I was going to write a post, but though it would be easier just to make a video. It’s about a technique that helps your brain focus on giving you the answers or the insights you want.
Don’t mind the dark spots on my shirt. It’s just water from washing my face. I’ll make it up to you by putting on a suit next time.
Yeah right.
Carl Zetterlund
I thought I would never say this. I remember taking statistics in high school and wasn’t too amused. Nothing has changed, so you can be assured I’m not talking about that kind of statistics. I’m talk’n about the web yo.
The internet has become a powerful force in marketing these days. Sure, there are millions of people using it everyday, but that’s not really why. It’s the fact that you can get amazingly detailed statistics on your visitors aka potential customers.
It’s unbelievable for an old school marketer. For every single person, you get to know how they found you. What they are doing on your website, and which customers are adding to your bottom line.
It’s amazing.
To offer perspective, let’s go back in time to the old school marketing days. I can envision this old dude named John in a suit sitting in a nice office. He happens to be CEO of a medium sized business. However, his business is becoming stagnant. He’s an old fart, but is good with people, so he asks his employees. Chris, the new marketing director, offers him advice.
“John! We need to use television to advertise our products. It’s the future!”
Now… there is just a couple of issues. Television advertising is expensive! The second issue is there is no way to know if you received a positive return on investment.
What is John to do?
If he’s a risk taker and has big dreams, he’ll do it. He’ll just cross his fingers and hope for the best. You can be assured he has his doubts.
John sees his ads run on his television at home. He’s quite excited. His own products are in the magic box! He is incredible anxious to see if business improves. The next few days business seems to increase. His retailers are ordering more of his products.
But how can he be so sure?
He can’t. His customers are retail businesses. Thus, he can’t ask the “How did you hear about us?” question.
Traditional marketing has had this huge problem since the beginning of time! I can just imagine how many young marketing directors had to sweat bullets when jumping into large scale marketing projects. It has to be nerve wracking. Anything could happen, and it may have nothing to do with you or your advertising project.
Anyway, times have changed with the internet. I use Google Analytics, and it’s amazing how much information I get from it. It allows me to make minor tweaks and test how little changes affect my bottom line.
There is only one problem. I’m addicted. I check it 10+ times a day, which is a complete waste of my time.
I have a funny feeling this is a shared problem with internet marketers. Maybe I’ll start a mental health program helping internet entrepreneurs reduce their stat checking obsessive compulsive disorders and become the next internet Tony Robbins.
Until next time, live your life with passion, but cut the stats.
Carl Zetterlund
I’ve been thinking about the ups and downs of internet marketing, so it reminded me of roller coasters. I then probably went too far and constructed a much bigger metaphor…
I made a video describing it, so enjoy!
I haven’t been completely satisfied with what I have been doing in the last couple of weeks. This is because I feel like I’m much too focused in the short term. It’s the best way to make income now, but I feel that there isn’t too much long term potential. In addition, I don’t feel like I’m adding that much value to society. I feel like I’m just being a dirty sales person trying to push people to buy a product. Huh?
Isn’t that what marketing is all about?
Yeah I guess so, but it’s more of it not fitting into my ideals. I shouldn’t be too picky at the moment because I need to make money fast, so I can focus on what I really care about. However, I feel like it would be healthy to start a long term project to balance out my mind.
I’m losing focus because I don’t care too much about the profitable markets I’m finding. I really want to create something really cool that people can use, and it will have a genuine positive effect on them.
This is why I think I will need to setup a new structure for my time. A structure that will balance out my short and long term efforts. In other words, work an equal amount of time on quick profits as well as projects that may not pay off until months down the line.
I do have an idea for a Web 2.0ish kind of site, which I think is really cool. I’ve been searching around to see if anyone has done it already. It doesn’t look like it, so I think I’m going to start working on it. I don’t think there is an open source project that suits exactly what I need, so I will have to learn how code AJAX or whatever those new age coders use.
Pardon my French.
I’m going to break my time up in 3 hour intervals. I will have a 1 hour timer set for each of those 3 hours to keep myself on pace. I will work on my long term project first thing in the morning as my mind is clearest then. I will then focus on writing on my blog or blogs for another 3 hour block. Next comes the 3 hour block of short term projects. I will top it off with 3 hours of focused reading or studying of interesting books, audio books, and videos.
That’s a good 12 hours of solid work. It’s really not work to me as I do enjoy being independent. However, keeping focused is a challenge in itself.
I’m not really sure if this idea of mine will work out, but I’ll see how it goes and make adjustments as needed.
My goal is to cut down all the time wasting I currently do. We can be so unbelievably inefficient without truly realizing it.
