Hello and thank you for visiting Flynn Wins!
My name is Lionel Houde. I've been trying to get into long-term affiliate marketing since 2005.
My first taste of real success came in that year. I was delivering pizza, and the owner, a regular frugaltarian, didn't want to pay monthly hosting fees; after all, he was giving me food discounts! None of the other drivers getting discounts were doing web work for him, so I took down the website, which had had a huge cable TV affiliate ad, my first ad ever, on the home page of the site. I also applied for another job and quit on a Friday. I still remember the satisfaction of turning down phone calls from drivers who didn't know where a few hard to find places were.
Things didn't go well as a baristo the next week. It was hectic, deafening, and annoying. At one point I must have thrown away three gallons of milk for one customer who wanted her drink exactly at 140 degrees.
I woke up one morning that week, dreading the noon shift, and stumbled toward my PayPal account. My affiliate company had paid me $500 for 5 cable TV sales! I called the store and quit that day. The next month I still got $300 more.
But, without the pizza site to advertise from, my money began to dry up. I made the mistake of stumbling into PPC advertising. "If you have to spend $100 to make $120, wouldn't you spend as much as you could?" breezed one expert, who really did do a good job, but had a wealth more experience doing PPC. I tried my first online ad campaign, and my commission money dwindled down, with a lot of uninterested people soaking me $5 when they clicked my ads.
After that, with my remaining money, I bought a few marketing guides. The affiliate marketing gurus I studied were effective, but only with a
ton of the tools they were using. Sometimes it seemed like the only way
they were making a living was giving out (or sometimes even selling!)
e-books that handed out affiliate links like Halloween candy.
Eventually my daily demands called me away from online marketing, and my dreams of making good money for providing legitimate services online faded into the background.
When my fiancee (now my wife) got me an iPhone, I got into podcasts. Most of it was vintage horror shows, but soon I realized how much time I wasting, and started looking into the business section of Apple's podcasts.
Enter Pat Flynn and the
Smart Passive Income Podcast.
I was skeptical about who he was. Anyone could have set up a spammy podcast, put a few tinyurls up, and left listeners to invest and fail.
All it took was one podcast to realize I was dealing with an excellent teacher and his very helpful, carefully chosen guests.
The past two years, after settling into married life, I've finally come to have the time I want to follow my goals, and apply what I can from over 130 of SPIP's episodes.
This website is not and will not be a competitor to Pat, giving away the full contents of his podcasts, or trying to sell the tools he does. There will be a link to each podcast in each post, and all you will see is how I apply Pat's and Pat's guests' main strategies to my own non-competing businesses.
Again, thank you for coming by, and I hope this will be a blog I can keep up alongside Mr. Flynn's excellent series for years to come. If you have any questions, comments, or other observations, please let me know!
Cordially,
Lionel Houde
Affiliate Marketer
(which is a lot bolder and graphically creative than Watch_Dogs, so much so that I don't recommend Watch_Dogs until I can review both on my up-and-coming Off Topic page). The rest will require a little more research, so maybe I can just go with what I know and get a review site going to get some more immediate money in.