The 40 Day Push Button Make Money Challenge

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The Entrepreneurial Life

What makes an entrepreneur? Is it their drive to be successful? Is it their amazing insight into new ways of achieving that success? Perhaps it’s their determination to succeed in the face of multiple failures?

I’m sure that being a modern entrepreneur takes all of these qualities, but it seems to me that one thing shared by many is the unswerving belief that there really is a pot of gold out there to be discovered at the end of the rainbow. The only trouble is, which rainbow is the one that they should be looking for?

Conflicting AdviceEvery direction you look, there’s a “guru” or expert of some kind, proclaiming that theirs is the only true way to wealth and happiness and that they will happily share their techniques with you (for a modest investment.) Of course, there are some good guys out there, in London they’d be known as the “diamond geezers” of the industry. Folks you can trust with your money and your life……

……and that’s where it all unravels.

Who can you really trust? How do you separate out out the good from the bad, the true expert from the fad-following WSO creator?

There’s something a little masochistic about being a beginner in the Internet Marketing world. You have to start out somewhere and you need to learn a lot in a short space of time. It’s only natural to think that you can succeed immediately when places like the Warrior Forum are so full of push-button schemes that all promise results in weeks (if not days or hours). So you buy a few WSOs and before you know it, your hard-drive is filling up with content and you still haven’t made any money. So you buy a few more – better ones than the last – but still struggle to make money from any of them.

Somewhere down this path, cynicism set in. It gets harder and harder to believe that any of it works. You may get sucked into the orbit of a “mentoring program” – usually another opportunity for the guru to sell you an online “training program” with very little mentoring included – and so the cynicism grows.

At this point, the huge majority of budding entrepreneurs give up. Mounting bills from internet marketing get added to the bills that come from just living, instead of being the solution to those bills.

If I am sounding bitter and twisted at this point, it may be because I have seen plenty of this in my own journey, but more than that, I have talked to so many others who are in this position.

I like to go to marketing events, to get to meet new people, to meet folks I have spoken to online and to add some professional drinking skills to the proceedings 🙂 I’ve got to say that it is starting to freak me out, just how many people don’t seem to be able to get started at all, let alone succeed with their first few steps online……and it’s not because they are stupid or untalented, they have just been overwhelmed by the possibilities and don’t know which way to turn.

Introducing the 40 Day Challenge

So, I’ve decided it’s time we had one of those challenge thingys. The sort where some awesome, well-known marketer announces to the world that they will make 10 grand by next weekend or their kidneys will be sold for charity.

Fortunately, I  feel that my lack of awesomeness and fame lets me off the whole “body parts” side of things and I’m prepared to take a bit longer than 25 nanoseconds to get things done.

What I have decided to do, is to take several of the recent, relatively well-promoted WSOs that have some implied instant success element. I’m going to split them down into fairly easy chunks that I can do each day and I’ll be testing them on my readers’ behalf for the next 40 days, which should take me up to the end of June.

If I have done it right, I should have several new streams of income running, which will come in handy as I travel to Italy in July and pay for my pizzas.

I know that this is not a particularly efficient test. I should probably do one at at time, but so many WSOs promise that a mere hour or two a day will make me a bazillion dollars in a month, that I reckon I can fit a few into each day and make 3 bazillion instead 🙂

The Rules of the Game

Every challenge has rules and mine is no different…..

  • I will try to pick WSOs that are “evergreen”, i.e. that will still be available for you to buy if they come out as a major success. There are no guarantees that this will be possible, as most of them get released with a skanky fake scarcity time limit these days.
  • I will endeavour to give you an idea of all that I am doing without giving away the magic sauce from the WSO itself. I think this is only fair to the authors – up to the point where it is clear that they have never made any money from this technique either and it’s a just another WSO shell-game! All creators and products will be mentioned by name so that their creators can find this series and defend themselves (possibly from my useless implementation of their WSO).
  • If you wish to follow along, I will probably stick up a bunch of affiliate links to the products in question (as a result of needing to pay my own bills too 🙂 ), but I won’t be counting that money in any results that I record.
  • I’m going to reserve the right to be rude, zany or anything else I feel like in my daily write-ups….sorry in advance!
  • The final thing is that I don’t work on Sundays – pure and simple – I may read about IM stuff, but I truly believe that a day of recharging is a good thing and so I don’t work. In fact, if the “lifestyle” is what you are chasing, Sundays off should just be the start of your relaxing, right?