I hope you’re doing well, and I’ll see you tomorrow.
Carl Zetterlund
This is probably one of the biggest cliches in the book. Frankly, mentioning this as a cliche is probably a cliche. Ahh ok, nevermind.
It’s amazing how you think you’ve got this idea of how you will make money, and how it can be completely turned on its head when you actually start doing it. When I first started actually blogging, I realized it was going to be a lot more work than I thought. It didn’t even stop there. I had to go through several cycles of this before I hit what was going to work. There were definitely some rough times.
My path is now COMPLETELY off from what I thought it would be a couple of months ago.
Here’s a laundry list of advice I have heard before… long before I started this whole ordeal:
I’m sure the list goes on, but that was literally off the top of my head. Even with all this in my head, I was still feeling like I had the perfect idea. It’s a strange sort of attachment you have. It’s a gut feeling.
It doesn’t help that I’ve been becoming more attuned to my intuition. How can you ignore intuition! It’s perfect!
WRONG.
Intuition is really only as good as your experiences. Input in equals input out, but this post isn’t about intuition.
There are people out there who are waiting for the perfect moment to quit their job and manifest their perfect business plan.
What a delusion!
There is NEVER a perfect moment and there is no way in hell your idea will be remotely the same after you actually start taking action. It’s a bold statement, but it’s true!
It doesn’t have to apply to the corporate whore either. It applies to everything you do in life.
Whether or not it is the perfect situation to talk to the cute guy or gal in the grocery store. Whether it is the right time to confront your boss with a promotion or raise. Whether it is the right time to call it quits in just about whatever.
You’ll read this and say. Yeah… yeah… sure… this all makes sense, but do you feel it. Do you have the experience?
I wonder.
Carl Zetterlund
P.S. I’ve gotten my hands on some typical get rich schemes. Sure… they’ve got some information that may be helpful. But they are just really marketing gimmicks. Marketers know that people want a magic pill despite knowing that there is no magic pill, and that only less than 10% actually read and use the product. The truth is that successful people will be so bootstrapped that they would have to be delusional. But don’t despair, the journey is the reward.
I am going to be as open as possible with my earnings. I think it will serve to motivate me to do more as well as offer others a different perspective. Also, I hope to inspire people that money can be made on the internet from scratch (not that I am an inspiration just yet). I remember being originally inspired by John Chow’s huge 10K+ monthly income reports from his blog alone. Let alone he runs a successful hardware review site.
I will only focus on income made on the internet. I started on August 20th, and I currently have three niches that are making me money. Keep in mind that Commission Junction may be withholding some money due to a merchant being slow.
Total Income: $46.49
Click Bank - $26.96
Commission Junction - $10.40
Amazon - $7.17
Adsense - $1.96
So there you have it. I made a whopping 46 bucks. I think it’s time to retire!
Well… maybe not so fast. My raw vegan habit is costing me about $200-$250 a month, which I consider a super good deal thanks to a local farmer’s market. I just can’t do the Ramen noodles thing. My health is just too important. I also am living at my parents, so I have a long ways to go.
I would also keep in mind that I only really started about 10 days ago, so give me a break :).
Here’s some info on the total traffic I’ve gotten on all of my niche websites in August:
Total Visits: 1808
Total Pageviews: 2778
That’s not bad for having the first visit come in 10 days ago. The good thing is that there is still a lot of opportunity out there that I need to seize.
Overall, I have a good feeling that I will make just enough money by the end of the year to scrape by on. My goal is to make $1000 next month, which a lot more than $46. I’m pretty positive I’ll easily reach that mark. If not, I know I’ll have learned a lot. So it’s a win win in my book.
Thanks for reading and let me know if you have any questions.
Carl Zetterlund
Spoiler Warning: First 9 Minutes
I watched a behind the scenes documentary of 2001: A Space Odyssey last night. I have to simply say that I love that movie. I love it so much because it explores a world of such massiveness and uncertainty. I can hardly express what I feel when such grand philosophical ideas are presented to me.
Who are we? Why do we kill each other on earth? What is this vast space we call the universe? What am I doing here? Am I really that important? What…
There is just so much we don’t know about our world. Yet, we are always so quick to haphazardly answer it. Why should we have to do that? Why can’t we just explore and discover? Why can’t the human race come together and work on a common goal of exploring the world around us?
Why do we need to waste our lives on senseless wars on beliefs that have little basis? Why can’t we all believe in the religion of discovery?
These questions have consumed my mind for ages. I sometimes forget as I am so caught up in the daily routine of life. Everyone loves to tell you what to do, and it’s usually just a reflection of themselves, a sort of self-validation.
