i think anyone who's primary reason is "i got sick of taking orders" or "being bossed around"won't do great in IM...no matter where you go you have a boss, and people working against you. freelance client work? you are the clients BITCH. affiliate markeing is as close to freedom as you come but you still have to kiss ass up the chain, imo.
How much did you have banked before you quit your 9-5?
- Thread starter leadsupplier
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I'm making 13 times more than I think I would be making at 9-5 at the time. My job left me in December 2007 (due to recession). I was kinda upset as that time was very important time of my life but I'm pretty much happy now when I look back and see things and imagine what if I still have to do 9-5.
In your case if u hitting 30K a month why the heck you ain't leaving it yet?
In your case if u hitting 30K a month why the heck you ain't leaving it yet?
Because it's not about how you do it when you're excited and motivated. It's how you do it when you lose 75% of your revenue in a week and you're burnt out from pulling 12 hour days for 3 straight months.
I dunno about that.
That's not the same as a boss. A boss pays you a fixed rate and manages the ceiling of your income. A boss reaps the profits, or he is the agent of the person who reaps the profits.
If you have 12 months of living expenses I wouldn't worry nearly as much. That is more than enough time to focus on scaling what you're doing now, while also having plenty of time to work on building up some longer term assets.
The biggest thing I would worry about, is what Guerilla said. Once you quit your job, it often can be harder to stay on top of your business stuff. Things can get put off, and the next thing you know if you aren't diligent about productivity you can throw a whole month away.
Before quitting your job I'd setup very specific long and short term goals. What do I want to have accomplished 1 month from now? 1 year from now? What are 8 specific 1 hour tasks I need to do today to get to that point? If you can handle keeping yourself productive then I'd say go for it. You are making good money right now, and you know enough that you'll be ok in a couple months if/when you're short term stuff starts to taper off.
The biggest thing I would worry about, is what Guerilla said. Once you quit your job, it often can be harder to stay on top of your business stuff. Things can get put off, and the next thing you know if you aren't diligent about productivity you can throw a whole month away.
Before quitting your job I'd setup very specific long and short term goals. What do I want to have accomplished 1 month from now? 1 year from now? What are 8 specific 1 hour tasks I need to do today to get to that point? If you can handle keeping yourself productive then I'd say go for it. You are making good money right now, and you know enough that you'll be ok in a couple months if/when you're short term stuff starts to taper off.
Quit your job. Then bust your ass working 12+ hour days doing IM. Honestly it sounds like you need to light a fire under your ass. Waiting to make 30k a month while holding down a full time job is ridiculous and sounds like an excuse to not take a risk. Time is money in this business. You will get there 10x faster by working IM full time. You will probably look back and wonder why you didn't quit earlier.
Of course this is assuming you are willing to put in the actual work and not fuck around. If you are, then just take the plunge man.
Of course this is assuming you are willing to put in the actual work and not fuck around. If you are, then just take the plunge man.
My timeline
October 2007 discovered affiliate marketing
December 2007 graduated from Georgia Tech
February 2008 got my first job doing PPC for Staples
March 2008 first Facebook campaign
August 2008. Took a week off vacation and went to ASE 08. Decided fuck it.
I probably made $40k before I quit. The reason I waited a while is I wanted to pay off the car and build a "cushion."
Also I was profiting from only one vertical on Facebook for a while. I didn't quit until I had money coming in from 3 different verticals.
Wow you're fucking retarded.
Did you just read 4 hour work week and decided you wanna make money from the internet only working a few hours a week? You sound like you have a shit work ethic.
Try being competitive against the guys working 14+ hours a day, 7 days a week, with multiple employees. I don't consider this a job, I actually enjoy doing this.
Your typical affiliate doesn't have VC's, shareholders, investors, or customers in the traditional sense. You think affiliate networks are our bosses? lol.
Lol, easy there. Trust me, if I had to work 14 hours a day, I wouldn't be in the IM game. I'd just go back to working a 9 to 5. One of (not the only though) reasons people join IM is to have more control over their life. 14 hours a day would leave you having less freedom than people working a 9 to 5.
Work smart. I think I may have had only one or two 14 hour days since I started IM years ago, and trust me, I'm doing just fine.
I don't post much in here but I felt compelled to respond to this.
I've been doing IM full time since I was laid off from a 150k job in August, with a one month old daughter. Before that I'd been doing PPC campaigns for about 18 months, constantly wondering how much I needed to be making before I pulled the trigger and quit. I had months where I was "thank God I have this job to fall back on" and months where it cost me money showing up at a day job.
