It’s been a year since I posted the original entry documenting my experience with AKMG.  Long story short, it’s water under the bridge.

Link to original story!

Aberdeen, South Dakota, is a great city to live in.  It is a great city to raise a family in.  Most of all, it’s a GREAT city to do business in.

It is not a great city to live in after it snows.

The city has an abysmal reputation for not doing a quality job keeping up with snow removal, which is unfortunate given the weather here is capable of dropping over 12″ of snow at a time.  The city does such a poor job plowing, sanding, and salting, that the number of car accidents after any substantial snowfall just skyrockets.  Just how many of these accidents can be avoided is anyone’s guess, but you would be hard pressed to effectively dispute that poorly plowed roads play a big impact. The city will spin this in any number of ways, but it comes down to poor road conditions even days after the last snowflake falls.

The facebook fan page took approximately 45 seconds to create and 5 minutes to throw out to my contact list. I let the list grow 100% organic.  Considering my town only has 22,000 people living here, the ‘conversion’ rate wasn’t great, but hey, organic is organic!

The reality is it takes a little bit of mob mentality to get any sort of results with small local governments, and my city of Aberdeen is no exception.  The Facebook fan page was only 3-4 days old when it hit 250 people, the frontpage of the 1/12/2009 newspaper, and got the attention of a local councilwoman.

Join the Aberdeen, South Dakota Snow Removal SUCKS! facebook group here!

UPDATE: 1/13/2010 @ 8am: ~500 fans of this page. Page 5 days old.  Entire population of city is only 21,000.

I think the thing most authors miss is that Twitter is a conversational platform, not a social media network like Facebook.  (Note it’s not a communication tool, but rather a conversational tool!)

Twitter’s longevity is sustainable for two reasons:

First it’s stupid easy to use. Anyone who can type can instantly use it.
Second, there is no advertising on Twitter. This sets it apart from 99% of the other social platforms out there.

The whole reason Myspace is a derelict graveyard of information is the advertising platform was woefully invasive to the web user.  They also allowed users to customize their page theme CSS and didn’t control how ads were displayed on those themes, resulting in seizure-inducing experiences for 99.9% of the users!  I think most new social platforms understand the failings of their predecessors and architect their offering as to avoid making the mistakes of those previous.

The thing about Twitter that gives it a very sustainable competitive advantage over the other major social platforms out there is quite simply, simplicity.  You can build any custom client, such as TwitterFox, TwitterBerry, and TweetDeck, and customize the Twitter experience to your own specific needs.  It’s funny, but each time Facebook changes it’s layout, there are the inevitable 4,000,000 users who join a new “the new Facebook layout stinks” group.  Facebook never seems to find a happy medium.

Twitter on the other hand completely avoids these hassles by following the golden rule of IT: KISS. (Keep it simple stupid!)

Almost all training organizations and colleges offer online training now. Find a technical school in your area that offers online courses is my recommendation.

Here is the truth about paid education:
Accredited private/state Colleges: Full of 2-year-old+ material (some material as old as 5-6 years) and instructors who are FAR removed from the world of profit and innovation. Stay far away.

For-profit colleges: Full of 2-year-old material but has a few instructors who know their shit. These guys base class offerings off of economic indicators and local business steering committees. Stay away if you can help it.

Tech universities: Mostly up to date material, BUT, most of the instructors are part-time because they work in the real world full time. Most are also seasoned veterans with very current experience. This is where you learn the nitty gritty of a topic, not just the theory or concept.

Technical Education Centers: New Horizons Computer Learning Centers for example is an excellent resource. They put uber-amounts of training, certifications, and real world experience into their instructors and are great for niche learning. Plus they are in SO much hurt right now you can EASILY negotiate a 5-6 course deal for the cost of 2 courses. Trust me, they’ll take $6K for 5 courses, especially since it’s online.

Very much consider meet the teaching staff at any place you consider attending; if you can’t meet them and size them up, don’t bother wasting the money.

REMEMBER THIS:

You get a formal education to make a living.

You self-educate to make a FORTUNE…

I finally hit a slump. After 12 months doing affiliate marketing 6+ hours a day, 7 days a week, I hit a brick wall that was 50 feet thick and 5,000 feet high. In other words, it was insurmountable under any circumstance. Well, maybe that’s exaggerating it a bit, but when you’re all alone sailing the hurricane-fueled waters of internet marketing, losing just a tiny bit of direction often seems like you’re on your way to the bottom of the ocean, not just a little off course.

That’s what happened to me. I had an offer that was killing the competition and getting me a daily consistent ROI of 500-700%. It was an easy offer to manage, all-graphic landing page, merchant supplied creatives, lots of traffic from Google content network, and a 50% landing page CTR with a 40% conversion rate at the offer. I was happy, making great money, finally on weekly wires with this ad network, and had the next 6 months of profits from this campaign all budgeted for new projects and other campaigns.

Then out the blue one day, I checked stats in the afternoon and found that the numbers were horrific, only about 5% of the normal amount. Freaking out that the offer died and my AM didn’t tell me, or that my ads weren’t running, or worse yet, that I was being scrubbed like a 10-year-old who just said “uncle fucker” in front of grandma, I ran straight to the Prosper 202 spy menu to check stats there, and sure enough, not a lot of traffic.

