About RRL

In short this website is about affiliate marketing, lifestyle design and starting and running your own business (whether that business be based out of your bedroom or a swanky office). To leave you with that description of this website would be highly irresponsible and pretty misleading though. This website/blog is actually a very personal space for me on the web. It’s a place where I will be documenting my steady and gradual escape from the Rat Race, and at the same time sharing some of the lessons I have learnt along the way, in the very ambitious hope that some one some where out there will benefit from it in some small way.

Who I am

I am Alex. Thats as far as I go as far as identity as I want to keep a relative anonymity for now. There is no foul play here, my motives for keeping my identity some what private are not sinister, but I do want to use this blog/website to share some very in-depth, personal experiences that I have been through, and that I am going through. This will at times call for me to make reference to certain situations, conversations and people that I deal with on a daily basis. I don’t want to identify those people specifically at all, and equally I don’t want them to come to my blog and discover that I am keeping a very public diary!

Again, I am not using this blog as a platform to criticize or ridicule anyone. Quite the opposite. If  I keep a relatively low profile, it will allow me to be very open and honest with YOU the reader, meaning you can better understand what I am going through and hopefully take more away from the things I am sharing with you.

I will probably relax my position in time on keeping my identity a little private, and eventually I imagine I will be a lot more “personal” on this blog. For now though, this is the way I am rolling! I hope you understand and respect that!

The Story So Far

I am 23 years old and I am from the UK. I started this whole affiliate and Internet marketing gig 2-3 years ago after getting suckered into the “get-rich-quick” products out there on the web. I dabbled in affiliate marketing, involving myself in PPC and SEO a couple years back. I made money, but I never stayed consistent, and I never built upon my efforts or scaled my business up. I’d love to go back and kick my 21 year old-self’s ass for not taking things more seriously. My life could potentially be 10 times better than what is now!

Anyway, fast-forward a bit, and after graduating from University in the grip of one of the ugliest recessions known to the modern World I got myself a job working for one of the top 1% clickbank merchants/affiliates in the World. It seemed like a golden opportunity to get to learn the real nuts and bolts of Internet and Affiliate marketing. My job at that company alternated between being an affiliate/JV manager and a project manager for a couple of websites the company owned.

During my time there I was working with my co-workers on some big 6-figure information product launches. Together, myself and my colleagues worked on handling affiliate relations, customer relations, paypal, merchant and payment issues, content creation and anything in-between.

Most “gurus” out there will tell you on their blog or in their ebook reports that they are “exposing” what goes on behind the scenes in their business and other guru’s businesses. But it really isn’t the case at all. The reading public get VERY little information about what REALLY goes on in the background of these affiliate and information businesses, and let me tell you, it gets real messy and ugly at times.

Seriously, some of the things I saw during my year working for that company blew my mind. From my boss’ expensive and lavish party lifestyle, through to receiving threats from affiliate partners via emails when we chased them for money they owed us. I have sat in rooms with and listened to the conversations of millionaires and business men of all levels. My time in that job saw me make contacts with masters of finance, credit and business, some of whom were always keen to invite me a long to discrete clandestine esque meetings in posh hotels in the middle of England to discuss possible upcoming web businesses (most of the time, these meetings amounted to absolutely nothing in terms of business or profit, but they were a nice day out all the same).

At the same time I was working a night-job, which had some pretty unsociable working hours. The work was fun, the people were great, but the long hours took their toll on me after a while. I was also dabbling in selling information products and some affiliate marketing. Same story as always, some limited success, but I eventually stopped putting any effort into any of it.

At around the same time, I started the Rat Race Lab blog. I used it as a place to rant, vent frustrations and generally share my thoughts. Again, it was just like a kind of rubbish, online public diary with some thoughts and posts on Internet and affiliate marketing thrown in there. There was really no direction and really no structure to any of it. I lost my way with the site, and in the end I got frustrated and simply closed it down. It was going no where in my eyes at the time.

I deleted all the content, posts and even removed the hosting account.

At the end of 2009, I reflected on my time at that company, and in truth I was very unhappy. I didn’t enjoy my job, and although my job paid a nice salary, I had a LOT of expenses. I was living in a flat by myself and it meant I had a lot of monthly out-goings to pay for. I didn’t see any opportunities for promotion in the company either and felt like my life was going no where.

So, I decided I was going to start up my own business in 2010. For two reasons:

1) I wanted to give running my own business a serious go

2) The company I worked for laid off all the staff  due to it’s inability to afford to keep paying the salaries.

Those are two pretty good reasons to leave a company!

With that, I setup two small startup businesses at the beginning of 2010 with a couple of old school friends. One business involved setting up a social network and the other was an online marketing consultancy. My two business partners knew very little about Internet marketing, SEO etc, but I told myself I would be able to teach them, and tackle most of the hard stuff myself.

To cut a long story short, I got it wrong.

I am still in business with my friends, but the online marketing consultancy seems to lack direction at the moment. The social network is an exciting project, but it’s definitely a slow-burner, and I think we will be waiting for a year or two before that business makes a profit or can afford to pay us any kind of living salary.

At the time of writing it is the back end of 2010, and I am back at my parent’s house (very embarrassing admission). I have put all of my money this year into these businesses and it really hasn’t paid off for a wide variety of reasons. I am pretty close to penniless, and my income has forced me to scale back my overheads and lifestyle. In a bid to save money, I have moved back home until I can sort my life and my business out.

And right now I am at a cross-roads. I fear that I made a number of mistakes this year, and I suspect my involvement in both ventures was misguided. On reflection, I don’t know what I was thinking when I decided I could make a success of two new businesses. I am at a point of transition whereby I am deciding where to put all my energies, time and focus.