I had money saved when I got laid off, and my fiance has a good job (although she was on maternity leave for six months, not getting paid), but all of my campaigns had died and my main traffic source had died - so I basically started from scratch when I got laid off.
It probably helped that my last day job was the most retarded company I've ever worked for (wasn't my choice to work there, we got sold to them), and it was almost a relief. But instead of panicking, it was a revelation. Either I'm good at IM or I'm not, so let's find out. I did know that after fifteen years at corporate gigs, I was tired of sitting in a car all day to show up at a specific time just so some asshole can pretend he's a good boss. I live two blocks from the ocean, but sitting in an office and working so that maybe the boss of my boss of my boss of my boss might decide that I get a 2% raise at the end of the year. Nobody does any actual work at corporate gigs, it's just a crapshoot.
I'm not bitter, and I definitely miss showing up hungover at 11 on Fridays, surfing the internet for two hours, and getting paid no matter what. I don't have time management issues (other than not taking enough breaks) - it's amazing how little on the internet actual matters when your time is money. I also make better choices with affiliate networks and offers - I don't have the patience to spend two days building campaigns for the latest hot triple-brokered offer that ends up getting dropped three days later. I look at everything long term. There's one specific network to which I sent 100k in revenue the first six months of this year that I won't run with anymore, because I can't count on them to give me the support I need as a legitimate businessman.
If you won't give me an affiliate manager who can give me answers to my specific questions, then fuck you I'll take my business somewhere else.
If you can't tell me why my campaign was declined, fuck you I'll run it somewhere else.
It's amazing how much more insight I find in my data now that I'm not trying to cram work into a seven hour window after I'm done with a day job and my fiance has gone to bed.
It's scary at times and really stressful - but what worth having isn't? You can always go get another day job. I wake up two hours earlier than I used to because I can't wait. I get to have lunch by the ocean, spend zero on gas, take a phone call or meeting whenever I want, see my daughter whenever I want. I don't treat this as "I hope this works out"; I treat it like there's no other option because it's the only one I want.
My long-winded point is that I can't say for sure I ever would have reached a point where I felt comfortable pulling the trigger on a day job - part of that was that a day job was limiting my ability to expand the business, but also I know I got comfortable at times. It seems scary to quit your job, but when you take a step back, every great entrepreneur has none it, and usually with a lot more risk than we have. We sit at computers and set up campaigns that launch pretty quickly. You can spend a couple hundred bucks and determine if a campaign is going to make any money. We know the traffic better than most ad networks know their own traffic (I've worked at a bunch - they're retards).
People act like a day job is the 'less risky' option - that's a fucking joke. At some point at any company, your number is going to be called. Companies work for shareholders and nobody else. That's awesome as a shareholder. It doesn't matter how hard you work a corporate gig, how long you've been there; it comes down to numbers. As least when you work for yourself you have some control over your success.
Only you know what makes you comfortable. But just work hard.
I've been doing IM full time since I was laid off from a 150k job in August, with a one month old daughter. Before that I'd been doing PPC campaigns for about 18 months, constantly wondering how much I needed to be making before I pulled the trigger and quit. I had months where I was "thank God I have this job to fall back on" and months where it cost me money showing up at a day job.
I had money saved when I got laid off, and my fiance has a good job (although she was on maternity leave for six months, not getting paid), but all of my campaigns had died and my main traffic source had died - so I basically started from scratch when I got laid off.
It probably helped that my last day job was the most retarded company I've ever worked for (wasn't my choice to work there, we got sold to them), and it was almost a relief. But instead of panicking, it was a revelation. Either I'm good at IM or I'm not, so let's find out. I did know that after fifteen years at corporate gigs, I was tired of sitting in a car all day to show up at a specific time just so some asshole can pretend he's a good boss. I live two blocks from the ocean, but sitting in an office and working so that maybe the boss of my boss of my boss of my boss might decide that I get a 2% raise at the end of the year. Nobody does any actual work at corporate gigs, it's just a crapshoot.
I'm not bitter, and I definitely miss showing up hungover at 11 on Fridays, surfing the internet for two hours, and getting paid no matter what. I don't have time management issues (other than not taking enough breaks) - it's amazing how little on the internet actual matters when your time is money. I also make better choices with affiliate networks and offers - I don't have the patience to spend two days building campaigns for the latest hot triple-brokered offer that ends up getting dropped three days later. I look at everything long term. There's one specific network to which I sent 100k in revenue the first six months of this year that I won't run with anymore, because I can't count on them to give me the support I need as a legitimate businessman.
If you won't give me an affiliate manager who can give me answers to my specific questions, then fuck you I'll take my business somewhere else.
If you can't tell me why my campaign was declined, fuck you I'll run it somewhere else.
