So.... Losing 10lbs is proving a lot harder than I originally expected. Thankfully, I'm on a steady path of losing a little weight each week. The last couple weeks I was stuck at 184.5 lbs and FINALLY I am below that weight!

As of this last Wednesday, I am at:

Wahoo! 183.5 lbs!

Running out of time!!

While I want to celebrate the loss of another pound, I am running out of time to take myself from 189 lbs (starting weight of the competition) down to 179 lbs (goal weight).

I have just a few weeks now to be able to pull it together to lose another 4.5 lbs!

I've been picking up the exercise routine and it's been a bit more intense compared to when I started.

This last Wednesday we ran on a trail for roughly 20 minutes without stopping. It was pretty tough compared to the cushy track or the ease of the treadmill. After that, we came back my friend Kanoa's house and jumped rope for about 5 minutes straight. (The video was before the time started so I wouldn't be out of breath haha). Lastly, we did about 7 different ab exercises.

It was a great work out for sure!

Dietary Changes

The hardest thing for me to change is the way I eat. I have some weeks where I have meetings over lunch 4-5 times. Mainly the focus for me is not trying to not eat out because I love it. The focus is trying to order more healthy, drink more water, and most importantly stop eating when I am full.

My parents always taught me to eat everything on my plate and to be quite honest, it's something I'll never pass on to my own kids. It's always hard for me to stop and pass up on the rest of a really good meal but I've been getting better at simply stopping when I am full.

Lastly, I realized how many calories even 1% milk has... A lot! It's because of this that I have tried to scale back on my consumption of milk as a substitute to soda. I love a nice cold cup of milk poured over a glass full of ice! Hahaha.

Goal

My goal for this competition is to hit 179 lbs but my real goal is to get down to about 175 lbs. I don't want to go any less than that because I want to gain muscle mass, but not a ton of muscle.

I don't want to end up like Greg Valentino after all!

Managing growth was one area I wish I had a little more experience in when I was first starting. I wasn't very wise with how I grew initially because I wasn't as much of a problem solver as I am today.

In fact, there would be days where I would flat out have to turn off profitable campaigns because my credit card was maxed and the payment had not gone through yet. Crazy, I know.

My Growth Story

Over the course of the past three years, I have seen some huge growth financially and managing that growth was quite a challenge at first for me. I had some guidance but really it was still a bit tough.

Credit Cards...

When I was first seeing growth in affiliate marketing, I was a student, had about $8,000 in credit card limits, all fully paid off, $0 debt, $0 bills (thank you Mom and Dad ), and things were great. But as I began to grow, $8000 really became nothing in the spectrum (and today especially) of things.

For a while because I was naive, I would just charge up my credit card to as much as possible and pay it all off as soon as I got paid. Many times I would have a charged up credit card and would just be sitting waiting for payments to come. As you know this can be terrible for your credit (and hurt mine quite a bit for a little while there).

After realizing that my credit score was going down consistently due to the way I was running my business, I decided to ask some high limit credit friends for some help and try to raise my limit.

Borrowing Credit

Raising my credit card limit was a total failure. I got a raised limit of around $1000. Big whoop right? Next...

I had a good friend of mine who offered to let me use his $20,000 credit card. The full card was essentially mine. I would use the credit card and then pay it off and pay my friend a nice little chunk of change as his cut for helping me grow my business.

This worked for a while and things were great until... I started growing more. Soon $20,000 became nothing. I was spending a few thousand a day at the time and $20,000 became a few days worth of advertising. No longer viable and I certainly did not want to ruin my friends credit score by doing the same mistake twice!

Invoicing

Onto the next plan. I researched, researched, researched and finally ended up calling google adwords billing support to talk to them about what I could do.

I was spending $50,000- $60,000 per month at the time and needed a better way to manage my growth. I asked them if there was any way I could get a line of credit or something from them and they told me about Google Invoicing! (Insert turning point to business here )

Google Invoicing is essentially a line of credit where you apply to allow your Google ads run for the month and you pay them within 30 days. It's only available to higher volume clients and there are a few downsides.

First, you can't switch your account back to credit cards once you have switched to invoicing. They're going to go through the trouble of credit checks, D and B checks, payment history, etc and want to make sure you're not just using them for a I'm having a slow month method of delaying payments. No switching back at all, ever.

