Justin Goff

Three years ago I was a bum.  I hated to read, I wasn’t into learning new things. I had no reason to. I watched 5 hours of mind numbing TV everyday and had no idea what I wanted in life. I was extremely self absorbed, NEVER thinking of anyone besides myself. I found myself in a gym maybe once a month if I was lucky. My post college plan was to just grab a job in sports, which would hopefully make me a lot of money. I was materialistic. I tried to find happiness in the wrong places. Thinking that if I only had more money, a better car, a better apartment, my happiness would somehow improve. I had no big goals, no big dreams or anything of the sort. I didn’t need anything more than what I had at the time. I was content.

One random day, I was reading some article online and it referenced the book Fight Club. I had never seen the movie or read the book. It sounded cool, so on a whim I went out to Barnes and Nobles and picked it up. A few days later I pulled it off my desk, laid on my bed and read the whole thing. I was completely blown away. I remember lying there after finishing, and just trying to grasp everything I just read.

Here it was, a paperback theme song for my life. I was Jack. Everyday was just another monotonous step in my life. No challenges, no moments of triumph, no realizations, no learning, no progress. I was slowly striving for mediocrity.

In the three years since, my life has changed more than I could have thought. I’m much more self aware now. I understand people and situations better. I know what I want in my life when it comes to business, relationships and friends. I just a bought a new Jeep this weekend. A couple years ago this would have been a huge deal to me, but now it really doesn’t hit me the same. Don’t get me wrong, I love the way I feel when Im in it and I like the way it looks, but beyond that it’s just a vehicle to me. A couple years ago, I’m not so sure that would have been the case. To me it represents small progress in my life ; a slight reward for going out and continuing to push myself when it comes to my business.

It’s crazy to look back at posts I made on this blog even last year. What the hell was I thinking? I’m sure I’ll feel the same way when I read this a year from now as well. But I think that’s a good thing. It shows that I’m still learning and making progress. As Chuck says in Fight Club…

May I never be complete. May I never be content. May I never be perfect. Deliver me, Tyler, from being perfect and complete.

Looking back I can tell I’m making progress. Will I ever get to where I want? Probably not, but that’s not the goal. There is no end game. No final stage to pass through. I hope I’m always striving for more ; always pushing myself past what I think is possible. That’s the end goal.

My host transitioned my site to a new platform, which apparently didnt support the version of wordpress I was running.  So everything got reversed, and all of your RSS feeds probably got loaded up with old posts (I know mine did)

I apologize to all of you for that.  Im not a tech guy, so it took me a bit of time to find someone to update it for me.  It’s all better now, and I’ll be posting this upcoming week… Some cool things goin down!

-Justin

Edit - Site sold

So it’s been about 1.5 weeks now since I’ve returned from San Francisco from the Elite Retreat. When I was done with the conference, I had hundreds of ideas literally flowing in my head. I was itching to get home and get cracking on them. I sat down and talked with my partner for the fitness site last week and we mapped out some plans for what we need to do to get our site at least to a soft launch. I erased all the details and whittled the site down to the core of what’s needed for a launch. I’d rather launch with all the gizmos and gadgets, but I guess it’s also beneficial to get going and work out bugs.

Ever since that sit down, I’ve just felt a bit overwhelmed and can’t really find one thing to concentrate on. Getting content ready, organizing designers, programmers, logo makers, contracts and everything else that goes into making a new site is extremely time consuming and taxing. All I want to do is get this thing up and start putting content on it, but our designer is taking longer than expected, and producing high quality articles/videos is not easy. I’ve been discouraged a few times this past week and got nothing accomplished for about 3 days. I jumped back into the saddle today and we knocked out some solid videos, and plan on doing some more this weekend.I really just feel that conferences can be tough on you cause they’re like a ramped up energy drink. You have two days of nothing but business talk and you don’t care about anything except absorbing as much information as possible. Everything else in your life becomes a detail. Then when it’s all done, you make the trip home, organize everything you learned, catch up on email, other problems, laundry, rent etc… It’s really a ton of crap all coming at you at once. On top of all that you have a boatload of ideas running rampant through your head and you just want to start implementing them as soon as possible.

You really go from one extreme to another. 10 days ago I was in a room getting personal help from Brian Clark, Shoemoney and Aaron Wall…… now I’m sitting in my room all by myself trying to crank out content and organize business plans. Quite different.

