The Affiliate Journey

The Long Walk to Full-Time Affiliate Marketing Success

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The Secret Link Building Sauce that Most Affiliate Marketers & SEO’s alike Don’t Know About

October 21st, 2009 · Link Building

Long title for a really short post I promise!

Do you do your own link building?
Do your outsource link building?
Do you have ANYTHING AT ALL TO DO WITH LINK BUILDING?

If so listen up… I’m going to share with you a very quick point of interest that I consider to be the “secret sauce” of link building.

When I first tell you I know you’re going to say whaaa… com’on that’s not secret, everyone knows about this. How ever not everyone pays attention or even cares about it… And It ain’t Page Rank.

Ready… here it is….

CACHE DATE

That’s right, if you’ve been buying, building, trading, swapping or what ever you do for links based on page rank stop it. I use only three things to decide whether a link is worth while going after and the very first is cache date. I’ll get to all 3 things I look at soon, but first let me explain why cache date is important.

Keeping it Fresh!

If you read my recent post about What no one wants to tell you about link building then you already got a taste of this.

You see getting a link on a page of another site is the first step to building incoming links. The next step is ensuring that Google, yahoo & MSN (if you care about Bing…) find it. If your link is on a page that never gets indexed in Google then it might as well not even be there. You want to find links that are on some what theme’d pages, that have less then 30-40 out going links (the fewer the better) and are being cached frequently, preferably every 10-15 days.

How to Check Cache Dates

I hope most of you know how to do this but just in case you don’t here’s the deal. If you are in the Google SERPS there’s a CACHE link beside the SERP result. You can click that and it will show you the most recent cache of that page. If you have the Google toolbar installed then you can click the arrow beside the PR bar and it will give you three options, the first of which is “Cached snapshot of page”. This will also give you the recent cache date.

Look for pages that have a cache date from the last 10-15 days… the newer the better this means your link will get found and counted.

So that’s it… the secret sauce of link building. Use this like a mantra for yourself before you go head over heals trying to get your link placed on a PR4 or 5 page. Remember if it ain’t cached it don’t matter! :)

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Focus on the Things You Can Control

October 20th, 2009 · General, Make More Money

I’m as guilty as the next person of what I’m going to talk about in this post.

Worrying, Focusing and wasting time on the things I/we cannot control in our affiliate marketing businesses.

Affiliate marketing is just that “marketing”. It’s almost a science. You can test, tweak, measure and modify based on results. It’s a beautiful thing, but we often times get bogged down in stupid negative thinking like.

“I can’t do this”

OR

“Oh no my sales are down what happened”

Thoughts like these can lower our productivity to literally zero if we’re not careful not just for an afternoon but for days, weeks and even months if you’re not careful.

So what’s the solution?

Focus on the things that you can control, and let the affiliate gods take care of the rest.

So what can you control?

There is quite a lot you can control, or at least attempt to control when it comes to affiliate marketing.

Because the basic rules of marketing apply, anything that can be measured can be improved upon. So if you’re a paid search affiliate you can track your CTR form PPC ads, then work to improve that by tweaking your control ads headline or copy.

Vice Versa maybe you’re getting a great CTR to your landing page but no one is clicking through to the offer. This could be a multitude of things:

  • Your headline
  • Your copy or an image
  • The conversation that happens between your ad to your copy (does it match up?)
  • No call to action above the fold
  • Etc…..

It might seem like you’re not in complete control of your affiliate marketing business. It might even feel like this is all a crap shoot. I’m here to tell you it’s not, and what separates $10,000 a month from $1000 a month is tracking, tweaking, testing and doing it all again and again and again.

You can control headlines, copy, images, PPC ads etc. So do it! Control it, work it. See if you can take a campaign that is currently making $30 a day to $50 or even $100. You can make more sales from the traffic you’re getting you just need to make a better mouse trap.

What about Organic Search Affiliates?

Can we control our business as well as Paid affiliates? Truthfully yes. The world of SEO and organic search always comes across as very volitile how ever with the recent Google slap on review sites it just goes to show that PPC results can get tossed around as well.

So what can you control on the organic side?

Well all those things I talked about for a PPC landing page above, they go for organic pages too. Just because you’re not paying for the visitor doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be working your butt off to convert every single person you can that lands on your organic landing pages.

