I’ve been in a “reflection mood” lately, so I wanna share with you some of the BIG lessons I’ve learned over the past 4 years making my living online.

1.  Enjoy the process of building your business, because the end result won’t make you any happier…

I wrote about this the other day on my own blog and got a lot of good feedback from my readers.   Most people live their lives hoping the future will get better and make them heppy.  Here’s the truth… It won’t.  If you’re not happy building your business, you’re not going to be happy when you finally “make it”.

2.  Working from home is a LONELY experience…

As a copywriter, I’ve written a lot of copy for “work from home” type products.  I always try to sell the person the dream of quitting their job, and making thousands of dollars while sitting in their pajamas (cause thats what they want).  Well the truth of the matter is, working from home can be a very lonely experience.  And it’s even tougher when you’re going through a hard time like a break up or the death of a friend.  We don’t have the same kind of social outlet that most people do when they’re at a job with 50+ employees.

3.  At some point you have to treat this like a “real business”

When you’re starting out, or you’re an affiliate making a few bucks you can kind of do whatever you want.  But once you get your business to the point that it’s doing $100.000+ you need to start treating this like a real business.  This means you have to commit yourself to doing certain things every day, every week and every month.  This isn’t what most newbies want to hear, but that’s what it takes to be successful.

4.  The more money you make, the easier it gets…

You’re probably familiar with the phrase “the rich get richer”…  When it comes to your business, this is definitely true.  I noticed when my  31 Day Fat Loss Cure product started to take off, we saw a BIG snowball of new revenue streams coming in.  We made more direct sales, we got more affiliates, even our search rankings improved.   Once the ball gets rolling, you need to ride the momentum and cash in on all the opportunities that start showing up for you.

5.  The less people you depend on, the better off you’ll be…

One of the surest ways to drive yourself nuts is to depend on other people for your success.  This includes affiliates, product launches or even search rankings in Google.  If you want to have complete control over your business you need to learn how to drive your own paid traffic from multiple sources (Facebook, PPC, Media Buys, Offline etc..)

6.  Discipline is everything…

My buddy Craig Ballantyne has helped me a lot in this category.  When I talk about Craig to other marketers, the only word I use to describe him is “Machine”.  Craig might not be the “smartest” internet marketer out there, but he makes more than 99% of people online because of his consistent discipline.  I’m pretty sure he does 7 figures a year currently, and if you looked at all the “stuff” he gets done, you would see why.  Staying disciplined is not fun, or sexy… but it’s essential to running a business for multiple years (and not just a few months).

My Wrap Up

A large majority of the people you read about online are nothing more than a “flash in the pan”.  They make a few thousand dollars, tell everyone about it and then are never successful again.  I’ve been doing this full time for 4 years… Shoe’s been doing it for 10+.  While our businesses are completely different, there’s a lot of similarities as to how we got where we are…

Shoe was in debt and unhappy with his life and decided to turn things around.  Back when I hit rock bottom, my girlfriend of 3 years broke up with me, and I lost my big consulting client that was 90% of my income in the SAME week.  I was miserable and 2 months away from being dead broke.  The only place I could go was up.

I went on to make The 31 Day Fat Loss Cure one of the top fat loss products on Clickbank in just a few months – and since then I’ve realized that these 6 ideas I just discussed were what helped me to get there.

Feel free to leave me a comment below if you have any questions or you’d like to share some of the BIG things you’ve learned about making money online…

- Justin

Jeremy is out on vacation this week, so I thought I would jump in and share 2 big “Ah-ha moments” with you that helped me go from “down and broke” to having a very successful 6 figure online business…

These were a few of the “eye-openers” that I was always missing out on, but once I realized them, a lot of stuff changed for me…

1.  Your traffic methods have to be congruent with your goals…

If your goal is to make $1 million this year, then article marketing and blogging are probably not going to get you there.

However, if your goal is to make an extra $1000 per month on the side, then both of those methods will definitely work.