My plan for this weekend is to really focus on 1-2 major things that I want to get done. I’m trying to come up with a new name for another membership site/product site that I’m going to be starting, and also I’m looking to get everything straightened out with the designer for our fitness site.

Conference hangovers - Have you ever experienced one? If so are there any good ways to go about dealing with it??? Or am I just too drunk to be writing this post?

Photo Cred: DK

I posted a few months ago that I was planning to attend Elite Retreat this week. It’s got a $5k price tag, which I think is great because it weeds out all the people who aren’t serious. Everyone coming to this conference wants to make a real change in their business and their lives so it was an awesome group of people to be around.

The speakers at the event were awesome and they really went out of their way to help. The guys leading it were Brian Clark, Aaron Wall, Neil Patel, Andy Liu, Jeremy and there was a special segment by Guy Kawasaki and Matt Mullenweg. Some of the speakers had full presentations prepared and then did a Q&A. Some of them stood up and just spoke about whatever was on their mind and then took questions as they went along. It was a nice mix and I learned a lot from the speakers. I’ll go over some specifics…

• Brian - He was a HUGE help to me. Prolly more so than anyone else at the conference. I told him a bit about my new site and he pulled me aside the first day and went over a bunch of frameworks and business model setups with me that would set the foundation for our business. If you dont know Brian yet, he runs CopyBlogger.com and has had some great success with membership sites, joint ventures, affiliate marketing and I’m assuming consulting as well. My new fitness site is going to be a very similar business model to a lot of his sites and he was able to really relate to what I was doing. He opened my eyes to the idea of joint ventures, which I think will be money when we launch new projects.

• Aaron Wall - I’ve been reading SEObook for the past year or so now and have always thought Aaron had the best search marketing blog out there. His search knowledge is amazing, and he tests so many things that he really knows specifics when he talks about SEO. I think the biggest thing I learned from him was promoting 4-5 pieces of great content on your site to draw links. He does really well with the tools and guides on his site which draw him massive amounts of links.

• Neil Patel - Neil is the social media guru. He was a bit haphazard with his presentation, but he really opened up my eyes to the power of social media for gaining links. Some of his specific YouTube and Facebook examples were pretty startling and I got some great traffic driving ideas from him.

• Andy Liu - I knew nothing about Andy Liu before the conference. He’s the CEO of BuddyTv.com, and one of the smartest all around people I’ve ever talked to. A lot of the guys in online marketing are very smart in online marketing but when it comes to other business areas they’re lost. Andy is a flat out genius when it comes to all areas of business. He really made me see the value in being analytical and testing stuff to no end. I’ve never been into testing ideas, but it’s amazing how big of a difference testing can make in your business.

• Jeremy - Shoe talked a lot about his new project Fighters.com. It’s gonna be a social network(ish) type site for mixed martial arts. There’s some big competition in the MMA space, but knowing Jeremy’s past success he’ll make this project an industry leader within a year or two. Jeremy helped me a bit one on one when we were talking about my new fitness site. He gave me some great ideas for viraling our videos on YouTube and driving traffic to them.

• Guy Kawasaki - Guy talked a bunch about his new projects Truemors and AllTop. He’s one of the best public speakers I’ve ever seen. He really has that engaging charismatic type personality that’s easy to get sucked into. I asked Guy a question about how he’s developed so many benficial relationships over the years, and he really gave a good answer which went into depth about how you really just need to care a lot about other people and help them all the time. If you help people out, they’ll be more than willing to help you down the road. Being the slight narcissist that I am, this was a wake up call for me, and I’m really gonna start actively working at being more like Guy in this sense.

• Matt Mullenweg - Matt is the creator of Wordpress. He’s a pretty smart kid, and I think his best quality is his passion for open source. He really loves the wordpress brand and he has a real zest for helping other people. It shines through in his love for Wordpress.

Those were all the guys who spoke at the event. I took a lot away from the 1 on 1 sessions and the site critiques from everyone on the panel. Some things I never thought about with design and how people use a site were brought up by Brian and Aaron a lot. Both of them really seem to understand site architecture and how it affects the user. Thats a wrap on the speakers. Overall it would have been worth it had we just had the speakers there, but add to it the networking I got to do with the other attendees and it was definitely worth it. There were some absolute baller attendees there. Tons of guys were pulling middles 6 figures every month from a wide variety of stuff that ranged from affiliate marketing to membership sites to PPC to e-commerce sites. It was pretty impressive to say the least. Here’s a few of the guys I got to know pretty well…

• DK - He helped with the conference and was in charge of getting anything the attendees needed. He runs a San Diego chiropractic clinic and has been working to drive traffic through Google. He ranks #1 for the term, so he must be learning. I got to talk to him a bit, and I think he has some cool conference ideas in the works.

