I watched the vice presidential debate last night to know what’s up with our vice presidential candidates. And I would like to point out that me being in business already smell something that’s complete bullshit and what are genuinely good idea for a solution with our candidate’s answers.

I won’t be naming names as I will keep the decision to vote in your hands. We all have different opinions and me, having owning this blog, have a point of view on the matter. For one, I hate these politicians bashing each other. It’s like shit talking to fart that he stinks. When there are questions and problems prompted by the people, what I hear are the words “fight corruption & poverty” each and everytime. For my understanding, fighting corruption & poverty is indeed a great thing but giving a simpler solution to a problem is what counts most and you don’t have to bash the present administration to tell the people you are better. Let your ideas do the talking and the people the voting.

Like for example, the question about “How will you help the farmers that are affected by the El Nino”. All of the candidates answered fight corruption and only 1 out of them gave a really striking answer. In short all of them are whining about the present administration and 1 of them only gave a solution to the problem. “Build more and better irrigation”. If you watched it last night, you know what I’m talking about.

Another question prompted by a teacher “What can you do to help those teachers in remote areas? And the children lacking books and school supplies?” You know what the majority of them answered? Fight corruption because the funds are being halted there. How blur can you get? People know that the government is corrupt. The world know that the Philippine government is one of the corrupt goverment in the world. What we want to know if “HOW”. All of them are just bashing each other. Only one answer I’m completely impressed. “Raise the teacher’s salary and give every student a kindle.”. I said “WOW! A kindle! That’s effin’ brilliant!” Even when joking around, I would never thought of that. To all who doesn’t know, a kindle is an electronic device where you can get books in electronic format and read it. You can have 4,000+ books in this kindle and each student can use it until college. It’s a lot cheaper than a laptop and lighter to carry than a real book.

The sad thing is, I think we Filipinos are not yet over in voting for the person that is most dear in our hearts rather than a person that has the solution to a problem. Making the cycle repeat itself because we put the person uncapable yet makes us happy. We put people that are famous rather than people who can’t talk politics and just do action. We tend to put faith that a nice person can do all the job a competent person can. The sad thing is, a competent person, be it bad or good will always be better than just a nice person. We want to be “better” than other countries. Saying better is already challenging other nations. We don’t need nice guys to compete, we need competent people. Not whiners. People that when we think of, we remember them by the things they’ve done. Not by the things they’ve said and said they will do.

Picking a leader just like in a group in the class most often than not falls to the people who are most capable. Not because he is a close friend of yours. Why don’t we have this same mentality when picking leaders for our country? Most of the time, the better you are at speaking, the more chance your are at sitting in office. I guess, its all about selling yourself. Winning in a verbal debate is a sign of higher intellect to most of the people. To me, either you proved your point or not, what’s important is what you have done before talking, that speaks most clearly. We tend to forget about that. When choosing a candidate to vote, please ask yourself, what have this person done that really made a difference. Will my apo and apo sa tuhod benefit from this? When I’m gone, will my lineage benefit from this? Though we can see a lot of ads a politician helping and ofw get back to the Philippines as good. What good does it bring to the Philippines as a whole? When he gets back here, that ends there. Helping a person in need is good. But a politician putting an effort just to get testimonials to his next tv ad is probably the reason for helping you. Put our emotions aside because emotions cloud our judgment. Leave the “Follow your heart” bullshit to the hopeless romantics. We are placing our families and future generations at risk here. We think with our minds not with our hearts. It’s the same reason it’s placed above the head. When more lives are at stake (the Filipinos), would you decide using your heart or your head?

At the end of the day. When all things are said and done. If in case we all made a mistake placing the wrong guy in office. We should not blame the government if we are poor, if the government is corrupt, if the prices is high, if we still don’t have a house, if there are still squaters in the city, if there are crimes, if there are corrupt politicians and if there are still people who can’t afford to eat. Because after all, we are the one to blame. We put him there!

Vote wisely my friends!

A public service reminder by snoob

What can make your affiliate marketing successful? Contrary to popular belief traffic = money, it depends. And traffic is just only about 60% of the total formula to make your affiliate marketing campaign a success. Always remember that 80 - 20 rule. In any business, there is 80% chance to fail and 20% chance to succeed. Its also true in affiliate marketing. Out of 100 campaign that you might crank up will only lead to 20% of them making profit. But what good about this is eventhough you did not profit on the remaining 80, all the profits from the 20 campaigns is enough to cover your loses and will prove profitable.

