing physical products or services, let alone learning how to write attention grabbing sales copy or honest too goodness “pre-sales” technical reports, then proceed to market your wares all across the Internet using the latest in digital media with the skill of a ninja using every possible means at your disposal… just out of the blue or overnight. I’ve only very rarely seen that happen and I know lots of smart people.

For heaven’s sake just think about it a minute! In the corporate world all these widely varied skills get divided into completely separate companies! There are research companies, outsourcing and freelance companies, graphic design companies, web-master and web development companies, marketing companies and even further companies for customer support.

When you begin running your online business you are expected to fill all of those roles, all by yourself, at least at first, unless you can afford to start hiring other companies to do the work for you from the beginning and if you could do that you probably wouldn’t be reading blogs trying to find your answers.

The truth that nobody wants to tell you is that it takes a lot of time and effort to learn things like how to find a decent market, how to get the right information, how to figure out what to promote and then create, or even just how to sell whatever is it is you’re trying to sell online. I won’t lie to you. It isn’t usually easy, or fun, or glamorous, or quick. The honest truth is that it’s a helluva lot of work to do anything worth doing unless you’re already blessed with some sort of magic money tree and you can afford to waste dollar after dollar until you figure out how to turn a profit.

But, here’s the thing. These illusions that these “gurus” are selling, while usually not as easy as portrayed, are technically real and do exist for many persistant people. I suppose that fact is how some of the more shady "gurus" get away with misleading people and leading them to believe that just anyone can make a fortune online in a short time with little effort.

Eventually it IS possible to work 3 hours a week, or less, and still watch those huge checks roll in month after month or every two weeks, by switching everything to auto-pilot while you go on vacation. Imagine spending a few weeks working your tail off and then taking the next 6 months off and travel around the world if you want to. Once you know what you’re doing, that does become a possibility.

My friends and colleagues and I live the dream and we’re not that special, I can tell you. The secret is we work long hours when we have to and we just don’t ever give up trying new things.

But, it’s not something that the average person can do cold turkey, and you only get there after putting in your dues; a lot of long hours to get things started.

Ahem, that is, unless you know the right people… people that can save you time and money by letting you know what works and what doesn’t before you waste your time and money chasing everything under the sun.

But, learning just the basics takes time and learning everything you need to know could take years… especially the way the sharks out there like to try and slow you down by filling your head with useless information to cause you “information overload” and keep you buying their products. To learn only what you need to learn to do it quickly, you need to find someone to show you how to do it right from the beginning.

So this will be my attempt to put the whole thing is some kind of nutshell.

I will begin the next installment with various ways to conduct useful market research from you computer.

Then we’ll get into a little bit about affiliate sales and finding your “niche” in a market. …Then product creation, web design, marketing and copywriting and even customer service and anything else I can think of that might be helpful.

It turns out it’s not that hard to create the illusion of a 3D rollover button using nothing more than CSS and no images. Play the video below to watch over my shoulder as I do it.

Color Scheme Generator 2:

http://www.wellstyled.com/tools/colorscheme2/index-en.html

The CSS:

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input.subscribeButton {
	font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
	color: #333333;
	font-weight: bold;
	border: 2px solid;
	padding: 2px 5px 2px 5px;
	border-color: #D9D4C3 #BFBBAC #BFBBAC #D9D4C3;
	background-color: #FFFAE6;
}
input.subscribeButton:hover {
	border-color: #BFBBAC #D9D4C3 #D9D4C3 #BFBBAC;
 
}
input.subscribeButton:active {
	background-color: #807D73;
	color: #FFFFFF;
}
.center {
	text-align: center;
}

The HTML:

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<form method="post" action="#">
<table><tbody>
<tr>
<td>Name:</td>
<td><input name="name" size="20" type="text" /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Email:</td>
<td><input name="from" size="20" type="text" /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="center" colspan="2"><input class="subscribeButton" style="cursor: pointer" name="submit" value="Subscribe Now!" type="button" /></td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
</form>

I have begun making video tutorials for some coding and web development tasks I’ll be demonstrating. But, instead of just slapping the videos up on the blog here and using my own bandwidth, I want to take advantage of these online video services.

And, instead of uploading my videos to each service one at a time… YouTube, Google Video, then Yahoo, etc., I’m testing out a new service called Tube Mogul that promises to upload my videos to several online video sites at one time, AND give me the ability to track everything from one place.

Sounds pretty cool huh? Well, we’ll see.

Here’s the link to Tube Mogul if you’re curious:
http://www.tubemogul.com

I’ll let y’all know the results of my little test and if the extra effort ends up being worthwhile, just as soon as I get that first video posted here at the blog.

Sneak Peek: The first video tutorial will be on how to make 3D rollover buttons, like the one on my subscribe form in the sidebar to the right, using just CSS and without images.

