By Lilian Okado

Can I really succeed as a freelance writer?

Considering the global economic downturn no other time is this question more frequently asked. Many are worried about the possible demise of online jobs as offline opportunities diminish and hard times set in. With this in mind it is reasonable for an aspiring writer to wonder whether a writing career is worth pushing or getting into knowing full well that loads of companies around the world are aggressively scaling down.

It is apparent that there already exists a huge market of already established writers on the web who have more experience and undoubtedly may command a significant share of the spoils. However let me point out the not so obvious: opportunities (read writing opportunities) are usually better in a down economy. So there is no perfect time to get started. I’m sure you have heard the phrase: “There’s no time like the present.”

Nevertheless we cannot ignore the fact that a receding global economy causes people to react and opt to seek out an extra income on the internet. Whether residing in an ailing market or not, the rules of success in any career remain the same.

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Hi All. By now hopefully you will have read all our posts on the Arbitrage Conspiracy and listened to the Shaun Casey webinar. As we have said before, we are going back in with Arbitrage Conspiracy for round 2, especially since we heard Aymen describe the improvements they have made for Arbitrage 2 in the webinar for affiliates. Despite not responding to our emails – the Arbitrage Team appear to have heard the feedback from round one participants and have made solid changes to the program. Anyway we are now more convinced than ever that Arbitrage 2 is a great option; we are ready to do this. You know, every time we listen to these guys we realise we have been thinking waaaay too small.

One encouraging statistic Aymen mentioned in the webinar is success ratios for business opportunities. Apparently a good success rate for business opportunities is between 2 – 5% i.e. between 2 – 5% of people actually succeed. Well, Arbitrage Conspiracy 1 achieved a whopping 20 – 22% success rate. That means 20 – 22%  of Arbitrage round 1 participants made money on the program. That really is an outstanding figure and a great achievement. We are part of that 20 – 22% success rate; we did make some money in round 1 – but not what we had anticipated. Like we have said before, our circumstances impacted on our outcome i.e. we were travelling and by the time we got home our kids got (and stayed) sick from nearly 2 months and so we lost momentum. And now? We are ready to do it – waaaay better this time.

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Hi All. We are on some major synchronicity at the moment. Just after I wrote the article Network Responsibility we received an email from Max Bounty telling us:

“Max Bounty has just been ranked one of the top 20 performance marketing networks by Revenue Performance’s Online Advertising BlueBook. Revenue Performance, originally named Revenue Magazine, is one of the leading sources of business strategies, innovative marketing methods, effective online advertising techniques and emerging trends in technology for internet marketers. Their Top 20 list is the result of aggregating expert views, traffic data, measures of industry influence and many other pieces of information that they have researched. You can view the full rankings…. it is a tremendous honor to be ranked in the top 20 alongside such companies as Commission Junction, LinkShare, and MediaTrust.”

Cool huh? So if you have been thinking about joining a CPA Network consider this recommendation. And like I said in the previous article we have had really good experience with our affiliate manager- much better than with lots of other networks we are registered with. Anyway, I’ll leave it with you – just thought you might like to know.

Hi All

Further to the post about the changes to the FTC and the interview organised by Tru-Guru with Linda Goodman we just thought we’d share our experience as to why it’s sooo important to stay on top of the changes across the industry.

As you know we are relative PPC newbies ourselves. Well, be warned. Google cuts no slack for newbies – we got slapped – big time. We had our Google account suspended – which actually means closed. Why? because we chose the wrong campaigns to promote. Perhaps we are slow or something – but we really didn’t make the connection… instinctively we must have made some connection but apparently it didn’t make it to the frontal lobes…

When we were choosing campaigns to promote on Google we would try and vet the campaigns ourselves by filling out as much of the offer as possible to see how it worked.  So, for example, in the case of some grants campaigns we ran – we discovered that prospects would be billed within a week, despite the landing page advertising a ‘free trial‘. So we wrote an article telling people why we thought the grants packages are a good idea in principal and then TOLD them subscribers would be billed unless they canceled within a week. We made every effort to be transparent and ethical. Evidently when Google decided to revoke our account they didn’t consider the whole account. And it shows no mercy for being gullible/stupid/trusting – you pick the descriptor.

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This is the 4th post in the series of the Arbitrage Conspiracy Review ahead of the imminent product Sex, Drugs and Lazy Internet Millionaires release.  So far we’ve looked at different aspects of the course – we Introduce the Arbitrage Conspiracy, we looked at the mindset and focused on the free tools of the program. What we would like to do in this article is talk about some of the things Arbitrage Conspiracy (AC) did not do that we wished they had. These things fall into two main areas of teaching method and customer service. The other big issue for us was discussed in our post Mindset, we were frustrated AC alluded to but did not develop the idea that Arbitrage Conspiracy is more than PPC it is independent income generating strategy. We won’t revisit that in this article. Suffice to mention it here.

The course promised a ‘real ‘peak over the shoulder’ while a campaign was built and to our mind they never actually delivered. They never took us, step by step – at least not the way we had imagined, through a campaign. we thought they were going to start a campaign or two for students to follow through throughout the course. Instead, they logged onto sites and programs to show how they worked – but they never walked us through a campaign. That said, the lessons were comprehensive and covered every aspect of PPC marketing AC style. And we are very much ‘monkey see monkey do’ type people – so watching a campaign would have been useful.

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Hi All. We just had to post this. Yesterday we received a link to a recently recorded webinar between Aymen and Shawn Casey (another internet guru). I listened to that interview and was delighted to hear Aymen talk because he articulated the points we have been writing about. We are posting this for those of you with no direct experience of Aymen/Arbitrage Conspiracy so you can hear for yourself. Have a listen and see if you can hear what we have been describing then decide for yourself if you think it’s good value or not. Enjoy.

As an aside, we find that whole “7 Steps to Internet Income in 7 Days” irritating internet marketing hype; you know ‘if you eat nothing but raw food for seven days you could completely transform your intestinal health…’ Yeah right. Statements like that are meaningless, annoying and they get you to listen. We are not sure if that kind of hook is a good thing because it sets up unreal expectations. Fortunately they do counter it by discussing the demands/realities of building a business and that’s what this is – a business.

So ignore the marketing silliness, listen/watch the video and we think you will find some valuable information.