This is my mindset when I started. I created 100 sites knowing only less than 20 of them will make money. It is a lot of work and not for the faint of heart, but I like the adrenaline rush and the thrill of not knowing what lies ahead. But it proved to be a profitable venture for me. And in turn taught me a lot.

Keyword Research

First of all, to make an affiliate marketing campaign a success is “Keyword research”. Just because everybody you know targets make money online or pinay scandal, you should join the bandwagon to get some money. That’s not the case. Most of the time, following the crowd will only lead to financial losses. What you’ll do is work harder to keep up with everyone and it will only burn you out. And will stress you even more when you arrive at the end of the month is still not profitable.

Affiliate marketing is not a plug and play business. Its not as easy as you think like creating a paypal account. You need to think. Be a contrarian. Challenge every idea. Think smarter not work harder. Underwork your competition. Why would you want to target a keyword that is known by all? Why would you want to create a site about a subject that is talked by all? To get traffic? Yeah that might work. But before you go ahead and make a site? Can you consider this? Do you want to work harder than your competition or to work less but earn the same as him? You can do so by targetting a less known keyword that will give the same amount of money with less or no work. But of course, qualifying a keyword can tell you different kinds of things such as the quality of traffic which brings me to my next point.

Quality Traffic

You notice how I put “Quality” in it? Getting traffic is easy. Trust me. You can buy a traffic of 10,000 visitors per day for only $15 and there are lots of services like that floating around. But I would choose 100 visitors if it converts 50% of the time compared to 10,000 visitors which converts 0.0002% of the time any day. Traffic is easy to get. But quality traffic isn’t. Just because you can use twitter, facebook and stumbleupon doesn’t mean you’ll gonna get rich tomorrow when you wake up. People who use social networking sites are more tech savvy and in return use them only for fun and not really to open their credit cards and give you money. In other words, most of these social traffic are junk. If you want to be famous, these are great by the way. That is why a list bloggers like them. But for people who wants to make money. Stay away from social media, at least for now.

Also, in terms of SEO. Quality traffic often leads to the kind of keyword you target. Don’t get me wrong, if you have a nice keyword that gets more than a thousand hits a day from search engines, it is a great keyword. After all, if people came from the search engines, most likely they are willing to spend money. What I’m trying to tell is that, most of the time, high traffic keywords are more competitive and needs a lot of work to rank at. So learn to pick keywords that are a little long tail that expresses a need. For example: “restore bad credit score” is better than “bad credit score” as it expresses the need to fix a problem. Then you put up your affiliate site that offers solving bad credit scores.

Landing Pages

Landing page design are the face of your campaigns. If you’re gonna make money in this field, you need to have a nice, at least decent design to compete. If you’re gonna do it yourself and don’t know how to do it, do not be surprise if you’re not making money. At least learn how to design or hire someone with experience to do it. For starters, have at least 2 landing page design so you can test. Then you will try to beat the best converter with a new design until you settle with a conversion rate that is suitable to your taste.

Tracking

Track. Track. Track. The only thing that you should be addictive to is stats. Learn to track your affiliate campaigns. From PPC keywords to organic searches, use tracking software like google analytics, prosper202 and crazy egg (I use them personally). Google analytics offers great conversion tracking for its PPC campaigns while prosper202 offers great tracking for postbacks. Those 2 will give you detailed information such as, what link they clicked, where they come from, how long did they stayed on your site. Information such as these are crucial especially when you are purchasing your traffic such as ppc or ppv.

Split Test & Optimize

Split test is like a branch of tracking. This way, you want to maximize your earning potential from the site. So having 2 designs of the landing page is great to test them with each other. Sometimes you need to edit little things on your landing page to covert better. Landing pages are not the only thing you need to test, you also need to test different offers. Different merchants and different affiliate products. Do not trust cpa networks. Trust no one in fact. Sometimes, the same offer is available to different cpa networks but only one of them converts better. It is because CPA networks (sometimes) shrug money from you. One word to describe is “steal” the affiliate commission from you. Some networks do it aggressively, some conservatively. It is present in all networks you just have to settle for the lesser evil. Don’t trust anyone and test test test.

Love this song parody about the geekiness of today’s nerdy entrepreneurs. Funny but true. I just realized by watching this video, most of the entrepreneurs I admire are nerds! Jobs, Gates,DHH and the Google Gods FTW h4×0rs!

“Just do what you love.”