Posts Tagged ‘Action’
Hey again.
Listen, I kinda went on sabbatical, and I've been coding and doing some other related stuff ever since so that's why I haven't posted on this blog for so long.
Anyhow, a colleague was supposed to post here months ago and let you know about it, but he forgot, and I was too distracted to notice. LOL.
My single-minded focus thing sometimes keeps me from noticing a lot of things. He was supposed to tell you that I wouldn't be promoting anything for a while due to preparation for a product launch, and that I wouldn't be sending out my newsletter, that I would be kinda out of touch in general …
I guess I kinda made it optional, but he was even supposed to continue posting periodically …
(What do you think? Should I can him?)
Oh well. My apologies. But as I told him at the time, I would be back if something came up that I thought was truly worthwhile or that truly needed to be said. Or something like that. I don't remember my exact words.
Okay. So here it is, something truly worthwhile — but wait, let me just say that I have no idea if this will be truly worthwhile or not. But I said I wouldn't be back this soon unless it was. So, you know, I'm sending mixed signals here. LOL!
Well, okay, here's the thing. I haven't had the time or the inclination to check this out in detail yet, so my opinion on this is based on past experience with Mike rather than an actual evaluation of the offer.
So keep that in mind.
But as I'm sure you know, past experience is often a good measure. One can't always rely on it, but I believe this is going to be the real deal, and I would be remiss if I didn't tell you about it. Er, or give it my personal recommendation (since you've probably heard about it already anyway).
I do know that the last major training course Mike came out with was very worthwhile. So hopefully this will be as great as it sounds. (If not, it's being sold through Clickbank so you can always ask for your money back if it doesn't look right, okay?)
Anyhow, I've got lots to do yet on that launch and otherwise, so let me get on with it. I know you're going to want to check this out once you know what I'm talking about.
Oh wait. Everyone you should be following is promoting it already, so you probably already know what I'm talking about: Mike Johnson's Profit.FM.
So I'm not going to waste any more of your time here. If you haven't checked it out (because you were waiting just to see if your most trusted adviser — why, me, of course! — was going to promote it), then it's time to go to:
http://www.mythospheres.com/recommends/fm
My bonus? Well … how about free admittance to the launch of my own product? It will be a couple of months yet, though. Maybe more. And I can't tell you what it is yet. LOL.
Some bonus, huh? (Yes, it will be, actually.)
Oh well. I gotta get back to it.
I don't care (much) if you buy through my link or not. It will be your loss if you don't, of course, but I can't worry about that right now. I just thought I should let you know about it.
Profit.FM may not turn out to be anything special. Then again, if past experience can be trusted, it just may turn out to be one of the very few MUST HAVES this year.
I hope you will check it out:
http://www.mythospheres.com/recommends/fm
Either way, it will probably be a while before you hear from me again, so continued good luck with your endeavors and take care.
To your success!,
Richard D. Farley / MythoSpheres Development
As part of an effort to be of more of service to my subscribers, I've decided to start sending out more informational content — hopefully on a semi-regular basis.
Weekly, maybe? We'll see.
The length and quality of the writing, as well as of the information, may vary considerably. It will depend on what else (and how much) is going on with me, but I'll simply postpone and omit if I feel it's necessary.
So … this may eventually become a full-blown marketing newsletter. But for the immediate future, I expect it to be fairly short and to-the-point articles about various aspects of online marketing (and perhaps offline, too, occasionally).
My subscribers will find resources that pertain to the discussion (when available and when I feel comfortable recommending them) at the end of these soliloquies. (Soliloquies? Fancy word, yeah?) I will be putting these resources at the end so as to not interrupt the flow.
Some of this information (and the aforementioned resources) may prove to be "old hat" to some of my subscribers. Since I don't have a very complete picture about how much or how little experience various folks have, I have to go with the basics at least some of the time, right?
But if you are, or become, a subscriber and are patient with me. I know, sooner or later, I'll get around to providing some information that even the most seasoned marketer will find extremely valuable. Just don't expect it every time out.
Okay?
This will be for my subscribers ONLY and will not be published here, at AWeber, or elsewhere.
So if you haven't signed up yet, please do so and watch for my next email, most likely in about 12 hours or so, in which I will begin by discussing …
Don't you just love cliff-hangers? LOL.
To your continuing success!,
Richard D. Farley / MythoSpheres Development
As we all know, taking risks means facing the uncertain and unpredictable, and understandably, it can be scary. To risk means facing the possibility of humiliation, criticism and loss. It can even mean disastrous loss and having to pick up the pieces just to start all over again.
