Hustlers Make Mistakes Too
I have “failed” so many times. Failure is a good thing, and it has only been 3 years since I realized what failure does for me, and what it should do for many others.
The American education system, as well as any system in America, has taught us that making mistakes is punishable. What if we were to look at it in a different perspective? Why not see mistakes as tools to teach you to become stronger?
Back in the day, when I used to hustle outside of the workforce - I used to do Mobile DJing, pitch quarters in the park with the other rough necks - just to get a Daily Double Meal at McDonalds, I used to sell anything in highschool, I used to try so many things. Now all of these could have been successful, but I didn’t keep going.
Let me tell you the importance and science of manning up and keeping at it…
I know the feeling. You work so damn hard day in and day out. All you Adsense hustlers out there are getting nowhere after a year of 13 hour days. A lot of you rappers, people that own clothing lines, are making all the connections and putting in the work - but nothing seems to be working.
There is a law in the universe that I live by - as a human being and as a hustler - that’s the Law of Attraction. Might sound corny, but if you keep your mind on the goal, things will rearrange itself to accomodate your goal (I know it sounds cliche).
Many businesses have failed because I didn’t focus on my goal. I put in all this work, I was tired, I wasn’t seeing any results. I kept doing the same things and didn’t learn from my mistakes. All day, it was routine to do the same ol’ crap I was doing to try and pursue the dream. I never adapted to situations. Failure after failure - my brain waas trained that failing was a bad thing. So I quit.
It’s always funny. A few weeks or months after you quit, people start calling you, and opportunities are all around you.
Let me tell you a story that still hurts to this day. I used to DJ - that was my thing. I was gaining quite a reputation in Chicago - doing big shows, opening up for big acts, knowing the industry people, winning DJ Battles, putting out successful mixtapes, etc. I was passionate about “making it”. Once I gained that reputation, I wanted to see if I can cash in on my skills. That’s where things got ugly. The pressure to make money and make a living off DJing was too much for me to handle. Promoters stiffed me, some mixtapes went sour on the market, and things got a bit dark. I turned bitter because I wasn’t seeing the money come in - with all this hard work I was putting in…
I was so dedicated to DJing that a lot of the things around me started to crumble, relationships and my confidence. I decided to quit DJing and join the corporate work force so I can have some sense of security and money (yes, I got paid nice - I’m a smart dude).
Once I joined the workforce, so many opportunities popped up, I started taking calls in my cube at work. The biggest opportunity was touring with Twista in the Summer of 2003. I didn’t do it because I couldn’t take a month off of work and I just had started dating this new girl.
All in all, if I kept going - I would have made it.
There is a trend I usually see when you are seeking to make money off something.
1) You have all this drive and energy to research
2) You put in the work and apply everything you learned
3) You’re waiting for the money to pop up.
4) You start getting tired of waiting, but you keep doing it with blind faith.
5) You start seeing your life around you deteriorate.
6) You decide to quit.
7) You start seeing all the opportunities pop up months after you quit.
That’s what always happened to me.
In order to become truly successful, scratch off number 6 and replace that with “You decide to go on vacation and take a break”. Your mind needs to rest, you need new inspiration, and you need to clear your mind.
Pass through that breaking point (the point where you ask why God is doing this to you), and you’ll start to see the money roll in.
Keep going…
True Knowledge… for the street entrepreneur. No one ever said “I got so far from doing nothing.”
Here is an example of an affiliate marketing experiment not working for me personally:
Step 1 - The Guinea Pig
I (Montage) launched a hip-hop news site independently in August 2008 ( http://www.fuckthesource.com), riddled it with adsense and sat back. It started to earn around $1.00 per day. BrandC and I quickly put our heads together to come up with our master plan.
Step 2 - The Master Plan
BrandC and I figured, shoot if 1 site can make $1.00 a day with minimal effort, why not launch 100 of these sites to expand our footprint and rake in the dough. We focus on low cost keywords and relevant URL’s (Adwords campaigns) and ended up buying 100 .info domain names. All of the domain names we purchased were .info’s, keeping our overhead to a minimum. We then purchased a giant hosting plan from GoDaddy and did some domain aliasing.
Step 3 - Static or Dynamic?
We started off by creating landing pages for these domains or regular html pages. We had our sales copy and adsense on them. It then occurred to us that we might need a CMS, as we were going to regularily add and modify the content on these landin gpages. We also needed SEO (which we all know is an art form within itself). At the time I was just getting into Wordpress and Drupal and figured we should run these sites by using one of these platforms. We chose Worpress because of its ease of use. We found a cool application that would let us spawn mass sites off 1 installation of Wordpress (I will try to find the link for yall). After this was setup, the population of these sites began.
Step 4 - Seeding and Populating
BrandC and I decided on a Wordpress template and plug-ins that were necessary and began a massive install of WP on each of our 100 domains. This took about a week, working mainly 1-2 hours per night. We then took BrandC’s sales copy for each site and placed them into posts. Adsense was then hooked up on the master template and installed into each of the sites.
Step 5 - Affiliates
We needed more Affiliates. We shopped around and decided on ClickBank, Commission Junction, PepperJam and Kontera. They were all installed into our templates. This took and incredible amount of time. We went through the painstaking process of finding appropriate affiliates for each sites topic, and placing 125 x 125’s and header image banners on each site.
Step 6 - Analytics and Metrics
We sat back for a couple days, allowing Google Analytics to do its thing. What we found out next was disturbing.
Nothing.
We were getting no page views. All the keyword research and sales copy generation had any affect whatsoever. These sites were simply not getting visibility. We had done everything we could to make sure we followed the main steps in SEO. Still out of 100 sites, we were getting around 40 page views per day.
Step 6 - Re-Cooping
No page views = no content. We needed more content. Google needed more reasons to crawl our site and we needed to get indexed. We installed 1-10 XML/RSS feeds on each site that update automatically. The only problem was, we needed to fetch these feeds daily (Cron was broke in the plugin). Taking up more of our valuable time.
Step 7 - Project Hill House
After 2 months of tweaking 100 websites it was then clear what we needed to do.
Focus.
We needed to focus on quiality content on 1 website. This is how we came across the idea for Project Hill House. Both BrandC and myself are extremely driven and talented individuals (I might not be the best writer, but I’m working on it) and we feel that we can truly succeed and anything we put our minds to.
I’m doing a similar project right now projecthillhouse, except I use one domain (could possibly use hundreds of subdomains).
It’s called MapRatings.com and basically, I’m scraping content from all over the web (concerts and shows, bars, restaurants etc..) filtering out the bullshit and providing high value content to my audience who then vote on what they like. It’s community driven and geographically based, therefore I could do something like sacramento.mapratings.com, atlanta.mapratings.com etc. and monetize on 50 - 100 major US cities.
It’s not easy though man, I’m planning this out to be a 3-4 year project. I have to write custom code to scrape and filter for dozens and possibly even hundreds of different content types.
I think a fatal flaw to your plan was the .info domains. They suck for SEO. A better route that .info domains might be free wordpress or blogger accounts as it’s pretty easy to get a page rank of 1 or 2, and fuck… they’re free.
Don’t give up on that shit, just take a long break and go have some fun. I gave up 5 years ago… and for some damn reason I’m still at it.
BTW admin, great site, just found it today, will be reading more. If you ever wanna discuss/trade ideas on SEO techniques, monetization processes or the crazy shit you can accomplish advanced programming, hit me up at the email I left in this comment.