Reflections On My 30th Birthday

As I type this I just turned 30 years old and if you’re reading this and it’s still Sunday July 19 where you are, make sure you wish me a happy birthday .

I had a conversation leading up to my 30th birthday with a fellow 29 year old who was heading towards her 30th with a little trepidation. She had just divorced her husband, so needless to say she was experiencing significant changes in her life.

Personally I don’t look at 30 as a big deal, although there was one comment this particular girl made that caught my attention. She said as people turn 30 they usually are in one of two places – they have their “shit” together or they don’t. I told her I was about as happy as I could remember in my life as I turned 30, so her conclusion was I was one of those people who has their “shit together”. Yay for me.

It Was The Worst Of Times

It’s natural to reflect on your life as you get older, especially at milestone ages. If I look over my twenties I can certainly say it has been a wild ride, full of highs and lows.

I left my teenage years and entered my twenties while I was at university, not really enjoying my studies, not very motivated by much and just uncomfortable in my own skin.

The problem when your own self worth is low, is that you have great difficulty digging yourself out. You generally attract experiences to enhance your low self esteem because you view the world in “sad” glasses. Until you can switch the conversation going on inside your head from negative to positive, your experiences in the outside world will reflect this, further enhancing your negative belief structure.

In order to truly become confident, you need to have experiences that have a positive impact on you. There’s only so far re-framing your interpretation of events and thinking positive can take you, eventually you have to actually have the positive experiences to build your confidence.

As a result of my dogged determination to remain unhappy, I experienced many low-points. I’d have to say my time with panic attacks and anxiety during my early twenties was one of my least-favorite periods.

As always, thanks to the wonderful world of polarities that we exist in, the trauma caused by these experiences forced me to seek out answers to big questions. If I didn’t suffer the pain, I wouldn’t have gone looking for answers to certain questions either – you need the ying in order to see the contrast and thus fully experience the yang.

I won’t go into detail here, but if you want to read more about my experience with panic and the resultant search for happiness, you can read this –

The Key To Happiness

During my early twenties I had a few part time jobs and experimented with different web projects. My most successful at this time was my Magic: The Gathering card game website, which I grew to the largest site of its kind in Australia and then later sold for $13,000, the first big website deal I made.

I also started my proofreading business BetterEdit.com in my early twenties, which I would invest serious time into growing, including trips to university campuses in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Hawaii, Vancouver and Toronto to promote using posters.

From 20 to 25 years old I spent a lot of time playing with different projects and gained a lot of experience. I also began my study of Internet marketing during this time, and delved into more philosophical and spiritual studies too, as a means to figure out why the world is the way it is and what I could do to be happier in it.

I don’t look back on my first five years in my twenties as the most fun of times. Sure there were good times in there, but much of the experience was sabotaged by my attitude. I’m glad to have gone through that period for the growth it provided for me as a person, but I wouldn’t want to go back there again.

It Was The Best Of Times

A clear contrast to my first five years in my twenties, from 25 to 30 my life went from good to better to great, and thankfully, it’s still going!

It’s funny how as you get your “shit” together, people start to look at you as if you have answers to a question that has been bugging them for a long time – what to do with their life.

The answer to what to do with your life is simple – you need to experience. Your purpose is to gravitate towards activities that manifest joy for you, those around you and any person or living thing who is impacted by what you do. However, you won’t know what these things are by spending all your time wondering what to do.

Surrendering to the process of living is the only answer, but if you don’t at least commit to participating in the process, you don’t get anywhere.

I’ve read a lot of books that presented this wisdom as direct teachings from “god’s” mouth, or through the use of parables to explain ideas so you can more readily absorb them. Regardless of the source, reading about this is never enough, you need to BE it.

Creating awareness is definitely helpful, but until you experience the belief, it will remain only a truth as long as you have faith. If you really want to cement a concept you need to have lived it.

This is why the first five years of my twenties were so important. I needed to be lost in order to be capable of understanding what it feels like to find a purpose. The second five years were all about further refining and building upon the clarity I was discovering.

From 25 to today, the day after my 30th birthday, I achieved many milestones. I bought and sold websites, including selling my main business BetterEdit.com for six figures. I bought my first house, paid off the home loan within two years, traveled the world and just a few days before my 30th birthday, moved into a dream apartment in my ideal living location.