• Harrison - This is the 15 year old affiliate marketing phenom. Yeh thats right 15. Lord knows I wouldn’t have been mature enough or even close to smart enough to run a business at 15, but he definitely is. Funny dude too…

• Jeremy H - Jeremy used to do SEO and PPC for big corporate companies. Now he runs his own search marketing company and seems to be doing very well. He was a very cool guy and also the first guy I’ve ever met to crash his own plane.

• Arjun (AJ) - AJ’s one of the big dogs behind AffiliatePrograms.com, PAP and CAP. He’s only 21, but he’s doing some big things along with his partners. It was cool to talk poker affiliating with him and hear some of the big plans they have for all 3 brands. They have some great ideas rolling out in the future.

• Scott - Scott makes information products for the IT sector. He knows a lot about getting DVDs and CDs produced so I’ll be droppin him some emails when I get that part cracking on my new site.

• Slaven - This fella is a badass at PPC. Ive never done any PPC before, and Im planning to with my new site, so I think Slaven will be a great help when I have some questions on more advanced stuff.

• Brian M - Brian was a fellow Columbus guy who’s working full time right now, but he has some big goals for the future that entail working for himself. Right now he runs a Black celeb blog which I think has potential to be a great niche if he wants to elevate it into an “African American Gawker” type network.

• Zac Johnson - Zac has a pretty well known affiliate blog out there right now. He put up one of his sites for critique and to get some ideas from the panel. It was a MySpace layout/widget/picture type site that’s done well for him, but he said it’s been sitting stagnant for a while, and now theres things out there like RockYou and Slide that are taking the space over. Zac’s got a pretty big network of sites right now, and his blog is very solid. I highly recommend checkin it out…

• Giovanna Wall - Giovanna is Aaron’s wife. She told me how they met and it was though SEObook which I have to say is pretty cool. I talked to her a bit about SEObook and how they are doing with the transition to the new membership training site. It’s taken a lot of stress off of Aaron, but the profits are down right now (still makin $50k a month, haha). I told her about my fitness site and she said her and Aaron would be interested in helpin beta test since they both want to get back to working out regularly. I told her we’d be glad to help em out.

Overall thoughts

So was the conference worth $5,000+? Absolutely. There’s tons of single ideas that I got from Elite Retreat that will make up $5k in no time. The overall business models that I learned will pay dividends for a long time, and the contacts I’ll have to network with now are all willing to help each other out. I’m looking forward to getting my fitness site up and running and getting some feedback from all of the guys I met, along with all of you guys who read my blog every day… I’m pretty pumped to say the least…. If you have any questions throw ‘em at me in the comments….

-Justin

As most of you guys know, I’m a pretty big mixed martial arts (MMA) fan.  If you don’t follow it closely, here’s a summary of what’s going on.  The UFC right now is the biggest name in MMA.  Most people don’t even know what MMA is, they just call it UFC fighting.  The UFC has the best fighters in the game right now.  Smaller organizations are trying to grab a few of their fighters and kick start their organization off the heels of one or two big name guys.  It hasn’t been a very successful strategy yet for any of them, but there’s a few organizations on the horizon that are going to be making some noise due to their great strategy that’s based on power.  Some of these are prime examples and correlate well with The 48 Laws of Power.

Court attention at all cost

• Gary Shaw is the president of an upstart MMA league called EliteXC.  Gary Shaw understands how power works.  He’s the smaller organization and has nothing to lose by throwing stones at the UFC.  He just wants to be heard and to get EliteXC’s name in the press.  Well he’s done a great job at that.  Robert Greene states that you should always appear larger than normal, don’t get lost in oblivion, stand out from the masses.   Gary Shaw has doen this perfectly by throwing numerous insults at Dana White and the UFC.  He’s stated over and over again in press conferences that Dana White is scared of his organization, and that he thinks the fighters in EliteXC are the world champions.

Make other people come to you - Use bait if necessary

• Would Dana White mention EliteXC for any reason if Gary Shaw didn’t call him out?  Of course not.  It would be like Google mentioning some startup search company.  Gary Shaw baited Dana in by appealing to his ego and hot head.  Dana, trying to hold up his macho image fires off line after line defending the UFC and trying to insult Gary Shaw.  The more he talks, the more Gary Shaw wins.  Perfect bait.

