I think it’s interesting to look back on the strange paths we take that lead us to where we are.  Here’s my strange little path to where I am now.

I first found out about internet marketing from reading about something called the Golden Backdoor near the end of 2007.  I was curious about it and found a review of the product where someone said it involved promoting Clickbank products.  I didn’t get the Golden Backdoor, but I took a look at Clickbank and got an account.

I didn’t know anything about internet marketing, so logically, I printed out a bunch of neon fliers with the address to a website I bought that redirected people to a Clickbank product.  I then spent a few days plastering these fliers all over my neighborhood.  On bus stops, at the local community college.  Pretty much anywhere I could post anything.  I then proceeded to make exactly $0.

I was in school at the time and classes started again.  I let all this affiliate marketing stuff slip into the back of my mind.

In the summer of 2008, I got a crappy summer job working at Phoenix-area architecture firm that “designs” large big box and chain stores.  I put the word design in quotes because we didn’t actually design anything.  We got a prototype store from our clients and then did everything we could to trick local building departments into letting us build these monstrosities.  “What?  You don’t want a giant box in your city that doesn’t have any windows?  Well, what if we put these fake windows on it so it kind of looks like a real building?” It was soul-crushing work that contradicted everything that I believed about architecture.

I was fortunate enough to work near a Borders bookstore.  One day after work, I decided I should get an audio book to take advantage of my 30-minute commute.  That was when I found The 4 Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss.  I hated my job, so I got the audio version and listened to it every day on the way to and from work.  I must have listened to it at least 15-20 times that summer.

I wanted to try out what Tim recommended, but I couldn’t really think of a product I could create and market.  I already knew about Clickbank, so I decided I could just market someone else’s product.  I opened up a Google Adwords account and started direct-linking to Clickbank products.  It was pretty easy.  I must admit that I didn’t make much money doing this, but I did make a little.

I kept this up until about the beginning of 2009.  I heard about this course called Profit Lance.  It seemed really good, so I got it.  I started to get into it, but then school started again.  I graduated in May 2009 and came back to it.  It taught me a lot of good things, but I think the course became outdated since it was put out in 2007.

I gave up on it in June 2009, and floundered around in July.  Then in August I heard about the Thirty Day Challenge.  I did it and I built two Thirty Day Challenge sites.  Both of them never really took off, but I learned a lot about the current trends in internet marketing.

One day while looking for a Clickbank product for a third Thirty Day Challenge site, I saw something called the Six Day Weekend.  I clicked on it because it sounded like a knock off of the 4 Hour Work Week, which I liked a lot.  This was Sean Morrissy’s site that he had launched about a week earlier.  I watched some of his free videos.  They seemed really good, but I honestly had no idea where to start or what order I was supposed to watch them in (sorry, Sean).  I got confused.  All I knew was that Sean said Mark Ling was his mentor and Sean was living the lifestyle I wanted to live.

So I went to Mark Ling’s site Affilorama and signed up there.  I started making websites like they recommend back in August.  Now it’s 6 months later and here I am still doing it.

The past 6 months have had a lot of ups and downs.  I’ve had some success despite the fact that I recently realized I was doing a few things very wrong.  Things have gotten faster and easier as I’ve learned ways to shortcut and automate things.  Honestly, I’m really excited about the next few months and I’m eagerly looking forward to building some more websites!

This past Sunday, I met up with some internet marketers here in the Seattle area.  It was really cool to actually meet people that are doing this.  It makes me feel a little less crazy to actually be around people that talk about SEO, affiliate commission rates, and other topics that seem to make everyone else’s eyes glaze over.  I even met one guy that makes a full-time living from an affiliate website.  This was pretty huge for me.  I’ve talked to people online that make lots of money doing this.  I’ve even traded a few e-mails with some.  But to actually meet someone that’s doing this in person…  There was something especially motivating about that.

Tonight, I am going to start my first Japanese language class through the UW Experimental College.  I took a year of Japanese in college when I was an undergrad, but I forgot most of it.  Going to Tokyo in 2008, really made me want to learn Japanese so I could actually be a bilingual bad ass!  Plus, I’ve decided to set up a Japanese language website (which I will refer to as website #7 from here on), and this will be a great opportunity to get content for it.  All I need to do is go to class and learn something I want to learn anyway, then go home and write about what I learned to make an affiliate site.  Pretty sweet if you ask me!

This week is kind of hard for me.  My girlfriend is doing the Tim Ferriss Diet again.  She is forbidding me from doing it this time because she’s afraid I’ll wither away to nothing.  So, to help keep her motivated, I’m choosing to suffer as well, by only checking my Clickbank account on Fridays.  I did not realize, how addicted I was to logging in and seeing if I’ve made any sales.