If you want to do a high volume of revenue, you’re going to need to do one of the folowing…

• PPC
• Facebook ads
• Media buying (online & offline)
• Direct mail
• SEO

Now, you might be thinking “Shoe makes a ton of money off his blog”.  And that’s definitely true… but it’s WAYYY down on the profit scale for him in terms of the time he puts into it.

I don’t have a clue how much Shoe makes a year from all of his businesses, but I’m willing to bet the revenue they bring in from the blog is equal to less than one month’s revenue from all of his other sites.

What you need to realize is, there are certain traffic sources and certain strategies that you need to be doing to hit your financial goals.  Make sure they’re in line with each other…

2.  Being busy isn’t the same thing as being productive…

Truthfully, writing on Shoe’s blog is not really the most efficient use of my time.  However, I enjoy helping people and it helps me to pick up affiliates for our product…

You really have to FIGHT to make sure the time you are spending on your websites is actually productive and the highest value of your time.

So for example, I used to always edit blog posts for my site, make banners, install new WordPress updates etc…

Basically a bunch of stuff that had to be done, but it DID NOT have to be done by me.  If I know my average hour of productive work is worth $400, then doing stuff like designing banners and changing the WordPress theme are a waste of my time.

This is a big problem I used to have (and still do once and a while).  A lot of this stuff is more emotional than anything – most entrepreneurs are scared to give up control of the business.  They feel like they have to always have control over every aspect of what’s going on…

This is a fatal mistake.

In the beginning when you don’t have any money, you’ll still have to do the “busy work” type jobs.  But as you make more money, you need to find a way to outsource those, and always focus on the 1-3 things that directly make you the most money.

This is so simple, yet most people NEVER do it.  It’s one of the most crucial parts of running a successful business.

Let me know some of the big “ah-ha moments” you’ve had with your business – leave me a comment below…

- Justin

Note: This is Part 2 of a series on How To Make Your First $1000 As An Affiliate.  Part 1 can be found here…

So in the last post, I gave you a bunch of HIGH converting keywords that you should write articles about.

In response to that post, I got a lot of emails and comments with people trying to make this more complicated than it needs to be.  Here is what you need to be doing…

• Write 5 or more articles/blog posts per day for high converting keywords.  Insert your affiliate links for a converting product into your articles as many times as you can, and have a good call to action at the end.

That’s really the base of what you’re doing.  This is brain dead simple, but it works because most people are too damn lazy to do it.  They’d rather play on Facebook, post on forums and read blogs all day then actually do any work.

Now the second part of this is that you need to continue writing 5+ articles per day (should take about 20-30 minutes each) and also start focusing on your link building for each of those articles.

There’s a few ways you’ll want to do this…

1. Build back links through social media accounts, press releases and article writing

2.  Inter-link between your articles, blog posts, squidoo lenses etc…

3. Paid links (optional)

So let’s discuss how to do each of these…

Building Backlinks Through Social Media

I’m not a huge fan of using social media for links, but for article marketing it works pretty well.

So let’s say you followed the keyword articles I wrote in the first post.  You have 6-8 articles already written.  Now its time to get them ranked.

What you’ll want to do is setup an account on Digg, Twitter, Delicious and StumbleUpon.  You’re going to use these accounts to build a link to each article you write.  If you can, make sure you use some of your keywords when you submit to these sites.  So for example when submitting to StumbleUpon, you would use the keywords you used in your article.

So if you want to rank for “31 Day Fat Loss Cure Review” then simply use those keywords when submitting to social media sites.  Now along with the social media sites, you need to make sure you are grabbing links through a few other sources.  Social media alone is not going to help you rank.

Building Links With Your Own Articles

Once you have 10+ more articles written, make sure you start to inter-link between your articles.  So if you went after the keywords I suggested, then your article on “31 Day Fat Loss Cure Review” will have 3-4 of YOUR affiliate links in it, but you’ll also link within it to one of your other articles such as  your “31 Day Fat Loss Cure Scam” keyworded article.

