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Spending Money
September 08, 2004
After a tough couple of days meeting a huge and extremely boring offline deadline, I found myself with free time today, and instead of working on all of the different ideas I have, I've been spending time figuring out where to spend my money.
When I first started out on my own, ten years ago, I spent money. It wasn't really my money, it was more the bank's money. But I took a look at my market, and realized that the only way I was going to get anywhere was to appear as non-desperate as I could. And that meant spending money on quality business supplies. If I remember correctly, I shelled out over a thousand dollars for business letterhead.
The thing is, it worked. I used that letterhead to market my services, and I got responses. Eventually, I moved out of that field, into the field I'm in now - it's one where I don't have to market my services, which is nice. But when I moved into this field, I again had to spend money. This time around, it was software. I paid $500 for software when I landed my first assignment. Three years later I paid another $500 when I switched to another brand of software, one which increased my productivity and is something I consider one of the best buys I've ever made.
So today, I had a brainstorm. If I want to make it in this new venture, I've got to treat it like a business. Yes, I see that people can - and often do - get results without spending a dime. There's a lot of free information out there on the Internet. But the thing is, I have offline work that pays the bills, and if I purchase something that will give me the nuts and bolts then the time I spent reading it sure beats the time it would have taken me to ferret out similar information from the Internet. And if I purchase something that automates something that I need to do, again, that saves me time.
And time, really, is money.
So now, all I have to do is decide what I need. That's the hard part. There are so many products out there, and they all make some pretty amazing claims.
I bought James Martell's Affiliate Marketer's Handbook when I first started looking into affiliate marketing. I'd say that it was worth every penny of its somewhat hefty price tag. My mission now is to (1) implement James' system, and (2) find other information products which are of as high quality.
I'm going to start working on (1) tomorrow. I'll continue researching today, and hopefully end up with (2) sometime tonight. A little backwards, I know, but that boring deadline really tired me out, and I don't have any energy to think much today - I'd rather find something tonight that will spoonfeed me some motivation. And if I don't find anything, I guess I'll just hop over to SBI and buy MYSS. I've been meaning to do that for a while.
- BJ
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Posted by BJ at 08:11 PM in Internet Marketing | Permalink
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