Yes, I’m fully aware of the fact that until yesterday I was one of the very few that had not seen “The social network” yet. And yes, I know I should be ashamed because of that, being an internet marketeer and bit of entrepreneur myself. But hey, let’s just say I was waiting for the right moment!

Flying to Vegas for the Affiliate Summit West 2011 I was flipping channels on my private 55″ full-HD LED entertainment system 2.5″ in-flight entertainment system, when I came across a documentary about Zuckerberg. I think I missed most of it but I did learn some things that also featured in the movie. Zuckerberg being one of my biggest internet heroes back then, at that point already took some damage in my respect for him. Let’s just say the movie didn’t help him in that aspect.

When you watch ‘The social network’,  it is hard not to go on believing that he is a awkward, selfish, antisocial guy who really just stole the whole idea of Facebook from 2 of his fellow students. And we are led to believe that he is a cold hearted guy who puts money and success above everything else, and in the process of building his billion dollar project has no problems ditching his best friend and co-founder of Facebook. That being said, in the movie emphasis is put on the fact that he is very much influenced by Napster founder Sean Parker (who was excellently portrayed by Justin Timberlake, kudos!) in many of his private and business decisions.

So, where does it leave us now? What should we, viewers of the flick, have to believe now? Zuckerberg dismissed the movie as “a work of fiction”. In an interview he did he said that the small details were correct, like the clothing he wears, the fact that he has been dumped many times by the ladies and that Facebook started out as a way to get some sort of personal social attention. But the main plot was absolutely wrong according to Zuckerberg.

But based on all the facts we’ve seen and heard, and the fact that there is no clear evidence that he did NOT steal the idea for Facebook, were do I put him right now. I don’t know. Do I place him in my personal list of the world’s best entrepreneurs right next to Bill Gates, Steve jobs, Sergey Brin and Larry Page? No. Not for now. There are too many unknown factors to the whole Facebook legacy for me.

Besides that, Facebook is Zuckersbergs only project right now. Granted, it has no match in terms of value that has been created at lightning speed, but take Bill Gates, Jobs and the Google guys. They have all branched out to loads of products. Gates has Windows, Bing, Xbox and so on. Jobs has the Apple, Iphone, Ipod, Ipad, Apple TV, Itunes and numerous other things and look at the products Google rolled out in the last 10 years, Gmail, Chrome, Android, Youtube, Google Earth etc. I know they have been around longer, but I do like to challenge the thought of what Mark would be doing right now hadn’t he started Facebook.

So, now you tell me what you think. Is Zuckerberg a billion-dollar hit wonder who shouldn’t be credited at all, or is he simply a genius that should deserve all the respect in the world?

Here are some recent stats about Facebook you might find interesting:

Tags: entrepreneur, facebook, founder facebook, mark zuckerberg, thefacebook, www.facebook.com, zuckerberg
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I’ve been getting a lot of emails about what happened to the blog, or to me (although it was mainly the blog). As you can see the last post is from March of this year. [/ashame] Let me start with a big fat  SORRY!!! I wish I could name just one reason that is significant enough to have you say ‘Yes Gioom, we understand now that you haven’t been posting’.

I’m kind of ashamed because when I teach people about internet marketing or entrepeneurship in general, I always tell them to do what they believe in and stick to it. Never give up, no matter what!

Though that is very true and I’m a firm believer of that, you will now probably ask yourself ’so, what’s the deal with the blog that only lived a few months then?’.

Well let me explain. I didn’t setup this blog to make money. Off course it’s ultra super duber cool to make $25.000-50.000 per month like the big guys like Shoemoney and John Chow do, but that was never my intention (although I wouldn’t be hatin’ it!). I set this blog up last year because I think there are still many cool and ontold things going on in the marketing world that nobody is talking about. That plus I love sharing fun things like the funniest Youtube’s you have ever seen or just a really cool car.

Problem is, that exactly when I started this blog last year, my big ‘ol whiteboard was filled with 9 other projects that I was going to do in the coming months. Although this blog had a pretty high priority, I found out that the other projects took waaay more time then expected in the first place. Long story short; I took on too much too handle and I within a few months I found myself dealing with 10 projects that I could only spend so little time on, that most of them weren’t even worth the effort. They needed a lot of work, and I couldn’t give it to them.

