Motivational

Just a quick motivational post here on my old poker affiliate blog for those still making their way to this blog one way or another…

It is almost 4 years since I first started as a poker affiliate.  I will save the whole story on how it happened, as I have it on my About me page, but it is really neat to see how far I’ve come along (and how far other affiliates in a similar situation as me have came too).

I remember making my first link sale to Mike W and Jeremy M from the PAW forums at the time and getting extremely excited.  Like one of those “no way I just made money over the internet” type feelings.  Next came some affiliate commission from Chan Poker, and that first Real Money Player felt amazing.

The feelings of making your first bit of income online (especially at a young age) is one of the best feelings out there.

After making a few hundred bucks I still didn’t think I could turn this into a full time summer job while in school, but kept plugging away for whatever money I could get.  A few hundred a month turned into a little over a thousand dollars per month (including writing work) and that was about what I would make in the summer as a student ($400/week is about what I was used to earning).  That first summer I busted my ass writing for others and collecting small affiliate payments and the odd link sale.  I made just about what I would have made doing landscaping or whatever else.

Month by month the affiliate payments were growing.  I finally realized I might actually be able to do this for a living.

After only about 2 years I was making more than a lot of out of university or college jobs pay.  I was working hard, but also living the dream working from my bedroom as a teenager.

Another year or so goes by and I start to get bored with poker.  I don’t play poker much anymore at all, and I’ve started to hate writing about it.  I already have some established sports betting sites and casino sites doing decent – enough to pay the bills.

I sell half of my business for a very nice chunk of change.  Enough that I could buy myself a very nice car, or various other toys if I wanted to.

Luckily for me I have my head on somewhat straight.  I paid off my current car loan, but didn’t do too much more with that money.  Most went to taxes or right back into my business.

This is about when I realize that I want to make this my full time job.  School isn’t for me.  I know I can more than survive working online right now, and the sky is the limit.  If something happens to my websites, the industry, etc, I know I can adapt and at least make enough money online to get by.

Half way through my next semester of school I decide I’m done.  I’m ready to start working full time as an Internet marketer.

These last two years I haven’t seen the growth in my business that I’ve wanted to, but I am still probably considered pretty darn successful.  I am definitely not satisfied where I am right now, but I’m getting there.

I am in the middle of building my own house right now, and am able to put a solid 20% down on it.  It’s funny to reflect… about 4 years ago I was happy that I could buy myself a few lap dances video games with the money I was making online, and now I am buying my first home.

My business right now is focused around a lot of sports stuff (including the new NFL Betting Picks blog), a tiny bit of casino/poker, and a tiny bit of fitness related stuff.  I’m not sure where I will be in 5 or 10 years from now, but my guess is that I will likely still be in the sports betting nice and doing some more fitness stuff – those are my two biggest passions and nothing is better than doing work you enjoy.

Pretty random post, but it is cool to reflect back on your life/business.  I used to love motivational posts when I was a new affiliate, and hopefully this post finds the eyes of a new affiliate that needs a little boost.

I’m not too sure what it is… but the time I get the most done is between 10:00 PM and 2:00 AM.

Actually about 5 nights ago my girlfriend fell asleep watching TV just after midnight so I hopped on the computer and actually worked right until 4:45 am and it was one of the most productive nights I’ve had in a long time. I was dead tired in the morning, but the amount of work I got done was well worth it.

I don’t know what it is, but for some reason I seem to zone in at night time.

My day starts with getting up at 10am and for about an hour I check stats, emails and browse the forums and basically feel brain dead.  For the next few hours I will do some small work like posting articles I had written, but I don’t get too much done before hitting the gym early afternoon most days.  It isn’t until I’ve been awake for about 5-6 hours that I actually become productive.  After I hit the gym and make a light dinner I seem to get the most work done.

It kind of sucks because the night time is when there is the most going on outside of work (hangout with friends or gf, sports on TV, etc, etc), but no matter what I do I can never be too productive in the morning.  I don’t drink coffee but I’ve tried caffeine pills and they don’t help the cause at all.

Anyways just a random post because I’ve been very productive so far in January and will probably hit almost all of my January Affiliate Goals!

