Motivation For Entrepreneurs | Finch Sells

How to Learn by Osmosis: The Traits of a Successful Affiliate

Nov 20 2012

There are many blogs, forums and ebooks where you can learn the intricacies of online marketing. Some are great, some are poor, but nearly all are inferior to the process of learning by osmosis.

Osmosis is the art of unconscious learning. It is where we stop studying materials, and start absorbing them.

1) Park balls on knowledge 2) … 3) Profit $$$

Learning the Facts vs. Learning the Meaning

Imagine two kids go in to a lecture. One has a stack of notepads and pens. The other has his hands in his pockets. We’ll call them Kid Prepared and Kid Unprepared.

As the lecture begins, Kid Prepared starts scribbling notes. His hand whirrs furiously across the page, siphoning sound bytes and trying to record every last tidbit for future consumption.

In the next seat, Kid Unprepared stares blankly, soaking up the information and searching for its meaning.

Who do you think is more likely to be successful?

The plague of academia suggests that it will be Kid Prepared; the perennial note-taker, he who responds so intently that no fact is left behind. He is the kid that breezes through college, aces his degree, and should be changing the world.

Except in the real world, success goes to he who shuts the hell up and listens.

Learning by osmosis is all about listening. It is absorbing the world as a human sponge. It is how you apply meaning to what you see around you.

This innate talent for plucking the meaning out of a lecture, rather than the facts and figures, is how we develop intuition, which is the pulling force that separates successful entrepreneurs from bankrupt sob stories.

If you are an affiliate marketer, or if you do any kind of work online, learning by osmosis is especially important.

I believe many affiliates are trapped in the superficial mindset of Kid Prepared. They’ve read all the books, blogs and forums, but their ability to translate those principles in to a tangible business plan is still highly flawed.

They know what to do, they just don’t know how to do it. Their intuition is lacking.

“Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
– Oscar Wilde

That was 122 years ago.

God only knows what Oscar Wilde would make of the Internet. There has never been such an overflow of information at our fingertips – and most of it is useless.

Here are three strategies that are great for unconscious learning. They share a common trait, and that is to tear you away from your comfort zone.

Joint Venture with the smart and passionate

When you are running more online businesses than you can keep a tally on, promoting dozens of products, in a handful of different verticals, there is no way in hell that you can retain as much information as somebody who has specialised expertise in a single market.

The best you can hope for is an exceedingly good business partner who is willing to share the bacon.

My view is that every affiliate should be joint venturing, but only with the right people.

We are primarily monetization experts who know how to drive traffic. Our weakness is usually the product. We just don’t understand what we are promoting properly, and the Internet plus its millions of consumers suffers for it.

When I joint venture, I do so with individuals who are passionate in the market we are targeting – much more passionate than myself. Not only is their spirit contagious, but it pays to have somebody who is in touch with the grassroots of that market.

The secret to creating awesome affiliate websites is not rocket science. It’s having your ears pinned to the ground.

When you work with somebody who knows the market conditions, or is the market, you can learn a hell of a lot by shutting up and taking stock.

“If you always hire people who are smaller than you, we shall become a company of dwarfs. If, on the other hand, you always hire people who are bigger than you, we shall become a company of giants.”
– David Ogilvy

I believe this same principle applies to personal growth, career advancement and just about any item in a respectable Bucket List.

Work with people who know more than you, befriend people who are happier than you.

If nothing else, I’m sure your Facebook feed could do with the detox.

Bounce off a small mastermind group

Small mastermind groups are brilliant for those who work on their own. I’ve noticed a booming trend of Skype groups in the affiliate space.

If you can gather 4 or 5 ambitious minds, meld them to a routine, and share everything that is learned – the task of conquering affiliate marketing is suddenly a team effort.

Not only can you bounce creative ideas off your partners, but they will hold you accountable when you’ve spunked the entire day playing Civilization V with no new ads to show for your efforts.

Ahem.

Nobody wants to be the weak link in a mastermind group.

Get your mind out of the basement

What are you learning from your work environment?

If you work at home, one of the biggest stumbling blocks to unconscious learning is the home comfort that you are surrounded by. A stale non-challenging work environment is a catalyst for stale, unambitious ideas.

If you really want to take your business to the next level, you should first try taking it out of your mother’s basement. In your head – and probably in the literal sense, too.

