www.affiliateconfession.com

This is going to be kind of a short post today mainly because I’ve been feeling kind of gnarly for the last couple of days and I’m going to spend the rest of the day sitting on the couch with my MacAir laptop reading some blogs and listening to Frank Sinatra’s Nothing But The Best and some Fleetwod Mac songs I’m going to go get from iTunes in about 5 minutes. This is one of the nice benefits of working at home.

I’d much rather be a bit more active today and go through our regular shopping routine with my wife, but that’s the commitment I have to break today, not one where I have to phone the boss early in the morning and cough or sneeze over the phone to let them know I really don’t feel well. This is another nice benefit of working for yourself, not only can you sit around and do nothing all day (which I don’t recommend very often), you don’t have to grovel to a manager and ask for time off or go in sick and pass around your germs to everyone else at the office because you feel like you just have to be there.

If you want to work at home, something I do highly recommend, you may not need as much income as you think. It’s all in the way you look at wealth, what your priorities are and how you spend your money.

Working at home is wonderful, my wife is much more understanding than any boss I ever had.

In the past I haven’t been much of a techie sort of person. It’s not that I have a phobic fear of the latest gadgets, it’s mainly that I’m not interested. I have a cell phone because I want to talk to people when I need to, I don’t need it to check the latest stock reports while in the grocery line or see in the sports news that a NASCAR driver decided to do something innovative, like take a right turn (yea, I know, that would put them into the wall), it’s a freaking phone.

That is changing a bit since I received all the prizes in the Webmaster Talk contest. I am totally digging using my new Macbook Air and the iPod Touch is a thing of beauty and it is near nirvana to have all of my favorite tunes right on something the size of a small pad of paper. I’ve been using the MacBook Air to sit in the living room and work while my wife is in our shared office or I’ve taken it out a few times to the local coffee shop to blog or work on a BANS site in a different atmosphere than being at home all day.

The Flip video camera is another great little gadget from the Webmaster Talk prize cache that I haven’t had that much time to work with lately, but plan on doing some more YouTube videos soon. I’m looking over iMove video editing software on the Mac which looks to be pretty comprehensive for a free program.

So I’m slowly moving from a non-tech person to a tech guy. After only a couple of weeks of owning these new gadgets I can see how one would get attached to them. It’s not that I have to have my iPod with me every second of the day, but it is nice to sit down on the couch and be able to listen to a few Pink Floyd tunes without having to put a CD in the stereo. It’s also great to take it to band practice on Thursday nights or church on Sunday and be able to listen to the song we’re working on instead of just listening to someone talk through the parts of it.

Maybe having some of the more useful gadgets isn’t such a bad thing after all. The Dot Com lifestyle, even on a scale much smaller than John Chow, is a wonderful thing. I might get use to this.

The doorbell rang around 11:00am yesterday and I immediately thought, ‘Could it be?’ As I answered, the red and orange clad DHL driver held a rectangular package that a MacBook Air would fit in nicely and as I clumsily scrawled my signature, which turned to unintelligible scribbles on the driver’s touch pad, I could feel the anticipation rising.

It had finally arrived. The MacBook Air won in the Webmaster-Talk.com contest was now just two packing boxes away from actually resting in my hands. The dull kitchen knife cut through the plastic shipping tape and revealed the inner box that contained the prize. Even the packaging on a MacBook Air is a thing of beauty. It’s hard to believe there could really be a full size laptop computer, with all the accessories, in this box not much larger than a dictionary.

I removed the cellophane wrap from around the sleek black box with the familiar logo and fixed my eyes upon the prize. My initial reaction was almost of unbelief that such a nice prize, when I had not previously won anything of such value, was sitting before me. The MacBook Air’s amazing thinness also caused me to pick it up and turn it in every direction, viewing it from all angles to verify it was actually as thin as it looked.

The next step was to turn it on, run through a normal set up procedure and connect to the web through our wireless home network. Rather than hastily fumbling through hooking up what appeared to be the the power cord and turning on the new laptop only to come across something I didn’t understand (I’m not a Mac person), I sat down and meticulously read through the documentation so no one could throw the RTFM acronym at me.