Test your headlines, link locations, call to action buttons, images and copy. All of these things can have a role to play in how your visitor feels when they land on your site and what they do once they’re there.

From the stand point of rankings you can get more links to capture a higher spot in the SERP’s this will increase the traffic you get and in turn boost sales again.

I’m sure you get my point by now…

In case you don’t here it is. WORK ON THE THINGS YOU CAN CONTROL & TEST. Forget about worrying about what if’s, why’s and how comes. These thoughts will eat you alive in this game.

So get out there and start controlling your businesses!

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What No One Wants to Tell you About Link Building

October 8th, 2009 · Link Building, SEO

I wanted to write this post as a sort of silent response to the large number of membership sites out there now that claim to build you unlimited links. I’m not talking about those spammy systems that just swap hundreds of links with off topic sites…

What I mean are those sites that allow you to submit content, spin that content (with some funky set of characters and synonym setup) and then syndicate that content across hundreds of sites or blogs.

The types of services I’m talking about are those like

  • LinkVana
  • Article Marketing Automatiion
  • My Article Network (Which is more or less a re-branded version of article marketing automation)

Anyways enough about the negative. I have a point to this post and it’s to share with you one point that none of these services seem to want to share with their members, but before I do that let’s look at the good points.

Good Point #1 - Your Link Shows up inside relevant content from the body of an article

This is a key point. You want on topic content surrounding your link, and the fact that these networks allow you to vary anchor text you can get multiple links to one page that have a variety of different anchor texts. Not to mention that link is in content which is far better then a stranded link in the footer, side bar or gutter of someones site.

Good Point #2 - Your Link is on a Variety of Sites & IP Addresses

So most of you probably know that having 100 links all from the Same IP address isn’t a ton of help for you. Instead you want to spread your links across a variety of IP addresses in a natural looking way. These membership sites (especially those like Article Marketing Automation where it’s other peoples sites your posting to) have sites across a lot of different hosting accounts, servers and IP addresses.

Ok so there are the good points…

Now let’s take a peek at what I feel is the BIGGEST mis-conception about these membership sites.

DOWNFALL NUMERO UNO

Your articles on these sites may or may not get cached by Google, and after that I would have to say that less then 1% of them will ever get cached a second time.

OK some of you are probably saying “Whats it matter if it gets cached, let alone cached a second time?”

A quick over view of the importance of Cache date and link Building.

FIRST

SIDEBAR: For those that don’t know what cache date is. If you have the google tool bar quickly click on the the pagerank bar and you get a couple of options. One is similar results, another is cache date. If you click that it gives you the most recent cache of any given page in the google index. This is the last date that google completely indexed that page and took a cache of it to replace the previous version they had.

Ok back to the story…

Here’s the thing, a link on a page that isn’t cached might as well not exist. Why? Because Google never ever finds it. You might be saying, “But what about Bing and Yahoo” forget about them for now… I go after the search engine that can send me over 60% of all traffic online… and that’s the BIG G.

These article we submit to sites like these may get indexed once by the search engines, but they rarely ever get indexed a second time. Why? For a couple of reasons. These sites we post articles to aren’t exactly web masters prized posessions. most of them contain adsense ads and that’s it. There is minimal if any promotion done to them to help Search engine spiders show up often and because of these there is no real “DEEP CRAWLS” of the sites.

This means that your link may get found once and you’ll get the credit for it but it likely will never get found again. So in order for these systems to be really effective you must continue to submit content, and more content and more content to keep a fresh/current link for your sites & pages out there.

What’s the benefit of your link on a freshly cached page you might wonder?

Well, for starters if a search engine spider finds your link more often it follows it through to your page more often. This is good because your page will continue to get the credit for that link plus get cached more often, which is also good.

Second, if you only have links to your site that are cached once then never again your link campaign will die off without a continuous injection of new content & links.

What can you do about this?

Truthfully there isn’t anything really worth while you can do about it. How ever if you do get an article posted on what you feel is a good site you could place a link or two in a blog post to that article on the other site. This will help keep that page fresh on the other site. Also you could do a small link building campaign to the page.