Don’t get me wrong. There are many benefits to working from home:

No commuting in the winter cold
No boss peering over your shoulder
No colleagues to steal your milk from the fridge
No shirt and tie, more slippers and slacks

But there is one major disadvantage:

Who – and what – are you going to learn from?

The whole principle of learning by osmosis, of unconscious learning in general, is that we absorb the world around us. If your work revolves around a dank, stench-filled office that hasn’t been scrubbed since 2007, then that is not a particularly healthy world to absorb.

I believe business growth is stunted by the lifestyle that most Internet Marketers choose to adopt. It’s not that we don’t have the opportunities to learn from behind a screen, it’s that we fail to grasp them.

We wrap ourselves in home comforts while the truly great achievers are contorting their minds with new and uncomfortable challenges.

I can’t stress this advice firmly enough: network, network and network some more.

There is a sad belief that if we rock up to a marketing conference and fail to uncover a golden nugget, a brilliant traffic source or a hot new offer, the experience has been a giant failure. While I can understand the need for inspiration in these challenging times, the strongest incentive to network is the effect of being around equally ambitious minds – as well as the social interaction.

Your networking does not have to hinge on strictly marketing conferences.

Talented entrepreneurs are aware that some of the best ideas you will ever have are the result of ‘cross-pollination’ from meeting diverse and unusual characters a world apart from your usual comfort zone.

I often say that you can tell a lot about a man by his five closest friends, and you can tell a lot about his career by his five closest advisors. If we are the product of those combined forces, it makes sense to choose them wisely.

There’s a simple solution.

Don’t allow yourself to be influenced by your comfort zone. Snap out of it.

We, more than anybody, are prone to falling back on home comforts when we should be gasping to learn more. If you want to unleash the full effect of learning by osmosis, the good news is that you already are.

You just need to change the source.

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After much writing, re-writing, editing, head banging and more writing, the final volume of Premium Posts is complete and ready to set sail. It’s called The Empire Strategy and it will be released later this week. Drop your email in the list below for a chance to get it before everybody else (plus the free 50 page Survival Kit!)

How (and When) to Reignite Your Work Day

Aug 21 2012

Everybody has a motive to escape the office cubicle. What’s yours?

Maybe you despise the corporate politics, the water cooler bitching, or an insufferably low pay cheque. Perhaps you hate the commute. As a native Londoner with a short fuse for standing in transit, the chance to quit morning train-surfing was one of my great calls to action in life.

It’s our motives to make self-employment a success that sometimes lose their shine once the honeymoon period of surrealism wears off. We forget what drove us to pursue the extra responsibility. We forget why we do what we do. And that’s a shame.

Do you remember when Internet Marketing blew your mind with opportunity?

What would you pay to relive the nostalgia of making your first dollar online, of logging in to Clickbank and seeing a sale that demanded no boss, no commute, and just one moment of individual brilliance?

Our early success is often the most vivid to remember. We appreciated it more. It wasn’t a number to tap in to a profit and loss chart. It was something else: proof that our time splurged on the web had a purpose, a direction, a future. Money could be made online.

Four years on from that awakening, I am used to logging in to my emails and seeing sales. It’s no longer a thrill, but a stat to observe. I get nostalgic over how captivated I used to be. The amazement that Internet Marketing works has been replaced by serious unease at the thought that it might someday not.

If you are new to this industry, and particularly if you have just left a ‘traditional’ job to pursue success, the honeymoon period is one to savour.

Enjoy the First Taste of Self-Sufficiency

Any soul brave enough to exchange the rat race for self-employment, uncertainty and a royally shagged economy deserves a honeymoon period. The initial freedom of working from home provides just that. It’s the perfect opportunity to take one step back, appreciate how lucky you are, before plunging multiple steps forward and busting a ball or three to make the arrangements work.

Nobody wants to suffer the ignomy of returning to a day job just weeks after taking a dump on the concept via Facebook. But it’s healthy to take a moment of reflection. Especially if, like many, your precursor to self-employment has been moonlighting with two jobs. You will want to celebrate and enjoy that first taste of running your own ship. A few months down the line and such luxury is likely to cause inner turmoil.

“I want to take a break but I’ve got seven projects, four affiliate managers and an inbox full of hot offers to deal with. Maybe next month.”