So recently I decided to drop most of them and only continue with the ones that have the most potential in my opinion. This blog won’t certainly become a cash cow any day soon, but it’s one of the projects I like best, because let’s be honest, blogging is just a whole bunch of fun!

So, I make my promise today, and you can write it down if you want: from now on I will be posting again on a very regular basis!

That is, if you still want me too. If not, I WILL delete the whole website. I WILL!  Don’t test me!

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Living the “super” affiliate lifestyle is great, actually it’s better than great, it’s awesome! You can do whatever you want, whenever you want. Many super affiliates can keep this lifestyle up with just a couple of hours of work per week. Granted, I wish I could, but I enjoy working so much that most of the time I end up working 12-14 hours per day. It’s just hard to keep up so many projects all by yourself since I don’t have any staff.

Anyway, first thing I do when I get up in the early morning (not!) after finishing my healthy breakfast (again not!) is updating my spreadsheet with stats of the previous day. It’s really just a simple spreadsheet and I’ll tell you how mine looks like.

I’ve given each campaign it’s own page so that it’s always clear how that particular campaign performed on any given day. Then on that page you will see the dates of the month in the first column. The next columns are the expenses made for that offer on, for example, Adwords, Yahoo and MSN and/or Facebook and media buys. Then the next columns are for the revenue that you’ve created with that campaign. And in the final column I have my profit (hopefully) for that particular day. Then you add all the profits up at the botom to have a grand total for the month so far. I also made some very easy calculations for things like “average profit per day” and “estimated profit by the end of the month”. Then I have one summary page where all the profits of all the campaigns so far this month are presented and it also tells me what the estimated profit for the month is at that moment. If you like you could also import your stats from last month in this page and see whether you campaigns are steady, growing or falling.

Very easy stuf. Anybody with very little Excel skills can create this, but it’s SO important that you keep track. Seriously! It does not take me more than 15 mins a day, but I always exactly know how my campaigns are performing.

Now why am I telling you this? Because I got lazy! At one time I decided that things were going steady and I figured I didn’t need to keep track of my stats anymore. So for about 2 months I forgot about the sats and then I made a horrible discovery. I was performing like 20-30% less than the months before. Why? Just because I wasn’t aware what was going on anymore. One campaign completely went down the drain to a point where I was losing money. One domain that I was actively promoting was not automatically renewed so it was offline while I was still pumping money it and another campaign got Google slapped.

See, when you keep track daily you immediately see when something is off. Those losses would never have happened if I did my 15 minute routine for those 2 months too.

So that’s one big lesson learned, and from now on, if you weren’t already doing it, I want you all to start a spreadsheet like me and put your stats into that sucker! One tip: You might want to check out Google docs for this. This way you can view and edit your stats from any location, very handy!

Tags: affiliate, online marketing, stats
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Phishing has been around as long as the internet but so far I personally never had an attempt on any of my accounts, until a couple of days ago….

I got a directmessage through Twitter from Ashley (twittername Ashleemikel), it said: “you look funny here http://www.thephishinglink.com”. I will not post the real link she used because there are always people who are stupid enough to fall for it anyway after they’ve been warned. So in essence what it does like any phishing attempt, it redirects to a site that completely LOOKS like Twitter but if you look closely you’ll see that in the URL twitter is just the subdomain. It could like look http://www.twitter.securelogin.com or something. It’s the oldest trick in the book, but I bet a lot of people are still falling for this one.

I decided not to unfollow the scumbags, but rather keep checking what they come up with and already they have stepped it up notch. Now they’re making all kinds of online quizzes which you can fill out and in the end they want your Twitter login. Oh my god, I do not want to make a guess of the people who are buying that. So that was it, I informed Twitter of their practices and hopefully their account will be banned by the end of the day. But since the most easiest thing to do is making another Twitter account, I don’t think this is going to stop these guys.