Most of this wouldn’t have happened if I didn’t conduct one crucial experiment – I started a blog. Although it seems strange to give so much credit to one event, I guess I really need to thank my friend Ed Chalmers, because it was him who first uttered the word “blog” and suggest I investigate it.

Starting a blog was just an experiment, but it led me to discover that I was capable of writing words that people wanted to read. It also allowed me to focus on activities that helped me to grow in so many ways.

I realized I could forge a specialty by combining my experience growing a blog and studies of Internet marketing. Becoming clear on my purpose as a blogger meant that I could devote more time to what I wanted to do, sell off what I wasn’t interested in, and build a lifestyle business, which was ultimately my main goal (the freedom to choose lifestyle over work or money).

During this time I further refined my attitude and it is this that I am most grateful for. Mindset is, and always will be, the key to everything.

As humans we have freewill, which means we have the power to make the ultimate decision – how we perceive every moment and every event in our life. If you truly understand this, then nothing in your life can impact you in a way that you don’t want it to.

Living this idea is harder than stating it, but during the last five years I’ve become a lot better at it. Just as my “ugly and sad” glasses made me think in negatives, see negatives and thus experience negatives in my life, by changing the colour of my glasses, I started to think in positives, see the beauty and live the wonder, regardless of the external reality.

This switch in attitude helped every aspect of my business life too. When facing set-backs, if you just see them for what they are and then let them go so you can move on, your life is so much simpler.

Dealing with jealousy, depression and loneliness, were emotions that plagued me many times growing my business in the last ten years. By seeing them for what they are (false judgments I’d made and thus decided to see as real), letting them go and then moving back on focus towards what I wanted, has made the road to success a lot more smooth.

Business can be relatively easy when you just get out of your own way, learn some fundamentals about people and then put your head down and get stuff done. This is what I did during the last five years. I pushed myself to launch new projects, I learned what the key parts of my business are and what I should work to grow, and discovered my place in the business as it functions like a machine.

The result of this was the creation of three fantastic products, Blog Mastermind, Become A Blogger (in partnership with Gideon Shalwick, a great new friend and business partner I met in the last five years as well) and Membership Site Mastermind.

I owe a great deal of thanks to the pioneers in our industry. Without people like Jeff Walker, Mike Filsaime, Rich Schefren, John Reese, Frank Kern, Eben Pagan and countless others, who I learn a lot from by simply watching what they do, I wouldn’t have grown as an Internet marketer.

Seeing what is possible by watching others do it is incredibly powerful because it makes what might be possible become a reality. When you see someone do something and get a result, then you know that’s attainable as an outcome for you too. That’s why it’s critical to participate in your marketplace and find people you can model.

That, in many ways, is why this blog you are reading now is successful. That is very likely the reason why you have read this article up to this point. You know what is possible because I’ve done it. I’ve explained it right here in this article. You can model me, take parts of what I say and do and apply it to what you say and do.

The Journey Continues

If you go back to the very first blog post I made to this blog and read every word I have published up to today, you will take in almost five years of my life, five years that happen to be the most successful years of my life too.

The entries in this blog are reflective of the journey I’ve been on in my life, particularly my business life, which is why I named it the Entrepreneurs Journey. It’s a chronicle of what I’ve done, what I’m doing and what I’m thinking as I live it. It’s my experiences in written form.

More importantly though, this blog is a reflection of the key successes and failures I’ve had along the way. You can find the moment I learned how important it is to build an email list, the first time I used a squeeze page, how I launched my first product, my thoughts and experiments on profiting from a blog, how I bought and sold websites for profit, what I learned about the importance of my own thoughts as a key to success, my interviews with amazing people from around the world, and so much more.

Ultimately though, none of this really matters because it’s about what has been. What’s important to me, and just as important to you, is what you are doing and thinking right now and how you have changed as a person as a result of the path you have walked.

I hope as you have read any article in this blog at any point in time, if it has done nothing else, it has helped you to think and take actions that have lead you to become a better person, even if it was in just a tiny little way. I couldn’t ask for more than that.

…And of course, the journey continues, we’re not done yet!

Here’s to more adventures, success stories and even greater milestone achievements in the coming years.

Yaro Starak
Blogger

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Had a blast at the Techcrunch organized August Capital party.