There are some other things going on this week too, but they are directly related to my online business (my newspaper ad, outsourcing, etc.), so I’ll save those for my Friday update.  It’s times like now that I’m really excited to be alive!

It’s frustrating and disheartening.  It feels like the people in my life that I trust the most are betraying me and trying to pull me down.

So, why don’t I just get a job?  The answer is two-fold:

First, the economy sucks. With the real unemployment rate around 17.5%, now is a very stupid time to go out looking for a job unless you are absolutely desperate.  I have a masters degree in architecture, which makes me too “over educated” to get a job in any other field.  With most of the major architecture firms laying off about half of their staff, my odds of actually landing a job in my field are even slimmer.

There are barely any jobs out there in architecture these days.  The few job that there are are bombarded with so many resumes that the competition makes it almost an exercise in futility.  Even if I could get a job, all it would mean is that I’m willing to do the most amount of work possible for the least amount of money.  Not exactly the optimal position to be in.  Why try to win a battle in a losing war?

Secondly, working for a living is a waste of time. Yes, you heard that right.  If you’re here on my blog, you probably already believe this to some degree.  Take me, making a few hundred dollars a month and any one of my friends out there with a full-time job making $40,000/year ($3,333/month), and it looks like I’m coming in the loser.  But if both of us stopped working, I’d still be making a few hundred dollars every month, while their earnings immediately go to $0.  Starts to change the way you think about  things.

Add to that the fact that there really is no ceiling on how much I can make on my own.  I can keep working and keep growing my income into the six- or seven-figure range if I keep at it long enough.  While my full-time friend is stuck earning a solid $40k on salary if he works 40 hours this week or 80 hours.  The only time he can get that bumped up is by crossing his fingers and praying that once a year, his boss will give him a one or two thousand dollar raise.

So, even though I’m not really making “big money” yet, I still think I’m in a better situation.  I can keep my dignity by running my own business.  I don’t have to go out and sell myself all over town the the lowest bidder in this dismal economy and I don’t have to trade my time for money.

So keep laughing at me.  The joke is on you.  You ask me if my money comes from finding nickles on the sidewalk, but you wake up at 4AM to “survive” another day and come home tired only to piss away your free time in front of the TV.  You think I’m insane when you rent out your mind and body to someone else who can instantly decide to kick you to the curb and leave you with nothing.  I’m out here creating my own opportunity, and I’m out here creating my own assets.  One day I’ll be living the life and you’ll be left wondering how I did it still zoning out in front of the TV and renting your mind.  See you then.

[end rant]

The DVD is a presentation he gave at some seminar. He details this exercise where you sit down and answer one question. You answer it in incredible, minute detail. Doing say has the power to change your life. What is this “magical” question?

It’s “What would you do on your perfect day?”

Go into insane detail on this exercise.  Write about what you think about when you wake up in the morning.  What do you have for breakfast?  Where are you eating breakfast?  What do you do with your time?  What do you wear?  How do your clothes feel against your body?  Where do you live?  Who do you spend your time with?  What do you do when you spend your time with them?  How does that make you feel?  What are you working toward?  What makes you happy?

You get the idea.

Frank spent about 4 hours writing down the answer to this question.  He advocates getting into the boring, mundane details because the boring and mundane things are what life is made of.  Make this a day that you could live over and over again for the rest of your life and be completely content with it.

Frank says that almost as if by magic, he ended up living the exact life he wrote about within the following nine months after doing it.

Pretty cool.

I actually did this exercise, oh, maybe two years ago.  I don’t remember where I heard about from back then,  I didn’t take it into as insane detail as Frank did.  Personally, everything I wrote didn’t come true, but my current reality bears an odd resemblance to what I wrote about.

At the time, I was single, living in some sprawled out suburban desert wasteland in Tempe, Arizona.  The heat was oppressive and made me feel miserable most of the time.  I was in grad school taking lots of classes that didn’t particularly interest me that much.

I wrote about living in an exciting dense neighborhood where I could walk anywhere.  I had an awesome girlfriend and we lived together in a historic apartment building.  I spent my days hanging out in coffee shops and creating artwork.  My evenings were spent with close friends sharing good times.

Today, I now living in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle, which is pretty cool place.  Lots of activity and essentially the complete antithesis of anything you could find in Arizona.  I have a girlfriend that fits the description of the girl that I wrote about very closely.  I spend my time working on building websites in coffee shops.

Pretty cool!  I may not be all the way there, but I think I’m on track to getting what I wrote about two years ago.

I’m going to take some time today to answer the question again.  This time in more detail and with more description.  I’d recommend that you do this too.  When you finish doing this you should be totally jazzed and excited about what you wrote about.  You should be chomping at the bit to get out there and make it yours.  If you’re not, then you need to go back and do it again, focusing on what you really want for yourself.