Now heres a tip…

Make sure when you link to your other articles that it’s not in your call to action at the end of the article.  You want your call to action to drive them to the affiliate offer.

Now when you link to the other articles, make sure you use the keywords you want to rank for.  For example…

“Now, I know one of the big questions most people have might be… is The 31 Day Fat Loss Cure a Scam (link the bolded part to your article)”

Make sure you use the keywords you want to rank for – Don’t use something generic like “click here” or “go here” that’s not going to help with your SEO rankings.

Now the last link building strategy is optional, but works very well to help boost your articles or posts that you want to bump up a few more spots in the search engines.

Under The Radar Paid Links To Bump Your Rankings…

I currently don’t do much SEO so I don’t use paid links right now.  However, I have used them in the past for my old sites and they worked very well to take me from the bottom of page one in search rankings to the top of page one.

Here’s a few of the strategies that you should try out once you are making $30+ per day.

• Buy direct links from blog posts

This works very well for a few reasons.  If you find a blog on fitness, and you’d like to buy 1 single link from a specific blog post, then simply contact the blog owner and offer them $35 for a permanent link.  If the page ranks well, the $35 will be more than worth it.

Blog owners are also great to go after because most of them are eager to do anything to make money.  They really don’t care if you give them $35 or $200.

• Buy reviews with direct links

There’s a few review sites out there such as ReviewMe.  You can buy reviews for your blog and have them link specifically to the pages you want to rank well.  This is a pretty good idea if you can find a few quality blogs to get a review on.

I don’t want to overwhelm you with too much stuff today.  So between Part 1 and this, you should be able to easily get started and be on your way to making $1000 in the next few months.

Talk to ya next time…

- Justin

This post will be the “kickstart” you need to make your first $1000 online…

When I started as an affiliate online, I was a 20 year old college student at Ohio State.  I had a poker affiliate site running and was making a few dollars here and there.  But I never really broke through and started to make good money until I started to focus on a few specific things…

Just last week I was hanging out in San Diego with a few of my internet marketing friends…. In between some of our beach sessions, I started talking with them about blog post ideas for Shoe’s blog.  One of the things that kept coming up was they both said I need to make an “exact” blueprint to getting started online.

Hanging out in San Diego I found this cool pup chilling at the beach...

I’ve said this before, getting started online is the hardest part.  Going from 0-10 sales per day is a lot harder than going from 10-100 sales per day.

So over the next few weeks, I’m going to do a series on “How To Make Your First $1000 As An Affiliate” – and break down exactly what you need to do to make your first $1000.  Sound good?

Let’s Get Started…

Before I give out my big tips, you need to agree to a few things here with me…

1.  You’re willing to put in at least 2 hours of work per day (this includes weekends)

2.  You’re willing to do stuff that might be boring and tedious…

3.  You won’t quit before you make your first $1000

If you agree with all of those, then you’re ready to get rolling…

Justin’s 3 Step Process For Making Your First Dollar…

1.  Find an offer to promote…

• I’m going to give a shameless plug for my fat loss product on Clickbank since it converts very well.  Also I understand this niche the best so I’ll be able to give you the best advice on how to make money with it…  Feel free to promote any product you want that fits the following criteria…

• If you want to promote a different product here’s something to focus on – find a niche that solves a problem.  The big 3 are always good places to start (health, wealth and relationships).  Whatever you do, don’t follow the old adage of “do what you love and the money will follow”.   That’s complete bullshit.  Market forces determine how much money you can make, not whether or not you “love something”.  If you happen to love something that is in a good niche, then you have the perfect niche for yourself.  I happen to love fitness stuff, so the 31 Day Fat Loss Cure is right up my alley…

• Another good tip is you should try to find a niche that has a magazine based around it.  In MOST cases, if there is a magazine in that niche then its a profitable niche and you’ll be able to make money…

2. Drive traffic to your offer…

So let’s use the example of you promoting The 31 Day Fat Loss Cure.  And I’m going to assume you have no money to use for paid traffic.  Here’s the best way to make money with this offer…

Task 1: Pick off the easy sales with SEO’d blogs or articles…

The easiest way to make sales is to have pages that rank for what I like to call “money keywords”.  Instead of trying to rank for something generic like “fat loss”, you’re better off trying to hone in on a small keyword such as “31 day fat loss cure review”.   When someone is searching for these terms, they are actively looking to buy the product.  This means your conversions will be MUCH better than for general terms like “how to lose weight”.

