We’ve all had ’em. You know which ones I mean. The days when you really should have just stayed in bed. I had one of those days yesterday. And you know what the funny thing is? I was up and working at 5 AM that morning. I put in 15 hour work day and got absolutely nothing accomplished. Hard to believe? Let me give you a little taste of the day I had and see if something like this doesn’t sound familiar. Like I said, we’ve all had ’em.
My goal for the day was simple. Finish my sales page, membership upsell page, membership login page and membership download page and get everything ready to submit to Clickbank for product approval. It’s not like I’ve never done this before. After all, I’ve been creating products since 2006. This shouldn’t have been that difficult.
Well, I get the sales page done and test it and it’s working fine. Great! We’re a quarter of the way home. I then test the upsell page. On its own, it works fine. But I can’t get the sales page to go to the upsell page upon purchase.
So I contact Clickbank to find out what I’m doing wrong in my Pitch Plus testing. Turns out you can’t test Pitch Plus until AFTER your products have been approved. Well that’s kind of dumb. But whatever.
Okay, so I test the sales page and the upsell page separately and they seem to be working fine. Next I have to create the membership system which consists of a signup form, login page and download page. The signup form gets created by Optimize Member on the fly, so that’s no problem. I just have to concern myself with the login page and download page after they’ve successfully logged in.
Here is where things get a little sticky.
There are videos in the support area for how to do all this. I had watched them once and figured I remembered all that I needed to and could just go ahead with the process. If only it was that easy. Nothing worked. I mean NOTHING.
So I watched the videos again. They seemed simple enough. I thought I was following all the instructions. Apparently not because when I went through the page creation process again and tried to integrate everything, I couldn’t get the members download page to protect. Anybody could get to it, even if they weren’t a member.
Obviously, I was doing something wrong. But what?
I had spent hours going through the process of creating and deleting pages and starting all over again. By the end of the day, I still had just two working pages.
Ah, but it gets better.
During the course of the day, I discovered that my version of DLGuard (4.5) was not compatible with Pitch Plus. I had to upgrade to at least 4.6 and even that only provided a workaround.
Not having the money to upgrade at the moment, I put that to the side. But I realized that I would probably end up having to use another solution for this system.
Did I mention that by the end of the day I had just two working pages?
Today, I got a message from the DLGuard creator telling me that he would give me a upgrade to 4.6 because I’ve been a customer for so long.
So, I installed it. Now I can’t get into my admin area at all.
In the meantime, I didn’t write any new songs yesterday. I made all of one new synth patch for Zebra 2 and I had to deal with Clickbank. Something I don’t really look forward to doing. Of course I don’t look forward to dealing with most support staffs because most of them are woefully trained and only marginally so.
Today, I almost dread what’s next. I have to wait for the DLGuard creator to get back to me on the errors. I am going to try to watch those videos yet again and if I have to, stop them after each step and hopefully get some music done today.
I’m not holding my breath on any of that.
This has been a frustrating couple of years for me. I used to have a thriving business. Now, I’m starting all over again from scratch. So I guess you could say I’m having one of those years.
But, and this is a big but, I am confident that eventually everything will work out. How do I know this?
When I first turned to the Internet for a living, after having lost my last corporate America job in 2000, it took me 3 years just to start making any money at all. And even then, it was only about $1,200 a month. It was nothing to write home about.
It wasn’t until 2006 that my income jumped to the $45,000 a year range. In 2009, I think it was, my income really soared. And then after that year, things started to decline slowly. I was hoping it was just the economy and that things would pick up. But they never did. It turned out that my marketing methods were no longer viable thanks to changes at Google. I didn’t keep on top of things so that’s what happened. Finally, in 2013, things really hit rock bottom and this year I’ve made all of about $500.
Hard to believe I used to be one of the top marketers on the Internet. Seems like a lifetime ago.
And through all of this, here I am, still plugging away. Why? Because it beats the alternative.
I’m confident that things will turn around because I’ve done it before. Yes, it took some time, but I managed to build a successful business.
And with that, here comes the point of this article as it applies to you. It’s simple and it might sound cliche, but if I can do it, you can do it.
I don’t care what your musical dreams are, whether it’s being a hit pop writer or a world famous orchestrator. If you put your mind to it, you can do anything.
Now, where did I put those videos?
For The Love Of Music,
Steven “Wags” Wagenheim