It’ll be interesting to see how this goes…

The reason you fail is because you are going into your new venture with the mindset of an employee.

That is to say, you believe that you do work, so you should get paid.  I’m sorry to say it, but that is not how the world works.  Sure, in an office, you can find some dark cubicle in the corner to hide in and dink around on Facebook for eight hours and get paid for a day’s work.  But that’s not how things really work when you’re starting up your own business.  You don’t get paid in the real world just for showing up and eeking out the minimum amount of work at the last minute just to cover your ass and keep your job.

If you go in expecting to get paid for doing work, then you will absolutely fail.  You see, no one really cares if you can do work.  They care if you can create value.  That’s the secret.

The only way you will succeed is if you go in believing that you will get paid for creating value.

I have learned this from personal experience.  The past few months have not brought much financial gain.  I put in the time, but I didn’t make much money.  At first I found this very frustrating.

When you’re working for someone else you get used to getting paid every two weeks (or twice a month, or whatever).  You can sit on your ass talking to your co-workers about football for several hours a week, play solitaire or minesweeper on your computer, and tell everyone on Facebook that you are currently “tired” and the payroll gods will probably grant you a nice paycheck for $1500-$2000 dollars.

Ever since I graduated from ASU in May I’ve worked 40+ hours a week and I’ve only made about $400 in revenue (this does not count expenses like hosting and domains).  This fact has frustrated me.  I went in with the mindset of an employee.  After about two weeks I started to feel uneasy that I wasn’t somehow making at least $1500 bi-weekly.

It is a strange and frightening feeling to think that your actions are responsible for how much you earn.  You can’t just keep a desk warm and pull in a living wage.

I believe this is why most people fail at internet marketing or product creation.

Sure, half-assing it may get you by when you’re working for a company and you’re just trying to run out the clock.  But if you half-ass it on your business, you just won’t get paid.  Kind of sucks.  That means you actually need to do all the boring, tedious work (unless you can afford to outsource), and you have to do it the right way.

Another symptom of the employee mindset is that people are just used to blindly following orders from their supervisors.  Again, they get paid in most cases no matter if a project succeeds or fails.  Thus they take this thought process into making their own products and marketing them online.

They don’t bother to do market research to find out if anyone even wants the product they are making before they waste all the time in making it.  It’s madness when you think about it.  But it’s all conditioned into us by the idea of being paid a salary or wage regardless of the quality of the work we do.

Don’t expect to make a fortune just because you “worked hard” and created a social networking site for bald men if you didn’t even bother to do any initial research to determine if bald men even want a special networking site just for them.

Last summer I worked at an office and had to do work that was very strongly in opposition with my values.  As a result, I only did the bare minimum of work that was necessary.  The rest of the time I just spent reading articles on Wikipedia (since that was one of the few websites that wasn’t blocked).  There was no incentive for me to really try to do my job.  I also felt that by doing my job I was hurting local communities and economies by helping to build Walmarts and other big box stores.  So I didn’t bother breaking a sweat.  I just did the minimum amount I needed to by the deadlines I was given.

You can’t do this if you’re trying to strike out on your own.  This is the kiss of death.  Don’t write a horribly written, garbage article and wonder why none of the editors on the article directory sites will accept it, get frustrated, and say “article marketing doesn’t work!”  You have to put in the time and effort make sure you do things the right way.  Because out here, if you don’t do something properly, you won’t just get written up or chewed out by your boss, you flat-out won’t get paid.

And lastly, keep in mind that if your goal is passive income, then you really need to understand the dark side of separating what you do from how much you earn.  Yes, it seems cool to sit on your ass playing XBox all day and make a few hundred dollars.  But there is a flip side to all this too.  In the beginning you’ll have to do a lot of work, and guess what?  You won’t see a single cent for any of the work for weeks or months.

But wait!  That’s not fair!  Yes it is.  It’s exactly what you asked for.  You wanted to separate what you did with your time from how you make money.  Remember?  Get used to it and push through the initial pain.  Things will get better down the road.

So, if you are just getting started on some kind of business, remind yourself that you’re not an employee anymore.  If you want to bring home any cash from your efforts, you have to take the time to make sure you are offering value that someone is actually interested in.  And please, don’t just expect to get paid because you “worked hard.”

There’s still over a month left, but this year has been pretty wild so far.  I’ve gone through the grueling ordeal of completing a graduate thesis.  I got my masters degree.  I got LEED certified.  I left Arizona.  I’ve visited San Francisco, Portland, and Vancouver.  I got an apartment in the city with my awesome girlfriend.  There really is a lot to be thankful for.