The other downside is you can only pay via check or wire. You cannot pay via credit or debit. Good bye credit card points! The idea behind this is that you're essentially paying Google 2-4% (because checks / wires essentially cost them nothing) in interest for delaying payment 30 days. Credit cards charge 2-4% if you didn't get it.

Although there are some downsides to this, it was one of the single biggest turning points for my business. I took a bit of a risk when I was being interviewed by the lady and told her that I wasn't even going to be interested in the invoicing unless the limit was $150,000 per month or more and that my growth records have shown those numbers to be true.

They replied back shortly after congratulating me on a $350,000 credit limit per month. Not bad for a 20 something year old college drop out.

That's where my business began to grow and cash reserves built up to where I could afford to pay the advertising costs with no more issues.

Tips For Managing Growth

• Use credit cards if you are certain you are making a profit! I HIGHLY recommend you don't use credit to try and test. It's a dangerous game and you might end up with a heafty bill you can't afford. Affiliate Marketing has been around since the 90's for the internet and it's not going anywhere. If you can't afford it this month, WAIT until you can. Sacrifice your Starbucks or whatever so you can have an ad budget.
• If your credit is poor, Use friends credit cards. This might be hard to find, but friends and family who are following your growth might be interested in making some passive investments. Always make sure to put paying their credit cards down the first priority, even over your own bills.
• Try Google Invoicing. It works for some people and you never know if you will get accepted until you ask. It does not hurt to try and certainly can help you out a TON with cash flow.
• Ask your affiliate manager for faster payouts. If you're on net 15 payouts and you're having cash flow issues, ask to be paid faster. If it's over $1000 / week, simply say you need to be paid or you'll have to switch to a network that can pay weekly. Places like Copeac offer weekly Payouts for over $1000 in revenue by default. There is no reason why they should hold onto your money for longer than that. Besides, you should tell your manager that it will help you grow and make them more money... They will love to hear that.
• Be a problem solver. There are so many options out there. As a business person, YOU solve problems. Brain storm which solution works best for you and try, try, try. If you try, you will succeed eventually.
• Apply to a network like Copeac. They offer weekly payouts for those earning more than $1000 / week.

Hope that helps!

NickyCakes is another popular affiliate marketer that was at AdTech San Fran.

While at Adtech, Nickycakes won a Samsung 40" 1080P TV from CX Digital and he is wanting to give it away to YOU!

What you need to do is simple... Just follow Nickycakes on Twitter!

Each person who follows Nickycakes will be given 1 point. These points will get counted up and count as entries into the contest.

Before you do, read the official rules and get his twitter link

Good luck!

A few days ago Tyler Cruz and I started the blogger weight loss challenge.

Although I posted about the contest, I never posted what I was going to be doing. So now, I have decided to post my strategy to shed those pounds.

First, every Wednesday for about 2 months now, I have been working out for about an hour with a friend of mine, Kanoa. I know one time a week is not ideal but it's all the time I can afford at the current moment.

Next, I plan on adjusting my diet just a bit. Basically I want to cut out the little extra fat items that I don't need and won't miss as much.

As you can see, I have already cut my soda intake down to just 1 soda per day. Usually this soda is a cherry coke zero but on certain days, I'll go out to lunch and drink a regular coke. Normally when I go out to a restaurant, I get at least one refill of coke. Now when I go, I usually get a coke and then water after.

Lastly, At night I usually enjoyed a big glass of iced milk. Even though it's fat free or 1% milk most of the time, drinking things right before bed is not good for you as it sits in your stomach. So now before bed I will only drink water.

Participate:
I highly encourage all of you to participate and try to cut your weight down a bit if your BMI is over 25. I cant say how great I feel after each work out. I have more and more energy and I feel great.

Also make sure to participate and earn yourself $100 by writing a post on who you think will lose.

Official rule are located in the original post here.

So without further ado, here are the pictures for you to use on your Male Acai Flogs.

My Starting Weight

And for the video:
- Please note: This is in my friends Garage. We sometimes go to the local college and work out there. Also note that working out definitely does not bring out the best look in me... Lol.
-These videos will be put up every Wednesday.

We forgot to record after the last segment so all you get to see if me running. I was too tired to care. Next week, I'll try to make a better video.

Lastly, if you want to sponsor these weekly videos, please send me an email (view contact page) and I'll reply with my address and I will wear your shirt while working out.

These videos will be put up every Wednesday.