Awesome TC Ice sculpture. Booze provided by Grey Goose:

I helped out 2 at a time:

Later on the V.I.P.’s went to the 4 seasons to party on and I met Los Angeles TV Star Shira Lazar, former girlfriend of Kevin Rose:

I asked her if K-Rose dugg her or buried her and she did not think it was funny… =(

Thanks to August Capital & TechCrunch for throwing another great event! Looking forward to the Techcrunch50 conference in September.

This Post Is From ShoeMoney’s Internet Marketing Blog

August Capital TechCrunch Party Rocked

Hey folks, it’s Rebecca Kelley here (formally of SEOmoz and currently the Director of Social Media for 10e20, your friendly neighborhood social media marketing company). About a year and a half ago I pulled some guest posts out of my ass for Shoe, and he must have been nostalgic lately because he’s asked me to resume my position as guest blogger. You can look forward to guest posts from me a couple times a week. If that ain’t your cup of tea, avoid the blog when I post while we all have fun without you.

Anyway, one of the things I love about Shoe is what he said in his last post:

So I was talking with the notorious keyboard gangsta Nickycakes a couple weeks ago and telling him how bad I suck as a CEO and really need to get my time management skills in order.

The fact that he acknowledges his CEO suckitude goes to show you that he’s a smart guy (terrible speller, but oh well). I’ve met a lot of businesspeople and douchebags in this industry who either a) refuse to address their shortcomings, or b) know their weaknesses and do absolutely nothing about it. Those are the types of people I can’t stand working with. Either their heads are so far up their asses that they think they can do everything perfectly when in reality they’re effing up everything they get their bumbling hands on, or they go “Yeah, I suck at managing people but oh well, I’m going to keep sucking at it instead of either working to improve my skills or hiring someone who’s better suited for the role.”

Learn something from Jeremy, peeps. If you’re not good at something, either become good at it or, if you’re still unable to get good at it for whatever reason (like if you’re too wimpy to fire someone or you’re too scatterbrained to handle accounting stuff), find someone to fill the void and strengthen your company or team.  If you’re too ignorant, dumb or stubborn to acknowledge your shortcomings and come up with a solution, you’re only hurting yourself and the success of your business.

So there you have it, my triumphant return to guest posting for Shoe. I kept it short and sweet. Hopefully my next one will be a bit meatier and contain  more swear words and poop jokes. Tune in later this week to find out!

This Post Is From ShoeMoney’s Internet Marketing Blog

If the Shoe Fits…Guest Blog for It

One of the most popular resources for new bloggers – Become a Blogger – is reopening its doors to new participants – for 5 days only. Update: I’ve just been told that they’ve reopened the doors for one last time for another 24 hours due to hundreds of people asking for an extension. It ends 2pm EST on Wednesday 9th July.

It’s cheaper than ever before

If you’re a new blogger wondering how to get your blog started and moving towards reaching it’s potential – it can be a daunting prospect.

Become a Blogger is a step-by-step video based guide to walk you through the process in plain and easy to understand language.

The Guys Behind Become a Blogger

The two guys behind Become a Blogger are two people I have a lot of time for – Yaro Starak and Gideon Shalwick. Both live here in Australia and I regularly interact with both. They both have a gift in being able to explain complicated things clearly, they both know what they’re doing (you can get a taste for that in this free report that they’ve released) and have been successful in their own fields and they are both genuinely nice guys who I have real respect for.

I have no hesitation in recommending them to you as trainers and mentors in your blogging.

The resource is broken down into 8 Modules over 6 months – with a number of other bonuses. Here’s what is covered:

Module 1: Get Your Blog Up And Running Fast And FREE

Module 2: How To Optimize Your Blog For Maximum Search Engine Performance

Module 3: How To Create Powerful Content For Your Blog, Consistently and Without Fail

Module 4: How To Use Images On Your Blog To Make You Stand Out From The Crowd

Module 5: How To Create A Different Dimension To Your Blog By Adding Audio

Module 6: How To Breathe Life Into Your Blog Using Online Video

Module 7: How To Create Multiple Streams of High Quality Traffic To Your Blog

Module 8: How To Make Money From Your Blog

PLUS (Spread Throughout The Course): How To Use The “X-Factor” Strategies To Put Your Blog Into Super Drive!

