The pro-gay post even gay people will hate! 5 Sep 2015 1:49 PM (10 years ago)
I expect nearly everyone to disagree with most of this post. You probably have participated in discussions about legalizing gay marriage. Did you ever consider that the debate itself is offensive.
I’m writing this while a Kentucky clerk is in jail for contempt for failing to issue marriage licenses to gay people. I read an article on the topic and found it shocking when they mentioned the $35.50 fee for obtaining a marriage license. I was shocked that anyone would want to pay a government to be involved in their union. It is my strongly held conviction that marriage should be between the involved people and optionally their god(s) only. Why in the world should Kentucky or the US Government be an additional party in the union? I don’t want to marry my wife AND Colorado. I just want to marry my wife.
Did you know that state governments can change your marriage contract without your consent? Get married in California, but then move to Texas and get divorced, it is Texas laws which will apply to the divorce. Even if you don’t move, divorce laws might change in your state. Personally, I am not comfortable with the idea that outside parties can change the legal ramifications of a contract that I might sign. When a contract is agreed to, it should be iron clad, not malleable without consent. Marriage should be the most secure contract there is.
By participating in a discussion about which marriages should be legal, you implicitly accept that the government should be involved and that some marriages should not be legal. Even if you are pro-gay-marriage, you are probably against polygamy or incestual marriages.
It is my position that ALL marriage contracts should be legal. As long as both or all parties can be reasonably assumed to have the mental capacity to sign a contract and are NOT under duress. When I say ALL, I mean ALL. The most important parts of a marriage contract are that people agree to be committed to serve each other and work together in united lifetime goals.
Anyone should be able to marry ANYONE.
man/woman
man/man
woman/woman
brother/brother
mother/son
ANYONE.
When I say that, I don’t mean that they should be having sex. I think incest is disgusting, but I don’t think we need laws protecting adults from non-harmful consenting situations. It is my assumption that incestual marriages would be without sex.
Imagine that two underprivileged identical twin brothers decide to marry each other at age 18, one could work to support the other through law or medical school. Both would be better off because they worked together. The uneducated sibling would be protected by divorce law entitling them to a settlement and possible alimony. If they want, they could (while still married to each other) marry one or more women and work as co-fathers to any children produced. The educated brother could provide well financially freeing up the other brother to be a stay at home dad giving the kids the best of both worlds.
Notice that I wasn’t talking about sex. Marriage and sex don’t have to be related and the sex part is none of the government’s business. No victim=no crime. Morality should not and to a huge degree cannot be legislated.
To be crystal clear, I don’t support physical incest. I also believe that young people are not emotionally mature enough to give consent for sex or marriage. I believe laws protecting young or vulnerable people are unfortunately necessary. Current laws do not allow young people to sign contracts or give sexual consent and while there is a natural grey area as people mature into adulthood, I think current laws do a reasonably good job of protecting the innocent. I support laws protecting people who need protection.
I am a statistically very normal hetero man married to one woman. But I think legally we should be allowed to take extra spouses if we wanted them. Bigamy is wrong, but polyandry, or polygyny should be legal as long as all parties are consenting. Polygamy has a bad wrap because it usually involves fundamentalist religious people forcing underage girls into arranged marriages. The religion and it’s views should be tolerated. But the girls should be old enough, and should have the freedom to marry whom they choose within or without the church. Polygamy is common in many foundational religious texts so it seems strange to attempt moral arguments against it.
In the shortest description I can think of, I believe in maximum freedom for the maximum number of people possible.
American freedom and liberty to pursue happiness are at the core of our nation’s ideals. Freedom is what our friends and relatives have fought and died for. Limiting anyone’s freedom is treasonous.
If you feel strongly about your moral position, you will retain your beliefs. But you are not your God. You are not sin free. Therefore, you are not qualified to cast judgement upon others. You are not qualified to determine moral laws. Just live and let live, and rest easy knowing your God is all knowing and all powerful enough to handle the situation. You can’t possibly think your god is so weak that he needs your help, so just trust in god and let it go.
A reminder to focus on the good things in life. 7 Sep 2012 7:02 AM (13 years ago)
So, first of all, it’s been a while since I’ve blogged. I make no apologies. I’ve been loving and living life. This blog has never been my source of income. For the curious, you should know that I’m still making a living working from home as an internet marketer focused on lead generation for lending companies.
I’ve taken advantage of being able to work from anywhere, and have spent lots of time with my family on the road in our little old RV. But enough of that….
I recently went to Burning Man 2012 in Black Rock City, NV and am friends with several other people who went. One of these people was there and when we visited her at her camp she proceeded to complain about something every time we saw her. Just now on Facebook she complained about having had 3 flat tires within 2 weeks. She punctuated this complaint with “FML”.
I didn’t know what FML stood for. I rightly guessed that it means Fuck My Life. I’m not offended by the language, but the attitude is untenable. I would never use such an anti-affirmation. I habitually remove from my news feed people spouting such attitudes. I prefer for my life to be permeated by positivity.