It's amazing how much more insight I find in my data now that I'm not trying to cram work into a seven hour window after I'm done with a day job and my fiance has gone to bed.
It's scary at times and really stressful - but what worth having isn't? You can always go get another day job. I wake up two hours earlier than I used to because I can't wait. I get to have lunch by the ocean, spend zero on gas, take a phone call or meeting whenever I want, see my daughter whenever I want. I don't treat this as "I hope this works out"; I treat it like there's no other option because it's the only one I want.
My long-winded point is that I can't say for sure I ever would have reached a point where I felt comfortable pulling the trigger on a day job - part of that was that a day job was limiting my ability to expand the business, but also I know I got comfortable at times. It seems scary to quit your job, but when you take a step back, every great entrepreneur has none it, and usually with a lot more risk than we have. We sit at computers and set up campaigns that launch pretty quickly. You can spend a couple hundred bucks and determine if a campaign is going to make any money. We know the traffic better than most ad networks know their own traffic (I've worked at a bunch - they're retards).
People act like a day job is the 'less risky' option - that's a fucking joke. At some point at any company, your number is going to be called. Companies work for shareholders and nobody else. That's awesome as a shareholder. It doesn't matter how hard you work a corporate gig, how long you've been there; it comes down to numbers. As least when you work for yourself you have some control over your success.
Only you know what makes you comfortable. But just work hard.
LAWL. No, I just read the millionaire fastlane - on your recommendation. If you did read it, you obviously didn't understand it.
You don't think the network is your boss? Try sending shitty traffic and see how much longer you get paid. THEY (and the product owner) have the control and they can shit on you from a great height and fire your ass without warning - "like a boss".
In Millionaire Fastlane MJ says that he worked 7 days/week to get to where he is.
And the people making real money in affiliate marketing are not reliant on an affiliate network.
Cool, hope you got value out of the book. We can interpret it differently, but what I got out the book is that MJ Demarco worked his fucking ass off for a few years to get Limos.com where it is, and he did that twice. All his talks about having fun comes after putting in the work.
The network's still not the boss. Sending shitty traffic? That's a horrible business model if it's based on sending low quality leads. As far as I'm concerned, if you get cut off from an offer, there's no shortage of alternative places to go to. If a network wants to stop working with me, I have no shortage of others I can work with. I'm nowhere near "fucked."
@DreamMachine.
While it may be an inbuilt part of the capitalist system that anyone who wants to make money needs to add some value (i.e. keep someone happy), the rest of your argument is bullshit.
If you don't like working for a particular customer, you can just fire them and get others to replace them.
I work with clients, and I'm hugely fussy about who I'll work with. Unless I think they're going to be fun AND profitable, I'll politely decline. I haven't fired a customer for quite some time, because I am much better at pre-screening now, but I have no compunctions about doing it.
Whenever I do it, my income takes a very small dip until I replace them (usually a week or two).
If you're working for someone, and your boss turns out to be an asshole, you're faced with a choice. Put up with it, or fire them, and lose ALL of your income until you can find another job.
The only way the comparison holds up is if you're a business owner who only has one customer. In which case, you shouldn't be in business. Running a business isn't for everyone, and there's no shame in sticking at your job if you enjoy it, but it's very, very different from working for yourself.
While it may be an inbuilt part of the capitalist system that anyone who wants to make money needs to add some value (i.e. keep someone happy), the rest of your argument is bullshit.
If you don't like working for a particular customer, you can just fire them and get others to replace them.
I work with clients, and I'm hugely fussy about who I'll work with. Unless I think they're going to be fun AND profitable, I'll politely decline. I haven't fired a customer for quite some time, because I am much better at pre-screening now, but I have no compunctions about doing it.
Whenever I do it, my income takes a very small dip until I replace them (usually a week or two).
If you're working for someone, and your boss turns out to be an asshole, you're faced with a choice. Put up with it, or fire them, and lose ALL of your income until you can find another job.
The only way the comparison holds up is if you're a business owner who only has one customer. In which case, you shouldn't be in business. Running a business isn't for everyone, and there's no shame in sticking at your job if you enjoy it, but it's very, very different from working for yourself.
What really matters is how you value time. IM isn't ALL about separating time from income. It really is what you make of it. Some people automate IM as much as possible so they can have all the free time in world. Others grind 12+ hours a day for loads of short term cash (PPC, PPV, etc.) and stay indoors most of the time so they can purchase high end cars, clothes, and other materialistic goods. Then you have the people who are just so sick of their 9-5's that they'll anything to quit their jobs, and IM is a very attractive substitute for that. Don't forget that some people enjoy IM and actually want to do it in their free time.