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 crappy SEC officials, win.

• 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!

• 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


// 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);
}
}
?>