How ever when you start to think about all this work it might be more worth it to

a.) Pay a blogger to post an article for you on their site.
b.) Submit articles to the bigger directories that have a solid foot print of their own links out there.
c.) Post some content to social media sites like squidoo & hubpages and build some links to those (stay tuned I’m running a test on this right now).

SO Let’s Wrap it Up….

Are these types of membership worth it? Yes and No… They server a purpose to get quick exposure on a lot of IP’s and sites. How ever they cannot be your only method of promotion. Also they can take precious time away from your other projects if you aren’t careful that could provide more of an SEO benefit to your pages.

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Day 1: $10,000 Dollar Affiliate Goal

October 1st, 2009 · Make More Money

I just finished the first my real first day of work towards my $10,000 goal. If you’ve read my first post here then you have an idea about what I was starting off doing.

Today was a day of setting up some tests in Google Website Optimizer as well as modifying some headlines, sub headings and calls to action on pages I already have getting some traffic. All the work was done to only one site. I went back and fourth on whether I was going to try working on all 5 or 6 of my money sites at once and I decided to start with the top 2 for income from last month. I’ll then move on to the next 2 and so on.

What I focused on today were pages of a site that I am getting some half decent traffic for today and have:

  • Had a conversion at some point
  • Are getting clicks to the offer I’m promoting
  • Or are getting half decent traffic based on my analytics account

The changes I made were all on page but I made them for two different reasons.

  1. To Boost click through from the SERPS
  2. To increase my CTR to my merchant offer

I don’t know how many of you actively use Google’s web master tools, if you don’t you have to start. Google is giving a ton of great information in there. Point in case.

There’s a great report in there that will show you where your site is appearing for searches over the last 7 days. You can then look at the column next to it and see what pages are getting clicks from the search results. If you notice some pages that your ranking for on the first page and aren’t getting clicks to your site then you’ve got some great information to go on there.

You could

  1. Boost your ranking to get a higher spot to grab more traffic
  2. Improve your title tag and description so that your site is more attractive to the seacher

That’s just one great piece of info in there.

So back to what I spent the day doing.

The second type of changes I was making were content changes. Primarily I created some new buttons with calls 2 action on them to try and improve my CTR to the affiliate offer. This is going to take some time to test, but I feel it’s better then the text links I was using before.

Secondly I setup a test in Google Website Optimizer for one of my highly traffic’d pages that has generated some sales but is very low in my opinion based on the traffic numbers I’m seeing.

If you haven’t used Google Website Optimizer you have to check out that tool as well. It’s absolutely fantastic. I don’t have time to get into it in detail today but I’ll put together a tutorial about it one of these days.

Well that’s it for DAY 1.

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UPDATE: Social Media Link Building Test

October 1st, 2009 · Link Building, SEO

I posted last week about an experiment I was doing using several social media platforms (i.e. squidoo, hubpages, weebly etc.) for link building. The process is taking a lot longer then I expected, how ever it is moving forward.

What it’s looking like is at the end of this experiment I should have:

  • 9 Solid incoming links to a money page I’m trying to improve ranking for
  • 3-5 links pointing to 7 of my other sub-pages and home page of the same site with varying anchor text
  • 10-15+ incoming links to each social property I’ve setup

While this test is taking a lot of hard work and content writing to complete I think the results are going to be good. Many of my competitors in this niche are using social media sites for incoming links but when I reverse engineer their Squdioo lenses or HupPage Hubs I can’t see any real link building that was done for them.

The blueprint that I’ve put together and am testing should really juice up not just the pages on my site but also each social media site I create so it will be worth it in the long run.

Stay tuned for the results of this test coming in the next couple of weeks.

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Slow Sales Means time for Goal Setting

October 1st, 2009 · Make More Money

I have to admit I haven’t had a very productive summer. It’s only been a few months since I’ve gone full time in affiliate marketing, and to say the least I haven’t been doing the best job at staying on top of my business.

I took my new found freedom a little too lightly and spent a few too many days on the golf course and just generally messing around.

It’s almost the end of the month and looking at this months numbers my gross commissions have slipped about $1500 dollars since hitting a peak back in the Spring.

What exactly am I talking about?