This made me think of John Halcyon Styn who I met at Burning Man. He does a thing called Hug Nation that my wife wanted to attend, and I enjoyed. He’s a little freaky by muggle standards but brings a wonderful message of love and joy. One of his favorite stories to share is “Crap or Cone”. He states that “At all times we each have 1 foot in dog shit and in our hand we’re holding an ice cream cone. Some people will put down the ice cream cone so they can smell their foot. Maybe we should ignore the dog shit and enjoy the ice cream.”
He’s got a point. Every day, there are both good and bad things we can choose to focus on. Life is beautiful, bountiful, and magnificent. Ignore the dog shit.
Learn to spell or die broke. 15 Jul 2011 11:03 PM (14 years ago)
Spelling errors might be costing you half of your sales.
I’ve been a closet spelling/grammar/punctuation nazi for years. When I read a blog post or sales page with what I consider significant errors, my mind is completely sidetracked. I stop thinking about your message, and start thinking about what needs to be fixed. If you have grave errors on your page, I think you are stupid and sloppy and won’t consider buying anything from you.
I know lots of affiliates with poor skills are successful, but you’d be more successful if you eliminated these mistakes.
I’m not the only one. This article from the BBC inspired me to finally say what I think. The article alleges that in one case, they saw sales double after correcting an error on a sales page. Of course, one split test is inadequate, but I’m confident that there is truth to it.
What are you going to do about it? If you want to improve yourself and your sales, follow my affiliate link here and educate yourself.
P.S. I don’t claim to be perfect. I overuse commas and I know I sometimes make other writing mistakes.
Amazon drops all CA affiliates… What to do if you are affected. 29 Jun 2011 11:41 PM (14 years ago)
It was inevitable that CA would pass this tax meant to increase tax revenue. As misguided as it is, you can’t expect a bunch of doddery old politicians to understand the economics of the internet.
Screw California for taxing even more money from it’s people!
Screw Amazon for dropping 1000’s of affiliates while still accepting traffic and sales from their sites. I think it’s often overlooked that there are countless online businesses which people have spent years building. These websites may have large volumes of visitors flowing through them to Amazon.com. Amazon is still accepting all the sales generated by affiliates but isn’t paying those affiliates for their hard work. It’s outright theft! I’m angrier at Amazon than California.
Enough ranting. Time to move on. Here in Colorado we faced the same thing many months ago. I remember reading news stories of Colorado based affiliates moving out of state to save their businesses. I didn’t move, but I still control an active Amazon affiliate account and they pay me from time to time. Here’s how:
1. Establish an out of state LLC or similar entity.
2. Use their registered agent service to forward your mail.
3. Open a bank account in the company’s name. It can still be a CA bank account.
That’s about it….and it’s a legit workaround. The LLC is a legal entity similar to a person for the purpose of opening an Amazon account. The LLC is the affiliate. You are merely an employee of said company. Amazon pays the company, then the company pays you. Because the LLC isn’t in CA, you shouldn’t have any troubles.
Now, where do you go from here? Well, out of state LLC’s have been very popular in Delaware, Nevada, and Wyoming. I’ve done some research on it and like Wyoming the best. Delaware is best for companies with stockholders. Nevada is OK but has occasionally thought about weakening some of it’s strong points. Wyoming has no state income tax and has never had legislation which threatened all the strong points of Wyoming LLCs.
I personally really like the “Wyoming Close LLC” entity and have 2 of them myself. The “Close LLC” is meant for family owned businesses and is well structured for estate planning. If you have lots of money, or plan on having lots of money, it might be a useful entity.
Remember that you need a registered agent service to forward your 1st class mail. They’ll forward your 1099’s and so forth. My personal experience is that the mail forwarding is marginal, so I won’t be recommending either of the 2 registered agents I currently use. But it still gets the job done.
Also, my experience of opening them was that it took FOREVER (7 weeks) with one of them. The other took about 2 weeks. If you have a serious Amazon business, you may want to pay to expedite service and would be well advised to compare complaints that different agents have received. Check the Better Business Bureau.
I also shopped for the cheapest services over the long term and may be getting what I paid for. That being said, you can switch registered agents if you have trouble with one of them.
Here is an affiliate link to a pretty big outfit. I’ll get a few bucks if you choose these guys. But I haven’t tried them out myself. www.incorporate.com
P.S. It doesn’t have to be Wyoming. Maybe you have trusted friends or relatives out of state somewhere. You can set up an LLC in any state that Amazon still accepts. Several states have no state income tax. Costs vary state to state.
Did I leave something out? Got a question? Please comment and tell us what you think about the Ca affiliate tax.
Earnings update March 2011, $6.1K net profit 4 Apr 2011 11:05 PM (14 years ago)
March was a little better than the month before:
Total Spent: $8,555.97
Gross Profit: $14,638.15
Net Profit: $6,082.18
ROI: 71%
So it’s not the bigtime, but I’m happy to have done better than the month before. On top of that, I basically took the month off. I did do a little work here and there, but mostly I’ve been on sabbatical. I’ve been working on hobbies like brewing (honey mead, merlot wine, apple cider, dark beer), and fixing up an old RV I bought to take the family camping this summer. I’m really enjoying the intellectual challenges of fixing up the RV. This thing has been sitting for several years and has a lot of complicated systems that need to be brought back online. Maybe I’ll shoot some pics/video of it.