A few things happened after I talked to my AM. Earlier in the month. I had to pull teeth to get a tracking pixel on this offer, and it wasn’t until the pixel was placed that things started to go South. First, my AM called, said “bad news, our payout should have been $1.75, not $2, we need to immediately drop your payout, but in addition, this merchant hasn’t paid us since September 08 and we’d like you to stop the traffic right now.” (This was in March 09) So at this point I’m kind of stressing, but not too bad as the campaign would only lose about $1200/month and was still really profitable if I went down to $1.75, but to stop RIGHT NOW? I mean dude, I have this money budgeted for the next 6 months.

Then the ax came down, the AM said “Truth is 3 days from now we’re meeting with the merchant and will likely drop them for non-payment.” So here I am with this GREAT traffic source, AWESOME conversion stats, and PLANS for the future profits, and this flaming bag of shit is thrown on my doorstep.

No biggie I thought, I’ll find out who else has the offer or a similar offer and jump ship. I did that but the payout at the second network was just too low to make the campaign worthwhile and I’d have to get busy on a new campaign ASAP. Add to that, 24 hours after I switched the links to the new network, the great hand of Google, like a pimp hand to a wayward ho, came CRASHING down against my chin in the most spectacular Google bitch slap of the year. They killed 100% of the campaign, no reason, no explanation, no excuses, nothing.

So there I was, sitting there thinking “no biggie, I’ll get back to work.” and for a week, that’s what I did. Then the FTC got it’s panties in a knot and decided to go after gov’t grants and google cash offers, so all the guys running those jumped out of the niche and started hammering the other offers extremely hard, which made my efforts to find a new profitable niche a lot more expensive than I anticipated.

So I worked and worked for 2 weeks, never really putting anything together and each day, growing more and more depressed. I questioned my talent, my ability, my knowledge, and most of all, I questioned if this was the biz for me at all. Nothing seemed to go right.

Then it came to me one night in the middle of pwning a 6-pack of Guinness stouts, “you don’t have to hit a home run your first at-bat each game, just get on base, then go from there.”

So for the next few days I did just that. I stuck to some basic maintenance of some older sites. I dropped 40-50 links a day each day and started to see some organic conversions come across for the higher payout niches, I also started getting excited about doing the simple tasks. You know, for a long time, I thought I had to be everything from the CEO to the janitor, making sure I had 100% of the project plan organized and being completed on a constant basis throughout the day. I realized that’s not the case.

I started just telling myself “I’ll do 3 major things today, if I get them done in 8 hours, cool, if not, I’ll re-evaluate tomorrow morning and redefine my day’s priorities.” This was just what the doctor ordered. I wasn’t worried about the “big picture” all the time like I was previously. I still knew what the big picture was and documented accordingly, but by and large, I could just focus on the task at hand, and not get flustered with worrying if the other tasks were perfect.

I’m at the point now where I know tough times will be there in the future, and I’ll get depressed again over some dumbass campaign dying suddenly, but I’ll also be better equipped to handle the after effects of such a slump.

This scenario is like Las Vegas in a lot of ways. Tons of bright lights, tons of boobage, and tons of booze, but you have to remember that it all has it’s price, and if you play your cards right, you’ll come out better in the end.

If you pay attention the REAL bottom 10% of this country (the news media) you’d be left thinking “In this post-Bush era, we’re now feeling the effects of the past 8 years where fiscal policy took a back seat to our hunger for war, thus resulting in mass suffering among most Americans.”.

Nonsense.

“What we’ve got here is failure to communicate. Some men you just can’t reach, so you get what we had here last week which is the way he wants it. Well, he gets it. And I don’t like it any more than you men.”

We as Americans seem to have lost our intestinal fortitude.  Are the days when we mapped out our own path in life gone forever? What happened to this ‘American dream’ my grandfather chased last century?  People have simply become too dependent on others, that’s the root problem in this recession.

It used to be the dream was a wife, 2 kids, 1-car garage, nice neighborhood, and a white picket fence.  Now it seems we want guaranteed job security sitting in some cubicle farm on the 45th floor.  We settle for 1.5% raises each year and don’t bitch when that raise is negated by a 5% increase in your family heath insurance premium.  Hey, it’s a job right and it puts food on the table.   Seriously?   Leave your balls on the table next time you leave home, you obviously don’t need them.

Forget education too.  It’s easier to spend 2 years in college running up $20K in student loans, then realizing that all the booze you drank in the previous 24 months has rendered you more useless than Paris Hilton.  You drop out and take a $10/hour job at a call center under the guise of “taking a semester off”. Hey corky, semesters are 4 months, not 5 years, get your ass back in the classroom.  Total fail.

There is a simple formula for success in this great country of ours:  Research + analysis + resourceful planning + extremely hard work + persistence == profit.

Are you guaranteed to succeed? Sure, if you guarantee yourself.  If previously worked as a manager of some restaurant and now find your dumb ass delivering pizzas, you’re doing it wrong.  The ones that weather the rough seas of a recession aren’t the ones who settle for just getting by, they’re the people who say ‘screw dropping the anchor, drop that mainsail and set course for the storm’.  They find opportunity, they find resources that help them succeed, and most of all, they get aggressive.

A sailboat anchored in the harbor is perfectly safe, but that’s not what sailboats are made for.

If you find yourself sitting home unemployed, or work 10 hours a day for peanuts, or cry yourself to sleep each night, or feel any sort of pain in your current situation, get your ass out of that chair and find the closest mirror. Tell the person you’re looking at “you want change, make it”.