PLUS: a range of other bonuses including a 10 part audio series on ‘master the mindset’ – access to the Become a Blogger Forums and special members only Teleconferences.

Previously Become a Blogger was $77 a month. It sold out at that rate and they closed the doors so as to deliver value to those who signed up.

Cheaper for a Limited Time Only

This time it’s $47 a month but you only have 5 days to become a part of it.

You can either sign up on a month by month basis or invest in it up front for the 6 months get a discount.

Of course as usual with these guys – there’s a money back guarantee. If you’re not satisfied you can simply ask for your money back – I trust these guys to honor that commitment.

Signup for Become a Blogger here.

Update: I’ve just been chatting with Gideon and he tells me that they’re adding another bonus – a free call next week for new members of Become a Blogger – the call will cover the topic of niche/topic selection for bloggers – a topic many bloggers struggle with.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Become a Blogger Reopens for 5 Days Only – Now Cheaper Than Ever

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Who are you more likely to help out, a friend or an acquaintance? In networking, it seems to be about how many people you know. The number of people you have in your Rolodex is the metric of how well connected or networked you are. However, in my experience this is the completely wrong approach. If you build “acquaintance relationships” with everybody, then when it comes time to ask on someone for a large favor, how many of these acquaintances do you think will help you out?

Instead, I recommend taking an alternative approach to networking where you spend your time focused on building meaningful relationships with fewer people. Sure you may not know as many people as someone else, but when it comes time for you to call on someone in your network for a favor, they will be the ones who come true.

Another thing I have found is that by building a close relationship with someone, you gain access to their network. They will recommend you to their peers and these peers will have an instant trust in you and your ideas because you are being recommended by someone they trust. In this scenario, you can actually build a larger network than if you were just to exchange contact details with everyone you meet and your network will actually have trust in you and your abilities, a win-win.

So instead of trying to meet as many new people as you can today, look at the contacts you have already made and try to strengthen your relationship with them.

“How do I find affiliate products to promote on my blog?”

Last week I spoke with a small group of bloggers here in Melbourne over a coffee. One of the topics that a number of them were interested in talking about was affiliate marketing. They were struggling with the advertising as a model to make money from their blogs and wanted to branch out and experiment with affiliate promotions on their blog.

However wanting to get into affiliate marketing and actually doing it are two different things. There are a number of challenges to overcome first.

One of these challenges is finding the right product to promoted.

Choosing the right products to promote in affiliate promotions is crucial for a number of reasons – the two main ones being:

1. Relevant Products are Key – if your blog draws an audience centered around a particular topic or demographic you’re unlikely to be able to sell products that have no relevancy to your blog’s topic.

2. The Quality of Products can Impact Your Long Term Brand – promote low quality products and you could be hurting your brand. Readers remember who they heard about products from and their trust of you and your blog will be increased or decreased by what you recommend to them.

So – choosing the right affiliate product is crucial. It not only impacts conversions and profitability but it impacts your brand and relationships with readers.

How to Find the Right Affiliate Product to Promote

A few tips and thoughts on finding affiliate programs to promote come to mind:

1. Google It – this one isn’t rocket science but it does work. If you have a Beauty Product blog google “Beauty Products Affiliate Program”. Insert your main keywords into that search and you may just find products that are relevant to your niche.
2. Look at Your Competition – what products are other people promoting in your niche. Quite often a quick glance down the sidebar of another successful blog in your niche to see what products and services they are promoting will reveal affiliate products you could promote to (and it could also point you to some relevant advertisers to promote).
3. Check out AdSense Ads – many of the AdSense ads appearing besides Google search results, on other blogs and even on your own blog are likely to be products with affiliate programs attached. Don’t click the ads on your own blog but checking out what the ads promote can reveal all kinds of potential affiliate partners. The same thing is true with other types of advertising. For example I was recently surfing on Facebook and saw an ad relevant for my blog – on clicking it I found a new product with an affiliate program that I’d not heard of before.
4. Approach Potential Affiliate Partners – this one might not work if you’re a new blog with small traffic but as your blog grows you might find yourself in a position to approach the makers of a product or service to see if they’d start some kind of affiliate program for you. I’ve done this a couple of times over the last year and it has been great. The best part of it is that you get a head start on your competition for the promotion as you’re likely to be the only person promoting it.
5. Search Affiliate networks – lastly there are quite a few affiliate networks around that list many affiliate programs. Most of these have search functions to allow you to type in keywords and find promotions relevant to your niche. Check out MarketLeverage, Clickbank, Commission Junction, PepperJam Network (disclaimer, MarketLeverage sponsors ProBlogger) and many more.
6. Search Online Stores for Products – many online stores like Amazon have affiliate programs attached to them. In general the comissions are not massive (for example Amazon’s range from as low as 4% up to 15% depending upon the type of product and how much you sell) – I guess they have narrower profit margins) – but stores like this have a massive range of products and can be a good place to start while you build traffic and find other programs.