If you have been following this blog for the last month or so, you know I am trying to kick my addiction to Coke. Well, after only being able to go 6½ days without any coke what so ever, I couldn't take it any more.

Therefore instead, I have decided to just limit my intake and subsidize real coke with diet products. Sure, It's not good for me but to be quite honest, I'd rather die earlier than give it up. Hahahaha!

So here is my new plan...

First, I will only be drinking 6 cokes a week as opposed to 2+ cokes a day that I used to be on. Next, I will be replacing my regular coke (MOST of the time) with coke Zero. It's really good, SPECIALLY the coke zero cherry (MONEY) and coke zero vanilla.

Seriously, Cherry coke zero and Vanilla coke zero takes amazingly close to regular and has 0 calories.

Now, let's get healthier!

About 2 weeks ago after moving into the new office and working on a couple new campaigns, Jacob, a marketing guy here at Surge Marketing Inc. turns to me and says, "I wish there was a way in windows to have multiple copy and paste functions so that I could store more information in the clipboard."

After he mentioned it I went right to google and went through a few free programs.

After looking at a few, I found a program called Clipomatic. Basically, you copy items into the clipboard just like normal (Ctrl+c). Next to paste, you use Ctrl+Alt+V and it will show you a list of the last 10 things that were copied into the clipboard! Sweet!

Control+Alt+V got a little annoying to press so Jacob assigned one of those random buttons on the Logitech mouse that nobody uses to be the same as Ctrl+alt+v.

Clipomatic has become one of those programs that now has become something that is used a lot here and has saved a ton of time.

Now... What are some of your Time Saving Tips?!

Many people don't know that you can generate keywords in many ways for your pay per click affiliate campaigns.

In fact, there are a ton of ways that you can find huge keyword lists but not all are effective or worth it. So I will be going over a list of the commonly accepted ways to get large keyword lists, why you need large keyword lists, and where to go.

First, the way MOST people generate their keywords (80%+ I'd estimate) is via the normal google and yahoo tools. You create a campaign and boom a keyword generator pops up for you to use. Easy and works well, best of all free.

The way that most people don't know about is generating keywords via other tools and programs. Some of these tools are free, some cost, some suck, some are amazing. I have tested pretty much every program on the market today.

First, the bad keyword generating tools. Stay away from these:

• Keyword Elite. - Like sorting through 50,000 keywords to find a few good keywords? Not me. No thanks.
• Keyword Companion. - Expensive tool that is similar to keyword elite but sorts through keywords a bit easier. Overall, TERRIBLE customer support (I had to spam the owners blog to get a response to my support ticket, no joke.)

Now, the following tools are ones I have used and found to be great and actually useful.

• My personal favorite: Wordze. This is the tool I like the best for generating larger keyword lists. You can read my Wordze Review. here.
• WordTracker. This program is one of the top in the industry and the best part... a full 7 day free trial. No reason why you shouldn't try it.
• PPC Coach. While reviewing the PPC Coach program, I noticed a reallllllllly amazing keyword tool. I actually utilized the tool multiple times already and well, I'm not really going to get into the tool because it's a secret I don't really like to share. It's worth the $50 bucks just for that tool and you'll notice in the comments of the PPC Coach review that people seem to find it worth it too.

Why do you need large keyword lists?

In search engines, the more areas of coverage you have, the more traffic you get. Plain and simple.

Many times in google, you can just use a broad keyword such as "credit cards" and it will cover all the credit cards keywords. Here is the problem: With broad match like that, you're going to get a percent of untargeted traffic unless you're using a large negative keyword list.

What do you do? Use these generators and use exact and phrase. Then you know exactly what you're getting as far as traffic goes.

Test broad search at a latter time.

With yahoo search marketing, I find the more keywords the better as long as you group your keywords well.

So now you know how to get good quality keywords and where to put them and how to implement them.

EDIT: Wordtracker link was broken. It's now fixed.

Please note that the below post is a very SIMPLIFIED version of how to track keyword level conversions.

GOOGLE Adwords Required Changes:
In your adwords ad URL destination you add to the end:

?OVKEY={Keyword}

Yahoo Search Marketing Changes:
In your Yahoo Search Marketing Administration Tab, you can turn "tracking URL's" on. That's all you need to do.