On a side note I wanted to give big props to Bryan from PAL who run a great site BankrollManagement.org (which of course focuses on bankroll management tips for gamblers).  Bryan helped me switch two sites over from my shitty shared server at godady to my unlimited hosting account.  My sites were taking like 20 seconds to load at some parts of the day which was super annoying and costing me a lot of money.  I did an analytics comparison to two weeks before and after the switch and my bounce rates went down 2.23% and my pages per visit went up 2.34%.  Make sure your site loads fast!

Hope your killing it in January… because it only goes downhill from here! Haha just playing, but it seems like more work gets done in January because of goals and seeing income numbers for the year before! Have a good week.

One of my friends over at the poker affiliate listings forum who is a newer affiliate asked me if I could do a blog post about how I decide which of my income I re-invest into my affiliate business and what I keep for myself.  Great idea for a blog post!

When I first started as a poker affiliate I was living in a dorm room at my University.  A couple hundred dollars a month started rolling in around Christmas I believe it was from link sales and then the affiliate revenue followed slowly – I actually remember the first link sale I made was a big one on a couple different pages for $800 and I was so amazed at how much money I had made from putting a few links up haha.

Anyways during the first few months when I was bringing in revenue I pretty much kept it all for personal stuff as I didn’t have a job in University and needed the extra beer money.  I can’t remember completely but I think I only forked out $50 for my first template and then maybe another $150 for a second and didn’t really purchase much more at the beginning.

When summer came around I told my parents I could live off my poker affiliate  income (they didn’t really “get it” and asked a few times if I was getting a “real job”).  At this time my income was around $1500 per month, which was half writing content for others, part affiliate income and part advertising sales.  At this point I was comfortable enough to start spending a little bit of that income on purchasing things that would take me to the next level as an affiliate.

I guess I had it lucky because I was around 19 and living at my dads house still so I didn’t need to pay rent, car payments, etc that  a lot of start up affiliates might have to pay.  I was comfortable living off around $1000 per month and started putting back $500ish back into my affiliate business.

Re-investing into my sites really helped and I slowly started to grow, earning more and more affiliate revenue monthly instead of having to rely on writing and selling advertising.

As I have continued to grow over the past two years I find on average I have always re-invested about 1/3 to 1/2 of my monthly income back into my business.  It takes discipline because I could always take that $500, $1000, $2000 or $5000 and go buy myself something nice, but for some reason it has always come naturally to me to re-invest in my business. I guess its probably because I love this job, and love seeing myself grow in the business and I know it takes some re-investing to get myself to the next level.

So if you are asking how much you should re-invest back into your poker, gambling or whatever affiliate business you will have to ask yourself:

What is the minimum amount you can live off comfortably and stay somewhat happy?  As a new affiliate trying to make it you might have to sacrifice some things in order to re-invest into your business.  I know there is a lot of things I pay for now that if I was a new affiliate I would cut back on in order to help grow my business – try and find a couple things you don’t really need to spend money on and cut back.  There is no set amount you will need to put back into your business, but the more the better and the faster you will grow.

Hopefully that post will help some of the newer affiliates – It’s late and I am not re-reading it tonight so I hope it ran together and made sense … anyways little plug here for my UB Referral Code portal which I have been putting a little “re-investing” into over the past few weeks.  My next post will most likely not be until the start of August for a goal recap post, but hey never know I’ve been really motivated lately maybe I will get another one in.

I had a very productive week in my second week of summer (first real week because of my Wisdom Teeth surgery last week).  If I can continue to work like I did this week all summer I think I will be very happy in the winter when the hard work would start to show.

To start things off I never slept past 10:00 am, any my average wakeup time was 9:00 am – I started waking up with no alarm by the end of the week at around 8:30 am.  Getting up early plays a huge role in me getting things done for a few reasons.  When I’m up early the sun isn’t out yet, so I don’t have the need to sit outside in the sun, and don’t mind sitting my basement working.  Also my roomates aren’t up to much in the morning (if they are even awake), so I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything fun.  I also go to the gym around 4 with a friend, so if I were to sleep in it would be right in the middle of my working time, but this way I can get everything done before I head for a workout.