At the beginning of the Spring I was enjoying gross income around $5500-$6000 a month (before expenses). After briefly looking at my numbers for September I’m down to just over $4000. Am I shocked? Unfortunately not. While I don’t like to admit it I usually know when I screw something up and well, I know I’ve screwed something up.

How ever I’m not going to panic. I haven’t lost my ability to market, nor do SEO etc. So I’m going to lay out a plan for the rest of the year to bring myself back on track to hit my ultimate goal of $10,000 a month in affiliate commissions, and I’m going to document the journey here on my blog.

Here’s how I plan on documenting everything:

  • Provide End of Month Updates on income and growth over previous month(s)
  • Write daily about what changes I’m making, tests I’m running and over all how things are going

I’m going to use both my blog as well as a thread at DigitalPoint Forum to track my progress and hopefully pick up some readers along the way who can follow me on this journey.

Here’s the 30,000 foot view of my plan

  1. Work on Improving the conversions on the pages I have right now in the search engines ranking well and earning me money. I’m going to do this by split testing pages, working on new copy, testing headlines, calls to action etc. This is the best place for me to start since I have some traction with these pages already.
  2. Next I’m going to increase traffic to the pages I have already ranking some where in the SERPS to boost the traffic that is coming to these pages. This could mean link building to improve ranking on the first page or possibly bringing a page from the 6th page in the SERPS to the first page.
  3. Lastly I will add more pages to my sites to grow my reach in the search engines for each of my markets. The key here is I don’t want to add informational pages. Rather I want to add content pages that I think can add sales to my bottom line. I’m looking for converting keywords not just volume of pages & traffic here

That’s the plan in a nutshell. It might seem simple in those 3 points but I’ll be doing this across 5 or 6 sites, and of course each one of those points has a lot of work underneath of it.

I won’t be revealing my actual sites n any of the upcoming posts, but I will reveal exactly what sort of changes I’m making and give details on the work I’m doing.

Why?

Because a big part of goal setting is accountability, and since none of my friends or family (except for my wife and a couple of key other people) really understand what it is I do for a living it’s hard to find someone to be accountable to. What better place to find accountability for this goal then online with other Internet marketers.

I’m going to keep myself on track by taking a few minutes each day to just day dream about what it will be like when I achieve this goal. Also I’ll be making daily notes in my journal and keeping on top of monthly, weekly and daily goals.

While my GOAL is to achieve $10,000 in commissions in a month I’ve broken it down to achieving two sales per day for the entire month on average for each site. This will bring me over my goal, but it allows me to focus on actions rather then dollars earned.

It’s easier for me to concentrate on generating the traffic and conversion rates to achieve two sales per day for a particular product then it is to try and earn $2500 a month from a particular product.

If you’re interested in following me along this journey to achieving my goal you can sign up for my RSS feed notifications at the top right of this page. I hope you will as I think we can both learn a lot along the way.

To yours and my success in the coming days, weeks and months!

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Social Media Link Building Test

September 24th, 2009 · Link Building, SEO

There always seems to be some new technique coming out for how to use social media for link building. I had a mind flash the other day so I grabbed my business journal and started sketching out an idea I had to use social media sites along with article marketing, blogging and a couple of other techniques to build good quality 1 way links to the money pages on my affiliate sites.

I just started the test today, and it’s looking like it’s going to take about a week to get it fully setup. There’s a lot of content writing/creation required to test this.

How ever I intend to release my results in a report. I’ll likely have to do some videos to explain what it is I’m doing, but if it works the way I hope it’ll be a nice link building competitive edge you’ll have over your competitors.

Let me say that while this technique could be copied it does take quite a bit of work so one down fall is that not a lot of people would be willing to put the work in.

I’m interested in giving myself every edge I can over my competitors for my converting keywords so I’m willing to test it out on one site to see how well it works.

I’ll keep everyone updated with my status as I work through this test.

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Boosting Earnings Per Visitor and Revenues with Adsense

May 10th, 2009 · Make More Money

I know a lot of you have come to the same conclusion in the last year or two that Adsense is the worst performing affiliate program out there.

Maybe calling it the worst is a little harsh, but in comparison to programs that are targeted to your visitors it does not earn you the maximum revenue per visitor.

Recently something was brought to my attention that potentially we could be leaving a few bucks on the table each month by not having Adsense on some of our pages.


What exactly do I mean?