Right now? I am continuing to fulfill my duties for the two businesses I have been working on. Outside of that I am going to be conducting my own little income/affiliate experiments, and this time when I find something that is working for me, I am going to be sticking at it and scaling it up!

I am out of the Rat Race, but I am not in a better position than I was when I was in the thick of the rat race!

Although on the face of it my situation may appear pretty sad, desperate or hopeless I have taken a lot of positives from what has happened over the last couple of years:

1. I have a very supportive family, and I can now live rent free. I am exceptionally grateful I have them.

2. I am at rock-bottom right now, and the only way from here is up. I have a massive challenge before me, but I look forward to tackling it head on.

3. I have learnt some incredibly valuable lessons (the very hard way on occasion) and I am now in a position to use those lessons to help me excel and succeed (and maybe pass them along to a few people too).

4. I have developed several useful skills in SEO, marketing, website management and business to business sales. I intend to draw on these skill sets in the coming months and years.

So, I have decided to breath some life into this old domain of mine, and resurrect the blog/website. I now have a clear idea and vision for it and thus, I don’t see it dying in the same way it did around 6 months ago.

The Blog

The blog is where I will be doing two things:

1) Updating you on the affiliate experiments I run. I’ll be sharing my results and I’ll be updating you on what is going on in my life and my business. In short, you’ll be able to watch me fail or succeed in real time via my blog posts and updates, and if you like, you’ll be able to ethically steal and use some of the tactics that are working for me for your own business.

2) I’ll be sharing some of the most important/painful lessons I have learnt in the last couple of years. I won’t be doing this to preach, lecture or teach you. Instead I’ll be writing these posts to let some of you know out there, you are not the only one going through these challenges and there are ways around them. In short, my aim is to provide “food for thought”.

I won’t be updating this blog with trivial anecdotes from my personal life, and I won’t be talking about things that are irrelevant to escaping the Rat Race and breaking out on your own. Everything I write here will be geared towards my journey and the lessons I have learnt.

As such, the likely-hood is that I will not be posting on this blog regularly. I want to deliver quality articles/posts and so when I write one, I’ll be taking my time with it. This is as much about delivering quality content as it is time constraints. I don’t make money from this blog and as such, 80% of my time must be invested in doing just that. Making money. When something works/doesn’t work, or I have something interesting to share, this is the place I will be sharing it.

The Email List

I do have an opt-in form on the right-hand-side of most pages on this website, and that opt-in form will subscribe you to my email list if you enter your details and sign up.

But why would you subscribe to my list?

The short answer is; I don’t know. I am not offering a free video, report or life changing product for free when you sign up. The only thing I promise when you sign-up is to up-date you whenever I write a new blog post. So if my blog posts/writing interests you, and you want to keep up with my journey and experiments, feel free to subscribe.

Email promotions:

At the time of writing I have no products of my own to promote, and I truly don’t believe in pushing products on people who don’t want or need them. From time-to-time in future I *might* choose to make some recommendations to my email list. If I do, I promise to abide by the following rules:

1) Anything I recommend, I will have researched, used and reviewed. I will only email you with something that I truly believe will genuinely help you.

2) If I do decide to email you with a recommendation, I will provide you with two links. One will be an affiliate link (which means I will get a commission if you make a purchase) and a clean link (non-affiliate). Neither link will be anymore expensive or cheaper, but one link will mean I get a commission. It is up to you whether you think I deserve that commission.

3) I am not going to promote big product launches. I am sure many of you are on plenty of lists where you can get that kind of email.

In short I will be using this email list to update you when I make a new post. I will on the odd occasion send you an email about something cool which I think will help you. You will be able to choose whether you use my affiliate link, or a clean link.

Because of the rules I have imposed on myself for this email list, I ask that no one contacts me about any promotions, cross-promotions, joint ventures or email swaps at all for this website or it’s list. I will tell you in advance now, my answer will always be no (but in case you were considering it, thank you for your interest).

The Experiments

I have mentioned “experiments” quite a few times on this page and on the website. Since this is the “Rat Race Lab” I thought it would be appropriate to report back here on my blog when I experiment with new strategies, tactics and revenue models online.

Here are just some of the things I am going to be experimenting with:

- SEO

- Video Marketing

- List Building

- Article Marketing

- Information Product Publishing

- Paid Traffic

- Blogging

If you are active in any of these fields and have any advice or questions you’d like to offer, I’d be grateful to receive them. On the other side of the coin, if you have been wanting to test any of these things out, but have been afraid to, or you haven’t had the time, maybe I’ll be able to help you take some of the guess work out of these things for you!

My goal is to experiment with systems and find one that works well for me and once I do I intend to scale that model upwards ferociously! Through my experiments and the results I post here, I hope I will encourage some people to take some action in their businesses as well. I also hope that others may volunteer and show their results, findings and experiences in the comments on the blog, and maybe even via a few guest blog posts. Through our shared experiences, we can help each other, and all without a $47 price tag attached.

Final Word

Here is one of my favorite quotes of all time:

Better a student of reality than a master of illusion.

I try to live by that in the things that I do. I always strive to see things how they are, and I also strive to present things as they are as well. And that is exactly what I want to do here on this website.

I hope you have a good feel for this website and what I am trying to do here after reading this page. I am pretty sure well over 90% won’t have read this entire “About” page. It’s one of the longest I have seen online! But if you made it this far down, I am really grateful you took the time to learn a little more about my website and me.

Feel free to reach out and get in touch with me using my contact form, or simply leave a comment anywhere on the blog. I read them all.

Take it easy, stay safe and here is to your success.

*** Important Note: This page was last updated at approximately 22.30 (pm) 10th September 2010  ***