Step 2.
On your landing page at the VERY start of the file (About < html >) add the following:

< ? (remove the space between the < and the ?) $keyword=$_GET['OVKEY']; ?>

Step 3.
Now on your affiliate link add a sub id like so:
http://jumplink.com/jump.php?sub=< ?=$keyword;?> (Again remove the space between the < and the ?)

Obviously you replace the jumplink.com with the jumplink of your affiliate network.

Now you can see in the reports of your affiliate network which keyword converted for you.

The benefit of tracking keywords is you're able to find more profitable keywords and ditch the ones you're losing money on.

Just a word of caution. If you're running a campaign doing more than $100 bucks per day, I HIGHLY Recommend you work on some method of encryption for your keyword data.

I tried my best to answer all the questions. If I missed something, I'll be sure to answer it next time.

Browie Says:
Come on, give us a clue to exactly how much you are bringing in a month?

Rank them in money making or whatever: adsense, ysm, adcenter

Ever thought about doing a JV with a another guy?

Are you a loner or do you have a writer, coder, blah blah?

Last month I made around $20,000 USD. This month is going to be a bit more. My focus right now is trying to get AffiliateUNLEASHED.com released.

Right now it's YSM, Adwords, Adcenter, Adsense, Widgetbucks, YPN, etc. (If I understood your question correctly)

I am actually working on 2 joint ventures right now. As some may know, I joined up with a good friend of mine for affiliate unleashed. The second joint venture is a secret for now.

I have 1 employee, Erin. She's great! She does a lot of my writing and campaign stuff. All the coding and graphics I do myself because I enjoy it and I like to put a lot of tracking stuff on my pages.

ClarkeW Says:

What PPC network do you get the best ROI with?

Adwords, YSM, or Adcenter?

That depends on the campaign. I ran 1 campaign in google a while back that I could bid 0.30 per click. In yahoo I could only bid about 0.15 per click and still make a profit. Overall, they both seem to even out. Adcenter is the one that is random for me. I'll find a great niche every once in a while that will give me 300% returns through adcenter. Other times, the traffic can be not profitable at all.

Tyler Gresham Says:

How are you doing today?

Just kidding, I have a real question too, how long have you been working online, and learning about how to make money online?

I'm doing well. I've been trying to make money online since 2004, when I started a hosting business with my dad. I had made websites many years before that, never for profit though. Most of my learning came in 2004 till now.

Rob Says:

What’s the single most important skill do you think to succeed in affiliate and ppc marketing?

Is it technical skill like webmastering, programming, or kind of analytical skill, or marketing skill?

Thanks! Rob

Personally, I think it's analytical skill and persistence. You need to never give up. If a campaign doesn't work, figure out a way to make it work... specially if others are making money doing it. Analytical skill is so important. Knowing what converts and what does not is crucial. You could have an unprofitable campaign turned profitable, just by removing a few keywords. Thankfully, I enjoy statistics but many people do not. Now, for those of you who do not enjoy sitting over a plethera of excel sheets and mysql databases, Affiliate Unleashed just may be something you'll want to look into in the near future. Hehe...

One other thing about persistence. I have failed many times doing pay per click campaigns. Dont allow that to make you give up. Find enjoyment out of it and do not give up.

Brandon Says:

When you create a keyword list for an offer, how many do you start out with to test the offer and how targeted are they? Say, for a free ipod.. how broad would you go to target that offer?

This is one area I'm going to be touching upon heavily in the Affiliate Unleashed member area. People have a common misconception that you need 100,000 keywords to be successful. It's not always true. You actually can be quite successful with 10-50 keywords... it's just a matter of finding out what converts.

As for free ipod, there are literally millions of keywords you could do. Sure people will search for free ipod, but that's going to be costly to rank for. Perhaps bid on people searching for music artists and songs and such. Why? Because that is directly targeted to the item you're promoting... a music player.

Jeremy Says:

Where do you get your keywords from? How do you pick keywords?

How do you decide which campaigns should be promoted on: adwords, yahoo and msn?

Do you direct link to affiliates, build a site or both?

What niche could you make easy money with, is there one?

Do you advertise on other advertising networks besides adwords, msn and yahoo and if so which ones.

I think those are enough for now

God Bless,
Jeremy

I get most of my initial keywords from Wordze. You can read my review on that HERE.

As for how I pick them, you can read the question above. It's pretty similar.

Direct linking. I only do this a handful of times. You can read about one such experience HERE. I made a quick $200 bucks. I give good examples of when direct linking is the best.