Done. Read. Time to boot this puppy up and get down to business. Power cords in place, open up the Mac Air, press the start button and wait…and wait…and finally I see a flashing file folder icon with a question mark on a white background and…nothing. Hmm, ‘I’ll just reboot and all will be well.’ Waiting…waiting…same icon with the flashing question mark, indicating all is not well. Read and attempted the troubleshooting procedures to return the computer to factory settings…nothing. Additional troubleshooting procedures only tended to confirm the obvious, my new MacBook Air, that I had waited 6 weeks for, was dead!

Even spending an hour on the phone with a more than helpful AppleCare Support rep and trying additional tricks not in the manual were not enough to bring the Mac Air back from a computer afterlife. Only a hard drive transplant and complete system software reinstall would bring a full recovery.

The only solution was to place my sleek and beautifully brand new MacBook Air, which I had just peeled the protective plastic off of, into the hands of a computer tech who had been working on boxes all day. In his examination of my baby, he immediately smudged it with computer grime from systems that lay in heaps in the back room, filled with cold test equipment and probably colder coffee.

I left the black product box with the tech so as to give my first Mac computer at least some sense of comfort while away from home for a few days.

The anticipation continues…

I found out yesterday that the interview I did with Elance.com had been published on Wednesday 5-28. I assumed it would be published on June 2nd, but I guess it came out early. The interview was conducted back on 5-5-08 and had to get approval, be revised, releases signed and a couple other minor details. (I never knew these things were so involved.)

In the interview I discussed the criteria I use when hiring writers and how to communicate what you want from them so as to avoid any misunderstanding. Elance included 3 tips in the blog post based on what I told them during the interview and what was in a previous post on getting the most from Elance.

The interview probably came about because I sent a general email to someone at Elance letting them know about the previously mentioned post on April 16. It wasn’t anything to strongly self promotional, I just mentioned that the post might be of a benefit for people using their services and looking to hire writers. They must have liked what they read, because I got an email a couple of weeks later asking if I would agree to an interview. I wasn’t seeking an interview, I was just hoping they would link to the post, but you never know what will happen when you touch base with others around the web.

If you have more than you can handle on your own or are wanting to expand your online business and need content, web design help, coding or just about anything you can think of, Elance.com is definitely the place to outsource your work.

Read the Elance interview here and find out how to get the most from Elance here.

Part of the winnings I accrued in the Webmaster Talk contest was $750 in cash and that’s a nice little chunk of change to go have a big party with, go out to a nice super expensive dinner and a show, go buy a nice gadget or rent about 175 movies from Blockbuster. But are any of those things a smart move to make for the affiliate marketer?

If you said yes, then it’s time to stop playing with your blogging and affiliate business and get your lifetime membership to your choice of online video stores. Hopefully most everyone reading knows that’s not the best thing to do with a windfall of $750. As long as I’ve been writing Affiliate Confession and even before that, I decided any contest winnings or excess monetary gain would be invested right back into my affiliate business in the form of either advertising for this blog or into getting a better grasp on the pay per click game.

What I intend to do with the $750 is put all of it into PPC a little at a time as I try to figure out and benefit from a few new things learned over the last couple of months. For some, $750 isn’t a lot of money to spend in even a week on Adwords or Yahoo Search Marketing, but the plan is to carefully research various ClickBank and affiliate products and try to at least double that money and reinvest the profits again. As reported previously, I am seeing a little bit of profit in a couple of PPC campaigns I’ve been running lately, so at least there’s a little track record of success to build on.

I’ll be basing my PPC campaigns on information I’ve learned at Super Affiliate Mindset, Cash Tactics and CDF Networks (Thanks goes out to Poll Factory for alerting me to those last two resources). There’s also a good rundown of 3 distinct PPC bidding strategies that’s a good resource for search marketers I will be testing from. I especially like the tactic that Kris Jones from Pepperjam has used in the past and will be giving that one a try. You’ll have to go read the article mentioned above to find out what it is.

There’s a lot of info in the above mentioned blogs and article and you should be careful not to try too many different things at once, as I will be trying to avoid. As I’ve read, spreading yourself too thin and not really doing your due diligence in a niche and with a specific PPC technique may cause you to never find a profitable campaign. It may take failing a few times in the same niche with different strategies and keyword combinations before you find profitability.

I’ve been given a nice opportunity to delve into an area of online marketing that I frankly have not done very well in and I don’t want to squander the $750 winnings on something that isn’t going to ultimately benefit my business. Reinvesting in your business is really no secret, it is a necessity. Stay tuned for updates on hopefully good results.