How Smart Bloggers Make Dumb Choices

 Do you know the pluses and minuses of affiliate marketing? Great if you do. Even if you don’t, it just takes a bit of digging behind-the-scenes to look. You’ll discover many dumb things even expert bloggers do. Here’s a sampler.

Some merchants may be above-board, but may not be a good fit for your own type of audience. Sticking with such merchants is a dumb thing to do. 


 
Regularly, some bloggers get fooled by unscrupulous merchants all in the name of business. For all you care, all the noise about a particular product may just be mere hyping and some bloggers easily get carried away by that. More often than not, these bloggers forget the cliché, “If an opportunity seems too good to be true, it probably is.” Not heeding that is exactly why many bloggers sometimes get seduced by the tactics of less ethical and unscrupulous merchants.

It is easy to find numerous tips and tricks in affiliate marketing forums that might help you make a quick buck.  Such tricks could quickly lead to a break in trust with your audience. That is not the best way to go. In any business, trust counts for much and once it is lost, a lot is lost.

Anyone, no matter how experienced and expert they are can get fooled once in a while. Here are some quick tips to help you stay safe:

Don’t promote any product until you have all the vital information you need to promote it. To get this information, be sure you’ve subscribed to your affiliate partners’ email list and know exactly what your readers can expect in terms of follow-up marketing. That leaves you on very sure and safe grounds to promote the product as expected.

Do not pay a fee to become an affiliate. That is inclusive of membership or setup fees. Most credible affiliate program are FREE to join and many even entice people with sign-up bonuses. When you see product merchants asking for fees, it is likely they are running scams. Beware!

Don’t get involved in using tricks and unethical methods to promote any product.  Some marketers habitually use aggressive SEO tactics that focus exclusively on tricking search engines to market their products. That is a very dumb thing to do even if you may record a few successes here and there. If humans don’t wise up to your tricks soon enough, search engines will and they could have you banned from search engine listings. A real disaster if that happens.

 

Bad Choices That Can Leave You Poor

“If we are born poor, it is not our fault, but if we die poor, it is!”…… Bill Gates

Lack of a Definite Purpose, Goal or Chief Aim in life: No one can ever hope to succeed in any endeavor by drifting through life without any aim or purpose. That is, without the pursuit of a Definite Goal. You must assume the mentality of the Archer if you need to succeed in life. The Archer trains for years just to be able to hit the bull’s eye within an hour of competition. It is this singular purpose that propels him to train hard so as to succeed at competition proper. It is the same in life. “Drifting people are like rudderless ships and all the voyages of their lives are bound in shallows and miseries.” Anyone, who has nothing to aim at in life, is clearly courting poverty.

Lack of Ambition to move past Mediocrity: This is closely related to the first. People who lack a Definite Purpose hardly have any ambition to pursue. Ambition fuels the train of desire, increases drive and the will to achieve. Anyone who lacks this drive can hardly achieve anything worthwhile and may not be able to make money and live a good life.

Negative Mental Attitude: If you think you can, you can. If you think you can’t, you certainly can’t. The mind makes the man or woman. A Positive Mental Attitude energizes and increases drive for achievement. It increases productivity, improves quality of work and reduces stress. A Negative Mental Attitude which induces ill-health, envy, jealousy, bitterness, purposeless-ness and stressful life breeds poverty. A Negative Mental Attitude is avoidable by deliberate choice.

 

Why You Can't Get Something-for-Nothing

 

“If we are born poor, it is not our fault, but if we die poor, it is!”…… Bill Gates

Anyone who thinks he or she can get something-for-nothing forgets the natural law of “Cause and Effect.” The law of “Cause and Effect” is very thorough and does not spare the indolent. Even in physics, the law has been proven to work effectively. It simply means “action and reaction are always equal and opposite.” What you give is in direct proportion to what you get. In computer parlance, it is GIGO, “Garbage In, Garbage Out.” There is no free-lunch anywhere except in a mouse-trap. According to Napoleon Hill, “Life has no bargain counters. Everything has a price which must be paid in one form or another. No man is smart enough to cheat life. It has been tried by the smartest of men without success.” You can’t get something for nothing. What a farmer sows is what he reaps. “Life is like a cafeteria. You take your tray, select your food and pay at the other end. You can get anything you want as long as you are willing to pay the price. In a cafeteria, if you wait for people to serve you, you will wait forever.”  That is life for you. You make choices and pay the price to succeed.  Anyone who desires to go contrary to this natural course of events is making a clear choice to be poor. Poverty is a choice. Wealth is also a choice. What determines which you choose, is your thought-process followed by positive-action. That is what makes the difference.

 

Why You Must Always Make Good Choices

There are two sides to every coin, so it is with life. What you see is what you choose to see. Life chooses for you when you hesitate or refuse to choose for yourself. The choice life gives you cannot be the best for you because life does not know your taste. It is you and you alone who know best what you want. The choice of which way to take is yours alone. The choice of what to do and what not to do is also yours. You can choose the way to success or to failure, to wealth or to poverty. There is no such reality as failure unless you accept it as such. This is a clear choice; which is yours alone. To make it rich, you must steer clear of failures and avoid things that failures do. Take a look around you, no doubt you will find that those who have failed in life and are generally living poor have a lot in common. They tend to make poor and unhelpful choices all the time.