Becky Marie

Over the last couple of weeks I have noticed some strange events transpiring in my online world.  While checking out my tracking a couple weeks ago I found someone was searching my name (First and last) , home address & sometimes phone number. Then linking to my site(s) repeated via those searches. The search would not have “weird-ed” me out if it only happened once, but it happened repeatedly over days. My suspicions is it was only by one person, and At least that one person thinks I am worth investigating. The day after the search occurred I get an email from Braden at Clickbooth stating he ran across one of my pages and wanted to “discuss  getting my [your] application fast tracked and running our offers today. “ and then sighted a particular webpage of mine. At first I thought it was a little flattering that some “Affiliate Strategist” over at clickbooth thought I was worth giving the time of day. And considering that I applied for clickbooth about 6 months ago and was DENINED because I failed a stupid test of theirs I found the offer extra flattering.

Next Braden said, “We should jump on a call so I can get a little more information about your traffic and set you up with some of our top offers, when would be a good time? “ and then gave me a link to the application.

I don’t like to just randomly give people out my phone number in my online world until I am defiantly sure of there motives. My #1 pet peeve is pushy people attempting to get me to do things. So, I didn’t send him my phone number, nor did I fill out the application. I already belong to a large number of networks and , at the moment I don’t see the need to sign up for anymore.

So, all week I’ve been getting emails from this guy… Which put an uncomfortable feeling in my stomach. Does he have alteeror motives? What’s he trying to sell me? Maybe nothing, but I don’t like the high pressure techniques. 

This along with a couple other instances has lead me to believe that there are two types of people in the online world:

#1. Those trying to sell you something.

#2. Those you can trust & can call your Online friends & Buddies.

I have had a couple people who have acted as friends and then within the 3rd or 4th online conversation have pulled the, “Hey – Do I have a great product for you – It’s called ‘Make $1500 while you sleep’ , it only cost $429.99 please western union me the money today at it’ll only cost YOU $129.99”

I have met a handful of WONDERFUL people in the last year , Brendan (20yearbillionaire) , Tyler (Tyler Cruz), just to name a few. None of these people have EVER offered to sell me anything – ever.

So, maybe the clickbooth guy really thinks I would be a good addition to clickbooth & he wasn’t selling me anything at all. BUT – something in my gut said "STAY AWAY”.  One of the biggest things I have learned in the last year and one of the biggest pieces of advice I can give to anyone starting off  is to listen to your gut.

Thanks Friends for NOT being creepy sales people. : )

Becky

Well , I did it. I quit the part-time job and despite the fact that I have this super nasty head cold right now and feel like a pile of cow manure, I feel good about quitting. I gave my 2 weeks last Thursday, and this week is only 3 day work week. So, I only have 8 more days at the office job.

My reasons for quitting:

One is that I believe that great things come of distressed situations. While at the time I needed the job to pick myself up out of a hole I created, I don’t need that extra $180 a week right now. The reason being is the pet business is picking up, and over the last year I have learned so much about internet marketing that that’s going good too. I’m sure your thinking that if I don’t “need” the extra $180 a week the smart thing to would be to stay and stash the cash away. Well, for an extra conservative person that would be “smart” thing to do. BUT living smart doesn’t allow you the freedom to do great things. No one does great things when there being conservative. A little stress (or a lot)  is my biggest motivation. I mean that’s how I got started in this online work – I need money BADLY – I put my nose to the grid stone to solve the problem and I did.

Another reason for quitting is for my sanity. I was coming home tired and grumpy every night. This was because my boss was a jerk & my days were insanely long. Life is to short to do something you hate.  PERIOD.

And Lastly: I believe that TIME is MONEY. Period. If I invest the time that I spent in that office, into the internet then I will more then surpass the dollar amount I was making.

So that’s IT – I AM DONE! Internet watch out – I am back full time with vengeance. : )

Becky

As I promised in my last blog entry : VACTION PICTURES. Just a few : ) Please enjoy….

This is My Mr. Albert on Forked Lake. He’s so cute sometimes I can’t stand it.

This is the  view from my Camp site. I Want to go back!

All of us on top of Wrights Peak. My first Height Peak.

Meet Rupert, he’s our new dog.  I love him. 

My Best Friend and I in Lake Placid.

Our Nightly View.

And That’s it!!!!

