I’ve had my fingers on the keyboard, my hindquarters firmly planted in my Herman Miller, and my eyes fixated on the monitor for a month now. I’m usually up 21 hours straight g-r-i-n-d-i-n-g.

See I’m slowly coming out of the ghostwriting phase of my life and merging into That IM Thing on a full-time basis.

I’ve been bouncing around the Internet marketing forums, getting the scoop on who’s who and what’s what. Joining this site and that site, to get my name out there. Tweeting, stumbling, commenting, contributing. It’s a lot of work on the front end.

But I don’t mind. I’m not looking for a temporary high out of all of this. I want to be the girl that other boys and girls talk about. I’m building a brand called Dahlia from That IM Thing, and hard work isn’t optional – it’s like a 10,000 page manual that you have to read.

The need for a personal philosophy

With all of this new information swirling around in my brain, it’s easy to become distracted. In the Internet marketing field there are A LOT of shiny objects. Lot’s of free products, cheap products, highly reviewed products, expensive products from in-the-trenches entrepreneurs, software, lists, widgets, themes, launches. This is truly  a carnival to your business senses.

You cannot go far in this industry unless you have some type of filter that keeps you from straying in 20 different directions all at once. Basically, you need a philosophy.

Your IM philosophy is that one overriding statement that guides most of your actions, determines what products you buy, and how you’ll make your money.

It’s not something that you can pluck out of a hat. It has to be something that really stirs you deep down in the core of your IM soul.

You’ll know it when arrives on your doorstep, wrapped in a very unassuming package.

My game changer arrived as a freebie

I’ve been ordering and reading a lot of information from other Internet marketing heads lately, searching for my path, looking for my philosophy.

One guy I like is Jason Fladlien. Jason is a product creation mega robot. He’s got 14 e-books out right now, with surely no signs of slowing down. That appeals to me.

So a few weeks ago I got a free report via e-mail from Jason. I couldn’t tell you exactly what the entire thing was about, because once I read the message I needed to see, everything else kinda flopped out of my brain.

His message – my new philosophy – was quite simple: Learn how to work fast.

If you can create an entire information product in a single day, and write a sales letter in a few hours, then you are essentially your own ATM machine in this business.

Maybe it’s just me, but I can’t think of a better piece of advice in this age when procrastination is as normal as waking up and brushing your teeth in the morning.

Everybody wants to be  guru, a machiavelli, a rockstar, the leader of the social media pack. But most people take so long getting their act together that they lose momentum.

Life according to your new philosophy isn’t always picture perfect

I was fertile for Jason’s advice and I adapted it into my life almost instantly.

Without hesitation, I sat down and wrote a 55-page manual on guest blogging titled How to Become the Guest Blogger Everyone Wants – and the content marketer who gets a ton of targeted  backlinks, as well as a 12 page report titled: How to Find Blogs That Are Looking for Guest Authors.

I wrote it ALL over the course of 2 days. I cranked out the sales copy in 4 hours and did the cover in Adobe Illustrator while watching my necessary nightly dose of Korean soap operas.

Within a few days time I went from idea in my brain to full-fledged e-book, and I was damn proud of myself.

I listed my new guest blogging manual in Warrior Special Offer forum, sat back and waited for the floodgates to open.

Let’s just say the floodgates were ummmm, “rusted”

“Rusted” as in they never fully opened.

The launch was a flop. I mean I sold several copies of the manual, but nothing that I imagined I would.

And that bothered me.

See I did my homework. I had ordered and read not 1, not 2, but SEVERAL e-books showing you how to launch a successful WSO. I wasn’t going in to this thing with hope and a prayer. I was armed with knowledge of previous WSO megasellers.

So I was ill prepared for what I consider to be a sales failure. I just KNEW I was on my way to a 6-figure launch overnight.

As rough and tumble as I may seem on this blog, I’m still a girl. I sat down that evening and I actually friggin cried over that WSO. Yeah, tears and everything. I went to bed wondering – “Now what????”

Go back to your philosophy

The next morning I woke up and decided I was going to hit the ground running again. I was disappointed with my previous WSO, but the beauty of my newly adopted philosophy is that I can choose product ideas that I can create quickly.

Failure of a product that took 2 days to create is subatomic compared to failure of a product that you slaved over for 2-3 months.

I thought about the techniques I was currently using to make money online. Okay, I’m a pretty decent Amazon affiliate and I’d already been compiling a list of products that had the criteria of being decent sellers.

Products I sell usually have:

• 50+ reviews
• Cost $50 or more
• Have at least 3.7 – 5 stars in ratings

So I took my list, pruned it and double checked it. Then I sat down and wrote an 18-page companion report titled the Review Keyword  Modifier Report. It took me a day to compile and pretty up all the information. I wrote the sales letter in less than 2 hours.

That’s how the BIG LIST of Amazon Products came to be.

As I’m writing this, the BIG LIST has been out a little over 48 hours, and I’ve already made over $500, just from sales on the Warrior Special Offer forum. And the reviews – ha! – the reviews have been awesomely awesome.

Work fast, fail fast, learn fast, get rich fast

Looking back over the past WEEK - I’m glad that I didn’t do well with my first WSO. Failure made me pay much better attention to my surroundings.

When you’re in a niche marketplace like this, you can’t sell whatever you want to sell.

To create great selling products you have to know what the current buzz in the community is, and feed in to that chatter.

Making money as an Amazon affiliate is still big news in the Warrior community right now. The BIG LIST makes your job as an Amazon affiliate 1,000% easier (as stated by the people who purchased the information), plus the information is inexpensive at only $9. It’s one of those no-brainer purchases.

Create enough products that are impulse buys, and you’ll keep attracting impulse buyers. That’s why it makes perfect sense to master the art of working fast.

Do these 3 things if you want to work faster:

1) Understand the general basics of Internet marketing. You can’t work fast if you don’t know SEO from a Stumble. Knowing the basics of EVERYTHING enables you to see how bits and pieces of the puzzle can work together.

2) Know what people are doing RIGHT NOW. I really tear apart the Warrior forum to see what people are talking about, what problems they have and what questions keep getting asked over and over again.

3) Master at least 2 Internet marketing skills. You don’t have to be a ninja at everything, nor should you be. You’ll be able to create products much faster if you already have better-than-average knowledge on just a couple of key topics.

It’s not reasonable to expect that everything you do is going to turn to gold.

Working fast simply means that you can have failure and still have more than enough time for a comeback. In terms of building a profitable business, you can’t ask for more than that.