The day to day bullshit about mailing (shady data punks, beat up ip space, complaints etc) is just a part of the business. It's something we must accept and learn to work with and it just comes flwith the territory. Note: this doesn't apply to everyone. I know many of you have partners, cheap ass labor .... My gripe (in my case) is if I'm not gatting my cannons ready on "friday " then i make jack shit on "saturday " Maybe im just a veteran - noob or something but holy shit man, a weekend off the computer shouldn't be met with a major slaughter to my margin. I've tried scheduling days ahead of time but my luck usually has a block or dns or whatever problem that blows that option. Maybe i need a better domain / ip / offer plan.....maybe i need a lobotomy. I guess i just needed a moment to bitch. It just pisses me off sometimes when a brotha needs a break. But my breaks produce weak payouts. I know youve all been there, done that maybe someone has that obvious as hell suggestion I'm blind to. Man, I've got a psycho ex wife who's got hef fucking hand in my pocket "all for the sake of my boys " and some days i just feel like i bust my ass with long ass days just to pay that fucking retards rent (and healthcare and ......) Fucking c##t. Sorry guys. This ended up being a thread about feeling like i work like a dog and let c##t face take me to support court if i have a really good month. Any way, i guess this was meant more for the general chit chat forum so I'll end with THIS: How many of you have to work your asses off to make the kind of money to keep you in the biz and how many of you watch the numbers roll in while you sit around and scratch your crack? Oh, and with all do respect to the people on here who's egos are bigger than their wallets: i enjoy reading your posts about who has the biggest dick, honestly makes me laugh. But if you happen to respond to this, could you please refrain from the "I'm so good...." "my sys is so rad it prints money " (you know what i mean. Thanks. Ps - any suggestions on making an ex wife 'go away ' are welcome (PM those please) ha ha ha!
Great post, Erbux! I was able to relate to a lot of your points, and I'm sure others will as well. Over the years I've taken time off and had "employees" run everything. Ironically, when I was out of the loop, and they were in charge of picking offers and making certain "decisions", profits were always at their lowest. Unless an employee is a partner with a stake in your business, they will not proofread creatives or test links to make sure images work, the offer works, the template is structurally sound, 100% of the time. And in this business, even 1% can hurt you. Case in point... I had a now ex-employee run some part-time drops for me a long time ago, and it was for a Zoloft legal offer e.g. "Have you taken Zoloft and suffered side effects?" This employee thought it ok to get a template created with the subject "Cheap zoloft for sale". It was only pure luck I even caught this and was able to stop it from going out, but this is my point. Email is an instinctual thing. Some people have it, some don't. You can hire a person to create your subjects for you, and if that person doesn't have a clue, your revenues will fall significantly. It's very hard to find the right combination of "help". This isn't sweeping the floors or sticking bottle caps on bottles, where the square peg goes in the square hole. There are so many diff't elements, each has to be handled with precision: when do you let an offer 'rest' and stop mailing it? How many new offers should you be testing? Should you scale with this offer or that offer? How is my data hygiene? Are my sending IPs still in good rep? When was the last time this suppression list was updated? Is my data getting saturated? Should I take a break from MailerForum so I actually get some work done? (The last comment applies to SG - lol) So yeah man, I hear ya. And I would be very skeptical if any serious mailer said he had his entire operation streamlined so he could be vacationing the entire time. Those of us who made our "riches" in this business built our war chests back 10 years ago when Yahoo was afraid to "block' email for fear of lawsuits, and in general, life was easier, and you didn't have to man the ship as often, because even crappy subject lines made you good money. Now, those who wish to stay in the game have to roll up their sleeves a bit. For your weekend problem, assign 1-2 extra templates per day to yourself or your worker and set it aside as a "weekend" template, so when Friday comes around you have a handful of offers ready to roll. Keep one set of Ips as your weekend only mailing drops, and build an actives component list from your data that open on weekends, so you're fine tuning everything, and let the IPs rest Mon-Fri. For your ex-wife problem, assign 1-2 hitmen. Just kidding.
Thanks, Round. Everything you mentioned is everything that runs through my mind each week as I wing it all, one day to the next. You know how it goes: you have all the intentions in the world to do offers on Monday, IPs on Tuesday, templates on Friday.....it's like paying bill I suppose. You get to it when they all need done. And it's VERY hard as a one man machine to even eat lunch at the same time each day (or at all). Hiring someone would be great (in theory), but like you said - they don't really care enough unless they have an equity interest. It's a double edged sword - 1.) how much money will I loose taking time away to train someone 2.) what if they CAN do what I'm hoping and that time/money pays for itself 100 fold... At the end of the day, we're all faced with the same cliche' "You can't have your cake and eat it too" 99% of the time I just deal with it. Last night I was the other 1%'r. A fucking outlaw biker. A Redwood Original. Me, Myself and Walther.
this work is hard but sometimes you hit easy streaks with huge disasters in between. You need to have thick skin and not be phased by what seems like huge clusterfuks. if it were easy everyone would be doing it. And besides. It sure beats digging coal or working 12 hours a day for some asshole in some corporate hell hole. Im thankful every day. Even the bad ones.