Love ,

Becky

I just got back from vacation and it was the first vacation I wasn’t worried about money. Last year when I went away I unknowingly over drafted in both my checking accounts (business, and personal). I remember last year sitting in the woods and getting cell phone service for a 1/2 a minute. It was just enough time for my blackberry to connect with my bank account alerts. In came lots of alerts reading “Your bank account balance is under $5.00” ; “Your bank account balance is under $2.00” ; “Your bank account balance is under $0.00”. What a horrible feeling to be sitting in the woods, knowing you can do nothing, imagining the over draft fees piling up. Need less to say it wasn’t;t exactly relaxing.

Fast forward to this year and money was not on my mind while I relaxed in an inter-tube, on a beautiful Adirondack Lake, while reading Us Weekly, drinking a beer (vacation pics. to come) .  The bills were covered, and I had money left over to have fun with. Ahhh, what a great feeling. Knock on wood, but the last 2 months (as I indicated in my last blog) have been good online. I am seeing the highest numbers thus far, and I am starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. : ) My only on going problem is financing my marketing, which I believe I have a solution to. At the end of September / Mid- October I should have high enough affiliate checks coming in to pay OFF my business American Express card, which I can then use for my marketing.  The only bad part is that I have to wait a month. Think of all the money I am loosing during those days!

Here are my numbers lately (I left out the most of the days where I ran out of money… ):

The Dilemma – Advice Needed…..

As you can see things are going great as long as there is a cash flow going in to my campaigns. Also, besides crunching numbers day to day and 10 minute basic daily maintenance I’m not doing much with these this campaign, or on new ones. This is all  because of time restraints. Remember, I have a stupid , god awful, torturous office part – time office job? It only pays $11 dollars an hour, my paycheck for this week for doing 20 hours of work was just under $200.00 (I practically made that on 9/2 doing 10 minutes of work!) So, basically the job pulls in about an “extra” $800 a month, but SUCKS up 80 hours of my time! The boss is an jerk. The job makes me want to stab my toes with a butter knife… So, the job is guaranteed cash. Affiliate Marketing isn’t.  On the flip side, if I invested that 80 hours a month into my marketing endeavors I feel like I’d be doing even better then I am now. Another thing is my debt… I’d like to pay it off! I have $6000 in credit card debt….

So, what do you think? Keep to stupid job that allows me virtually no time to invest in online stuff but is a guaranteed source of money? Quit the job?

An Aside : Let’s also remember I have the cash source to my other business doing Animal behavioral Consults. This business is doing fine finically. In the future I would like to do this business casually, and marketing mainly.  

Becky

Hi! This is me typing on my blackberry. It maybe the only way I get around to typing up a post these days. Lately my days go as followed: Wake up & affiliate market, do pet business stuff , go to stupid office job , do pet stuff , get home & affiliate market –> SLEEP! Do it all again the next day. From time to time its wears on me, but I know that the hard work will pay off at some point.

Google officially hates me… No matter what kind of page I set up it give me the same crap “ad rarely shows due to low quality score”. When I click to see the reason for this it states the my landing page is POOR. Which is ridiculous! Everything is just the way it should be. The content is good, the keywords are all in a good place, the lay outs are appealing, privacy polices.. The hole 9 yards, and yet, a POOR quality score! So, I have turned to yahoo and MSN. It’s just hard to let go of google because I know how many clicks I COULD be getting and, in turn, how many sales.

Speaking of sales… I have decided in order to really be able to make a living at affiliate marketing I need to change a few things. For one I need to get good at higher payout offers. The second thing is I need a good combination of clicks from both the organic search and the paid search. This is something I have been able to achieve with some zip offers, but not with higher payout offers. One of the things I am a bit of a difficulty with in my organic search is finding a keyword (or words) that has a high search volume, but it’s not flooded. But really, don’t we all have this problem? Niche, niche , niche, the perfect undiscovered niche is what we are all looking for. Just like the search for gold out West…

Another thing that I have discovered with fooling about with non-zip submit offers is the extreme rate of copy cats out their! Apparently the big thing right now with biz opps is to make a fake online newspaper. Last week it was the blog, this week the newspaper. I have found it very interesting to watch the trends with all the high pay out offers on google, yahoo and MSN. If you check the big 3 on a regular basis for obvious keywords pertaining to high payout offers you’ll soon start to see copy cats pop up, trends, who’s getting scrubbed, who gave up and so forth. The pages that do long time I watch for subtle changes to see how they are optimizing there pages.