Inner voice: “Or how about never?”

In the weeks after my jump to full-time affiliate marketing, I carefully balanced my time between rolling around semi-naked in home comforts and bragging about the hour my alarm clock was set for. I’ve since learnt that there’s a special look of disgust reserved especially for those who need a wake-up call after 11am.

Two dogs and a loud postman has put an end to my 1-Hour Work Mornings. I now rise with my own time zone and promptly smoke the room out with coffee beans.

You can probably tell a lot about my first taste of self-sufficiency by this photographic evidence of my office from 2009:

A lot of ‘Changing the World’ going on here…

Archaic laptop barely capable of updating weight loss ads without chugging up fumes, rough unkempt looking bastard at the wheel, blanket making do as a curtain, and animals in the workplace (sitting on wireframes for extra productivity points).

It’s no wonder my very first week as a full-time Affiliate Marketer ended in spectacular confusion with an entire business collapsing around me in piles of Google Suspension notices. But you bet it was exciting.

Nothing beats the adrenaline rush of defining your career destination and then galloping after it like a mad man.

Once you have started that pursuit, it’s very difficult to slow down. At various points along the way, you will reflect nostalgically on the start of your journey and how easier it used to be. This nostalgia is a sign that you need to step back and get in touch with your original reasons for wanting to become self-employed.

Regain the Nostalgia of Working From Home

It’s ‘touch base’ with the soul time.

Did you quit your job to spend more time with family, to see more of your kids, to make a better fist of your relationships?

Then why are you locking yourself in the basement and growling thunder at anybody who dares interrupt? If your wife has to push a cold dinner plate under the crack in your office door, it’s probably a sign that you’ve lost touch with your family man aspirations.

Did you quit your job to pursue the ultimate financial freedom of earning money while you sleep?

Then why do you never sleep? Do you expect to hit a magic financial figure that suddenly allows you to unwind and enjoy life? What is it?

Did you quit your job in awe of that classic quote: “Entrepreneurship is living a few years of your life like most people won’t, so that you can spend the rest of your life like most people can’t.“

Then why do you still struggle to find happiness in the top dollar hotel suites that no mortal man would pay for? Why do all of your friends pay less for their thrills?

I believe many of us are guilty of losing touch with our original motives for why we do what we do. Stacking money in a bank vault, like economic growth, is tied to an illusion of grandeur. Neither can go on forever. Your current balance will mean nothing when you hit the grave.

To regain the nostalgia of working from home, we must remind ourselves of what we left behind. And why we left it. For some Internet Marketers, this may even lead to the realisation that your overall happiness was greater when you worked for ‘the man’.

There’s no shame in admitting that. In fact, the joke is on anybody with the balls to suggest otherwise. These are the same self-righteous pricks who believe everybody has to be an entrepreneur. Never mind the economic consequences, hey?

Reigniting your work day may be as simple as taking a train to your old place of work. Or driving there and spending a moment outside the gates. If I ever needed a reminder of the life I’m glad to have escaped, it’s the feeling of being packed in to a tube carriage at 8.49am by Kings Cross St Pancras.

Note: I don’t recommend brooding in the shadows outside your former workplace if you are an ex school teacher. Two words: criminal record.

Another good idea is to disconnect completely from technology for 24 hours.

We live in a world where instant notifications are pushed under our noses by multiple sources, on multiple devices at every hour of the day. It’s mission impossible for an Internet Marketer to ignore the noise when his profession has a voice in it.

By disabling your iPad, silencing the phone, and stepping away from the computer, you can begin to come to terms with what you’re left with.

If you find yourself standing lamely, scratching your balls for entertainment, there’s a good chance you need a second passion to give work new meaning. The nostalgia we associate with our first taste of self-employment has nothing to do with the work. It has everything to do with the sense of excitement, the new roads to explore, the not knowing what tomorrow might bring.

Once the honeymoon period wears off and working from home becomes your accepted reality, you need to seek the same excitement away from your screen.

We shouldn’t be afraid.

For most of us, it’s what we signed up for.

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Have you read Premium Posts Volume 6? Grab your instant access to the PDF, print it, turn off your computer, and read my shit. Thank you please.
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Where Productivity Ends and Staying Busy Begins

Jul 10 2012

At about 9pm on most nights, I find myself detouring from the productive tasks I’ve been grinding away at during the day. My attention will begin to sag, and my browser will find its way back to Facebook or Twitter with increasing regularity.

