It was Friday, July 12, 2024. I was getting ready to go out to eat with my partner when I got an email on my phone. I opened it and it said this:
Dear Stephen,
Congratulations! Your recent affiliate sale has been successfully confirmed!
Details of the sale:
Product Sold: MAP Backer
Sale Amount: $797.00
Affiliate Commission Earned: $566.73
I had joined on Wednesday, June 19th. It didn’t even take four weeks for me to make back 75% of what I had paid to get in. And since I don’t have to pay another penny for life thanks to taking advantage of Phase 2, I like my odds of being in profit soon.
A vindication of sorts.
Whenever you start anything new, there is always a degree of uncertainty. You always wonder whether you are going to succeed or not.
Even though it’s only been 4 months since I started this journey, and only a little over a month since I decided to become a map backer, it seems like a long time when you are waiting to get some kind of justification or vindication that you have made the correct choice.
I could just as easily have used the word validation, but I used the word vindication because a lot of people think it isn’t possible to do this. They don’t think an ordinary person of reasonable intellect and high ethical caliber can do this.
Too many people don’t trust the process of making money online. They think everybody is a scammer. They think everybody is lying to them. They think it is too difficult. They think people have to get lucky. They think people have to be special. They think people have to have a million social media followers.
These are all excuses. We may perceive them as reasons, but they are really just excuses for not succeeding. They are excuses for not trying anything new. They are excuses for staying in
our comfort zones.
Nothing great ever happens if you stay in your comfort zone.
If there’s one thing that has shown itself to be true over and over, with any demographic you want except those who were born of privilege, it is that nobody accomplishes anything great if they stay in their comfort zone.
If you were born of such privilege that everything gets handed to you, then you can stay in your comfort zone and everything works out fine. If you want to stay exactly where you are, then keep doing exactly what you’re doing.
But if you weren’t born of privilege, if you didn’t have a life path planned out for you from birth, if you didn’t have it all handed to you on the proverbial “silver spoon,” you’re going to have to get out of your comfort zone.
It’s a paradox of sorts: you aren’t comfortable with your results, but they are so familiar that they have become your comfort zone. In other words, discomfort is your comfort zone.
Look at it this way: you are going to be uncomfortable either way. Either you are going to stay with the discomfort that is familiar to you or you are going to get out of your comfort zone and try something new. If you fail at first, keep going. There are always going to be obstacles.
There is a funny thing about getting out of your comfort zone. To “clean up” an old one-liner, it’s only uncomfortable the first time. Once you’ve done anything new, it becomes part of your comfort zone.
Everything you do, every advance you make, becomes your new “normal.”
The essence of the journey.
And this is the essence of any great journey: you start at Point A with a goal of getting to Point Z. There will be numerous points along the way. And every time you pass a point, it is now a part of your past. It is history. It is “normal” now because it has happened to you.
Even if you don’t make it to Point Z, your life has been enriched in many ways. Hopefully, you’re never like Thomas Edison, who “found 1,000 ways not to create a light bulb.” But if you keep taking action and keep learning new things, whatever point you make it to will be a lot better than the Point A where you started.
I’m good with words, but I don’t have the words to tell you how great that first large ticket commission feels. But even as I was celebrating, the next thing going through my head was “OK, how do we make this repeatable?”
Faceless affiliate marketing is becoming the first thing I think of when I wake up and the last thing I think of before going to bed. Instead of going to sports scores, checking personal emails, or going down the social media rabbit hole, I start checking for commissions and composing emails and/or blog posts when I go to the computer first thing in the morning.
The main takeaways.
The tl;dr version: if I can do this, you can do this. I do have reasonable intellect, but not genius level. I’m certainly not doing anything you can’t do here. But I am doing the work. And for awhile, it has to be an obsession.
But the cool thing about this is that it isn’t really hard work. Physical labor is hard work. Putting up with the public is hard work. Yes, this can fry your brain from time to time, but it’s not that hard to decompress. The secret is keeping it simple.
The fundamentals are going to be there: find your best way of driving traffic and do it. Paid traffic works for me because it’s fast. If you are careful and do it right, you can avoid “taking a bath.” But even if you make mistakes, you can quickly overcome them.
For me, solo ads are the best traffic. They are reasonably priced and the fastest way I know of to build your email list unless you are someone with the talent, charisma, and blind dumb luck to go viral on Instagram or TikTok.
But this brings me to the second point about traffic: it will be better for you if you can find a sustainable way to bring traffic in organically from search engines or from cheaper, “wholesale” pop-under traffic.
My choice is to do a blog because that’s what I’m best at. It’s still “faceless affiliate marketing” because you can blog without showing your face. You can be fairly anonymous if you don’t use your entire name as your “brand.”
I don’t really have to be anonymous, so I go “semi-anonymous.”
For you, it may be blogging. You may want to build a YouTube channel, which is a great way to go if you are good at it. You may want to do Instagram or TikTok.
Whatever you are good at or want to be good at, just do it. And don’t be afraid to spend your time or your money on it.
Here is a link to MAP. Check them out. We were in Phase 2 when I wrote this, meaning you can still get a lifetime platinum membership as a MAP Backer.
To Your Success,
Steve T