Look at that bloke trying to catch a scroll in the wind! He's busting a gut trying to catch it, but all he gets for his efforts is exhaustion.
Ever felt like that as you chase after traffic for your latest affiliate offer?
If so, you can probably identify with the fifth Japanese proverb in the "Iroha Karuta" series that I posted on Liketu the other day:
@hirohurl/dont-break-your-bones-for-nothing
The Japanese goes like this:
“Hone-ori zon no kutabire mouke”
It means something like,
"Your loss is broken bones, your gain is exhaustion."
Take another look at that bloke with his eyes on the scroll he's chasing, totally unaware that he's about to break a few bones charging over a cliff...
As I said in my Liketu post, one way to translate the proverb would be to find a “dynamic equivalent” for the phrase “bone-breaking loss” and I think "a busted gut" works well:
“A busted gut for nothing but exhaustion.”
However, I decided to turn it into a full sentence like this:
“Wasted effort brings nothing but exhaustion.”
I think the guy chasing the scroll (in the top photo) offers a better illustration of the proverb than the "Daiso" (dime store) version of a boy who's exhausted himself searching for a four-leaf clover:
How I Busted A Gut Chasing A Fast Buck
Way back in 2007, when my main online business was selling Japanese games (including Iroha Karuta sets), I made my first foray into the affiliate marketing game.
I did that by joining a program called the Plug In Profit Site (PIPS) that is owned by a guy called Stone Evans. The site held out the prospect of earning "multiple streams of online income" simply by promoting the PIPS site.
Well, if you wanted to earn affiliate commissions you had to join all the affiliate programs otherwise your sponsor would scoop up any commissions coming from your page.
There were five programs. Not all cost money to join. In fact the only one that is still going strong, SFI, is a free-to-join program.
However, the other four were all paid programs at some if not all required monthly subscriptions to maintain.
When I joined I thought it would be a relatively straightforward matter of applying the skills I had learned from selling games online, but I was wrong! It was a totally different game, and one that I was losing at month after month. (I stayed in the game by using my game-site profits to subsidise my affiliate biz.)
Then, just as I had "busted a gut" promoting one of the programs, Stone Evans decided to replace it with a different program...
So now I was faced with a choice...
Promote that program alongside PIPS, dividing my efforts, or drop it and take the hit, and join the other program.
That happened numerous times.
Eventually, I abandoned PIPS since I could not control which programs were in the system or how long they'd be there.
I'd certainly busted a gut for nothing, or rather for a loss, but in the end the effort was not entirely wasted. I continued to work with one of the PIPS programs, SFI. I still do today. SFI yields a regular profit for very little effort and has consistently done so for several years now.
Check out my SFI blog here: https://sfi.siterubix.com/
Also, the PIPS experience did teach me a lot about affiliate marketing so I don't have any grudges about my experience.
What Online Program Have You Busted A Gut In Vain Over?
What about you? Do you have any "busted gut" experiences with online marketing that you'd like to tell us about?
FREE LISTNERDS!
Tell us about your failed online venture in the comments and I'll send you some free LISTNERDS as well as a CTP and ALIVE tip! (The better the story, the more LISTNERDS I'll send you!)
No More Busting A Gut For Nothing, Thanks To Hive!
Happily for us Hive-based content creators, we can always get some value out of our gut-busting losses by turning them into topics for content creation on the blockchain.
Cheers!
David Hurley
#InspiredFocus
#Index4Index