Are you fed up with being told to “be positive” or even,“stop complaining” by online business mentors and gurus and generally every Internet marketing or online business product owner? Have you had enough of them trying to make you feel inferior just because you don’t walk around with a huge fake smile on your face 24/7, or kiss the their highnesses feet? You’re not alone. And, I have some great news. You don’t have to feel bad anymore about not feeling good enough, according to recent discoveries outlined in the February 8, 2008 issue of Newsweek’s article by Sharon Begley, “Happiness: Enough Already”.

Discoveries in science about the brain, around the early 1990’s, seem to have catapulted this happiness nonsense. First, there was the insight about the brain’s activity in certain areas underlying the sense of well-being in people. Then there came the emergence of “positive psychology”, who’s proponents urged fellow researchers to study happiness as seriously as they did pathological states such as clinical depression. (Not the kind of unhappiness that most people confuse with actual depression, the real disorder) And, “when the science of happiness collided with pop culture and the marketplace, it morphed into something even its creators hardly recognized”, an industry designed to drug you or help you suppress or remove your natural emotions.

This happiness industry, according to Newsweek, “sends the insistent message that moderate levels of well-being aren’t enough: not only can we all be happier, but we practically have a duty to be so.”

Thankfully the same science that started this mess has finally had the time to make further discoveries that poke huge holes in this happiness movement and bring some sanity back to the issue.

So, what is the latest discovery? Humans need to feel the full range of human emotions. Duh. I’ve been saying that ever since the first anti-depressants began being pushed on television. It’s just common sense.

Ed Diener and his colleagues write in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, in their experiments on happiness, on a scale from 1 to 10 with 10 being the happiest, 8s were more successful than 9s and 10s, getting more education and earning more. In fact they state that, “once a moderate level of happiness is achieved, further increases can sometimes be detrimental” to income.

This suggests what I’ve been saying all along… that some level of discontent (not enough as to paralyze you of course, such as clinical depression) is beneficial as it makes a person strive to better themselves and the world around them. Another thing I’ve always said is that these pushers of the happiness industry are intentionally confusing people about what real depression is, giving them the notion that if they’re not completely blissed out all the time then they must be depressed. Even some doctors have been fooled into prescribing anti-depressants for just about anyone who asks for them.

Everyone has probably noticed by now the way that drug companies push their ineffective anti-depression drugs on people, at the same time admitting that, over 75% or so of, people who try them still have “some symptoms of depression” and, then they’ll say, “Here’s another pill to fix that…”.

We’ve all seen the ads. They’re hard to avoid. But, what, I think, is more difficult to avoid is the truth that isn’t being told about this “happiness industry”. The truth is that they’ve taken what would normally be a perfectly normal emotion, reactions to things that are upsetting or just not right in the world… and instead of telling anyone to take responsibility for themselves and step up to the plate and make a difference in the world by working to change whatever is making you unhappy (the old fashioned way), they say, “Here, take this pill and stop thinking about it.” Just let us run the world and you go “be happy”.

It seems to me that they’re drugging the population so they won’t notice how screwed up the world has become and try to fix it! They’re also giving people what they want, a “get out of responsibility free” card. And, it’s just not right, in my book. I’ve had enough.

These self-help authors and webmasters who preach that everyone should walk around with huge fake smiles and pretend to be happier, or more “positive”, are just as guilty. These people are doing the exact same thing to everyone, just without pushing the drugs.

The truth is that people are not supposed to be that happy all the time. It’s not natural. Emotions were meant to be felt not suppressed or blocked by some pill or even released too early. They’re meant to be felt. They’re meant to be useful. And, the honest truth is that very few people are naturally blissed out on cloud nine all the time and those people that are probably have some imbalance in brain chemistry themselves.

What’s wrong with feeling a moderate sense of well-being like most people? What is wrong with a person pointing out the obvious flaws in some aspect of their lives or the world, or just some product they just bought? What’s wrong with being upset when somebody gives you a bad deal? Nothing. Absolutely Nothing. In fact being a well adjusted person must include the full range of human emotions and the ups and downs that accompany them.

The worst part about this enormous lie put out by these profit hungry pushers of happiness, that everyone should act positive and happy all the time, is that these pushers themselves can then turn around and use this notion as another way to avoid their main responsibility; the responsibility of listening and responding to their customers, whatever their customers’ attitude.

I recently read an article where one of these Internet business gurus actually likened his run-in with an upset customer to that customer “pooping on his floor” if you can imagine that. Ugh! What is wrong with someone that is so afraid of the normal range of human emotions that they can’t even engage in active conversation with someone who doesn’t fit their notion of being positive enough? Couldn’t the inability to talk with anyone that doesn’t fit your notion of “being positive”, be diagnosed as a disorder itself?

