Everything
Dr Ngo said here should be memorized.
If you cut your spending and discretionary purchases to the absolute lowest you can go while reinvesting everything you can back into your business, you can start with a pretty low paying job. I believe Nickycakes said at some point he had only $5/day to spend on PPC when he got started.
Finch has mentioned several times that he got started by finding all the free Adwords coupons he could. Another thing to keep in mind.
So rather than go work on an oil rig, why not work for something related to the industry? Approach a web shop, design firm or SEO house for an entry-level job and later leverage those skills to your own benefit? It's like a two-fer, applicable education and a paycheck you can reinvest on your own.
If you just want cash without having to dig into your own pockets for an education and don't care about carry over of your skills and wasting your time, I would do, in this order:
- Commercial Fishing (in a period from end of May- 1st wk of Sept a few years back I made $30k; in a shorter mid June-end of July season I made between 7-12k... but it entails some big risk and possibly making nothing at all if the boat breaks).
- Oil rig work.
- Wildland Firefighting. $30k for 3 months worth of work. Ask Grindstone.
- Work on the North Shore of the Alaskan pipeline (had a friend who bought himself a fourplex after working as a carpenter up there for two years. Now he collects checks and surfs in Bali).
- Union blue collar work- carpentry probably has the least schooling involved with the fastest apprentice-journeyman track (in Philly the apprentices earn about $20/hr.)
- Realtor. The *average* annual salary for a decent one is $58k/yr... though that can vary widely. You can learn and use all the marketing skills you can muster to promote yourself; shitty thing is that this too requires a 2-5k initial investment on your part. If you can weather that though, why not start with AM?
(Note that for most of the jobs listed above, they pay well as a grunt because there is some risk of death or dismemberment).
FWIW, I set out in this industry to become an affiliate marketer and somewhere along the line, like you, I thought "shit I need a fuckton of cash to do this thing" and ended up missing the forest through the trees building a service-based business. Still money to be made no doubt, but not the same at all.
If I could do it all over again, I'd have stuck to my guns and found a way to pay the bills that also gave me the
maximum amount of time and least amount of distraction so I could devote my energy to affiliate marketing, and not fucking around with clients.
Mi dos centavos.
