I just finished watching the UK vs. Georgia game on Yahoo sportscast. I am so mad right now, if I had a CRT monitor, my fist would be through it. Why? At the end of the game, kentucky used a well structured play in hopes of forcing a foul. In my opinion, I witnessed the most perfect execution of that play ever. The georgia player was tricked into bulldozing over a kentucky player near the sideline. No foul was called. Kentucky ended up losing.

I learned a real valuable lesson that I think completely applies to our business. RULES were created to have order — but most of the time, chaos prevails and rules are worthless. There was no way the official would call that foul, though it should have happened. Google should ban every ’sketchy site’ it finds, parasite hostings _shouldnt_ work. Guess what, it does. You have to make a choice, do you take the moral high ground or exploit a system and its rules.

I, personally, have found success by putting the ‘rules’ aside.

Georgia, and the asshat SEC officials, win.

Almost daily I have people complaining about how they can’t seem to make more than a buck or two a day online. These are good, hard working people, almost all of them are really intellegent. Why can a guy like me make money, but they cant?

• Time Commitment
• Lack of Focus
• Lack of Skillset
• Lack of Connections
• No Killer Instinct

Time Commitment

Some of you jokers waste a lot of time. I am challenging you this - if you are new to this game, set aside 6 hours a night to it. Wow, deStone, thats a lot of time for a guy like me. No crap. I did it. I worked an 8am to 6:30pm job every day. I’d come home, log into irc, open up my eclipse dev setup, and start. A lot of times I would work until 3am, go to bed, and start again at 8am. Yeah, it sucks, but if your going to learn and be successful, you got to put in your time. Unfortunately, not all of us got to learn about Affiliate Marketing while we were in high school or college.

Lack of Focus

Go buy an nice, expensive moleskinne notepad from Borders. Write down all of your goals for the night in it — everything you need to get done. Use a new page every day, carry over the stuff you didnt finish to the next day. Jot ideas down in it. This book is your new lifeblood.

Find good mood music, and start lighting up your projects - be it creating a mass amount of PPC campaigns, facebook ads, or building a cloaking system for your super-duper-blackhat control center. Journal everything.

Quit wasting time in irc pestering people! I see so many people just sitting there on irc, waiting for someone to drop this super idea that is going to turn them into a millionaire. Guess what, the only way to strike it rich is to do it first and keep quiet about it!

Lack of Skillset

I’m putting this on the list just because I think a lot of people think they are too good to code their own stuff. I’ve met them, they continue to tell me on email “deStone, I’ll just outsource it”. Yeah, ok, whatever, Why are these jokers emailing me asking for tips if they are so sharp and have enough cash to outsource everything. Don’t get me wrong, outsourcing has its place, but a fundamental understanding of how to code and create systems is going to make you a winner in this business.

Lack of Connections

The ultimate fear, I remember it — talking to my first affiliate manager. Guess what guys, very few of those affiliate managers have a clue on how to drive traffic, build websites, or scale systems. All they do is interface offers to people. If your a newbie, guess what, your getting an affiliate manager that probably knows less about the business then you do! But guess what, those people hold the keys to success. Dont be scared to call them, dont freak out when they call you wanting to join their programs. Having a ton of affiliate programs, and good people to work with — that’s key!

• Neverblue Ads
• Copeac
• RocketProfit
• CPAEmpire
• PepperJam Networks
• Ads4Dough
• Advaliant
• Hydra Networks

Another important way to get connections — irc! Don’t be a douchebag - join our channels, idle, jump in every once and a while and share something but DO NOT COME IN ACTING LIKE YOU’RE GOD and start demanding people tell you how to do stuff.

No Killer Instinct

I’ve had terrible headaches for nearly 4 months now, daily. I have an amazing girlfriend that wants to spend more time with me. Trust me, I have 1000x more reasons to not be working on projects then you do. Hell, I didn’t feel like writing this blog post. But guess what, I have a killer instinct. I MUST SUCCEED. I will not let myself fail. And that drives me insane. It pushes me to staying focused. It forces me to meet new people and network. That instinct made me become a php ninja and css junkie last year. I can not fail. I will not allow it. Do you have that? If not, your not going to make big bucks in this business. I know a lot of people that have that kind of drive and desire — to be the best, and those people arent going to let ANY of you out-do them, especially if you’re lazy.

In conclusion

I know this post wasn’t technical at all - I just feel like every once and a while, a person needs to hear something like this to encourage them to keep building systems, keep starting new streams, and to continue to strive to be their best. Hell, I feel energized right now while I’m reviewing this — lets get to work, mates!

I’m writing this because I am pissed, like, violently upset. I’ve had hundreds of people messenging me stuff like this:
"deStone, help, my clicks went from $0.10 to $8.00 overnight. What can I do? Why did this happen?"

