Pizza. Check.
A couple of alcoholic bevvies. Check.
A few of rounds of Call of Duty zombie mode. Check.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Check.
It must be Friday night. I write that as if it Friday still means the same as it did when I worked the corporate salt mines. The truth is when you’re self-employed every day is a workday, but every day is also a fun day, mostly.
I spent a good part of the day holed up in my mobile office sketching out a marketing strategy for my affiliate marketing ambitions.
There are a few ways to go about it. You can be passive (which is what I’ve been doing mostly) mentioning a few books here and there and using my Amazon affiliate link to connect people to books and products I’ve read and used. I also showcase things in the sidebars of my blogs (who looks at sidebars anymore?).
A more active approach is to create niche websites and drive traffic to the site using PPC ads and Facebook ads. This is an automated and active approach. You fork out a lot of money in ad fees, but if you get your targeting right, the money you bring in should cover the expense. With this approach you also don’t have to necessarily be married to the niche topic. But you do have to have an entrepreneurial eye for trends and gaps.
I’ve taken a middle ground approach with my Zombie Zoo shop and blog. It’s a hybrid between drop shipping and affiliate marketing. And since I talk about zombies and the coming zombie apocalypse a lot, I’ve also decided to create an active blog on the site where I can curate the zombie related stuff I find on the web. The idea here is to attract zombie fans to the blog for their zombie fix and while they’re there, buy some zombie gear.
Ok. Enough about work. I’m actually trying to drink beer and watch Buffy. I wasn’t a Buffy fan when it first aired, but since I started reading about pop culture and philosophy, Buffy The Vampire Slayer keeps coming up as one of the greatest television series ever. Like Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist, the show can be consumed on two levels. The second level is where the deep stuff happens. So as I’m watching it, I’m paying attention to both stories, plus reading this book and this book.
For example, the understory of the episode Out of Mind, Out of Sight deals with Jung’s concept of the Shadow Self and how the Shadow Self represents everything we refuse to acknowledge about ourselves, the dark stuff we keep hidden (or think we keep hidden) from other people, including ourselves. (As I read that paragraph back, I was thinking, man…can’t I just watch TV like a normal person)
“Looking in the mirror everyday and seeing nothing there is an overrated pleasure.” – Angel
I’m starting to scribble out lines of poetry again. This usually happens when I start paying attention to the quieter voices in my head and feeling the urge to celebrate the mystery of existence in its many masks of meaning.
Lips
Lust
And coming poetry and comics
Have Your Cake
Whenever human existence feels itself uncertain, it looks again for guidance to that invisible world in which, it seems, we have never ceased to believe.
Clay