The 40 day time limit is there to give me (and you if you follow along) a chance to read up on the next technique, or to do some of the admin stuff like writing it all in here and maybe making some videos. I will probably also try adding a traffic course into the back-end of all this to see if my posts will benefit the blog too.

Tomorrow, I’ll be laying out the chosen WSOs. I hope to have one on Kindle, one on CPA, one about affiliate sales (hmm, maybe) and one other product creation type WSO. Stay tuned to see what they are going to be.

If you think this is a good idea, a terrible idea, or you just want to cheer for the team, then leave me a comment below and let’s spread the success around a bit.

2011 and some Biblical Context to my IM work.

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No, it’s not a pseudo-apocalyptic rant about the world coming to an end in 2011 – although we may all revisit that comment when the FTC have finished with all their little plans for us this year.

It’s more about a line in the Bible that talks about us “doing what we know we should not do, and not doing those things that we know we should”. Of course, in the original sense it all boils down more to the spirit being willing, but the flesh being weak….an excuse trotted out for almost any kind of slightly naughty thing we think we can get away with these days. Cream buns, anyone?

On a more secular and personal level, it hits home at this time of year as we all make and break those incredible New Year resolutions. Who’s stopped going to the gym already?

Where it really gets serious, though, is in our Intenet Marketing endeavours. Here’s a list of some of the stuff I have looked at in 2010:

  • SEO
  • PPC
  • Facebook Ads
  • Outsourcing
  • Local Marketing
  • Social Media Marketing
  • Amazon affiliate program
  • Adsense

Now, that’s not a comprehensive list and it certainly doesn’t do justice to all the books, courses and WSO’s that I have bought in the same period. So, how many of these things made me money? How many of them should I look at in the light of the quote at the start of the post?

So, what are the things that have been “the things you should not have done” – how have they stopped you getting on with all the things you should have concentrated on and how much money has been diverted away from you as a result.

My promise to myself this year is to get down to turning all this incredible knowledge and “stuff” from 2010 into cash and to do it one step at a time. Yes, the Facebook page will get some attention, but it won’t be my first port of call. This blog and its readers and subscribers deserve first call on my time. So I’m committed to getting back to the near-daily updates on my progress, with reports of what I have learned along the way.

Secondly, my existing Amazon sites are going to get some work and traffic sent their way. They deserve it, the poor wee  orphans!!

Thirdly, my listbuilding will definitely see a new lease of life in 2011. This is one area that I have been woefully poor at and this needs to change for the New Year.

Then finally (for now) I will definitely be putting more work into reviewing the stuff that I have bought, so that others get a chance to see exactly what’s in some of these packages that are sold “sight unseen”. I’m only going to recommend and promote the ones that I have used and like. Others may get a passing reference and maybe sometimes a sneer too, we’ll see.

This is actually one of the things that worked quite well for me towards the end of 2010. I spent some time reviewing and promoting Dan Brock’s Amazon program (Deadbeat Super Affiliate) and I am still seeing sporadic affiliate sales coming from that even now.

For those that tracked my earnings progress through the Summer, I’m pleased to be able to say that the Christmas period brought in a combined total of around $300 for the month of December. Next year I will starting the site creation waaaay earlier!

This number brings my total for the year to an almost perfect $1000 and that’s only starting the counting when I did, later in the Summer. So, not perfect, but certainly encouraging as a start. My next target is to get that earning period down to one month i.e. one month, $1000 and of course to start ramping it up from there.

So, where is your New Year starting? Does any of this strike any chords?