And better conversions means more money for you!

So to get started,  here’s a few of the best converting keywords for our site (straight from my Google Analytics)

• 31 Day Fat Loss Cure
• The 31 Day Fat Loss Cure
• www.31dayfatlosscure.com
• 31 day belly fat cure
• 31 day fat loss plan
• vic magary
• vic magary fat loss
• vic magary scam
• 31 day fat loss cure scam

So what you need to do here is pretty simple.  Take the keywords I just gave you and either make a site with multiple pages on it for each keyword or make a bunch of Squidoo lenses, HubPages or press releases.

This is where the grunt work comes in.

If you want to make good money writing SEO articles you need to write A LOT of articles.  I recommend at least 4-5 per day.  Basically all you need to do is crank out an article in 20-30 minutes.  Get a kitchen timer and set it for 20-30 minutes and then crank out a quality article in 20-30 minutes.  This will get easier as you become a better writer.  Copyblogger has a great post about how to write an article in 20 minutes

In your articles what you’ll want to do is base your article around the keyword you’re writing about – and then write a good 500 word article about that keyword.  Make sure you put lots of links in the article (with your affiliate link) going to the product.  You also want to make sure you end the article with a good call to action to get them to go check out the website (with your affiliate link of course).

I don’t wanna overwhelm you with too much stuff right off the bat, so get started on this right away.  Here’s a quick wrap-up for what you need to do…

1.  Pick your product to promote (find an in-demand niche that will last)

2.  Get a list of keywords together for that product (make sure you get “buying” keywords and not just generic keywords)

3.  Write 4-5 articles per day on your “money keywords”  (do this on article sites like Squidoo, or on your own blog/website)

I’ll be back next time with step 2 of the process…

- Justin

If you want to know the “secret” to getting rich online, split testing is it.

However, it also might be the most “unsexy” part of the business.  It’s not fun to talk about like traffic or launch videos.  And it’s certainly not something you see any of the gurus teaching.

But if you want to make a bunch of money online, you MUST split test. It’s the biggest difference between the guys who are failing and the guys who are making a boatload of money online.

Split testing is really a “discipline” type thing.  And being a good Ohio boy with good work ethic, I’m pretty committed to testing everything.

So today I wanna open up my playbook and share with you the results of 2 BIG impact split tests I ran for The 31 Day Fat Loss Cure…

Add To Cart Button Testing

So the first test I did was with different “Add To Cart” buttons on our site.  Buttons on your site are one of the MOST important things you can test for sales.

My friend, Jon who does all kinds of landing page optimization and conversion tracking for big companies kind of sparked this idea at the last Elite Retreat conference…

He got me thinking about our button and how to make it jump out more, so I got right to it and tested a new brighter button for the site… I also added some text above that says “Claim Your Copy Now”

These 2 little tweaks gave me a 78% increase in sales! Overall the return on this little change has been over $70,000!

Now the point of this is not to use the same button as me – the point is you MUST test all kinds of button colors and shapes if you want to get maximum conversions for your product or offer.

For starters I always recommend testing…

• big buttons
• orange buttons
• eye catching buttons

In addition to the button testing, the other significant test I ran was with the header on our site…

Header Testing

The header on your website is a pretty big deal when it comes to conversions.  Most people royally mess this up and use a BIG header that takes up a lot of space.  From my experience, small headers usually do MUCH better conversion wise.

