Swimming With Sharks

One of the most frustrating, embarrassing and deflating things that you can ever have happen to you in business is to be burnt by a business partner.  This is someone you’ve trusted, you’ve invested yourself into (time, effort, money, etc) and you’ve set out with the best of intentions to have great shared success with them, but then they basically screw you over.

I’ve been down this road a couple of times and it can really make you question yourself.

About seven or eight years ago when I was starting out with internet marketing, I was very heavily focused on learning to generate traffic.

I think I’ve said it numerous times in these daily emails but when you’re just learning to do marketing online, the most important skills you can learn are: copywriting, how to construct an offer that converts and driving traffic.  If you can do any of those three things, you’ve got a better than average chance of having some success.

So as I was saying, I was learning to drive traffic and was having some success – especially in CPA type offers.  I had one offer for a Dyson vacuum lead gen that was generating me good numbers and excellent financial returns.  Back then, there were small communities where guys hung out talking traffic and my success caught the attention of a few people.

A few of these guys had products on Clickbank in the internet marketing space, so they suggested I try promoting those as an affiliate.  It took me a few weeks to figure out how to have some success and before long, I was driving good sales to them on a daily basis.

In fact, I’d become so successful at selling Clickbank products that one day they told me I was an Apex affiliate which is one of their top 100 affiliates.  That garnered more interest from some of the people I was getting to know.

The funny thing was, I still had my job and this was all happening in my spare time.  I wasn’t really taking it seriously and eventually one of the guys I’d gotten to know suggested that I partner with him on a couple things.

Long story short, I did the work and never got paid for it.  This guy took pictures of his new Maserati for the internet and meanwhile owed me twenty-five grand.

There have been one or two other instances over the years where I’ve partnered with someone in the internet marketing space only to end up getting burned.

The bottom line is, when you swim with sharks, you should expect to get bitten.  It can be exciting and you can learn a lot, but eventually, the shark will do what nature designed it to do and that takes a bite out of you.

That’s not to say that all partnerships online are bad, in fact, I’ve had more dozens of positive experiences for every bad one.  I’m just saying that you need to be careful and that you should think about ways to minimise your risk.  I assumed a guy who was buying high-end saunas for his beach house in La Jolla and driving a new sports car was good at his word – that was a mistake.

Here’s the thing, none of those bad experiences really set me back.  Sure, I got nipped by the sharks, but the reality is that I learned how to drive traffic, I learned how to build offers and I learned how to write passable copy.  I picked up the skills that allow me to be self-sufficient online.

They are like my own shark proof cage and I encourage you to develop them as well.

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