Easiest niche: ringtones (use azoogleads for ringtones) and dating (use neverblueads).

I advertise on some other networks, but not other PPC networks. I have tried facebook, adbrite, and some banner exchange websites.

petra1 Says:

What was the first campaign you started making money off and did u you use a landing page?

I started making money affiliate marketing using all direct linking methods. I believe the first campaign I did was a campaign for ringtones, directly linking via google. It worked for a while but then died down. I find most direct linking campaigns die down after a while. I use landing pages for almost everything now.

Benjamin Says:

1) What offers are you promoting
2) What keywords are you using for them
3) Which adcopy is working the best for each offer
4) Your bank account number

Heh, kidding. Real question here: How is the Amazon thing coming along? Any updates for us? I am considering venturing into PPC -> High-end Amazon products as well, and probably even eBay in the near future.

Ben

Hahaha. Oh and here is my Social security number too: ...

The amazon thing is coming along slowly. I've tried out about 5-6 products, none have been profitable. Doh! I've been so consumed with Affiliate Unleashed that I have not had a huge amount of time to really focus on it. I might put it on pause and revisit once I have some more time. Thanks for asking / reminding me.

Tom Says:

What do you think is the simplest thing to make money online ? Not that I think there is something easy, but what gives the easiest or fastest results ?

Easy. Pay per click. Even if you just wrote an ebook about something you consider yourself an expert on (with the exception of making money online - it's over saturated), and put it in a Pay per click campaign. Pay per click is perhaps one of the most efficient ways to test something without a huge amount of invested time.

yeikow Says:

a) How many hours a day do you usually work?

b) Do you sometimes feel it’s a lonely type of work?

c) If you someone had 12h/day free, massive motivation to succeed in this business and basic understanding of the online world: what is the shortest time you think he could reasonably expect to take to make $100/day? (1 week, 1 month, 6months, 6 years… )

d) how can one get in touch with you

And last but not least, digging a bit deper…
e) Do you find your work fulfilling, do feel like you are giving your deepest gift by spending your waking hours working as an affiliate manager?

Cheers!

I work anywhere from 0 hours per day (on holidays) to 15+ hours a day. It depends on my mood. I generally work ~8 hours and then go try to do something else. I'm a guy who can sit alone and not talk to anyone for hours. So personally I dont find it lonely. If I get lonely, then I just talk to my girlfriend or go on a forum.

If you had 12 hours a day and are very motivated you could succeed very shortly. The difference between being successful now and being successful later is being teachable. Learn from those who are actually making money and chuck the advice of those who are not. I've set up campaigns before in just a few days that have made me $100+ / day. It's not impossible to succeed. Personally, I think if you had that kind of time and dedication, mixed with a great affiliate system / guide (cough affiliate unleashed cough), you would be able to succeed in a month or two.

As for contacting me: I will be offering direct consultation via Affiliate Unleashed for personal suggestions and such. Otherwise, you're looking @ the method you can use to contact me. Obviously I can't give out my personal information to everyone. As it is, I get asked for help multiple times a week from people on DP and via email. Now, that's not a bad thing! It's simply that I cant spend all my time helping others or else I would have nothing to give out as advice

As a final question, this is a great one.

I find my work very fulfilling. Why? Because it enables me to give. My heart is for people. I love giving to people. On earth, we can gain an innumerable amount of wealth, toys, and cars but when we die, it will amount to nothing. The wealth I am able to gain through this business allows me to invest into the eternal things such as paying for children in Africa to learn and have food... or for a pastor to have an education... or for a struggling addict on skid row (LA) to see breakthrough and be free from drugs.

If you think about it, there is nothing more fulfilling than being able to change someone else for the better. And you know what, vision like that takes 2 things, work and money. I know I can and will continue to provide at least 1 of those aspects to any area that I can.

This is where my true passion is.

Wahoo. Finally Checks from May, 2007 are coming in!

Last month was one of my most successful months affiliate marketing, only second to ...well... this month, June.

Here are a couple of my most recent checks from azoogleads and neverblueads.

The greatest thing about these is the profit margin. On average, these checks are about 60% profit. Not bad returns... considering most savings accounts are less than 5% annually.

Anyways, I have about 4 other checks coming this month most of which will come while I am gone on my Launch Camp Vacation. Thankfully, I will have internet access during this time. Hahahaha... Tis the life of an affiliate marketer.