Who wants that? Why would anybody take risks when the costs can be so great, when there is so much to lose?
Part of the answer of course, is that an unwillingness to take risks, when they are appropriate, can in and of itself be the biggest risk of all.
Life is dynamic, always changing, and risk opens opportunities to grow with change rather than be victimized by it. Taking a risk means you are making things happen in your life rather than just letting life happen to you.
Self discovery, new ideas, new skills, new and exciting experiences, new interests, renewed confidence and previously unrealized talents can all be rewards of risk.
And a life without risk can easily become a life that is lived primarily in fear — and sometimes without interest, without enthusiasm, without exhilaration, without, well, a sense of being truly alive.
But why talk about this?
Because my observation and experience suggest that the fear of taking risks — or too much eagerness to take them without sufficient thought — are the two characteristics, the two extremes if you will, that have diminished far too many lives.
And whether I can succeed in this or not, I want to do what I can to keep any of that from happening to the people I know and care about, i.e., my family, my friends, my business associates and my customers — you.
But of course, I don't mean the mundane risks we take every day, the ones we don't think about because we can't see their potentially life-changing effects (even when they are there) because we have become so inured to them.
What I am really talking about are the big ones, the ones that we know are big and that we face only a handful of times in our lives, the ones that we may even know can make us, or even break us.
Of course I don't want to suggest that there aren't at least a few guidelines one can use to evaluate these risks.
Certainly, if a potential outcome is very positive and the potential downside is very limited, that's probably a risk worth taking. And contrarily, if the potential downside is great, but the upside is relatively modest, many would rightfully question the wisdom of taking that kind of risk.
With some thought, of course we can all take calculated risks, considering our finances, our circumstances, our strengths and weaknesses, our health, our relationships and our sense of fulfillment.
All that said though, there really are no magic wands or crystal balls that can tell us what risks are right for us, or are worth taking, or when.
Still, it is worthwhile to remember that not stepping up to the challenges in our lives can sap our spirits, drain our energies and make our own personal worlds smaller, darker, flatter and far less fulfilling.
So … if you've had any trouble taking risks up until now, or have had any trouble with having faith in yourself, or in investing in yourself, I hope you will think seriously about the potential rewards of risk, and not just the perils.
As we all know life doesn't come with any guarantees, except, maybe, for one. When death comes, it is not likely to be the chances we took that we will regret, but the ones we realize we should have taken.
Are you going to be okay if what you remember most about your life are the missed opportunities, the times when you plodded along in safety and listened to your fear?
Or are you going to feel a lot more okay about your life knowing that when it really mattered, you went for it? Sure, maybe, sometimes losing — but sometimes winning wonderfully even against the odds?
So what are you willing to risk? If not now, when?
Remember, your time on this Earth is limited. Are you going to look back one day and wonder what your life might have been? Or are you going to put yourself out there, put your dreams on the line and go for it … while the achievement of at least some of those dreams is still a possibility, while you still have the chance?
Now that the dust has begun to settle, I thought it might be appropriate to offer an opinion about Mike Filsaime’s AffiliateJump.
First things first. This post is not about promoting AffiliateJump. Nor is it about trashing Mike. (I won't name names, but there is actually another marketer out there who has also reviewed AffiliateJump, is misrepresenting a few things, and is being very unfair to Mike.) I simply bought into the program and this is my honest assessment.
Before I convey that assessment though, for those who may not know what AffiliateJump is, let me begin with a little background:
CPA, or Cost Per Action, marketing has been gaining momentum lately. Perhaps for good reason — after all, CPA is all about generating leads (freely submitted contact information from potential customers) and offers you the chance to make money, significant money, from a single customer. Some CPA offers pay as much as $200 when a customer signs up.
Further, you don't actually have to sell the customer anything. You simply send them a link.
Many Internet marketers are promoting CPA these days, and certainly some are making some serious money.
But the problem for many has been how to get accepted by the CPA networks. This has proven difficult for some as many of the networks require, among other things, a proven track record and a demonstrated ability to generate traffic, certainly two requirements newbies, and even some more experienced marketers, can have difficulty with. Additionally, there is the problem of choosing which offers to promote as well as how to promote them.
Mike Filsaime's AffiliateJump promises a turnkey workaround for these challenges. For example, you don't have to be accepted by the CPA networks. By simply buying into AffiliateJump, you are guaranteed to be "accepted" automatically.