Anyway, I expect the next few months to be okay, but I’m planning on taking a lot of time off this summer to take the family to some camping events.
To your success!
Danger Brown
Earnings update February 2011, $3.7K net profit 6 Mar 2011 10:03 PM (14 years ago)
February has been the worst month yet for me in a long time. First some numbers:
Total Spent: $6,580.07
Gross Profit: $10,242.92
Net Profit: $3,662.85
ROI: 55.7%
I really hate posting numbers like this. It’s embarrassing. But I made a commitment to share my results on this blog.
The 3 main reasons my income sucks right now:
1. I’ve been lazy
2. When I did work, I neglected my active campaigns to work on upcoming projects.
3. I have 5 kids and our 11 month old and my wife haven’t been sleeping well at night. So I wind up babysitting until 1 or 2 pm while my wife gets some shuteye. After that, I have trouble getting motivated feeling like the day is shot already.
I spent several days looking into and studying new niches and new traffic sources. Basically, it’s like I’ve been going back to school.
I spent about 7-10 days side-tracked working on developing a board game. Probably sounds silly to some people…. I’m a born entrepreneur and have always been easily side-tracked by whatever new idea infatuates me at the time. I’d put this as the #1 reason I’m not rich yet. A person really needs to focus on one thing to achieve great success in life. Learn from my experience. Focus on only 1 or 2 traffic sources and 1 or 2 niches.
To your success!
Danger Brown
3 reasons my income is in the shitter, and what I’m doing about it. 16 Feb 2011 11:26 AM (14 years ago)
My income is in the shitter. I’ll probably only net about $4K or so this month.
There are 3 reasons:
1. Normal cycles. I’ve been pushing financial related offers like payday loans. They always perform badly this time of year so I expected this to happen.
2. I’ve stuck with doing paid search and have started having trouble with MSN slapping campaigns or inexplicably not giving me volume. So I’ve had trouble scaling my campaigns.
3. I’m not building out new paid search campaigns right now. I’ve decided to switch to alternate traffic sources and new niches. Because I’m getting into doing completely new things, I’ve been spending time trying to figure out this new stuff and not doing things that will make me money today. Also, there will be a learning curve that’ll probably eat into my profit margins.
So you ask, “What is Danger going to do next?”
I’m thinking I’ll try some dating offers with small targeted media buys on individual sites. Later, after I understand media buys better, I’ll scale up with network and larger media buys and make a mountain of cash.
Why dating? Because it has the potential to go massive but also has low payouts which should allow for more efficient optimization of creatives, offers, etc. Example: A $30 payout diet rebill would require me to spend a bare minimum of $30 to test each new ad variation, but a $3 payout dating offer would require a minimum of only $3 per creative. So I figure with dating I’ll be able to throw a lot more shit at the wall and see what sticks.
Why small media buys? Because I’m sick of having a lack of control over my traffic. Most traffic sources involve a wildcard element. With search engine dependent traffic you can get a slap and be out of business in the blink of an eye. I know dating is big on Facebook, but they love to disapprove ads and even ban accounts over there. I figure that media buying gives the maximum amount of control over traffic and most especially traffic volume.
If you happen to know something about pushing dating offers via display, I’d love to hear from you (please comment). Right now I’m struggling to figure out the best sorts of sites to target.
Earnings update January 2011, $6.2K net profit 2 Feb 2011 10:03 PM (14 years ago)
January has been crap for me. It’s the worst month I’ve had since about 8 or 9 months ago.
Here are the totals for my January 2011 Affiliate marketing efforts.
Total Spent: $6662.13
Gross Profit: $12,837.00
Net Profit: $6,174.87
ROI: 92.6%
Though I can make the excuse that my niche (financial) tends to crap out in the winter, I’d expected to scale things up to compensate for that. My MSN campaigns have suffered from several slaps and I’ve been trying to adjust my landing pages to keep MSN happy. Just about 7 days ago I implemented a change that has slightly hurt my ROI but has so far kept the slaps away.
I’m getting sick of these slaps and unpredictable volume. I’m getting real interested in moving into other traffic sources.
Videos from parties at Affiliate Summit West 2011 16 Jan 2011 10:11 PM (14 years ago)
The first four clips are from the Affiliate Ball and the last video is from Shareasale’s party.
I rolled with some friends to a few other locations but didn’t think to take pictures most of the time. But of course, during the Affiliate Ball, there were something like 15 parties all at the same time. I shot these videos with my Motorola Droid X
Video: Shoemoney interviewed about Link Control 14 Jan 2011 10:02 PM (14 years ago)
An impromptu interview with Shoemoney at the airport in Las Vegas. It’s a nice overview of the newly launched Link Control. Initially, I messed up and uploaded the unfinished file with crappy audio. This version of the video is much improved.