9pm is where my productivity ends and staying busy begins.

There’s a huge difference between productive work and work that simply keeps you busy. Arguably that difference is life and death, living and slaving. When work becomes a matter of passing idle time, our mental breakdown is soon to follow. It’s the magic cocktail for exhaustion, depression and a tunnel with no light.

How do you know that you’re working to stay busy?

You have 17 tabs active on your web browser. Four of them are Facebook, 1 of them is Twitter, and the rest are a combination of BBC Sport stories and Wikipedia entries on the First World War.
Your workflow consists of a juggling act between refreshing Facebook for new clicks on your ads, then skipping back to your control panel to see how many of the clicks have converted. You slip away in disgust at your lack of revenue, crack open a new browser on Mashable, and then repeat the same bloody process 4 minutes later. Probably in a new tab.
You cruise through the entire database of gigs on Fiverr, despite having no precise idea of what you’re looking to buy. You just know that you’re missing something important, and it’s being snapped up by your competition. Of course, your competition doesn’t have a name or a face. It’s simply a projected vision of your own self if only you were working twice as hard.
You invest an aimless hour of your time in to ‘figures projection’. Yes, this is the useless affiliate art of taking his stats from Day A and B, then multiplying them by a combination of 30, 90 and 365 to find out how rich he’ll be 1 month, 3 months and 1 year from now. I have done this many times and it has never worked. Ever.
You refresh your bloody Gmail! To hear from who, I have no idea. Perhaps the National Lottery’s unclaimed millions department…
You click on link after link of mildly stimulating headlines, knowing all too well that the information to follow is a rehash of a thousand similar articles you’ve already eyeballed to death. You know the information can’t possibly help you, or it would have done 5 months ago. But you read it anyway. Why? Because ‘staying busy’ is better than being stationed away from the computer screen, where the magic email that says you’ve finally ‘made it’ can’t land.

Do any of these symptoms sound familiar?

Learning to recognise this transition in your day is the key to understanding where productivity ends and staying busy begins. Once you’ve pinpointed the divide, you have half a chance at correcting it.

I’m not saying recognition alone is a cure. We are highly trained creatures of habits. It’s all too easy to convince ourselves that time is being spent effectively, even when it’s clearly being spunked down the drain – along with that nutritious delicious Rustlers burger you ate in all of about 14 seconds.

Tip: Want an indication of how ‘busy’ you feel? Take a look at how quickly you eat. If you attack your meals like a wolf at a tea party, there’s probably a little voice in the back of your head singing, “Hey, you, don’t you have some place to be?“

We are fixated with the idea that doing something is better than nothing. But guess what? That’s a steaming pile of horse shit. And you know it.

Doing nothing and shutting the hell up is important for many reasons. Not least because it gives your brain a chance to digest the ticking matrix of data and meaningless tasks that have bumrushed your day.

Here’s a challenge.

Take 5 minutes. Sit your arse down away from the computer screen, and be silent.

What happens? Where does your mind go? What thoughts bubble to the cusp of your imagination?

Treasure them. They are the silent streaks of creativity that are routinely pummelled in to submission by the constant stream of diarrhoea you willingly subject your mind to.

Without silence there is no context. Without silence there is no opportunity to disconnect from the day and regain control of where it’s heading. So, if you’ve reached the tipping point where staying busy is your only desire – stop. Disconnect.

Go outside and shut the fuck up.

Everything will make more sense when you return.

Recommended This Week

I recently did an interview for GenerationY (good new site) on the trials of working from home. Give it a read if you’re wondering what my day looks like.
If you haven’t downloaded it already, make sure you grab a copy of my freshly brewed Affiliate Marketer’s Survival Kit (add your email below for access). It’s 50 pages of up-to-the-second info on what currently works in affiliate marketing.
Be sure to check out Adsimilis, the official sponsor of Premium Posts Volume 5. Adsimilis is one of the most effective networks in the world for a CPA marketer to sink his teeth in to. They are particularly dominant in the dating vertical, with industry leading payouts. If you are a dating affiliate, you need to be on Adsimilis. Simples.