Here’s a quick run-down of my day today.

4:30am – Zoe wakes up in her crate and starts whining.  She wants to go outside.  I take her outside, and realize for the first time in a long time that the sun is almost out by 4:30am… it’s definitely bright enough to see clearly, but the sun isn’t out yet.  Zoe takes care of her business, and we go back inside.  After I get her to fall asleep again, I fall asleep in 3 seconds flat.

9:00am – Zoe wakes me up again by dropping one of the toys in her crate, but manages to fall back asleep.  I’m exhausted so I fall back asleep as well.

??:??am – What must have been about half hour to an hour later, the power goes out.  Kobe wakes up, Zoe wakes up, I wake up.  I take Zoe out to take care of her business again.  I come back inside and wonder how I’m going to go about doing things with the power out.  The biggest problem being that we are on well water, so I have a pump that pumps water from the well into the house.  No power = no pump = no water.  I have a generator, but that takes a bit of time to setup and I’ve got a puppy to take care of.

Luckily for iPhone technology, I’m able to surf onto BCHydo’s website and see that they only expect the power to be out for about two hours.  I decide to just play with Zoe while we wait for the power to come back on.  About an hour later the power is back – thank God.

11:30am – Zoe passes out in her crate, for her afternoon nap.  That gives me about an hour and a half of time to catch up on emails and to get a bit of work done on a few projects.  1:00pm, Zoe wakes up and needs to go outside again.

The rest of the day I spent playing with her, taking her outside and working on getting her and Kobe to get along.  Kobe is an awesome dog, but he’s pretty old now and he has not had any previous experience with puppies, so when Zoe jumps at him playfully he doesn’t really know what to do.  Each session I’ve had with them, they are getting along better and better, but I’m taking my time to do it right as I don’t want him to accidentally hurt her since he’s so fricken big and she’s being really dumb right now trying to challenge him playfully, not realizing his size.

By 5pm I felt like I had walked 10 miles, taking Zoe out for walks and keeping an eye out for her inside the house as I’m house training her.  I was exhausted.  My brother came by with his wife, my nephew and niece to see the puppy later on in the evening as well.  By the time the day was over I was completely exhausted.

So, what does all this have to do with Puppy Breath and Affiliate Marketing?

Well, here’s the thing.  On a day like today, where I pretty much spent the whole day running around Zoe, trying to get her and Kobe to get along, dealing with power failures etc., it would be easy to just go to bed and consider the day a write-off as far as trying to get any work done for my business.  However, it is on days like this that we can have our greatest learning lessons and make the most progress in business, if we simply learn to ask ourselves the right questions.

So even though I’m totally exhausted and ready to go to bed, I asked myself this question – “How can what I went through today help me to make more money in my business?”

As soon as I asked myself this question, I immediately came up with a whole bunch of answers.  Firstly, the reality of the situation is that I’m not the only person in the world who just got a puppy.  There are probably millions of other people who are in the exact same situation as I am.  So, one way I could make money throughout this experience is to keep track of every concern, issue, question and problem that I encounter through the day and later on use those as keyword ideas for PPC Affiliate Marketing.

You see, anyone can come up with keywords like these when it comes to trying to promote a puppy training eBook:

• Golden Retriever Training
• Labrador Retriever Training
• German Shepherd Training
• etc.

Those are tough keywords to compete on in that niche since they’ve been over-saturated already.  However, just today I probably dealt with at least two to three dozen questions related to owning a puppy.  Other puppy owners are going to have the exact same questions.  I can use those questions as keywords for an affiliate marketing campaign.

Here’s some examples of what I mean:

• puppy meets old dog
• what causes puppy breath
• when do puppies lose first teeth
• puppy crate sizes
• etc.

See how actually owning a puppy makes you think of a totally different type of keyword / question?  These keywords can be used to promote affiliate products in the “puppy training” niche.   So, one answer to my question of how I can use this experience to make money online is to capture the questions, concerns and keywords I myself am searching for on Google while going through this phase of owning a new puppy.  That will give me a distinct advantage against other affiliate marketers who are trying to promote “Puppy” products, as they probably won’t be able to think of even 10% of the keywords I’ll be able to come up with since I’m living the situation right now.

Another thing I now realize is that owning a puppy is very time consuming.  Of course I knew this before, but I never really realized just how time consuming it is.  So, how does this help me to make money online?  Well, it helps me because it brings up the importance of time in any potential landing pages I would create for a campaign.  I would be willing to bet that people do a lot more “impulse” buying for information products right around the time they first get their puppy as they don’t have time to research and shop around.  So, if I can build a landing page that hits on all the important factors people like me would be looking for, while at the same time saving the person a lot of time, I’m pretty sure that page would convert much higher.

Now, how can you use this to help you make money online?  Well, realize that if you’re getting into PPC affiliate marketing, most people who are going to be promoting products, don’t actually have any direct experience with the products they’re promoting.  For example, there are a tonne of affiliate marketers who are promoting weight loss products, but they probably have never had weight problems.  Or, there might be affiliate marketers who promote government grants, but they have never applied for a grant themselves.

Look at your life and think about the areas of your life that you’re having challenges with right now.  Then, think about the things that you search for on Google.  Are there any digital products that address the challenges you’re going through?  Which keywords are you using to describe those challenges?  Write everything down, as you might never be in this same position again and it might be a hundred times more difficult to try to think of keywords once you’re no longer in this situation.

Did you just have a baby?  What do you search for?

Did you just lose a dog?  What kind of stuff did you search of afterwords?

Are you going through a debt crisis?  What do you search for?

Did you break up with someone?  What kind of stuff do you search for now?

All these “life situations” give us a temporary opportunity to capture the keywords, challenges and questions we have in that specific situation and I would be willing to bet that 80-90% of those keywords won’t have any competition on them as people who aren’t in that specific situation simply won’t be able to think of them.