But there is just so much out there…
I love people who can admire the world around us. From the tiniest organism to the numerous solar systems all throughout the universe.
I personally get a sort of high. It makes all my problems disapear. Not that they are problems to begin with.
I feel like I am part of a minority. Do others not have the capability to grasp these grand thoughts? Do they shut these ideas out immediately because it feels better to be certain about the future? Can they not feel the euphoric high I feel when I contemplate everything?
I can’t answer these questions, but I’m always trying to figure them out. Humans are a fascinating subject in itself.
I admire people like Stanley Kubrik and Arthur C. Clark who take such an obsession to detailing the vastness of our universe. This obsession brings out amazing art that helps raise the collective consciousness of the world.
So many things in our lives don’t matter. How can you not just set your mind free and to do whatever you really feel like doing? Why suffer when you have nothing to lose?
We were born into the most amazing playground. One of just potentially many in our universe.
Why do you do what you do?
Carl Zetterlund
P.S. I am at unease that political issues were at the heart of us spending billions to get to the moon. Once the race to space was over, the money was funneled elsewhere. Hmmm…
Spoiler Warning: Ending
I lied. I have made much more than a dollar before on the internet, but this dollar is different. The money I made before was just always on the side and didn’t mean that much to me. I wasn’t so invested in it.
Now… the dollar I made recently meant a lot…
Think about it. I recently quit my job. My initial plans didn’t work out as well as I hoped it would. I’m now living with my parents and assuring them I’ll be making enough money on the internet before the year ends.
I’m pretty confident in that I will make enough money, but I agree that I am delusional. Then again, everyone is delusion, and it’s really about picking the best kind of delusion, but that’s for another post.
I’ve had a bunch of what I call mini failures already. I thought I could just run off to India without any of my own money for leverage. I had a grand delusion of starting three successful blogs and somehow making enough money with them quickly. The problem was the “quickly” part. It’s hard to make money quickly on a blog unless you already have some kind of leverage in real life, which means you are already successful at doing something.
Blogging is hard work. It takes time to create quality content and then you have spend most of your time marketing. One of my favorite bloggers, John Chow, recently posted that making money blogging is about 10% and 90% marketing. Then you keep hearing that content is king, so that 90% is huge. By the way, he makes $12,000 a month on his personal blog.
After this blogging revelation, I went out to try a different approach. It kinda hurt that I had already invested time in blogging, but hey, life moves on.
I moved on to this thirty day challenge where a couple of internet marketers were telling people that they could make $10 on the internet without spending any money. I was quite intrigued.
After a couple of weeks of them telling me stuff I already knew, then they dropped a bombshell. A way to find a niche market and to have a website rank in the top 10-20 in Google almost instantly. Now for many of you who don’t know anything about search engines, it takes work and time to get traffic from Google. It doesn’t help that Google ranks the age of a website as an important factor.
Anyway, Ed and Dan (internet gurus) showed me a way that I could actually see how many people are searching for a term. This is an amazing feat by itself because an accurate way of measuring this doesn’t exist. Google knows, but they won’t tell us because there would just be more spam. Most internet marketers just spend months developing a website to just have it tank because they find out there isn’t anyone searching for or willing to buy that product.
With this new information, I got sucked into it. I searched and searched for the perfect niche. Realizing that trying to achieve perfection without actually doing anything was going to be a problem, so I picked one and went with it. Guess what it was? A children’s toy called Webkinz.
At first I was a bit put off by creating a website around a toy, but it’s actually a very interesting product. Ganz, the company behind Webkinz, has created an ingenious business model. You buy a stuffed animal just like a Beanie Baby. However, there is a tag on it with a special number. You use this number on their website and you get the animal in the virtual world. Then you can do all sorts of things in this virtual world.
Kids are HOOKED on this Webkinz thing. The top retired animal sells for over $1000 on eBay. There are now hundreds of thousands of kids playing around with their virtual version of their pets.
Anyway, I created website around it. It wasn’t a great website, but it targeted people who were looking to buy Webkinz. I then tried to cram as many Amazon and eBay ads as I could. I then did the internet marketing tricks I was taught and bam, I was ranked in the top 10.
I was pretty impressed. However, it means nothing if you can’t convert it.
I didn’t goto bed that night. The web platform I chose to create my site on was pretty slow, so it took me all night and morning. It was a strange feeling because I didn’t feel tired at all. I was so excited about the potential of my website that I was wide awake till about 2 PM.