In this conversion test, I made our header a little more professional looking – and also added in the stock photo cartoons.  The use of cartoons is little trick that works really well for conversions.  Everyone loves cartoons, so putting cartoons on your site can be an easy way to instantly create trust with your visitors…

Here’s the split test…

As you can see, I got a 27% increase in conversions with this header change.

If you’re looking for something to test with your header, I would try the following…

• smaller header
• cartoons
• good, clean logo
• light in color like grey or light blue…

Overall these little conversion increases helped add about $93,000 to my pocket that I wouldn’t have had if we didn’t split test.

- Justin

The first bet I ever made on a football game was like a shot of liquid cocaine…

It was my senior year of high school, and I put $20 on the #1 ranked Miami Hurricanes to cover the 17 point spread at Boston College.  Looking back it was a terrible bet, but that first bet was all I needed to get hooked.

Fast forward a few years and I had done pretty well making a part-time income with my sports bets.  Not alot, but it was enough to keep me from having to get a real job when I was in college.  However, like anything with gambling, you’ll have some major ups and downs. I had a particularly bad stretch of games in 2004 and before I knew it, I owed a bookie $1295 that I didn’t have.

I really didn’t know the bookie very well, but he was the kind of guy you don’t want to owe money to.

I was in a real pinch and had to scramble to find a way to quickly come up with the money.  I grabbed a part-time job valeting cars in downtown Columbus over Christmas break – and also got the bright idea to try and sell my gambling picks on the internet.

The funny thing was, I lost money on my own but my picks were doing really well, so all of my friends were making some nice money betting on my picks.  So I decided to setup a website and see if I could sell my picks every weekend for football season.  I’ll be the first to tell you, this website was god awful.  I cant believe anyone thought it was a legit.  It looked like one of those sites that you designed in 6th grade in a beginner’s computer class.

My first UGLY website

Anyways, on December 20th of that year my site was up, and I had a bunch of packages up for sale.  I logged into my email account and saw I had a Paypal notice – I checked Paypal and instantly my eyes lit up.  There was an order for our biggest package for $147!

I still remember that first sale.  There’s really nothing else like it.

I’ve had $5,000 dollar days since then, and even those don’t get me as excited as the first sale I made online.

My “Secret” To Being Successful Online…

After that first sale, I continued to work on my website and try and make money with it.  I think I made around $1000 in my first year online.  But that was all I needed to get me started.

Throughout college I kept working on my online business and after I graduated, I decided to try and make this a full time gig.  I won’t lie to you and say it’s been easy.  In fact it’s been a VERY rough ride.  There were times in the beginning when I went from making $15,000 per month to just a few months later considering moving back in with my parents or having to find a real job.

Hell, just last summer my business came upon VERY hard times. My big consulting client decided to change his business, and he really didn’t need me anymore. And to make things even worse, my girlfriend of 3 years broke up with me just a few days after that.   So within a span of a few days, I lost 90% of my income and got dumped my girlfriend.

I was an absolute wreck.

I contemplated giving up on the whole damn thing and just slaving away in the 9-5 world.  I honestly wasn’t sure if it was worth it to keep going.

But I didn’t.

I scraped by doing copywriting jobs and freelance consulting while I worked on my fitness site. I made it an initial goal of mine to make $100 a day within 30 days of starting the 31DayFatLossCure.com.  I didn’t hit that initial goal in 30 days, but when I eventually did I could see the massive potential that was ahead.

Things started to turn around, and quickly ramped up once I dialed in a bunch of our Facebook advertising and blog advertising.  Fast forward a few months , and in December of 2010 we did over $110,000 in sales from the 31 Day Fat Loss Cure alone!

I now have one of the top weight loss products on Clickbank and because of that I’m also one of the highest paid copywriters and Facebook Ad consultants around.  I literally have to turn down 3-4 jobs every week because I can’t handle most of them.

I didn’t write this post to brag about my success, there’s a very valid point here.  So read on…

Here’s The Real “Meat” Of The Story…

If you’re struggling right now to make money online, I can guarantee you are closer than you think.

