Here’s a little Taoism in affiliate markeitng for you. I’ve been reading this book called Silent Power by Stuart Wilde. In it, one of the quotes in the book really caught by eye and made me take a step back in how I’ve been running my affiliate marketing game.

“Striving is leaning emotionally into a goal, a target- yearning for it, feeling pressured by your lack of it- tearing around like a chicken , with its head cut off, trying to get it. That’s striving.

Working is moving relentlessly toward your target, one step at a time, in an organized and disciplined way.”

The book notes that there are three reasons why we struggle and why struggling is not the same as effort. Struggle is not an honorable thing. And the two reasons for it are

1) The goal you are trying to reach isn’t coming fast enough.

2) Your actions are incorrect (wrong strategy).

3) Frustration from having placed a goal into a particular time frame, only to find that life has denied you.

Realizing the fact that I’ve been suffering many of the same symptoms, I need to set a rather medium term goal and have a well-defined method. I’ve been testing way too many offers and I continue to do so in the hopes that one of them might take off. I was consistently making $200-250 a day until this week and it is really depressing to see it all go back to square one again.

So my medium term goal is to make $500 a day consistenly by the end of December 2009.

Further, I’m now gonna take a very clearly defined approach as to which offers I work on and when I test new offers. I think the following will work best for me:

• Focus on ONE offer at a time (if offer is offered in multiple countries, then just one country at a time.)

• Only move onto another country/offer once that particular one is consistently making $100 a day profit.

• Work for a maximum of four hours a day (yeah right like I’m gonna be able to do this one, but I’ll try.)

If anyone has any other tips on how to scale a profitable campaign or perhaps their own specific method on when/how to approach testing new offers, feel free to post them in the comments .

These are just some of the top apps that I use that keep me on top of the ball whether in terms of productivity or finances.

1. Google Tasks FTW – So many companies have tried to innovate and revolutionize the “to do” list, and of all the downloads and apps I’ve ever tried to replace the sticky note, nothing has come as close as Google Tasks. This little feature is neatly tucked away at the bottom of my GMail screen and the reason it works is because I’m forced to look at it if I want to check my email…which is pretty much all the time. There’s no escaping the to do list with Google Tasks.

2. Mint.com – If you haven’t checked out Mint.com, do it today! This thing kicks ass and beats just about any financial app out there. Forget plugging away at your calculator, figuring out your budget, and how much you spent. All you have to do is upload all your accounts/loans/assets/debit and credit cards and this site automatically tells you what your budget should be and if you’re staying on top of it. It tracks your net worth on a daily basis and makes all sorts of bar graphs and pie charts that make u feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Check it out – Mint.com.

3. RescueTime – Here’s one application that I haven’t used as much as the rest, but I probably should. RescueTime runs in the background of your computer and keeps track of which websites/applications you spend the most time on. This way – if you’re spending too much time on say Facebook or AIM, Rescue Time let’s you know by email and even sends you daily/weekly updates on where you’ve been spending your time. Get RescueTime if you’re at all concerned about productivity.

Do you use any of the following? Let me know your thoughts in the comments!

Finally some progress! And along to go with it – finally a brand new theme and upgrade! Hope you guys like it.

Right before ASE 09, my AM progress really started to pick up. I’d been in the “dead zone” or “dip” for about six months. Nothing I tried was working and I threw a whole lot of crap at the wall just to see if something would stick.

Fortunately, things are going okay now and only going to get better. I’m now chipping away at my $10,000 worth of PPC debt from failed attempts and stupid mistakes. In fact, I’ve already paid off one of my credit cards just by using what little credit I had left on it (less than $100) by continually re-investing it into profitable campaigns.

Here’s a recap of spend and revenues for Aug. 2009 so far:

Revenue: $4620.23

Spend: $3104.54

Profit: $1515.69

Add SEO/ old clickbank articles: $395

So around $$1900 for the month. Much better than scraping for nickels and dimes in my room to buy a meal from the dollar menu a few months ago (seriously, it was that bad).

Keep in mind this spend involved a lot of testing during the beginning of the month so most of it resulted in a loss. But I will post another one of these probably two weeks into September. I expect it to be a lot better. This is the first time I’ve ever really posted revenue/spend numbers and it’s kind of gut wrenching to put it out in the open, but I think it’s going to help me bring in bigger numbers in the future because there’s no way I’m satisfied with just that. Grateful yes, satisfied no.

I’m really starting to focus on what I’m good at now. Just because everyone is pushing rebills, doesn’t mean you should too. There are a whole lot of offers out there that can potentially make you money and it’s all about just finding that somewhat hidden offer that not a lot of people are going after and killing it.

This marks a new turning point in my AM journey. I went from easily making $100+ days when I started to losing a lot of money and now back doing bigger numbers than I started off with. It’s so weird now – I was in the garage and saw my old burnt out laptop sitting there with sticky notes on it with a big $250 a day written on it. It feels good to reach your goals, but it also makes you want to work harder. I definitely am aiming to see consistent $500 a day profit days by the end of September (hopefully by next week) and most certainly $1000 by December 31st, 2009.

If there’s going to be a rags-to-riches affiliate story in 2009, it’s going to be me .

Okay so this post is definitely long over due, but what can I say – I learned so much at ASE 09 NYC that I’ve just been cranking out campaigns non-stop and making more money.

