A few days ago, I put out something on here about failures… people talked about failures, and how they learned from them, and I shared one of my recent ones.

However, although you need failures - mistakes to learn from - to succeed, talking about how everyone’s screwed up can get depressing. So let’s shake things up, and talk about the opposite

Everyday, I hear some type of success story - be it someone making their first $1 online to someone making their first $1,000 website sale. Both are pretty cool - I remember the first times I did either of those things, and I thought it was cool then and seeing newbies do these kinds of things today… I think it’s cool now

A recent success I had is not even mine, but of a forum I’m involved with - I participate a lot in an Arsenal forum called Goonersweb and recently spoke to the admins about promoting the forum more - anyways, a few days ago they managed to have their first ever contest sponsored, nothing major (a bike) but free stuff is always good - especially if you’ve never had that kind of thing before

I’ve got to cut this post short, as I’m watching the football (soccer) but I’d love to hear some of the successes you guys have had. Feel free to go into detail - hearing about other people doing well, no matter how big or how small is always motivational.

So what successes have you guys had recently?

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A few of you might have noticed the RSS count jump from 700 odd to around 980 or so… some questions have been raised through instant messsenger and email.

Although I’d love to claim I’ve discovered some secret hack that gets me hundreds of subscribers within seconds, the truth is far more boring.

When I originally got Aweber, I made one of the mistakes that most people make - targeting the internet marketing niche. Now, the greatest deal of money is in other niches - so I learned as I experimented more and more, and although I have around seven messages setup as an autoresponder series should people join my list (here’s the link)… I haven’t really updated it in ages.

Rather than let the list die - a large portion of it is built through methods like forum marketing and Youtube, so people that don’t know about the blog yet - I decided to combine it with my blog through Aweber’s Blog Broadcast feature, as both talk about the same topics. Ergo the large boost. If you’re on the newsletter, you’ll get a thrice monthly email with all new content from the blog.

This has been done by bloggers such as John Chow, Yaro Starak, Gyutae at Winning The Web, John Cow and dozens of others… so for all accusing me of gaming numbers etc, meh. Personally, I can’t wait till I pass 1,000 subscribers as that is what defines a blog moving from the third tier into the second tier.

Anyways, just wanted to clarify. As for today’s post - I’m dead tired, as I’ve been out the whole of today… so sorry, nothing useful for you guys today. Just wanted to welcome newsletter subscribers to the blog, and one hopes you guys will stick around

Over the next few days, I’ll talk about how I got 200+ subscribers to join within a week or so (through the password protected post that went viral) and maybe another question and answer session if you guys are interested. Let me know, comments section of this post.

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I’m back.

First off - thanks to all the guest posters, they were of pretty high quality I thought and I enjoyed reading them (more than my own posts, even ). Also, thanks for the birthday wishes - unfortunately, my email inbox has been jammed with emails (more than 1,000 legitimate ones over the last week - mainly because of the ’secret’ method release and various other things) so if you’ve sent me an important email and I haven’t replied - it’s because I haven’t seen it or have seen it and forgotten about it.

Although the break was good, it’s great to be back; it’s also great to see that TUK finally broke the 700 subscribers mark. Next up will be trying to aim towards 1,000 - that may be difficult, but we’ll see. Of course, the easiest way to reach the 1,000 mark is if you guys help out; so please send people over here if you like the stuff you read.

Today what I wanted to do is ask you guys about a question that is pretty important in blogging, especially the internet marketing niche where proof is everything. If you’re running a blog teaching people to do stuff, and you cannot do that stuff yourself - you’re not going to last long.

On most blogs you read - even this one - you rarely see failures. People will talk about their successes, most notably their big ones; however, when was the last time you saw a blogger admit he had royally screwed up?

I had a huge failure recently - considering that things have been going pretty good of late, with metrics constantly increasing - it was the launch of a new project which you will not hear about after this post.

I had an idea, as I have a lot of them - when I get ideas, I tend to believe that they are amazing and that all of them will be successes - now, of course that’s not true. Anyways, I had an idea involving social marketing and a specific CPA offer - one that I thought would make me loads of money without having to spend it.

This was a week or so ago - I worked for the best part of a day (10 hours or so) setting things up, tweaking the landing page, testing things to make sure there wouldn’t be any problems… at the time, I honestly thought I could have an early retirement just off this project.

