Rich Twin Poor Twin

2007 – what a crazy year. We started the year out strong; our passive income was around 5 times our salaries as professional electrical engineers. As I mentioned in my previous post, the real spark that made this into a reality was through constant visualization of what we wanted and keeping our goals in our minds. Once you do that, you will start making decisions small and large in tune with the path to getting whatever it is you want. One of the first actions that we took (that we thought was small and insignificant at the time) was to model our adsense placement from high trafficked sites and from bloggers talking about how much they earned with adsense. Even though it was a small action and we SHOULD have done it years ago, it really never occurred to us to JUST DO IT until we were hungry enough to increase our passive income. You see, it’s really not how hard you work but the effectiveness of your actions and decisions in reaching your goals. And a lot of those actions and decisions are actually governed by your sub consciousness and uncontrollable events and people that are attracted to you.

Things were going well and it was almost a routine. We did our 9-5, came home, checked our stats and worked on our sites for an hour or two every night. We were at the point where we were deciding and planning on how and when to quit our day jobs – our professional careers, something that we were trained for much of our lives. But something always kept us back. Our jobs were actually pretty cushy and relaxing compared to some we knew about from our friends and family. Then the unthinkable happened – we got banned from adsense which was the majority of our online passive income at the time. Can you imagine? Getting a steady $x,xxx per day in passive income to almost NOTHING? To say the least we were hurt – bad. It was not even about the money, it was the questioning, the unknown of what to do now? How can we get back the income we were generating from our business?

This was around June and for about 2 whole months we were depressed. I have never been depressed like that in my LIFE. It is the sort of thing you only read about and yes the symptoms written about it are true – loss of appetite, deep sadness, weight loss, etc. I did not want to talk to anyone, reply to any emails, or do anything. I just did my 9-5, came home, and slept.

The first thing we did was try to work hard to fix it. To find an alternative – what a waste of time. Life was just telling us to move on. We went outside every day after work and just ran and really asked ourselves what it is we wanted and what it was we “had” when we were banking with adsense. You know what? We found out that we still had it and always will have it. It’s the ability to create anything we wanted, feeling free, being free, being grateful, and just enjoying life – Knowing that somehow someway we were going to make it.

Within 5 months from the day we lost almost everything, we were able to bring our passive income streams back to where they were and more and quit our day jobs. From this experience, I know that in order to be rich, I must be grateful, humble, enjoy life, never give up, and respect others – in other words I need to keep learning, growing, and becoming a better person.

The last few week I’ve been relaxing and just thinking about exactly what I want for my business and life. My brother and I are still playing with affiliate marketing and the stock market. The only thing that seems to be the bottleneck is the construction and optimization of the landing pages right now.

Another neat investment that a friend told us about is LendingClub.com where regular people borrow and lend money online with better rates on both sides. I have already created a portfolio there and lent out money to people who want to pay off high interest credit card loans and such. If you want to sign up just send me an email to get a referral link that puts 25 dollars into both of our accounts.

Next week we will be in Vegas to attend a seminar to learn from some affiliate marketers like Amit Mehta. It should be fun.

I’ve been “hacking” at affiliate marketing for a month now and I feel like I need a break. It feels too much like a job. That is probably why I stopped doing affiliate marketing 2 years ago with clickbank. I like the sweet checks though. Cashing them in is always fun, but trying to scale the sales seems too tedious and not that straightforward. Increasing traffic does not equate to an increase in profit. Some people say to collect visitor emails to “hit” them up again but that is just not my style. The total profit we got through affiliate marketing last month was $5k. That is okay but looking back it was not really worth the time. I will most likely refocus on developing my sites, finishing projects, increasing my current brands, and sales of my own products and just maintain the affiliate sales.  

I took a look at the alexa ranking and awstats for this site. This site has an average of about 500 visitors a day but yesterday there was an extra surge of visitors. I think this site has momentum and potential to make some money. Here are some pictures of the traffic stats.

I have been really trying to hit up affiliate marketing these last few weeks as well as working on some guides. Affiliate marketing was actually the first system I used to make money online but it never took off in terms of scaling it up to where we wanted it to be. We never took it seriously because making money with adsense was a lot easier. We put up ads on our sites and our visitors decided to click on it or not. We did not have to worry about “getting the sale” and did not have this feeling of “forcing” these offers and products onto our users. We tried many affiliate networks but most of them cater to US and Canada. So we can only push them on a few of our sites. We have also been experimenting on making better landing pages with interactivity to get users to click on the offers themselves. Most of these affiliate networks now have conversion tracking which helps this trail and error process. But this is really tedious and a lot of motivation helps. I know for a fact that top affiliates can make up to $5000 a day easily. After these few weeks we have seen just how much more profitable affiliate marketing is compared to placing adsense on a site. It does require more trail and errors though.

Anyone else use valueclick? Their ads stopped showing on Friday and their sites are all down. There are also rumors of an FTC probe on Valueclick from posters on message boards. I looked at their stock symbol (VCLK) and it looks like it took a recent hit a few days ago and another hit in afterhours. It looks like it is set to take a nosedrive on Monday. It makes it seem like our problems look like nothing compared to theirs. Adbrite is also having problems serving their ads this week.

Update August 11, 2007: Value Click is back up along with their ads displaying on sites.

I received a suggestion from a reader to offer mentorship to people to maximize their adsense profits today. This is a good suggestion and one which we already have experience with. This idea was actually one of the first things I thought about and did when we started making a decent amount of money through adsense about 2 years ago and we had even written a book on making money online.

I remember the first time I showed a friend our adsense accounts. His first words were: “Teach me” after the initial disbelief. But after we told him the “secrets”, it seemed like he did not think he could do it and just wanted us to do all the work for him and just collect the Adsense earnings. I believe all the information that is needed to generate revenue from adsense has probably been written about in blogs, books, or in forums. But it ultimately comes back to the individual and how much he wants it. Knowing what to do and then actually executing the actions necessary is not easy. I think the other main reason we stopped doing it and selling our book was due to greed and fear. We were greedy and feared what would happen if we taught too many people. Maybe in the future we’ll rebrand the book and start selling it again.