I’ve seen more than a handful of people go from “rags to riches” in less than 2 months.  I’ve seen people who were SOOOO close to making big money, just throw it all away and quit.

Now the point of my story is this – bad shit happens to successful people all of the time.  We just have a different way of looking at it.

Getting $1200 in debt didn’t look like a good thing at the time, but it ended up giving me the life I have now.  Getting fired from my consulting gig last year looked like the end of me online, but it ended up lighting a fire under my ass to get The 31 Day Fat Loss Cure rolling. Without being fired, I probably never would be where I’m at now.

Remember:  Bad shit happens to everyone.  It’s how you deal with it that determines whether or not you’ll be successful.

- Justin

P.S. – Feel free to share a story of you overcoming a bad situation in the comments below.  I’d like to hear them…

I’ve been playing around with buying Youtube accounts lately for traffic and wanted to share some of my story…

Now you might be wondering why would anyone want to buy a Youtube account?  Well if you can find a good account with a lot of views in your niche then you can promote your website or affiliate links on those accounts pretty easily.

Take for example this video…

As you can see, this video has 77,258 views on it.  It’s not a ton, but if the account has 20-30 videos like this then it would be well worth it to try and buy the account.

All you have to do is go to Clickbank and find a workout of diet product and promote it with an affiliate link under the video.  You can also add annotations to the video so that you can direct them to your URL (redirect it) as well…

Now the other way you can do this is to find accounts that have just 1-2 KILLER videos with millions of views.  This is what I try to do.  Most of these accounts are run by kids who have no clue that the views they have are worth anything.  So for a 12 year old kid, if you offered him $100 for the account he would probably gladly take it.

How to buy the account and make an offer

This is where it boils down to a numbers game.  Most of the accounts you want, you’ll have a hard time getting an answer from the owner.  And if you do, most of them are skeptical that you’re going to scam them or steal their identity (cant happen, but people are skeptical)

I heard some good tips on this from a Jason Moffat video I watched a while back – he said that what was working for him was using something like this in a private Youtube message…

Hey, I just came across your Youtube account and Im interested in buying it.  My buddy and I are having a competition to see who can get the most traffic to our websites and I want to use some of the videos you have to do that.  If you want to setup the videos on another account thats fine with me, I just want your account as it is.  I can pay you like $100 for the account – and Ill send you the money via Paypal or a check in the mail.  Let me know if youre interested.

Now one of the keys to this is that you have to find accounts that someone has no emotional or economic attachment to.  If someone has a bunch of workout videos for their own site and they are making money with it,  they arent going to sell it to you.  And if some little kid has a bunch of his favorite WoW clips on his account, then he’s prolly going to be hesitant with giving it up…

This is why you either have to tell them they can keep all the vids and move them to a new account – or you need to find accounts that just have 1-2 really good videos that have 1 million+ views….

What to do once you have the account

Once you agree on a price, then all you need to do is get the password from them.  Make sure you change it right away (along with any other information)

And then you can start to monetize the videos by linking them to your affiliate links – or by sending them to your own website.  The best ways to link up is in the “About” box and also put annotations on the screen that direct people to your website or redirecting URL.

One of the easiest ways to figure out which accounts to buy would be to go Clickbank and find products that would fit certain types of videos.  So if there is a Youtube video of a 7 year old doing a killer solo on guitar then find a “learn how to play guitar” product on Clickbank and put an affiliate link in there.

You could literally do this for almost every niche that has a product on Clickbank.

My experiences buying Youtube accounts

So far I’ve bought 5 accounts for $650 total.  My total affiliate commission made off all the accounts has been $1750.  Now the good thing is, if these accounts all stay active and the traffic stays the same, I’ll make an extra $10,000-$12,000 dollars this year off the accounts.

I havent hit a MAJOR winner ($5k or more per month), but Im going to keep trying to see if I can find one…

- Justin