If you’re not familiar with conversion rates take a minute to read my post about increasing conversion rates to pump up your income.

You see not every page on your website is going to convert visitors to sales as well as each other. This could be because of the keyword people are finding you for, your content, or a slew of other reasons.

That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try to capture a few bucks from those visitors though.

so here’s my:

3 step plan to maximize earnings per visitor with Adsense

1. )Know your conversions and where your sales are coming from.

The first step is knowing which pages generate sales on your website. So you must setup tracking for each page on your site. This way you will know which pages are generating the most click-through s and which are generating the most sales.

From here you can see which pages are under performing (i.e. lots of traffic and no click-through s or sales). You can first try to increase click-through s and sales (tweaking content, testing different calls to action) but if you can’t seem to get the numbers up this is where Adsense comes in.

2.) Place Adsense in a prominent position on your under performing pages

First off I don’t think we should just splash Adsense everywhere. If you have a top ranking page that reviews a high converting ebook placing Adsense on that page isn’t necessary (nor does it make sense in my opinion).

How ever if you have a “how to” article that doesn’t seem to convert that well but gets a lot of visitors each day this is prime Adsense real estate.

So place Adsense on those pages that revealed themselves to be under performers in terms of sales and conversions.

3.) Track your results

From step 1 you could have effectively figured out your earnings per visitor by looking at your analytics to see how many visitors came to a page in a given number of days, and then compare that to the earnings from that page for the same time period.

This isn’t easy to do with Adsense unfortunately (because it’s tough to track individual pages with Adsense), but you can look at the over all increase in revenue of your site after you’ve added Adsense and compare that to the affiliate income you’re still getting from those pages.

The over all revenue should increase. If it hasn’t then consider taking Adsense off of the pages.

This isn’t going to double your income or anything (Or at least I hope it doesn’t, if it does revisit your keywords and business model).

It will add a few bucks to the bottom line each month. It’s a worth while test in the quest to squeeze every ounce of revenue from a website.

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The Secret Ingredient Super Affiliates Use to Sky Rocket Commissions…. Conversion Rate

May 9th, 2009 · General, Make More Money

For those that know me, I’m a big organic SEO guy. I don’t do a lot of PPC, I tend to get frustrated with it. How ever I’m sure that if I did do more PPC I’d be a better writer, more diligent tester, and probably pay more attention to my conversion and click through rates on my sites.

I was doing some brain storming in my business journal this week about how I can grow revenues, and it occurred to me that I haven’t really tested or tracked my conversion rates that well on any of the sites I was reviewing.

Each site was doing OK, and as a whole this group of 8 sites earned between $5K and $7K in commissions each month. How ever I was pretty sure I could get it to $10K.

This led me to do a bit of reading on the subject of conversion and I came to realize that most of the super affiliates I’ve read about don’t have 150 websites. Nor are they promoting 100 different products on one site. They’re laser focusing there efforts on a hand full of offers at any point in time, and usually only one offer per site.

They’re putting there heart and soul into making the most money from that affiliate offer.

This led me to put together the following list of to-do items and things to test for my set of sites.

Focus on one product for the entire site where possible (outside of product reviews)

Each individual article or content page will be focused on promoting one particular product. So for instance if you have a SpyWare site you might have reviews for a multitude of products, but on each article page I will test just one of those products at a time. See which one appears to convert the best then try to improve the Click through rate for that product.

The theory goes is that if you’re conversion rate for the merchant stays the same and you can double the number of visitors you send that merchant you should double your commissions.

Ensure tracking is implemented on every page

Along with tracking, ensure I have unique tracking codes for each page, and possibly even link position.

Knowing which product seems to generate the most revenue for your site is good stuff. Learning which page(s) on your site are generating the most click through s to the merchants site is next.

Setup a unique tracking code for each page of my site, it could be a letter, number of combination of the two. It could also be the keyword the page is focused on.

When I do this I log it all in a spread sheet so I can frequently check my stats to see which pages are producing sales, which are getting a ton of click through s with no sales etc.

You should take tracking into consideration when you’re choosing affiliate merchants to work with. The big networks such as Commission Junction have this type of tracking available, but some in house programs do not.

Test Calls to action on each page

Always be testing is a pretty good modo I think when we’re talking about affiliate marketing.

