Ecommerce

A Step by Step Guide to Validating an eCommerce Product [with a Low Budget]

It's fast to validate campaigns in the affiliate marketing world.

You get some offer recommendations from your affiliate manager.

You reverse engineer competitors with a spy tool to see what's working. You "borrow" some landing pages.

And you come up with some angles to make the campaign your own.

Business

Business Ideation: How to Discover New Business Ideas

In 2007, a pair of roommates moved to San Francisco. They were broke, jobless, and they didn’t have money for rent.

They needed to come up with a quick hustle. With a conference coming around the corner, they noticed that all the hotels in the city were sold out.

That’s when one of them came up with an idea. That company is now known as airbnb.com.

Investment

How I Invest my Money

I've seen several friends lose thousands of dollars since the year started.

It wasn't because of job loss. It wasn't because of the pandemic.

It was because they invested everything they had into stocks like GameStop and AMC. And I saw this happen last week with Dogecoin.

By the time the general public starts investing, it's already too late.

They're left holding the bags.

Affiliate Marketing

Is Affiliate Marketing Dead in 2021? My Honest Thoughts

“Is affiliate marketing dead?” “Is affiliate marketing still worth it?

I’ve always hated these questions, and I’ve been hearing them since 2007.

I hate these questions because they feel like excuses.

It’s kinda like seeing someone half-assing it at the gym. Then seeing them blame their gym equipment for their lack of results.

But now it’s 2021—things have changed over the years.

Business

Unique Mechanisms: Why They Matter and Why Your Product NEEDS Them (With Examples)

I’ve been running an experiment for the past year. Every time I catch up with an entrepreneur friend, I’ll ask them:

“What do you think makes a great product? What criteria are you looking for when you’re creating or promoting a product?”

These are all seven- to eight-figure e-commerce brand owners.

Here are some of the paraphrased answers that I’ve gotten.

Books, Gear and Reviews

The 9 Best Books I Read in 2020 (+ Key Takeaways)

Reading is steroids for your mind. I can't believe that for $10 and a few hours, I can learn what took someone a lifetime to figure out.

When I first started reading business books, I was obsessed with motivation and mindset. I wanted to become an entrepreneur and needed all the motivation I could get.

As I start running affiliate marketing campaigns, I studied every marketing and copywriting book I could get my hands on to boost my conversions. Then I hired my first employees. My daily Kindle reading was about leadership and management.

What am I reading these days? I’ve realized how little I know and how many blind spots I have in my mind.

Marketing

How to Find Underpriced Sources of Traffic in 2021

The biggest challenge for any brand is to figure out how to get attention. Everyone has Facebook tunnel vision because they’re the 800lb gorilla in the industry.

But Facebook as a platform has become more difficult to work with. Yes, even more than usual.

Facebook costs keep increasing

Organic reach is a joke

Unpredictable banning policies for advertisers. I’ve seen guys running the most vanilla Shopify stores ever

Personal

10 Valuable Lessons that I Learned in 2020

We raced to find toilet paper.

We panicked as the stock market nosedived in March.

We’ve never seen more fighting going on in our Facebook newsfeeds.

And we’ve never spent more time alone and isolated.

It’s safe to say that we’re never going to forget 2020. We all went through a lot of pain this year. I’ve learned that pain is one of life’s best way of teaching us.

Productivity

The Step-by-Step Annual Planning Guide for Overachievers

I use to be a horrible annual planner. Then I read everything I could find on planning, spent thousands on workshops, and iterated my process over ten years. Now, I'm badass at this.

I'm going to teach you everything I know about annual planning. This won't be easy. This is designed for overachievers. I've held nothing back.

So, why go through this process? It’s a major time commitment. I’m investing four days into mine.

Business

Business and Life Lessons From Tony Hsieh, former CEO of Zappos

I had a "holy shit" moment when I ordered from Zappos for the first time.

This happened over a decade ago.

I chose the slowest shipping option to save money.

I expected the shoes to arrive in 7 to 10 business days.

My shoes arrived the next morning. Keep in mind that this was years before Amazon made 2-day shipping the standard.

Business

How to Brainstorm Unique Products in a Competitive Market

You don’t need to have a “Eureka!” moment to come up with a great business idea. You can easily come up with great ideas if you ask yourself the right questions.

More people are interested in entrepreneurship than ever before. Everyone gets stuck at “coming up with a good idea.”

One problem I see is people want to create copycat products that aren't any different from the incumbents. Or they want to make the same thing, but just do it cheaper.

Productivity

How to Prevent Burnout: Real Examples and Best Practices

I hate the “hustle” culture that’s embedded in modern entrepreneurship.

What is it? It’s the feeling that we should constantly be working. There’s pressure to work while you’re on vacation.

In the back of an Uber for 30 minutes? That’s time for a catchup call or to reply to emails.

Can you relate to this feeling?

Charles Ngo Articles