Hi,

What was the most taxing aspect of entrepreneurship you had to endure during your success?

I had one website that was ranking for a keyword in Google. It was something along the lines of "Target Coupon Codes". But it wasn't Target (just using it as an example). So when someone searched for a coupon code for Target, my website came up #1 and the guy who's #1 gets the lion's share of the traffic.

Once I created the website, the only thing I had to do was change the expiration date of the coupon codes at the end of every month. So there was no work schedule, no work at all in fact. I maybe wrote 1 article a month for the website, and since I was an English major during my 2 year tenure at a local community college....I worked about 1 hour a month. I could pump out a 500 word article in less than 20 minutes and people actually liked reading what I had to write.

I took a few years vacation and just de-programmed myself from corporate life. I hated my previous job and I embarked on learning SEO and teaching myself how to run a business. I can honestly say I made every single rookie mistake there was to make. I'm extremely intelligent, but it just goes to show that even with intelligence, mistakes can and will be made. From tax mistakes to spending money when I should be saving it....to just general business fuck ups. I was socially awkward at the time and somewhat shy, so it forced me to come out of my shell and get social skills.

I guess the most taxing aspect was building a relationship with the advertiser. They saw how much money I was making every month, and they didn't know me from Adam. My biggest fear was that they would somehow attempt to thwart all that money I was making. So I attempted to ingratiate myself with them. Being that there are a ton of evil scammers in affiliate marketing, I figured if I were to ingratiate myself with the marketing manager of this company, I could potentially have an unfair advantage over the other guys who are doing the same thing I am. I also had competitors going after the same keyword as I was....and those guys were breaking the rules that the advertiser had laid out. So I kinda sorta became a snitch. I ratted out competitors who were breaking the rules in a desperate attempt to keep them at bay. It worked. I don't feel bad because it's just business. It was an unfair advantage that I had and I intended to keep it that way by any means necessary.

So I created a devious plan to ingratiate myself with this guy. Nobody liked him. He had a very professional-by-the-book attitude. He was kind of an asshole. I am the type of person who gets along with everyone, no matter who they are. I'm extremely easy going.

So I took whatever little ego that I had and threw it in the trash can and approached this guy, hat in hand, and in a humble manner. That worked really well.

Most affiliate marketers at that time were egotistical bastards. There were a ton of us who thought our shit didn't stink and that we were gods. Those guys were mostly right because in 2007, we controlled what you saw on the internet, NOT Google.

So while my competitors were calling this guy (the marketing manager for the company that was paying me) and throwing out demands like they were Jesus Christ....my tone of voice was extremely humble and I actually brought him into the creative process so he felt like we were a team.

So I spent the next year calling this guy on the phone every few weeks to update him on the progress of my website and how I was creating great content/etc.

Then I started meeting him at affiliate conferences in New York and in Vegas.

My efforts paid off.

I remember one time I flew out to the city the company was headquartered in. He wanted me to meet the Vice President of the company. The marketing manager told me in confidence that the VP was an over-bearing asshole/etc. So I used that info to my advantage. Over the course of lunch, I made the marketing manager look like he was the one who was responsible for my success. I made it look like it was a team effort. The VP left that lunch meeting with a very good impression of not only me, but the marketing manager. Of course, this scored me a million brownie points with the marketing manager. And the money kept rolling in month after month.

In 2009, he gave me an exclusive offer which basically doubled my income. I did not have to do a single thing. So I went from $40k/mo. to $80k/mo. overnight.

Other than that, and up until Penguin 1.0 (the Google algorithm which killed millions of innocent, small time mom-and-pop webmasters over a phony boogeyman scare story of "we're trying to rid the internet of spam websites") I really had nothing to do.

Those days are long gone. We really had something special.

In 2012 Google started their war upon the mom-and-pop webmaster (basically anyone that wasn't a Fortune 500 company or wasn't featured on Reddit or Digg). Google started this war under the false pretense of "we're trying to get rid of spammers", but in reality.....they just wanted to get every single mom-and-pop website out there dependent on Adwords (their paid advertising platform). I saw more than a few mom-and-pop business in America (I did some client work for SEO) get wiped off the face of the map with the Google Penguin and Panda updates, and they were NOT doing anything spammy.

But Google is a for-profit company and the mantra of "do no evil" was replaced with "Higher profits by any means necessary so we can look good on Wall St."

Bastards.