Anyways, playing with the big boys is a new adventure for me. I will keep you posted. If I can make $100 a day with zip / email submits I should be able to use those skills to triple my daily income with higher payout offers!

Watch out! Here I come big payout!
Becky

The last few days on the internet have been pretty rough. I must admit was fairly grumpy, and annoyed yesterday at affiliate marketing in general. Google \ slapped my campaign for no reason. I gave Tyler a mouth full over AIM. He gave me his usual pep talk, which helped a little.  My pages are all "real" webpage’s, not polls or anything like that. And my keywords are all directly related to my webpage. So on Sunday I was making good to take over 5th place in the Peerfly publisher challenge, on Monday all the ground was lost. To make matters worse I wasn’t able to get home to even see if I could remedy the problem till 9:30 at night. As of this morning I think I have the kinks to that problem all worked out, but then later today “WHA-BAM!” Slapped in the face again. …. I could easily take over 4th or 5th place if adwords wasn’t torturing me. 4th or 5th place isn’t looking so great right now.

The CPARev.com – Make Money!’>CPARev.com – Make Money!’>CAPrev is another story all together. The competition hasn’t been nearly as stiff as Peerfly. Which is fine with me because the only thing I REALLY want is the HD Mini (5th – 8th place prizes).  I could really use the new computer, but that’s not going to happen this time around…  My Affiliate manager says he’s getting me a handful of offers that I asked about, but we will see if he follows through, and if I can get my slap to go away. The exciting thing to watch in the competition is not me, but the rise of 20YearBillionaire. He started in the world of Affiliate Marketing just slightly before I did. He just joined with CPArev last night, and not soon after he joined his numbers began to rise… and rise…. and rise….. and rise… At one point I saw him do about $100.00 in less then 19 minutes! INSANITY! 20YearBillionaire and I started AM around the same time. So, I must admit, that at first I was filled with admiration and slight jealousy! Why am I not pulling these numbers?

The simple answer that both 20YearBillionaire & Tyler reminded me was that we all pay our dues. I took 2 months off, and 20YearBillionaire has been working 16 hours a day for last 6 months figuring stuff out… He’s got an edge on me! Plus, he’s a great person with a baby on the way. He deserved it. If anything I can use it as motivation to where I “could” be. The only difference between the successful and the non-success in AM is pure effort & diligence…. If nothing else, the last few days have been just added fuel to my fire.

Everyone that I have encountered in my AM life has been incredibly welcoming and kind. For that I am endlessly thankful. Endless.

Thank you. And goodnight.

Becky

The last 12 days have been good to me in the world of affiliate marketing. I just slightly tweaked my winning campaigns that I had up last month. My results have been pretty good (see below). I know that there are campaigns out there that I could be making a lot more money on. However, for the time being I am going to stick with what I know works so that I can generate a positive cash flow. I am leaning towards the idea of  putting a side $50 – $100 of “experimental money” to play with some new, more profitable campaigns.

Friday I signed up for June’s Publishers Challenge with the CapRev. There are TEN top prizes!!!! I have won theses competitions in the past and I might I add I was the first GIRL to place in this competition! [Click Here to See MY Winning Competitions]. Depending on what offers CapRev has to offer I can see myself placing. At this moment I am patiently waiting for CapRev to approve my application.

THE GLITCH IN MY PLAN TO WIN: I am quickly running out of financing to run my campaigns. Which is horribly painful… The only thing that might save me is most of my networks have a NET 15, but I do have one that is a NET 30. That NET 30 Kills me! Waiting around for a month for $1500 check is hard. So here is my question to you – Do you have any ideas on how I can get financing besides credit cards?

Thoughts?

Thanks!

Becky

Good Morning. I am drinking the worst coffee ever complements of my boyfriend who never measures the coffee before putting it in the filter. Consequently I am drinking water. Yum.

Anyways, It is nice to see people come of the wood work and leave comments when I thought only 3 people read this; myself, Tyler Cruz, and Brendan (another affiliate). So, if I haven’t said it already, Thank you for your support, for visiting, and for caring.

Now on to the story of my disappearance….