First off – this particular Affiliate Summit (my 2nd summit) was made particular awesome due to two reasons.

1) Ian Fernando inviting me to his private dinner.

2) Adam and the EliteProfits.com team sponsoring part of the dinner and balling out at Club Touch.

I have to say that it was indeed quite an opportunity to take part in Ian’s dinner. If you ever get the chance to go, you’d be dumb not to. It was at a very unique and upscale restaurant only a few blocks away from the conference hotel. There were about 20 or so people in attendance including the sponsors and everyone got to share and learn from each other in a great setting. Really gotta give it up to Ian for letting me come through.

Now another thing that made the dinner so great was the fact that Adam from EliteProfits handed everyone in attendance a vintage 2000 bottle of Dom Perignon! I can definitely say without a doubt that everyone was very very happy with their gift. EliteProfits didn’t stop there though. After running into Adam at the exhibition hall, he invited me to come hang out with his crew at Club Touch in VIP. I thought for sure since I was going there anyway later on and he and his crew were super cool at the dinner.
Biz Markee was due to perform there although he made a quick one song appearance…lame. Nonetheless, that didn’t ruin the party for anyone who was hanging out with EliteProfits. Our table definitely had the grey goose flowing all night courtesy of EliteProfits. I think we had the best spot in the club too. It was definitely a good time getting to talk to Adam about AM as well as meet and talk with the rest of his crew.

Later on in the night we got to chilling in the upper level and I got to meet a lot of affiliates I had only read or heard about like Dennis Yu as well as chill out with Ian and Ad Hustler. This is pretty much the point of the story where the rest is forgotten or withheld haha.

I have to say though that it definitely wouldn’t have been as good of a weekend without EliteProfits throwing it down. Up until recently, they had been a completely private network. These guys have been in the industry since the heyday and definitely know how to look out for their affiliates and most of all they actually know what they are talking about. When I talked to Adam I knew he knew his stuff and that he had done it and continues to make stuff happen in affiliate marketing for himself as well as his affiliates.

I highly suggest you check out EliteProfits today and get in touch with Adam. This is one network you do not want to miss out on.

After you’ve done that, check out this slideshow from the party: Slideshow

Now the title of this post might be corny, but here’s the thing.

I’ve noticed that I’ve been so hell bent on focusing on failure and embracing failing so much, that I’ve completely been short sighting myself because what I should be focusing on is success.

It’s important to know that you need to fail in order to learn, but when that becomes your sole train of thought it’s no good.

I need to move away from the notion of failing to succeed because I’m comfortable with it now after facing it every single day over the past year and a half. In fact, I think I’ve always been able to embrace failure and perhaps a little too much.

That’s why from today on I’m going to try and post about various challenges and the success I’m having along with them.

The first success of my 60 days of success is choosing to go healthy. I’ve been eating a whole lot of unhealthy fast food and staying on the computer for hours on a day without hitting the gym is doing a lot of damage to my health.

That’s why I’ve decided to try out the V Diet (Lite version). The main reason I’m doing this is not because I want a quick and easy way to gain muscle/lose fat, but rather to get used to and hopefully actually start liking healthy food.
The diet consists of replacing breakfast and dinner with protein shakes essentially. Along with this, I’ll be following a regimen of in house exercises as I’m not quit ready to hit the gym yet (I think the reason I hate the gym is because I hate working out in front of people esp as a noob).

Anyhow, I’ll be starting tomorrow (hopefully) and will let everyone know how it goes. I would post pics of my progress in getting rid of this beer belly gut of mine, but I’d rather not show up on some of those acai flogs you guys have been pushing
Oh and I just felt like putting up that picture of Captain America haha probably because  he has abs of steel.

So here’s the lowdown on ASE 09 in NYC  (I can’t believe it’s already time)

Truth is ASE is look like its going to be A LOT more scaled back than ASW Vegas was. The reason for this is likely that NYC is expensive as sh** to try to do anything on a large scale.

It seems as though there are a lot of private, invite-only parties/dinners and that’s the route most networks are opting to take. Nonetheless there should be some events here and there to keep your interest. Here are some things to look out for:

• ShareaSale is having a sick looking rooftop party on top of the Empire Hotel. Details for the party and how to get in are here. I don’t know much about ShareaSale except that I won a stuffed panda bear from them back at ASW 09 and they seem like a fun network.

• WF members are looking to have their own impromptu meetup at a lounge/club and if that doesn’t work out one of the members is just going to get us a suite and pay for all the “goods.”

• For a complete list of events, check out this post at Branding100.

• A good idea to remain in touch and up to date is to get on twitter. Just tonight, AdHustler posted a thread on WF for everyone to post their twitter usernames. It makes it MUCH easier to know what’s going on at the moment and where your friends are at/ people you just met. Twitter was huge back at ASW and pretty much everyone was either glued to that or the #cakes channel on IRC. If you’re on twitter, get at me: twitter.com/rohailr

• Meetup202 will be having a huge meetup during ASE, although details are still unannounced.

Even though the summit appears to be scaled back in terms of networks throwing events, I have a pretty good feeling there is going to be A LOT to gain just from attending. Even if you’re a newbie or a seasoned affiliate, networking in this industry is always a plus.