I think the real problem is that these people just don’t want to hear anything that might upset their own often too fragile mindset. In my humble opinion, these sorts are some of the weakest and most irrational people on the planet and people like that have no business running a business that has anything to do with customers. They certainly have no right o preach or give advice to others… bad advice at that.

So, if you’ve been worried that you’re just not “positive” enough to make it in Internet business, you can relax. Being successful in business doesn’t require you to be blissed out, and true success turns out to be much more than just being happy all the time. (Unless maybe you’re trying to sell a self-help idea that you can show people how to be happy all of the time.)

Sure, you still don’t want to wallow in negativity either. And, if you’re about to hang yourself or drive off a cliff, you should probably seek professional help and some sort of drugs that might keep you from offing yourself.

But, the majority of us seem to have been duped into thinking that life is supposed to be all rainbows and sunshine and if we don’t feel that way then something must be wrong with us. And, that’s just not true. That’s a lie that has been crammed down our throats to do nothing more than to sell pharmaceuticals and self-help programs.

So, relax. You don’t have to act fake or take some pill to get rid of your emotions. Most of us don’t need any of that. What we need is a more realistic and balanced view of what success really is… and how you can be just as big a success as you want to be without chasing some illusion that you should be happy all of the time.

After all, without sadness or just the regular “feelin’ alright”, how would anyone know what true happiness is when it comes? And, without people pointing out flaws or things they don’t like about the world… how in the world is anything ever supposed to get better?

Don’t ask the gurus or drug companies. They have a vested interest in your notion that you’re not happy enough as you are and instead of fixing anything for real, you should just take a pill or subscribe to their crazy ideas. I’ve even begun to wonder if there’s not some government conspiracy with the pharmaceutical industry to keep everyone drugged so they can run the country any way they please without anyone “complaining” too loudly… and where they’re running our country seems to be… into the ground, judging by the current state of affairs.

This will be my first "blog" and to be perfectly honest, I’m not thrilled about it. I’ve been hearing for months about how I should really start blogging and the mere mention of the word "blog" is beginning to make my stomach turn a little I’ve been making a great living online for the past 5 years without ever having to start blogging or trying to “create a name for myself” or anything like that, and quite frankly, I preferred it that way. I never in a million years wanted to be famous for selling stuff or even well known and I certainly never wanted my name used in a website domain. All I ever wanted from this online business thing is to never ever have to be locked in as someone’s employee ever again… to make enough money to stay at home and have the freedom to work where and when I please. I’m sure a lot of you can relate to that.

I’m happy to be able to say that I’ve been successful in that regard for just over a handful of years now. Working from home, I’ve been blessed with the extra time I wanted to raise my step-son from age 10 on up, he’s now 15, to be the fine young man he has become. (I’ve apparently done so well that my wife has decided it’s time to have another and we’re starting all over again sometime this coming August when she’s due! That’s fantastic news and we’re thrilled.

But, it also means that it’s time for me to grow up a little and stop lurking behind the scenes making a moderately good income when I could be out here helping people AND building something larger than just my own marketing endeavors.

You’ve probably never heard of me before now. And, that’s good. It’s mostly because I liked it better that way until recently, but also probably because I’ve never claimed to have a bestseller hit and I’ve never been touted as a “super affiliate”, whatever that is, although making hundreds of sales a day, sending thousands of visitors a day, to my favorite merchant as an affiliate probably would qualify.

Ah, those were the good ol’ days. Up until just about a year ago, if you had any knack at all for writing short catchy phrases, PPC (pay per click) was easy money and a mostly passive income too. Getting checks every two weeks for thousands of dollars from Clickbank is pretty fun, especially when the work was done months previous and you haven’t done a darn thing but have a good time all summer. Unfortunately, these days PPC usually also involves a lot more work, like creating websites and landing pages, and that also amounts to extra steps for the consumer and so usually less sales for you. The easy days of writing a great AD and sending targeted traffic directly to a merchant seem to have become a thing of the past. These days everyone seems to be all about building email lists and keeping those customers for yourself, instead of just passing them on to some merchant. So, now that means that the days of easy passive Internet income are over and the whole thing involves a lot more work and time and creativity.

However, being an affiliate can still be fun and it’s a good way to learn the ropes of online marketing and business because it allows a person to focus on marketing and learning the technical aspects of the work while collecting a nice fat check for your efforts and letting all the merchants’ worry about all the headaches of running the actual business.

I will be adding a few articles on how to be a successful affiliate, however the bulk of this site will be focused on research, product creation, Internet marketing and generally how to start your own online business and get your own affiliates.

But, whether you start out as an affiliate or you jump right into online business with some sort of mall or shopping cart site, eventually you’ll have ideas and you’ll want to create your own products too, like me over the past year or so. When that bug bites, you enter a whole new world of mine fields to navigate, just to learn the basics, with countless experts vying for your attention, clogging up your inbox. Cutting through the clutter is a real challenge. Knowing who to listen to is another. I’ve been around the block enough times to know usually who’s telling the truth and who’s full of nonsense, or just full of themselves, and I’m pretty hard on most of these “gurus”. I certainly won’t be recommending anything just because I have a deal with someone or I’m getting a commission.