Another reason why I had a productive week was the fact that I don’t have as much income coming in since I sold my poker sites recently.  It pisses me off when I can’t check my stats and see that I got a CPA or two for my poker players each night, and I use it as motivation.  Of course I remember how good it felt getting a couple sign ups each day, so I am working to get that feeling back sooner than later.

Besides launching two smaller sites (that I am confident can produce some revenue if I get them ranking), I also got my main sports betting portal TheSportsGeek.com switched over to a completely new template.  Whenever I get a new, better look for a site I get excited and I really want to get it switched over so I work extremely hard.  I spent like 6 hours straight Wednesday night and then woke up early and spent all day getting the new template up.  The work is very boring in switching over a template, and I had a few problems, but now that it’s done I am extremely happy and excited.

I made a post at PAL asking for a review of the site, and most people seemed to really like the layout and design I got done for it (Eduardo did another excellent job for me).  I set up a split test for my Aweber newsletter sign up button, which was the main criticism I received.  I love asking PAL members for reviews of sites, because I always get something pointed out to me that I wouldn’t have really notice myself.  The next step for me is to work on calls to action and continue to put up solid content.  I added a bunch of new pages including the Sports Betting Articles section which I filled with 12 or so new sports betting articles, and I changed around the URL structure completely to something that made a lot more sense.

Anyways, overall a great week and I want to keep that up – of course I want to have a little fun soon as I haven’t done anything exciting lately at all – looks like me and my roommates are holding a Kegger for this upcoming May 2-4 long weekend

This is a guest post from Mike, who is a really successful poker affiliate.  There is a great message being sent here, and is something I need to try and follow more as well.  Thanks for doing an article for me Mike!  I will try post a couple more affiliate tips and motivation type posts like this over the summer, because I know I really like reading these types of posts (especially when I was a newer affiliate).

You Shouldn’t Be Reading this Post

Seriously. Get to work.

I’ve posted about this before, but the people I know who make the most money online don’t browse affiliate forums all day, study SEO posts, chat on Skype, or read affiliate blogs. Nor do they have the highest post counts at forums PAL… in fact, most of them have the lowest.

Of course I’m not saying you should never do any of the things above, because they do have some importance. I like to keep tabs on my friends by checking out their blogs once in a while, browse the forums to stay up on industry news (and it’s always cool to help people out… more on that later), and have Skype conversations to conduct business or chat with a buddy.

However, if you notice that most of your day is spent “researching” or “networking”, I bet you aren’t satisfied with your monthly income. And unfortunately, there is no amount of tools, filters, blockers, or anything else you can install on your computer that will cure your lack of productivity. You have to make the decision yourself.

Someone had a great post on the forums the other day (I think it was Graham) about how most of the older members who made up PartyRiches/PAW have “grown out” of the forum. I think that’s an excellent observation. Although I’m infinitely grateful for all the help I’ve received through the various forums Jeremy has run, I’ve gotten to the point where I know what to do and it’s just a matter of doing it. And I bet a lot of the people reading this post are at the same point.

This belief was further reinforced last week when I attended a SEO/Social Media conference. I went into the event hoping that I could pick up a few tactics from the so-called “gurus” that would give me an edge in the poker market.

However, over two days of presentations, Q&A, conversations, and panels, I learned two small things, neither of which will have a major effect on my business. There are no secrets… I’m pretty sure half the people I know could have run those sessions.

So what is the solution for an affiliate who wants to get to the next level? I’m not sure I have the answer, but it definitely isn’t to install “productivity boosters” on your computer, learn a new SEO theory, or read the latest time management strategy. I think all you need to do is decide deep down if you want a high post count or a fat bank account, and everything will flow from that decision.

BTW – I’d be very hypocritical if I told everyone to stop posting at/reading PAL, because I learned pretty much everything I know from those forums. But once you get to a certain point you need to cut down on your browsing time and increase your grinding time. If you want to help new affiliates out that is great, but there’s no reason to stay involved in all the drama and bickering that often fills the boards (and can quickly waste an entire workday).

This post was provided by Mike Wittmeyer of BestPokerSites.org.