^ Its nice to hear that having attrition is in attribute which benefits in this industry. Sadly does not seem to be the case in most.
Feeling your pain Erbux but bluehairdave makes a valid point. Whenever i get frustrated i try to imagine how much worse it could be. I know a lot of people that work shit jobs for miserable pay and still deal with all the same problems. i.e., bills, ex-wives, taxes, etc. I know it feels good just to vent sometimes, god knows i do it all the time For weekends, try an integrated solution like adk. Set it and forget it. Im sure you've probably already thought of that, but it works great for me.
Erbux, it takes a lot to vent to a forum of your peers... so I applaud you. Just some random suggestions that may or may not help.. 1. Try sending offers over the weekend that your x-c**t would open and spend your hard earned money on? If you can't get rid of her you might as well use her as incentive or creativity, right? 2. Focus on your boys... your blessed to have them. 3. Watch the movie "The Secret" by Rhonda Byrne. I am in no way a crazy cult follower of the movie but it teaches you about the "Law of attraction" and it's crazy how well it works. If anything, it will get you to focus on positives rather then negative things. Good luck...I hope everyones support helps
really like this thread. It's Real and it's Personal. Thanks for sharing/venting erbux. Pretty sure all of us goes through similar crap at various times. There have been some great practical suggestions so I won't reiterate them. The only think I would add is to not sweat the small stuff - or even the big stuff. Just do what you do and look for the best. If something less than the best comes along it's only gonna be temporary - as long as you're moving forward. Let it go and rock on. That's my 2 cents worth anyway
I have to say, i wasn't sure which way this post would go. I appreciate that many of you (if not all) relate to this. SG - you are spot-on about GI. I didn't throw that in with the op but ever since i got into that area the need to move faster and faster kicked in. I was always a broadband/cable guy. Like many others, the SBC changes forced me to venture out and GI seemed like the quickest fix. I used to get a handful of ips that i could run to the same list each day with the same domain. It would be weeks or months until I'd 521. Now if I'm not doing a swap every 24hrs, I'm fucked...you know the drill. I'm getting too old for the cat and mouse game. There's other important things which need attention. My opinion, GI is a younger mailers game where they go for days without sleep building an army and banging hookers......ahhh the good old days. Smarter not harder - works for me. Thanks guys!
Email, like Vegas, never sleeps. You certainly can't automate everything in this business... but, put some monitoring on your servers so you at least know they are still up over the weekend. Get a service to notify you about your IP space. That way you don't have to be at your computer 24/7 and you'll be aware if there are any issues. If you don't have something that will text you, then have the email notices sent to Gmail and have them forwarded to your phone via email or text. Likewise you can have seeds hitting your email every hour or however often you need so you know your server(s) are sending. Get a smart phone. I can SSH to my Linux servers from my Android. Makes it nice to check on those kinds of things in a pinch. When I was running Windoze in the past, I had a Windoze CE phone and could remote desktop to my servers. Can still do that with Android Apps as well. Plus you can check stats and keep an eye on things - nice for the Aff Networks with mobile ready sites/apps. Sure, it is hard to find reliable help for creatives, subject lines, etc. But you could hire someone offshore inexpensively to monitor things for you. Keep a couple of servers on hand set up and ready (if you have that ability with your MTA) and you can put them to work easy if there is an issue. Makes for a nice fallback so you don't wake up with no IPs one day and make no money until you get some more servers online. Yes, I take my laptop everywhere. Even took it on my honeymoon much to the dismay of my wife. We are pretty tied to our business, but you can use some tools to help take away the worry - so you can get away from time to time. That's the beauty of this business as well...you can travel anywhere you have internet
You've just showed how little you really know about GI. I guess some people are happy getting stoned everyday and having software pull creatives that everyone and their mother abuses and getting paid pennies per click.. I would rather put in effort and make cash than bathing my brain in pot and making $200/day. Everyone's process is different, obviously he's more of a manual labor kinda guy or doesn't have a talented group of monkeys behind him to help.
I'll start this by saying I haven't read the rest of the responses yet... brain power is dwindling after the 4th 12+ hour day in the office this week. I would love to spend some time helping you optimize your scheduling process and getting some set processes in place that could help you see immediately increases in your revenue. This is one thing I am really good out when it comes to mailing. I can't give you much else with your tech issues because I am a self admitted tech illiterate =). But if I can help you increase your revenue 10 - 20% with improved scheduling then it would make the weekend less important and possibly give you some breathing room. I am also good with chick situations (being one helps) and that sounds like no fun at all... PM me if you want to set something up.
Tough times.. lol. Your ego is greater than your skill set. It's called being delirious.. You drown what little mental acuity you could have in pot. I guess if I was consistently wrong, I would want to destroy any memory of failure by smoking myself retarded.
" Mailing GI is a path to the Dark Side " ????? LOL Funny stuff. Thanks Yoda!! :stupido3: SG, u continue to amaze. As a mailer of both TLD and GI, thats a crock of sheet. As the real Yoda would say "Anger and Hate lead to the Dark Side.......and SG you be a GI hater!"