Win through your actions - never through argument

• What does Dana white seek to gain from arguing with Gary Shaw?  Nothing.  Keep your mouth shut Dana and keep producing the best MMA tv show and pay per view out there and people will see why the UFC is a better product.

Disdain things you can not have - Ignoring them is the best revenge

• Ding Ding Ding!!!  Dana White needs to read this paragraph one hundred times over.   By acknowledging a petty problem, you give it credibility.  EliteXC was nothing when Shaw started throwing insults at the UFC.  Dana White should have realized that the UFC was miles ahead of the small organizations and treated them like so.  Anytime he got a question or comment about one of them, all he had to say was non chalantly “no comment” or “next question”.  It sounds too easy, but thats all he needed to do.  By lashing back out at Gary Shaw, Dana was giving EliteXC credibility.  Think about it…. If you were sitting at the bar with your girlfriend and some little dork with pimples and no game tried to hit on her would you think anything of it.  Nah you’d laugh, tease him a bit and keep talking to your girlfriend.  Now how about if George Clooney came up with a big smile on his face and smoothly started talking to her?  Obviously you’d be a bit more worried.  George Clooney is a legitimate threat to steal your girlfriend, while the Poindexter has no shot whatsoever.   EliteXC had no chance of stealing the UFC’s thunder, but Dana’s ego gave them some hope…

Overall thoughts

• Gary Shaw took his no name organization into the spotlight by playing Dana White like a fiddle.  EliteXC rode the credibility Dana gave them and just inked a deal with CBS to broadcast fights on Saturday nights.  The laws of power have been around for centuries and are grounded in events and situations that continue to rise up over time.  Learn them now and make them a part of your life.  When you get to the point that you make decisions based on the 48 laws without thinking, you’ve made it.  The goal is to be like water.  Never rigid in your approach, always  adapting and changing to the situation.  Kudos to Gary Shaw for understanding power and using it to his advantage.

Sooner or later I figured I was going to hit a rough patch, but I didn’t think it was going to be all at once.  I’ve lost a ton of traffic to my main income producing pages (about 50-60%) and the traffic Im getting now, just doesn’t seem to be converting like it used to.

My income for the past 4 months or so has been around 10k net profit.  For March, I’m going to be lucky to net 2k.  I kinda thought this was going to happen, as I really have neglected by link building with my pages and have put more focus towards my MMA site and also the new fitness site Im working on.  I guess I just didn’t expect it to all crash down at once.
I was planning on trying to squeek by for the next 2 months until my fitness site hits the ground running, but I’m starting to think that might be a bad idea.  A few quality link purchases might be a good investment for me at this point to try and boost my SE rankings back to the top for my top earning pages.

I know long term that the fitness site is going to be a HUGE hit.  There’s no doubt in my mind.  It’s gonna really help people and make a difference in their lives, and also be huge earner for me and my partner.  My projection for us in 1.5-2 years is to be making between $1-$2 million off the site.  Between the community we are going to build, our branding, the residual income, PPC, and all of our products…I know it’s going to be a big winner.

But until that day comes, I still need to make do with what I have right now.   So I’m reachin out to you guys who read my blog all the time… Whats the best way to get some good pages that used to rank well, back up into the top tier results?

To everyone who reads my blog, and likes the posts I’m sorry for not writing for 2 months. It’s not that I didn’t have the time or didn’t wanna write, I really just wasn’t motivated to write anything. Every idea I had for a post seemed rehashed and too general so I just stopped writing. Alright now that I got that out of the way, lets move on to what this piece is really about.

I’ve mentioned before that I had plans before of building up a great network of gambling sites and blogs, which I know would have done very well. But to be truthful, I’m in a different place now than I was when I wrote those posts. I used to be a huge poker player and sports bettor a few years ago. I was really into both and I spent a lot of time watchin games and playin tournaments. I was always reading about poker as well and learning as much as I could. A lot of crap has changed since then….. I don’t bet on sports anymore, and I haven’t played a hand of online poker in prolly over 2 years. I’m just not into either of them as much anymore.
While the poker and gambling websites are fun and the money is great, I feel like there’s always this slightly empty feeling about it all. I don’t have a real connection with the people who I profit from, and in all essence Im not really adding a ton of value into their lives. Nothing I’m doing for them is really life changing. It’s not something they’ll tell their friends and family about.