The project grossed $1912.67 in its first 24 hours.

Isn’t that super? That’s almost $60,000 per month, right?

However…

The money I spent on the project was $1905.35

So… ten hours of setting things up, a day of promoting it… and I get a net profit of $7. You work out the hourly rate for that one and you’ll get the same reaction I did… ouch!

I’ll probably work on it a little more over the next few weeks, but for now I’m just taking a break with it… to me, that was a huge waste of time and I don’t like wasting time

However, the one thing I have learned over the last month and a half is that social networks are easy as hell to make money off. Try playing around with them, and you’ll be surprised (I’m not just talking about this projet, but others I’ve done with social networks over the last 1.5 months). You have to be creative and unique - some half assed copied rubbish won’t do well, but if you hit it right you will make money. How creative and unique you are, of course determines the amount of profit you make.

What I learned was that if I had tested things a little more, and waited for some time, I would probably have made more money - I was so sure that this was going to do well that I set it up just before I went to sleep, and by morning it was too far gone to change much.

Despite being on a break though, I did have a pretty decent success this week - making almost $3,000 for about one hour of work (related to website flipping). I will put up a post this week talking about what I did to make that money, something pretty simple that any of you guys can replicate. Stay tuned

Above, I’ve talked about one of my biggest cock ups in my internet marketing career - how about you? I asked this question a few months ago, but it’s always interesting to see what readers are up to - what is one of your recent failures, and how did you take it?

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Sorry for the delay, it was supposed to go out yesterday but Feedburner decided to be funny.

This competition was a successful one, even though I didn’t win Blogging Idol - I saw an almost 300 subscriber increase over the duration of the competition, and this is with zilch work on my part (apart from writing posts, of course).

Anyways, no time to waffle on a little more, even though I’d like to - I’ll be 17 in around 15 minutes. Winners were drawn through Random.org.

The winner of the Nintendo Wii is:

raziiii @ gmail.com

The winner of the Flip Mino is:

virtual134 @ gmail.com

Winners have 24 hours to claim their prizes, or else winners will be redrawn.

Have a good day all!

EDIT: 17, finally. Happy Birthday to me, eh.

Here’s a ‘gift’ for you guys - most of you will have this, but some won’t That eBook about making money from your blog that I wrote a little while ago, given to you guys with resale rights (some have made a couple hundred selling it) - anyways, here’s a direct link. Enjoy!

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Today is the LAST chance to enter the Nintendo Wii contest. All you have to do is subscribe, so check it out and win a Nintendo Wii!

A few of you know that I talked a few days ago (August 7th) about releasing a step by step guide to a method that has made me $7,500 over the last two months (with zilch work after setting it up). Now, I gave ample time for people to do the tasks - tasks that were nothing compared to the idea you’d gain (if you didn’t know of it already).

I could quite easily have packaged this up, created a sales page and put it out there as an information product at $47, and no one would have blinked an eye.

However, I did set myself a deadline, as in all honesty I didn’t want to spend the rest of my entrepreneur “career” answering emails asking for the password. Even though I set a deadline, I’ve gotten emails and instant messages from more than fifty odd people asking for the password, people that can’t read or were too lazy to do the tasks.

Anyways, as I’m an evil nice guy, I’m giving you guys one more chance - the password will be given out until August 20th, no more. If you ask me after that, I will smack the hell out of you.

As people that get in early should always be rewarded, the things you have to do will be harder. Just to be fair to people that did follow instructions.

1. If you have a blog, write a full blown review of this blog. Length is up to you, but it should be a few paragraphs at least. Positive or negative, that is entirely up to you.

2. Refer five friends to subscribe via email and get them to comment on the original post.

3. Build ten dofollow links to this blog, with anchor text ‘entrepreneur blog’. If you’re going to be blog commenting, do not put out crap, two word comments in broken English as they will do more harm than good. This is no longer something available as of August 16th, 2008 because of the dangers (have had something like 1,000 links built towards this blog with the anchor text over the last couple weeks). Sorry guys, but you can easily do one of the former two. Cheers to Jacob Cass for pointing this out

Two things you can do, no negotiations.

Another thing - if you have questions about the actual method (having got the password earlier), please leave questions on the post, or email me - do not contact me via instant messenger. Some people have been pissing me off with dozens of questions within the space of minutes, remember that I’m supposed to be on a break.

Thanks guys. Comments on this post are closed.

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