It all started when I read the Behemoth’s interview on TylerCruz.com (see bottom of this entry for a link). For those of you who don’t know, the Behemoth is an affiliate marketer who was (maybe still is) making $40,000 in a month. He squished the competition Tyler Cruz’s affiliate competitions, and I really mean SQUISHED! Anyways, in that interview he made a remarked to someone who had a “Make Money Online Blog.” He said something to the effect of, “Why do you have a Blog about Making Money, if your not making any money?”

At which point I thought, “Why am I blogging when I am barely making any money?” And so I stopped….

However, the story doesn’t end there. The story really goes WAY back to last summer. As I have mentioned briefly before I own my own business. It’s a pet care services business; my employee’s and I do pet sitting, and pet walking. And I specialize in animal behavior consults. Where I live has a HUGE suburban sprawl and thus it is not uncommon for me to drive 300 miles in one day. Last summer when gas prices went over $4.00 a gallon it was hard to make ends meet. It literally cut my profits by 70%. Looking back I should have let my employee’s go, because instead of paying myself, I paid them. I was paying myself barley anything at all. I charged everything on credit cards. By November I was in a hole, a big ass hole. I was choosing between paying the electric bill or my business credit cards. Which, of course adds late fee on top of other fees, on top of more fees (yay – fun). There were 6 months in there when I didn’t pay for a single bill on time! Then my best buddy, Albert (my doggie), had to have emergency surgery. Which was another unexpected BIG bill. To make matters even worse in February of this year my new upstairs tenant (I own an apartment) stopped / never started paying rent. That went on for 3 months till I just recently evicted him. That was a lose of $700 a month that I was depending on. I skipped my mortgage payment for a month because I was so tight on money. And there I went deeper into my hole. And the snowball effect continued…

By then my personal and business credit score was shot, and all my credit cards maxed out. Was I doing good with affiliate marketing in February and March of this year? YES! Absolutely. However, I shot myself in the foot. I charged all of advertising on my American Express Gold card that I had gotten about 4 years back. The one down side to American Express Gold cards is that you have to pay the balance IN FULL every month. And with Affiliate Marketing you don’t get paid till the 15^th or 30^th of the following month. YIKES!

And when March came along Google adwords had charged me for January’s, February’s AND March’s advertising. So in March I owned AMX just over $5000.00 and the BIG checks from March’s campaigns weren’t going to be in till late April. Where the Hell was I going to get $5000.00??? AND pay 2 months of my mortgage? Things were bad, really bad. I was beyond panicked and stressed. You have no idea the anxiety money can bring you unless you have been there. I have shed a lot of tears over the last year, all over money.

In March I did have a winning campaign… I was making $60 – $120 a day, with an average 46% ROI. I make over $1000.00 in 10 days! However, I couldn’t afford to finance it. It killed me to just let go of that money. But it wasn’t multiple choice. I had (and still have) a horrible credit score. To make matters worse I was behind on so many bills…. I knew that if things continued on this path I risked loosing my house.

And so, I grit my teeth and looked for a “real job”. With in a week I got a stupid part-time office job 1 block away from house. It pays ok. The hours work within my business schedule, so I have been doing both. The boss is a complete asshole (more on that after I quit). Frankly, I hate ever minute that I am there. Sticking butter knifes in my eyeballs might be more fun.

The good news is… I have caught up on a lot of my bills. I paid off 3 credit cards, and only have $6000 more to go to pay off all of it (more on credit cards another post). After I pay off those two cards I will probably quit the stupid job. Gosh, I can’t wait! I currently have about $1100 of financing to play with my affiliate marketing. I have my money making campaign up again, and have made over $300 in the last 7days (yippy!). I could be making more a day with this campaign because my ROI stays at about 50% – 60% no matter how money I put behind it. Thus, If I had more money to throw at it I’d be making more.

The thing is I really love affiliate marketing and I truly missed it… I love the challenge of it. I love the creativity of it. I love the people that I have met because of it. I love how when I try to explain it to my friends they get this weird look on there face. My love for animals is in my soul, and it will be for my entire life. But a person can have two loves and I think I have found my two…

Thank you for visiting.

Thank you for reading.

Thoughts and input are always nice.

Becky

[Click Here to Read the Interview Tyler Cruz did with The Behemoth.]

I AM BACK.. So hold on to your seats, and soon I’ll be telling you about my highs and lows over the last 2 months…. But I can’t right now because I’ve had two glasses of wine and my eyes are telling me I can’t type right now.

Did you Miss me????