The biggest thing though has been the shift in trying to establish a passive stream of income.  I’m grateful that I have the (limited) resources that have allowed me to pursue this full-time.  I am grateful that my girlfriend believes in me and doesn’t think I’m wasting my time on a pipe dream, which my mom and best friend seem to think.  I am grateful for the handful of like-minded people I’ve been introduced to through this blog.  And I don’t usually like to give personal plugs, but I’m really grateful for Mark Ling and everyone over at Affilorama.  The success stories I’ve heard over there and they useful affiliate marketing tips I’ve learned have really kept me going.

I feel so thankful for everything that’s happened over the past few months.  I know I’m just getting started, but I feel like this journey is starting to get exciting.  I’m really starting to believe.  Once you can believe, so many great things are possible.

Today, my friend Chris gave me a heads up that a “male graduate student” committed suicide by shooting himself in front of one of his professor in the Architecture building at ASU.  I was a bit concerned about it all, wondering if I knew the man or the professor.  The police were not releasing the names of either.  My mind was racing as I envisioned various people that I know being driven to the point of suicide.

A few minutes ago, I discovered the names of both the student and the professor.  I did not know either of them.  But the story still hits very close to home for me.  I must have walked down that hallway hundreds of times during my two years at ASU.  It’s haunting to think that someone killed themselves in that same hallway.

I don’t know what happened between the student and the professor, but I can only imagine that it must have been a horrible thing for the professor to witness.

I wonder what drove that man to kill himself, and in front of his professor, no less.  Architecture is a very challenging discipline and students often pour over projects for many sleepless nights.  When we receive poor reviews of our very personal work, it sometimes feels like the world is crumbling in on us.  I can only hope that this isn’t what happened.  I hope that the man had more to live for than architecture.  And that would be an enormous burden for any professor to have to carry.

Please, no matter how bleak life may seem or how lost you may feel, always try to look for a reason to keep going.  Even if it’s something as simple as the sound of birds at sunrise or watching a plant slowly grow as you water it over the months.  There are always little bits of happiness in our lives.  Sometimes we lose track of them when we get caught up in our problems and all we need is to take a moment and reconnect with them.

To anyone at ASU that might happen to stumble across this, my heart goes out to you.

And to David, I hope you are finally at peace.

Being broke is actually a very enlightening experience.  I would recommend that everyone do it at some point in their lives.  It really makes you understand what you really need to live off of.

Back when I was a cubicle drone, I made $42,000 per year, which let me live pretty comfortably.  In fact, I lived a rather simple lifestyle back then too, so I could save about $500 out of each paycheck and either dump that into savings or use it to work on some personal project I had at the time.  Yet for some reason, I didn’t believe that I was particularly well off.  All my friends were making more than me.  $50,000 or more.

The truth, however, is that you don’t really need that much money to live off of.  Everyone likes to joke and reminisce about how things were so much cheaper “back in the day.”  Maybe they were cheaper, I don’t really know.  I’m only 27, which really isn’t that old (although it does seem to be considerably older than most of the other bloggers I follow).

I really think that we just got tricked into thinking that we need more fancy toys.  Toys cost money, and so we need higher paying jobs (or at least a household with two breadwinners) to afford all the shiny gadgets.

What kinds of things do we think we need that just gobble up our paychecks?

Well, lots of people are still under they hypnotic spell that they need to own a 2000+ square foot house even though many families have done just fine in past generations with homes less than half that size.

And of course the only place you can get a house like that is in the suburbs, which are designed around cars (not humans), so you need a car or two.

Then there’s the fact that there’s nothing to do in the suburbs, so you need TV’s, DVD’s, and video games to entertain yourself in addition to all the other toys you might collect.

When you live in the suburbs you have to take care of your lawn, so get a lawn mower, spend a fortune watering the grass and dumping chemicals onto it.  After all, you wouldn’t want the neighbors to think poorly of you because you’re lawn might have a yellow patch or *gasp* a weed!

And of of course all this gets even more pricey when we think that we need the biggest, best, newest versions of everything!  Is a 2009 BMW really necessary to drive to and from work when a ‘98 Corolla would get the job done at a fraction of the price?  Or better yet, why have a car at all when you could just take the bus or walk?  (yes, I do understand that not all places have great public transit–see my point above about suburbs)

It really does all add up.  I believe that in most places in the United States it is possible to live quite comfortably on $20,000 or $30,000 a year.  The problem is that we believe that we need to have all these fancy things in our lives.  They add up, they really do.  When I think of what I could be doing with $42,000 today, it really boggles my mind!  When you’re not chasing fads and trying to impress everyone, life really can be cheap.

I know that being broke is not fun and it can be stressful to worry about how you’re going to pay the bills, but I always like to look for the silver lining in everything.  In this case, I’m not cluttering my apartment with all sorts of useless crap and worthless baubles.