This is what their page looks like right now:

More info on phishing on this Twitter page

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If there is one marketeer / mindset guru that I absolutely worship, then it’s self-proclaimed “Lazy Bastard” Frank Kern. Since the beginning of my business he was one of the first “guru’s” I came across and till this day he is still by far my favorite.

Frank has something magical. I don’t know if it is his relaxed way of telling how cool his “shit” is, or that his shit is really that good, but everytime Frank Kern pitches something I end up buying it, no matter how expensive it is. I just found out he released a offer where you get to personally meet the man and together the 2 of your are going to look into your business and he promises to increase the results of your company with at least 600% if not more. Ok, it’s a shady $100,000 to get in that program, but at least you get picked up at the airport in his all new Rolls Royce Phantom coupé.

Anyway, to get back to business. I’m a member of his Mass control Monthly newsletter, which is always full of insanely interesting stuff that you can use on your business. So in his latest edition he tells about how to sum up your achievements, which you are the most proud of, of the past year. Then after that ask yourself 2 things:
1. Where do you want to go?
2. What’s been working so far?

So, I thought that might be very interesting so I decided to do this, and even print it out and hang it on the wall. So here goes:

My list of achievements that I’m proud of in 2009:

- Somewhere around april/march I had my very first 5 figure profit day. Not revenue, but pure profit. It took me over 3 years to achieve this.

- In May the media buys that I’ve been doing really took off and I achieved my first month with more than $250,000 in profit. Unfortunately that is still my best month to date. So something to work on in 2010.

- Also in May I bought something I thought I could never afford it when it came out in 2007. I’m talking about my precious, an Audi R8.  I have had it tuned, it has 500 HP now, and it has an insane sound to it. I will post pics and movies later for anybody that might be interested in this. I’m so proud of it that I want to share so…

- From a health point of view I had a breakthrough too. When I reached 277 lbs in november I thought it was about time to do something about that. I didn’t feel good, every move that I made was too much. I was just a lazy, fat bastard. So then I hired a personal trainer. We did some serious running, lifting and kickboxing (love that!). In the end I want to end up on 209 lbs, but that’s very far away still, but I’m happy to say that I already lost 29 lbs so far!

So, then it’s time to ask the 2 questions. First is, where do you want to go?

- For starters I want this blog to really kick in. I want it to become very successful and more important, I want YOU to be succesful through the info I will be sharing here. From a business point of view (because in the end we all want to make money, right?) I want to gather a massive list of followers on email, Facebook and Twitter.

- I told you I did very well with the media buys. Unfortunately lately I’ve not been doing so well with them unfortunately so I really have to work on it to get them going again.

- Last year I made my first steps into social media marketing. Although I had some small successes, this really has to kick off still. I want to really get the hang of this as I think there is MUCH money to be made there.

- Also I want to start my first webshop. Probably you wonder why I would want something that is so time consuming while I have so many other things to do. But I really want to do this and learn a lot from it. I have never setup a campaign where I did everything from the advertising until the physical shipping itself. I think there is much to be learned by this project.

- I want to reach the 209 lbs by may 28th (my birthday).

- I really love the new Ferrari 458 Italia. If I could afford it by the end of the year, I would be a VERY happy man. You’ll come to know that I’m a supercar fanatic, so you can expect some posts about new exotics once in a while too.

So, question 2: What’s been working so far?

- I started the blog on january 1, and the traffic is starting to come in now. I already got a healthy list and many Twitter followers. This is going in the right direction.

- The media buys HAVE been working, but I really have to kick it up a notch to get them going again.

- Social media worked, but also in this area I have to spend more time into it to really get to the bottom of it and get it seriously going.

- My PPC campaigns are still going strong. This is still my core business. They have been doing well for over 3 years now. However I had some good campaigns in the financial vertical, but due to some setbacks these campaigns have been lacking and I need to start all over with them again with new landingpages that fit better into the current demand.

So to sum up what I have to do in 2010: Get this blog going, get the media buys going again, step into social media marketing, improve the PPC campaigns, start the webshop, get healthy at 209 lbs and buy myself a Ferrari 548 Italia by the end of the year.

So, what are your goals for 2010?

Tags: 2010, goals, marketing, resolutions
Posted in General | 5 Comments »