How do you find affiliate products to promote on your blogs?

PS: this post builds upon yesterdays post – What is Affiliate Marketing?

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

How to Find Profitable Affiliate Products to Promote

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This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

Is the Online Business Manager a VA on Steroids?

Marketing podcast with Tina Forsyth (Click to listen, right click and Save As to download – subscribe now via iTunes

For this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast I visited with Tina Forsyth, author of Becoming an Online Business Manager: Playing a Bigger Role with your Clients (and Yourself) Forsyth wrote her book to help train, initially VAs, in more advanced roles of helping business owners “run” the business.

Here’s her official definition of the Online Business Manager: A virtually based support professional who manages online based businesses, including the day-to-day management of projects, operations, team members and metrics.

However she likes to look at the role from a bit of a different angle – what is the purpose of an Online Business Manager beyond ‘what they do’?

The role of the OBM boils down to one simple thing: To free up the business owner so that they can focus their time and energy on the things that only THEY can do in their business.

What she found after writing her book was that yes, lots of VAs and marketing assistants wanted this information, but lots of business owners started to contact her as well to learn where they could get an OBM. Recently she started training would be OBMs in a 16 week certification program.

For the business or individual stuck with too much to do and no way to manage it – the OBM might prove to be a solid answer.

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I remember when the 4 hour work week came out, I was approached pretty hardcore by Tim Ferris to promote it. Now some people responded to his approach and hooked him up but I didn’t care for his over the top hustle and told him to buzz off (in so many words). But I was nice compared to Penelope’s experience with Tim Ferris in his hustle to promote the 4-hour work week.

Meh I digress….

So I was talking with the notorious keyboard gangsta Nickycakes a couple weeks ago and telling him how bad I suck as a CEO and really need to get my time management skills in order. Nick went on about the 4-hour work week book and how it totally changed his life and now he has time to take out all these girls in Vegas or something like that… He recommended that I pick up the book right away no matter what I thought personally about Tim Ferris.

Now anyone who knows me, knows I am not a reader and have never read a book in my life. So in true ShoeMoney style I pirated from the usenet picked up the 4-Hour work week from iTunes and gave it a listen.

Now there is a lot of fluff in the book but one key takeaway for me was a line about “Are you coming up with new ideas to prevent doing the hard work that needs to be done to finish ones you already started”. Damn that was deep and really hit home with me. I wrote it on a piece of paper and put it on my monitor.

My wife has a saying whenever I keep coming up with new ideas. That I need to Prioritize the Potentially Profitable Projects.

So are you looking to new things avoiding the hard work required to finish what you have already started?

This Post Is From ShoeMoney’s Internet Marketing Blog

Eyes On The Prize

This Friday I will be speaking at Guy Kawasaki’s Revenue Bootcamp with the recently named “Sexiest Single Indian Millionaire” in America – Neil Patel:

Then we are headed to the Techcrunch/August Capital Event in Redwood City.

Techcrunch Events (techcrunch40/50, techcrunch awards) are always the site of some truly amazing networking for me. Plus, being I am from the press team means I get to harass inteview people like Mark Zuckerberg, Kevin Rose, Mc Hammer, Ashton Kutcher or any of the other internet rock stars that might show up:

Tickets are only $20 to the night event and there will be food and booze. Trust me, if you are local or even close and can make this event you are a complete idiot if you don’t!!!!!

Get your tickets here while they are available.

I would just like to once again thank Michael Arrington, Heather, and Daniel Brusilovsky for recognizing a quality journalism and giving me a press pass.

This Post Is From ShoeMoney’s Internet Marketing Blog

Techcrunch August Capital Event This Friday in Redwood City Tickets Still Available!!