Rich Twin Poor Twin

We’re packing for New York and this is likely to be our last post for the year. We wish everyone a happy holiday and new year.

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 have several unfinished projects and yet I find myself constantly writing down new projects, buying domains, and thinking about ideas to develop. If you have this same habit, focus on building a steady stream of income from previous projects and invest only a partial amount of time, energy, and money into your new ideas while growing what is already working for you.

I’ve learned that one of the things you really need in this business is patience and trust. Because you cannot do everything yourself, you need to find the right people and trust them. After all this time, I still find it difficult sometimes to just wait on programmers and designers to complete a job. While you’re waiting on projects, I recommend testing out other sources of income. Recently we have been revisiting affiliate marketing and are pretty amazed at how little effort and time it takes to generate some extra passive income. We found that it takes trail and error and you have to take it really seriously to set it up correctly. Sending people to the merchant’s landing page is the basics and will generate a small ROI if any. Also the profits are not long term. You own nothing.

We have also been testing out Neverblueads and some other CPA networks. Although Neverblueads does not have a huge selection of merchants compared to some other networks, I would say that it has the best metrics and reporting.

Sometimes its healthy to just get away from all of it and just relax. The other week, when I went to see the Bourne Identity, looking to waste some time before the movie, I came across this game: Stackers. After just one try, I found it quite addicting. My twin and I actually got to the top of the Major Prize row 3 times! With a chance to win an XBOX360, Wiii and other sweet prizes. But when we went home and did a little research we found that the game is actually rigged. The last row at least. Here is a video of the game and the rigged last row.

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.

There is a new episode of The Millionaire Inside tonight. If you also feel the need for some motivation I recommend you watch the show which features some of today’s top money mentors including Robert Kiyosaki. I saw some previous episodes that dealt with getting out of debt and I expect this new episode to deal more with creating and maintaining wealth.

I added and tweaked RTPT some more and put back the forums. You’ll notice the forums is not on vbulletin. Just like when we first started making sites again – we just got the basics down and upgraded the sites as more money came in. Working on personal sites feels rewarding even if they do not bring in money. Lately, we’ve been working on sites that we just wanted to make ourselves. We’ve also been more careful with our money. Looking back, it just seems like we wasted a lot of money when we didn’t really need to. We just threw money at programmers, domains, sites, servers, admins, ebooks, and software and I feel like I should have given more to the people I care for. 

Having been schooled for most of our lives and Engineering being engrained into our heads through high school and College, our minds are wired to solve problems by constantly thinking about them until we actually do. Solving the problem is actually easy to do. The hard part is finding the root cause thats causing the problem and then maning up to do what it takes to solve it. We were the type of kids in school that talked about exam questions after the tests had been taken hours and even days before. We actually memorized problems and tried to figure out if we put the right answers on the papers. Our friends back then thought we were nuts for doing that.

People we talk to have just said to let the loss or setback go and just move on. Our progress for a comeback is really really bad because we did not let go of it yet and can not until we go back and find the root of the problem – its just in our nature.  It is also a lesson that was just meant to be learned. Yea people say diverisfy, diverisfy, diverisfy, but that is not the root cause that led to our setback. If one is to keep asking WHY? he can see it is not the cause of the loss or setback. It is good advice though. After days of thinking and asking the question WHY? we have come to see the major flaws in how we thought, acted, in our systems, and in our business. The next step is to solve these problems on our existing systems and carry them through to future ones.

Below is an illustration of how asking the question WHY can help you find the root cause of your problems. It is usually asking 5 whys but you can do more or less to get to the root of your problem. Take care in not going too far because God, religion, pursuit of happiness, and existance and purpose will probably be mentioned or appear. Then you got a whole new set of questions.