The fact that I could stay up all night and do this meant something to me. It had been such a long time since I stayed up all night and felt completely awake. It meant I was doing something worthwhile and exciting.
But, I was pretty delirious that day. I kept checking website statistics until my sleep deprivation finally hit me. I was about pass out, so I went to bed.
After waking up at an odd hour, I checked my affiliate account on Amazon. Then I saw it.
A sale!!! I made a whooping $1.70.
My parents asked me what I was so excited about it. I told them and they laughed. They tried to joke around with me, but they didn’t get it. It wasn’t just an ordinary dollar or $1.70.
It’s special dollar because of its passive income potential. Once I spent the time to build it, I would only need to tweak it once in awhile if I wanted to keep making roughly the same amount.
That’s the power of the internet!
I’ve made about $17 so far from the site alone. It’s still pocket change, but I haven’t really spent much time on it except for checking on it and adding occasional content.
But this is only peanuts. It validates something for me, and it gives me motivation to push forward with different ideas. The potential is endless.
I tried to mimic the success in different products, but I’ve had a tough time. I realized that the internet is the equivalent of the wild west. It’s constantly changing. Our Google overlords hide information from us. There are a bunch of bandits trying to steal money unfairly. It’s like a war zone.
It all boils down to the fact that it ain’t easy work. I’m probably making like 10 cents an hour so far, but personally, it’s incredibly rewarding. I’m incredibly excited, and I hope create enough these small websites to generate enough so I can focus on bigger projects.
If you’re interested in making money on the internet in your spare time, I think I will write a nice guide on how to make your first dollar on the internet, so stay tuned.
Thanks for reading.
Carl Zetterlund
I’m back in full force! I created a video to give you an update on what I have been doing for the last 9 days. I talk about the thirty day challenge as well as some insight into what I plan on doing with this blog.Hope you enjoy the video.
I plan on doing at least one a week to spice things up. Don’t give me too much of a hard time. I’m working on removing all those “umms”, “basically”, and other strange language abnormalities.
See ya,
Carl Zetterlund
I’m sitting here in front of my computer because I’m inspired. It’s 1:30 AM in the morning, and I ‘m trying to go to bed after watching a video of Tyler talking. He’s a professional pick up artist who cofounded Real Social Dynamics. You can find his blog here.
This post isn’t about picking up girls. It’s about the mindset and transformation that is required in becoming a pick up artist. This mindset and transformation is extremely powerful and can lead you to get anything you want in anything.
What is transformation?
It’s about lasting positive change.
But not in some measly superficial way. I’m talking major change to your very core. Change that comes slowly. Change that is impactful. I’m talking about change that turns you from a empty, purposeless, and energy sucking human being to a whole, purposefull, and vibrant source of energy.
Transformation is such an important concept to me because I have personally gone through a lot of change in my life, and it’s something I want to share with others. I feel there are so many people in this world who are just simply lost.
Instead of fixing themsevlves, they just fill themselves up with superficial and temporary emotional stimulus like television. It’s disgusting to see. IT JUST IS.
But how can we blame them. Our society… our economic system feeds us what we THINK we want. It’s a perpetuating cycle of self disillusionment.
Now many of you are not going to understand me. You just aren’t. Not in this moment at least because it’s not something you can get overnight. It’s a slow process, and there is no other way. There is no magic pill despite what all the marketers tell you.
However, the potential is there, and I’m telling you there is a way. There is something great out there for you to embrace. I know this sounds pretty wishy washy and egotistical, but that’s just the way it is.
Maybe I’m only really talk to a small part of the population who want to be great and have the determination to realize it. If this is you, all I know is that you are a rare breed. A rare breed that finds itself in disillusionment with people around them. A breed who doesn’t settle for mediocrity. A breed who wants everything they know is possible.
Almost unimaginable.
You may or may not see it or taste what it is, but you have the urge. The gut feeling to be more.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there are more people than I think who want it all. Maybe they just need to see the light.
Or maybe I’m right with my seemingly pessimistic view. Who knows.
It doesn’t matter.
I just want to say that today is a huge turning point for me. It’s about direction. I’ve already put myself in a position where I think I can’t fail, but it’s not enough. You can’t just quit a job and be set. You have to feel, think, and live the mindset EVERY second… and SOMETIMES you forget! Sometimes you don’t realize the power you have despite how freaking obvious it is.
Many of you are very confused right now, but it doesn’t matter. Just keep trying to understand and you’ll get there.
Thank you Tyler. You’re absolutely amazing. You have put me back on track.
I know this has been a vague post, but if you stick with me and take this path of steady growth, you’ll come back to this and it’ll click. I promise.
Carl Zetterlund
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