No, the only tools, websites, software or information products that will be recommended here are either things that I myself use or have used successfully in one way or another. I’m even working on releasing, very soon now, some software of my own that I’ve been building and using that will completely automate the whole process that I personally use to sell digital products through my favorite payment processor at the moment, Clickbank.

So, to sum it all up, my reasons for finally giving in to my family’s and friends’ repeated requests to start this blog, even though I don’t care about seeing my “name in lights”, are many. Even though I really don’t relish the thought of writing articles every day, or even every week, I do feel the need to give back and to help people who are starting out like I was years ago. Also, I feel the need to give back to the community something that I never found while “cutting my teeth” in online business; an honest behind the scenes look at some of the more practical “nuts and bolts” aspects of the actual work required. Plus, it will be nice to have a simple URL to give to the people I meet almost daily that ask me to explain how I make money online.

The pitfalls when just starting out in online business are many, and they’re pretty much impossible to explain in just one sitting, even though I often try.

The first one is that unless you are starting out with lots of disposable money that you don’t mind burning while you learn how to outsource everything, you’re going to have to get the job done yourself somehow. Usually, get anything done yourself you’ll most likely have to learn at least the basics of writing ads and articles, plus many technical skills, along with codes like HTML, CSS and PHP, unless you already know all that. And, even if you already have lots of money and are planning to outsource everything from the start, having at least some knowledge of the technical side is important and can help you avoid getting taken advantage of.

So, future articles on how to create and do certain things with your websites will be a high priority.

Another thing I will be addressing is the reality of working from home and what you can do to protect yourself from the predators out there and how to keep your sanity amid the enormous steaming piles of hooey out there.

Believe it or not, there seem to even be people out there who have a vested interest in creating the illusion that it’s all so easy that anyone can do it, or that it takes so little time that you can do it on the side. While this is possible through automation it usually doesn’t come until after you’ve done all the tedious work to actually start your business and the way most of those online business or “work from home” products are presented is an outright lie.

When I think of this, the recent wave of bad television commercials for shady online business products leaps to mind. One even has some cartoon fox telling you to be “Crazy like a Fox”. You’d be crazy to buy that junk. In my experience, the truth about online business and working form home is that… sure the opportunities are there, but the whole thing just isn’t suitable for most people and very few people really do have the patience and determination and self motivation and enormous amounts of free time, (or if you have none of those… the money) that is required to start a home business on the Internet.

But, these “gurus” and “experts” out there want as many people as possible to believe that just anyone can do it… with their instructions of course. They want as many people as possible to believe their lies… at least long enough for them to buy themselves a case of information overload. I imagine that if they only sold their products to the people that could actually use them they probably wouldn’t be so filthy rich.

Whether it’s intentional or not, most online business and “work from home” products are usually overflowing with every sort of vague and useless overview-type information they can throw in, often managing to never provide a single bit of practical specific detailed information on any one thing. This “information overload” often seems to be designed to keep your head spinning at least long enough for the refund period to expire.

Then they’ll turn around and tell you your problem is that you have “information overload” (I think some Internet marketing guru probably coined that phrase), and then they’ll proceed to sell you another of their products that’s supposed to fix this new problem they themselves have created!

You’re left with folders full of junk products that just sit there, useless… collecting digital dust. And, if you’re like I used to be, you’re probably immediately off buying the next new information product that claims to have all the answers. You may even be starting to think that maybe these guys are misleading you, or intentionally spreading misinformation for their own profit, or just not telling anyone the whole truth. And, in many ways I think you’d be right.

You’ll probably be shocked to learn that even most of those websites out there in this field that advertise, “Don’t get scammed”, or similar things are some of the biggest scams out there! To top that, I won’t name names today, but even most of the sites that claim to be for “work at home Moms” are full of scams! It’s outrageous. Who can you trust when that sort of nonsense is tolerated?

So, the main mission of this blog will be to help people avoid getting taken advantage of by the sharks that so frequently swim in the muddy waters of online business and Internet marketing.

If you’re one of those little sharks out looking for unwitting sucker to promote your stuff, or you’re a new student of online business that’s just looking for some kind of fake product recommendations thing full of rosy images or overly positive descriptions, you should leave now. This is not the site for you. This blog is for people who can handle the truth without having their whole day ruined just because I’m not “being positive” or some such hooey.

I’ll instead most likely be doing the opposite, using my unavoidably hilarious and sometimes sarcastic wit to cut through as much bull as possible to bring you practical, timely information on how to really start generating your income from the Internet.