Through AffiliateJump, your offers will be available to you through an easy-to-use interface, and you can build "websites" to promote those offers in just a few minutes, or actually, even seconds if you're not too particular. Not only that, but you don't have to buy a domain name to do it. That's all taken care of for you.
Then all you do is promote these "websites."
Sounds great, doesn't it? Well, yes and no.
While the folks at AffiliateJump seem to be working on some of the shortcomings, as of this writing there are definitely some problems. For one, the "websites" — or actually pages — that AffiliateJump allows you to create will all be located at similar domains (there are several available, but still a fairly limited choice). For another, the domain names, being limited, will not necessarily have much to do with the names of the products you'll be promoting, which means you could have a more difficult time driving traffic to your site.
You are given a choice, and with care you can get somewhat close in some cases, but certainly not all, and the closer the domain name comes to the name of the product or service that is being promoted, generally the better. Search engines seem to like it much better when the domain name and the content somewhat agree.
Another drawback, but another thing the folks at AffiliateJump claim to be working on improving, is that the pages generated are extremely similar, both in appearance and content (they don't have to be exactly the same, there are some customizations available, but they are very limited as of this writing).
Here are a couple of examples:
If your browser doesn't support frames and you would like to view the example page, Click Here, then use your browser's Back button to return to this review.
If your browser doesn't support frames and you would like to view the example page, Click Here, then use your browser's Back button to return to this review.
While the pages are attractive enough, it means all the other AffiliateJump members will be promoting pages that may be identical to, or vary only in minor respects from, the ones you are promoting, and it means the sites will look very similar to the search engines. Very similar, as opposed to identical, might not be a fatal drawback, but keep in mind that many of those very similar pages are likely to be hosted at the exact same domain name. So, you know, if that's not fatal either, it's certainly not good.
It could be a major problem, in fact, in terms of attracting visitors to your pages. While a Google rep very recently said Google does not actually penalize duplicate content, he also explained that the effect is often the same, and it is a truism in internet marketing at this point that the search engines don't like duplicate content, for whatever rhyme or reason. So if, say, a hundred, or a thousand pages all look extremely similar, it is likely only a few will get any attention from the search engines and the rest will be left out — and given Murphy's law, probably yours, and that would mean no search-engine-generated visitors to your offers. Of course you could drive traffic through advertising, but keep in mind that for every product or service offered, you'll be competing with every other AffiliateJump member for the exact same offers.
Another drawback is the price. To be able to create 100 offers, you'll pay. At the time I signed up, it cost $200 for the initial setup fee (refundable, but only after you have earned $1000 in commissions) and then $99.95 a month thereafter. There were cheaper options, but hardly worth having in my opinion, as they were so limited in terms of the number of pages you were allowed to set up and promote. Additionally, there are some of my long-time internet marketing acquaintances who are, rightly or not, outraged that anyone should be asked to pay for the opportunity to promote the offers of a CPA network in any case, and while AffiliateJump may yet prove itself very worthwhile for some, or in one sense or another, they certainly do have a point.
It seems odd that these matters were not given more thought from the start, especially considering Mike Filsaime's experience. It would be tempting for a cynic (or realist?) to surmise that AffiliateJump has been designed to make a lot of money for Mike, rather than having been designed with any real concern for creating any real opportunities for its members; however, as I said at the outset, I'm not about trashing Mike here, and also as mentioned before, there does seem to be a sincere effort on at AffiliateJump to address many of these issues. Recently, they have also been adding some training videos.
I'm not prepared here and now to pass a final judgment, and I am going to reserve the right to recommend and promote AffiliateJump at some point in the future if things improve enough; however, some of my continued evaluation will depend on how long I decide to remain a member, and in conclusion, newbies, and less-experienced marketers — who are clearly the primary target customer base for AffiliateJump — are, in my opinion, the ones least likely to be able to profit from AffiliateJump, so I'd warn most to stay away, at least as it stands now.
Meanwhile, if you are truly interested in CPA marketing, which admittedly can be highly lucrative, I'd like to suggest something you may find more worthwhile.
To receive an email about my recommendation, and a full explanation as to why I recommend it, please enter your name and email below. And yes, we (my company) may, very occasionally, send you another recommendation or notice of opportunity, but we certainly will not SPAM you or waste your time, and you will be able to unsubscribe from the list anytime you like simply by clicking on a link that will be included in any email we may send you.
Best regards,
Richard D. Farley