With that said, my new project is going to be a fitness site. I’ve partnered with my personal trainer on the site, and we’re out to create a great community and truly make a difference in people’s lives. After doing research for the project, I feel like it’s going to be very profitable and also make a huge difference in the lives of our community. If I can get people to change their lifestyle and exercise more, eat better, live longer and feel more confident about themselves all while making some good money then I think I have a winning combination.

We’re going to be going after many different streams of revenue with this site and I think our business model is as solid as can be.  We’re going to use a combination of products, subscription and some affiliate sales.  The more I get into this, I’m starting to realize there’s so much more money to be made through other revenue streams besides affiliate marketing.  I’m really pumped to be able to do some big time email and PPC marketing.  There’s a lot to learn still, but were on the right path….

I’ll keep ya updated…

For those of you who have been following my blog for a while, you’ve noticed that I made some great strides in October and November. December dipped a bit below November, but still a great month for me overall. I just recently took a big hit with one of my poker pages that was ranking very well and bringing in probably 40-50% of my income for the past three months. It sucks to say the least, but I think it was good for me long term because it’s forcing me to get my ass in gear and to start building more sites.

This got me thinking last week about what I really would like to do with my business. Sure making 10k per month is great for me right now and I love every bit of it…but where do I go from here? I’m in a transitional period right now and I feel like I need to make a big decision. What I have now, could slip out from under me and I could be back to making 2k a month in no time. Well that’s not what I want to do. I want to build sites that are the best in the industry. Sites that tons of people use everyday, to get information from or to connect with other people. I decided last week that I need to make the next step, and in order to do that I need to learn more. Shoemoney posted about 10 days ago about Elite Retreat in San Francisco. It caught my attention and after reading about it, I think I’m the exact type of person that will get a lot out of a conference like this. Sure the price tag is a bit steep ($5k), but with the quality speakers and the personal attention you receive, I feel like my eyes are gonna be opened to a whole new way of doing business. I have no doubt in my mind that I’ll be able to earn back all of the money I spend on this trip within two months of coming back.

To be the best, it helps to learn from the best. And that’s exactly what I’ll be doing. I don’t think this could come at a better time for me. I’m getting used to doing the same things over and over with my websites, and I need to be exposed to new ways of making money….. I’ve set a new goal for the end of 2008. It might seem ridiculous to a lot of you guys….hell it seemed ridiculous to me when I posted it on my wall this past week. I’m going to be making 30k per month by the end of 2008. I feel like 2007 was a great jump for me, but 2008 will mark my transition into becoming a real publisher.

I think we should all strive to be the best at what we do. Push ourselves beyond what we think is even possible. The only way to find out is to try…

As an entrepreneur, we all dream of the day when we’re able to quit our jobs and be out on our own.  For a lot of people the main thing that deters them from venturing out on their own is their fear.  As Tim Ferriss says “uncertainty and the prospect of failure can be very scary noises in the shadows.  Most people will choose unhappiness over uncertainty.”  This is a hard lesson for people to deal with and the majority of them are scared to take the first major step.

Most people who avoid quitting their jobs do so by convincing themselves that their jobs aren’t that bad ; that things could be worse and that their situation is likely to improve if they get a raise.  This clever rationalization will work if you’re in a mediocre or lackluster job.  Only when you absolutely HATE your situation, will most people force themselves to make a real change in their life.

Stop making excuses 

As Napoleon Hill stated, people who do not succeed all have one trait in common.  They have alibis to explain their lack of achievement.  Some of the most popular alibis people have are…

• If only I didnt have a wife and family…
• If only I had enough pull…
• If only I had money…
• If only I had a good education…
• If only I had good health…
• If only I could get a job….
• If only times were better…
• If only the conditions were better…
• If only I were younger….

There’s always a hundred reasons not to do something.  It’s easy to get sucked in by excuses and the comfort of your current job.  But look at the long term benefits of branching out on your own.  Your success will depend on you.  You have the opportunity to increase your happiness, your income and your free time all based on your own work ethic.  That’s probably much better than your current situation

As Seth Godin so perfectly stated, “The best time to start was last year.  The second best time to start is right now”  If one of your goals is to run your own business, get a plan in place and take action now.  For real…. now!

Bonus motivation - Sly Stallone’s story which inspired the movie Rocky as told by Tony Robbins….