What I've Been Up To Recently

bybryonbrewer

10.5K followers

10 years ago

So, while lurking recently and randomly hitting "report abuse" buttons, I've seen my name crop up a few times with questions like:

"where is that handsome devil?"

"Are his fish OK recently?"

"Why is my inbox so empty?" and so on. I noticed that my activity has been down a bit.

This is unfair on my 1,533 followers, so I've decided to give an update on what I've been doing.

First up, my fish are fine.

I have indeed been very busy though, which is both a good thing and a bad thing.

Back in September I launched a website/business/product that required a lot of time spent testing and doing this and testing some more and doing that, and generally "bouncing around like a Gerbil on crack" as @RICH. would say.

Actually, Gerbils prefer Meth, but there you go. (I'll blog about my Gerbil next time).

Owning your own product is incredibly different from being an affiliate. It is the reverse of the coin, you can actually have your own affiliates.

Over the course of improving my business, I needed to have a plugin custom-made, which led to me basically owning a second product. Now myself and the plugin developer are going to launch it professionally together, which means more crack-meth fueled bouncing.

So I might not be able to bless you all with my chat presence as much as I'd like.

Don't worry though, there are plenty of old dogs around to keep you entertained.

There is a point to all this though.

I've made a lot of observations about online business from being on the "other side of the coin" (with two products), and so I wanted to share them with you.

So here they are:

• Half-assed work doesn't cut it. When it's your own product, you care a lot more. You'll pay people to do professional work for you if necessary. You won't care about buying premium images, because you don't want to use low quality on your site.
• Look at the bigger picture. There's no way I'm going to try to quickly cobble something together and think "phew..hope that makes me money". Now I may well produce something which isn't that good, and I'll go back to it later and improve it, but I'll never just chase some quick money anymore. I have so many plans that I am going to be working till 2016 at this rate. I bought a new notepad and everything.
• Wait for the money later. Probably $99 of every $100 I earn online right now goes back into my business in some form or another. While this means that the Aston Martin is going to have to wait, it does mean that the Aston Martin is more likely to actually come. I can wait until later for the money, because I want it to be larger than $100.
• Testing is your new best friend. Actually, I knew this when I was doing affiliate marketing, but when it's your own thing, you have to test so much. Pricing, pricing, copy, pricing, copy, pitches, did I say test pricing?
• It's so easy to forget where you are going and start being a sheep. This probably applies to every aspect of IM. I think we should all be zigging while others are zagging. I found myself frustrated a lot that my product wasn't selling exactly how I had imagined, and soon enough I was starting to follow what the others were doing. I've caught myself now and am going back to doing what I want to do, but it's so easy to get lost and just follow. Be careful!

I hope that these few insights have come across clearly, as I often struggle to get my point across.

Anyway, that's what I've been upto. Generally rambling.