Well, I’ll lay it out for you, the reason you got slapped is because you’re lazy! LAZY! All you want to do is “get rich quick” and you think that there is some magical formula that will never change. Google has built their Adwords platform around having companies create landing pages that sell products. We are kind of like middle men to that process, as most of the time, we don’t own the product nor are we the company.

So Google wants to make us pay more, cause they want legit stuff - not third-party affiliate marketers that are just looking to get rich quick. What do they do? They change the rules to make it harder for us when they see a pattern forming. Guess what, you whinners, 90% of the people that are complaining were direct linkers to affiliate offers. Google doesnt want Neverblue Ads or Copeac to make money, THEY want to make money. Obviously Google cant get rid of us - their stock would fail epically — like barman’s attempt to hook up with this hot girl. So it has to be a slow and progressive change. This is one way they weed out the morons trying to make a quick buck.

That being said, we now have to accept the rules have changed and we have to work harder to get cheap clicks. Guess what, I’ve been doing that for a long time, my strategy has only slightly changed with this update. You, if you are seeing high dollar clicks, must now change or be removed from the SEM gene pool. Here is what I would do if I were you. Careful, you might actually learn something in the following steps.

• A) Quit reading seo moz and all the misinformation posted on their site about how to fix the QS Slap. Google doesn’t give a shit how fast the page loads - this information is retarded. 90% of those people are just wanting you to subscribe to their rss feed so they feel important.
• b) Go do a search on google for a competitive term.
• C) click an ad that is ranking well, and you feel would not be there unless they got the click for a real price, versus the inflated QS price.
• D) Very important — VIEW SOURCE THE EFFING PAGE and see what they are doing to get a high quality score. Then apply it to your designs if applicable. Rinse and repeat these steps until you have a system that gets you $0.05 clicks again.
• E) *BONUS* Don’t ask me what i’m doing, because i’m going to make fun of you for expecting me to give away a million dollar strategy to some dumbass (I don’t know) on the Internet for free. Live, Learn, and Utilize.

I’m thanking God this happened. I can now buy some competitive terms for a lot less mula then before because there is less competition.

ps: I <3 you, barman.

I have two four requirements to use this code.

• so if your reading this, and you haven’t signed up on the mailing list - do so, now.
• Go to another super affiliates site and ask them where their code samples are and link back to me in the comment section.
• Join us on #deStonesucks on irc. — see details here.
• Add the RSS to your reader.

Mailing list signup

You’re going to need a few things for this to work. One of them is magpie, then you will need a dictionary file as well (right click, save as). For those truly lazy, here is a complete download of this entire tutorial.

Step 1:

Create a directory called backlinker on your server. Dump the contents of dictionary.txt, the magpie install, and backlinker.php into it.

Step 2:

Modify the code so that $promoteurl is your website you are wanting to blast out. $throttle is just seconds between hits on del.icio.us.

Step 3:

Run the backlinker from the Command Line. If you have other dictionary files, you can use them instead of ‘dictionary’ (must be a .txt file)

php backlinker.php dictionary

Step 4:

Watch as the hits start rolling in from referrer logs. Modifications I have on my personal version - I store each url in a database so I can re - hit it later, I have proxy support built in, and I am using the multi-curl class our buddy win– created. If I gave you that, I wouldnt be helping you, now would I? Questions? Join the irc channel and discuss.

Backlinker.php - View Source

<?php
// set timeout to 0 so it doesnt time out.
set_time_limit(0);
$promoteurl = "http://www.somewebsite.com/subdir/";
$throttle = 10;
require_once('rss_fetch.inc');
// open up our dictionary.txt file, dump it to memory for use
$myFile = $argv[1] . ".txt";
$fh = fopen($myFile, 'r');
$theData = fread($fh, filesize($myFile));
fclose($fh);
unset($fh);
echo("\n\n deStone's del.icio.us backlinker \n***************************************\n");
echo("Promoting: " . $promoteurl . "\n");
echo("*** LOADING " . $argv[1] . ".txt\n");
// get an array of each keyword from the dictionary file.
$taggroup = explode("\n", $theData);
unset($myFile);
unset($theData);
foreach ($taggroup as $tag)
{
$tag = trim($tag);
$url = "http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/" . $tag . "/";
$rss = fetch_rss($url);
//throttle for del.icio.us
sleep($throttle);
foreach($rss->items as $item => $x)
{
$url = $x["link"];
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_REFERER, $promoteurl);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, false);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0');
$result = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close ($ch);
echo("Hit " . $url . "\n");
unset($result);
unset($ch);
unset($tag);
}
}
?>