I’ve often built a site, did the SEO work, and say that site generates a few hundred a month then I walk away to the next project. How ever what I never really thought about was I’m leaving dollars on the table because I don’t know if this site is converting as best it can.

To improve this I need to test different calls to action, content, copy and layouts. (i.e. buttons, anchor text for your links, images, positioning of each). Test them for say 100-200 visitors to that page and then consider tweaking it a bit. Keep notes of changes and dates as well as back-ups of the previous files you modify so you can always go back to a better converting format of a given page.

This can have a HUGE impact on your revenues.

Let me explain with an example.

You’re site gets 100 unique visitors a day, and you make $25 per sale on the particular product you’re promoting.

You see 15-20 clicks through to the merchant and on average you get 1 sale a day from that.

So for argument sake we’ll say you have a 15% CTR (click through rate) and a 6% conversion rate with the merchant. So for any 30 day month you’re making about $750.

There isn’t a lot we can do to improve conversion rates on the merchants end besides as far as layout and call to action goes. We can improve the quality of traffic we send OR improve our education and pre-sell of the product on our site.

The other thing we can aggressively work on is improving our CTR to the merchant.

Let’s say we test, tweak and track some changes to our layout, text, buttons etc. By the end of the month we were able to bring up that 15% CTR to 31% CTR.

That’s a pretty huge change, and assuming that the quality of the traffic is the same or better the 6% conversion rate should hold true so instead of 1 sale a day you’re seeing about 1.86, or let’s call it 2 sales a day.

What does this mean to the bottom line for this particular site?

Well you’ve just taken a $750 a month revenue stream and turned it into a $1500 a month revenue stream.

Could you do that across all of your sites?

Freakin right you could!

You could give yourself a hefty pay raise without creating new sites, just improving the ones you’ve got.

Now I’m not blind to think that this can all be done in a week. It takes time, planning and depending on the number of sites you have probably a few months. How ever doesn’t it seem like it’s worth the effort?

I thought so.

Take some time on Monday to think about how your sites are converting. First step is if you don’t have it setup implement tracking for each page so you can check your CTR’s. This stuff is what Super Affiliates gobble up to increase revenues.

Some people say the money’s in the list. If you play with conversion numbers long enough you might think other wise.

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Challenge, Learn and Live to be Successful in Online Business

April 19th, 2009 · General, Make More Money

One thing that I’ve really come to realize in the last 12 months is that we always have to be learning.

We need to be learning new skills, trying new things, challenging ourselves more and more.

I came to this conclusion both in my affiliate marketing business, as well as in my personal life at home.

Why am I writing about learning and trying new things?

I feel that this is a key trait/skill for affiliate and online marketers in general to have.

You see if you get comfortable with an exact system, set of steps, or tasks in the online world then you can quickly be left behind.

Also, it’s key to have a firm grasp on how particular tasks are done, even those which you outsource to others.

Why?

To avoid having the wool pulled over your eyes by a contract worker, and to ensure you’re paying for quality.

EXAMPLE:

I have two graphic designers I use on a regular basis, but sometimes my drive to launch a new test site dwindles while I wait for my designer to get my template back to me for the site.

This morning I decided, “Hey I can probably whip up some of my own landing page templates for my new PPC testing I’m starting” (see my post from earlier this week if you’re wondering about my new PPC test).

So I set out to find some worth while Photoshop tutorials to see what I could learn.

Guess what, a couple of hours later I had created a sample layout by follow a couple of tutorials and I feel pretty confident that with a bit of practice over my next couple of sites I could start creating my own landing pages.

Pretty slick!

Now, I’m not suggesting that I will always do this, and realistically it’s not the best use of my time, but I have to say I feel some what empowered this morning after learning this new skill that I could come up with an idea, research the niche, create a simple landing page design and have it going by the afternoon if I really wanted to now.

The Bottom Line

Never rest on your laurels in this business.

If you want to keep growing your business, then you have to keep growing yourself. Both with new skills, mental and emotional capacity etc.

Always be reading something challenging, always be challenging yourself to learn a new skill. You might not see the results right away, but trust me you’ll begin to build more and more self confidence in yourself that will spill into other areas of your life and business.

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