Its already been quite a while since I last entered a blog. Some of my friends email me to remind me that updating the blog regularly is a must. Well, I have been busy building websites from my freelance projects and I was not able to concentrate on affiliate marketing.

Anyway perhaps not updating my blog has been a blessing in disguise. I was able to
recall a story from Robert Kiyosaki’s Book - Cashflow Quadrant. The story is very interesting because it shows to kinds of contractors. One that starts immediately and the other one went into planning before implementing the project that has been awarded.

Once upon a time there was this quaint little village. It was a great place to live except for one problem. The village had no water unless it rained. To solve this problem once and for all, the village elders decided to put out to bid the contract to have water delivered to the village on a dialy basis. Tow people volunteered to take on the task and the elders awarded the contract to both of them. They felt that a little competition would keep prices low and insure a back up supply of water.

The first of the two people who won the contract. Ed, immediately ran out, bought two galvanized steel buckets and begin running back and forth along the trail to the lake which was a mile away. He immediately began making money as he labored morning to dusk hauling water from the lake with his two buckets. He would empty them into the large concrete holding tank the village had built. Each morning he had to get up before the rest of the village awoke to make sure there was enough water for the village whne it wanted it. It was hard work, but he was very happy to be making money and for having one of the two exclusive contracts for this business.

The second winning contractor, Bill, diappeared for a while. He was not seen for months, which made Ed very happy since he had no competition. Ed was making all the money.
Instead of buying two buckets to compete with Ed, Bill had written a business plan, created a corporation, found four investors, employed a president to do the work, and returned six months later with a construction crew. Within a year his team had built a large volume stainless steel pipeline which connected the village to the lake.

At the grand opening celebration, Bill announced that his water was cleaner than Ed’s water. Bill knew that there had been complaints about dirt in Ed’s water. Bill also announced that he could supply the village with water 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Ed could only deliver water on the weekdays…he did not work on weekeneds. Then bill announced that he would charge 75% less than Ed did for this higher quality and more reliable source of water. The village cheered and ran immediately for the faucet at the end of Bill’s pipeline.

In order to compete, Ed immediately lowered his rates by 75%, bought two more buckets, added covers to his buckets and hauling four buckets each trip. In order to provide better service, he hired his two sons to give him a hand for the night shift and on weekends. When his boys went off to college, he said to them, “Hurry back because someday this business will belong to you.”

For some reason, after college, his two sons never returned. Eventually Ed has employees and union problems. The union was demanding higher wages, better benefits, and wanted its members to only haul one bucket at a time.

Bill, on the other hand, realized that if this village needed water then other villages must need water too. He rewrote his business plan and went off to sell his high speed, high volume, low cost, and clean water delivery system to villages throughout the world. He only makes a penny per bucket of water delivered, but he delivers billions of buckets of water everyday. Regardless if he works or not, billions of people conume billions of buckets of water, and all that money purs into his bank account. Bill had developed a pipeline to deliver money to himself as well as water to the villages.

Bill lived happily ever after and Ed worked hard for the rest of his life and had financial problems forever after. The end….

Success does not only comes to the one who works hard but also to the one who work smart. Hope you enjoy and has been inspired.

Good Luck and more power to us.
Happy Marketing.

James

References:
Rich Dad, Poor Dad book

Cash Flow Quadrant

Look at American Idol’s traffic:

David Cook
http://youtube.com/watch?v=h_aiawC-9aM
Views: 1,348,414

Jason Castro
http://youtube.com/watch?v=TdnzKgq-B6Y
Views: 947,228

American Idol 5 worst
http://youtube.com/watch?v=8MoEsz42fnw
Views: 1,109,852

What does this mean from the perspective of an affiliate marketer? If we can re-direct traffic from youtube’s hottest video to our site then we may no longer be having headaches as to where to get traffic.

more power.

James

My wife is an avid fan of American Idol and she watch the show relentless. Aside from that she spend countless hours reviewing the opinions from fans about the performance of each contestant.

In today’s show there are about 38 million votes that came in. And this just the flock from the United States. I wonder if they have statistics for international viewers. What’s my point? 38 million viewers and they are also potential customers. Selling only a dollar to this followers will give you 38 million dollars. Well, this is only a rough estimate.

Itunes is selling 0.99 per download, you multiply that by the number of viewers then you have your gross sales. Impressive.

Perhaps this might be the computation done by the “ebook gurus” low price + sell it to the masses and there you have it “millionaire”.

Well, but one need to solve how are we going to reach the “million flock”.

Hmmm. Now this is one strategy to consider.

more power reaching our “million flock”.

by the way bye Carly -

James

Turnkey Sites is one of the sale able items on the Internet today.  This article will explain to newbies what are turnkey sites and how are they going to help web entrepreneurs in their online business.

Turnkey websites are pre-made websites that are designed on a special niche.  In a turnkey sites every aspect or functionalities are already working, it means an entrepreneur will only install the site to the web server (sometimes an install script is already included), and wallah everything is already pre-made.  By the way you also need to include some of your personal info like (site title, contact info, paypal id, affiliate id etc.)

Turnkey websites are designed is such a way that starting web entrepreneurs need not to hire a web developer.

What does it cost for a turnkey site?  This will depend on what kind of niche will you be promoting.  For youtube.com clone websites, a respectable turnkey site ranges from $300 - $800, and sometimes it can go down up to $10.00 a piece (surf Ebay, the prizes are crazy but the after sales service is crazy too <sigh>).

Are there any disadvantages? Yes. Since the maker of the turnkey site is offering it to a large consumption of internet marketer, you might see a similar website same as yours.  Same in design and same in functionalities.  Solution?  After you have purchased the turnkey site you want to tweak it a bit before making it live.  Tweaking it like changing the theme colors and adding original functionalities.  If you are not completely a newbie in developing a site you may want to hire a web designer and developer for a fee.

Another thing if you will be purchasing a turnkey site solely without the hosting bundle, double check if the hosting requirements matches your hosting server.

CTR percentage down, page impressions suddenly takes a plunge, your affiliate conversion rate went from 20% to virtually nothing and no matter what you do, it doesn’t change. These are just some of the things that an affiliate marketer will experience in course of the affiliate journey. Whenever I encounter such things I just wanted to bang my head through the monitor and ask myself why the hell my stat went bersek.

What do you do? During this time of stress the best time is to remove yourself from the situation and relax. Why? Studies have shown that the mind can think more effectively when relaxed than it is under-pressure. Forget a while your CTR percentages, etc. and consider some of the basic relaxing technique:

Watch a movie, you may want to try Mr. Bean.
Listen to music.
Do meditation.
Get a sleep.
Go date the girl/guy that has been bugging you around, let her/him treat you for dinner…lol

Relaxing activity will depend on your preference, you can go from yoga meditation or just hearing a rock music. I know one prominent affiliate marketer’s relaxation activity includes listening to a rock music while drinking beer.

After you have relax for a couple of hours or a day, you can go back to your computer and try solving the problem again. By the way, just don’t spend too much time relaxing that you have completely forgotten that you have a problem.

To ease you a bit watch this funny video.