Den of Thieves is a fantastic movie. If you haven't seen it, you should. It is twisty and intense throughout, then in the end; it's a complete shocker. Who ends up on top???

If you haven’t read the book Good to Great by Jim Collins, I suggest you put that on your reading list. You will understand what I mean when I say, "I get the right people on my bus."

Along the way, I put several of the wrong people on my bus; hiring wrong has cost me time and money. The key takeaway here is that when you have the wrong person on the bus, you need to push them out the door quickly.

When you have the right people on your bus, make sure they are happy and keep them riding along.

Mindset #1 Failing Faster Will Get You Success Quicker

Online marketing isn't my first rodeo. I have started other businesses, some have done well, and some have not. Usually, based on my experience as an entrepreneur, when you realize something is not working or worth your time, it's better to cut it off abruptly, take your losses, and move on to something else.

For example, in 2012, I started a party bus business. I ran it for about three years, but the company never really made any money, and I certainly was never able to recoup my initial investment. Now don't get me wrong, I had some profitable months. Inevitably a party bus would have a breakdown on a weekend when 95% of your revenue comes in on the weekends, and if you lose revenue on the weekend, you are likely going to lose money that month. It was never-ending with these older buses, break downs, drunk customers breaking stuff, drivers complaining, you name it. Once I realized the business was failing, I sold the buses for losses, the digital assets liquidated to a buddy, and I moved on with a considerable loss. But through this three-year debacle, I learned how to buy Google ads, do some search engine optimization (SEO), and generate leads online from Yelp and Facebook. My party bus loss was the beginning stages of my mindset that you could create business pretty much out of thin air on the internet.

Mindset #2: You are one campaign or funnel away

No one keeps track of your failures. My first campaigns all lost money until one opening football weekend when I hit it big with the Draft Kings app on mobile installs.

I did this because I believed in myself and the mentor.

Sure enough, this app was paying $10 an install or something close to that, and it was converting like crazy. I want to say I made about $10K on a $5K spend that weekend, so about 100% return on investment (ROI).

I know that the $K I made was not life-changing money, and they cut the payout the next week, but it did pay me back for the mentorship I bought overnight. Later on, that year, I hit the big one that made almost $100K profit in a month and wiped out my credit card debt in less than 30 days. Now for me, that was life-changing!

You are one campaign or one funnel away from the life you want.

Mindset #3: You Can't Be Afraid to Lose Money

I hate losing money, we all do, but there is no way around it in this business. As I already mentioned, I have been down low five figures before I found the winning ad set.

There are start-up costs in any business, servers, spy tools, trackers, and of course, traffic.

Understand that it hurts more to lose $100 than it feels good to make $200, a psychological principle called "loss aversion," a tendency to strongly prefer avoiding losses over acquiring gains. It is in our DNA to avoid risk.

So, how can we overcome this?

You have to have money put aside, a.k.a start-up money or seed funding. Just like in any business, you need to plan on an initial investment to buy the data. Without data, you don't have a business.

People spend $20K-$100K for a college education, but that does not guarantee them a good job. I'm not sure why anyone would complain about dropping $1-2K on trying to get a campaign to work. You have to look at your risk vs. reward ration and not at the money. The money is a business investment; once you put it aside, you need to detach yourself from it emotionally.

Mindset #4 Patience is Key

We mentioned this earlier, and it is worth mentioning again. There are ups and downs in this market.

There was a stretch in 2018, 2019, and even in 2020, when Facebook has issues with Congress, privacy, and a political scandal, making it nearly impossible to run our working campaigns for a few months. We hung around, testing and playing the waiting game. Usually, later in the year, Facebook's stock falls as earnings and users were down. When Facebook loosens up, we come in and "clean up." Then we go back to $100K months!!

I am sure you heard the analogy of a Bamboo tree. In the early years, nothing happens. You water it, but you don't see anything pop out of the ground, then all of a sudden, they grow up to 80 feet in a single year.

A similar scenario happened to me in 2018. I had to keep the team afloat with my other businesses, and we had nothing good working, accounts were all disabled, and we even lost almost all the business managers.

Then it was like overnight, the good ole days were back, and $100K months came along again!

In the down times, when things were not working, I told my team to try other traffic sources like Pinterest and Google to improve their skills. When it came back around, we were better, more skilled, and crushed it.

Mindset #5 There is No Going Back

​Once I embark on a journey, there are two outcomes, either I kill it and make a lot of money, or I fail and fail quickly and move on quickly to another opportunity.

It would be best if you adopt this mindset from day #1.I have seen so many people say they will do this business and "try" Affiliate Marketing and never take any action.

It's okay to lose money on campaigns. It's okay to fail on campaigns. I can say I have had more losing campaigns than winning ones, but the winners make up big time for the losers.

I was in a situation when I started this business where I was in huge credit card debt, and the business I was in was seasonal, and I was at the beginning of the slow season. With the credit cards maxed and no reserves for food, I had to succeed; there was no option. Money was not going to come in for about four months, rent, loan payments, etc., were coming in like clockwork, so for me, it was eat or be eaten, and guess what, I am still here.