#i didn't want to advertise in this guide but if you're reading this my website is classicpokemonguide by the way!

[dramaticunicorn82]

Love & Pride

"That's what my heart yearns for now - love and pride. That's what my heart yearns for now - love and pride.

Start your journey early or maybe later get your boots on

Look for rainbows it's cloudy

Take your hairdryer blow them all away.

In you I've found a story I want to keep hearing. In you I see all colours not just black or white. In you I find a reason and hope for all dreamers

You are my fill you're my supply of love and pride. That's what my heart yearns for now - love and pride. . . ."

--- Mick Roberts/Paul King

As I mentioned in a blog I wrote from June 1st, it's Pride month! June is Pride month and that means we celebrate the lives of LGBTQIA+ history, people, and events that have happened to lead us to where we are today. It can be a pretty complicated history but there is a great website for you to visit if you want to read more on it. Just click the link below if you would like to learn more.

Let me give you a brief history of my own experiences with Pride. I didn't even really celebrate it until I moved to the city known as New York. My first Pride parade was the summer of 2005 in between my junior and senior years of college and it was my first summer in NYC. I went to brunch with friends and waved my rainbow flag like the biggest queen you ever saw. I met a few guys and made out and got the number of a guy who never called me back. Yup. Sounds about right. LOL. While watching the parade I marveled at the floats and groups of people marching along the closed off streets of New York City. My first Pride was in NYC - a place home to one of the most infamous protests in all history, the Stonewall riots. I had a huge smile on my face the entire time. It was so crowded and hot but I didn't care, I was having the time of my life. It was also during this years Pride Parade that I took a glance at the group "Cheer NY." Cheer NY is a group of adults who are either part of the LGBTQIA+ community or at least allies, who are cheerleaders for different charity events and other events like LGBTQIA+ sports leagues.

They. Were. GAYMAZING! Anyone who knew me growing up knew I always loved tumbling and gymnastics. From an early age when my sister was a cheerleader in high school and taught me how to do a cartwheel, I have always been a fan. Took tumbling when I was little bit but I always wanted to do more. This group were doing all the things cheerleaders did - not just cheers but tumbling and throwing people in the air - doing flips, etc. I loved it! During the parade I was handed a flyer that advertised they were having try-outs. It's something I always wanted to do and so I tried out and made it and spent a little over a year on this squad. It was incredible. I got to meet other people in the community and made new friends and got to have so much fun while I did it. I loved it. I miss it. I still have my cheerleading outfit even though I know I'll never fit back into it. I payed a lot for it so I'm keeping as a memento for damn sure.

I bet you would still be amazed to now that I can STILL do a cartwheel, round-off, and (sometimes) a one-handed cart-wheel. I love doing it. :)

Anyways, since then I haven't always been to a Pride celebration but I always preached Pride because it's very important to me. Once I made way back to Southeast Texas I experienced Beaumont's first Pride in June of 2011 (I think it was 11) and then I started getting involved in the planning for their next Prides. When I returned officially back to Beaumont in 2016 I was a debutante for that years Pride ball (my second coming out so to speak) and I have had an active part every single year since then. The last few years I was the DQIC. Drag queen in charge.

This year is quite different. I am no longer involved in SETX's Pride celebration. It does make me sad, but I'm also okay with it. I was feeling major fatigue from last years celebration and mix that with the frustration of the place Pride was held (Jefferson Theatre...ugh...the city of Beaumont as a city DOES NOT support anything LGBTQIA+, but that's another story). I needed a break. Then I got let go from my job, then I lost my phone, then I had a mental breakdown, couldn't afford my rent, got a great job then slapped in the face with the realization that I would not actually work for about a year or so, had to go help take care of my sister and mom, sister dies, I have another breakdown and piss off my previous employer and my friends. Now I'm here. Not going to Pride.

Ya see, after this last breakdown. Breakdown might be too dramatic a term to use but they seemed like breakdowns to me. Oh well. My point is, I'm at this moment in my life where I need a break and I need to clear my head for a little bit. I'm exercising, currently not drinking alcohol, trying to get control of my money, working more, and just trying to welcome the positive and extinguish the negative. I'm trying to find new ways of handling my life and even though it's only been a couple of weeks, I'm doing pretty well.

I lost gigs and income by giving up Pride Beaumont but ya now, I really am okay with it. I miss it in ways but I KNOW it is what I need right now for my mental health.

I'm happy to see a lot of my friends taking the reins and trying to make Pride as good as ever. The fact that we can even have Pride in Beaumont and have had Pride in Beaumont for about a decade is pretty amazing. I am very proud of the people here who have made that possible for future generations. I am very proud of the work I did to help and will always cherish those memories.

Pride is also being held at BCP this year which I encouraged. I think it's a great place to hold Beaumont Pride. However, that really makes me uncomfortable even showing up (in drag or out) so this year I am avoiding it altogether. This Saturday, while a lot of my friends will be celebrating I will be relaxing by a pool with a mocktail and listening to music and working on my tan. And honestly....I'm looking forward to it. This year in particular, I do not miss having to get together outfits, putting music together, organizing a show line-up, being responsible for other performers, etc. I need this break for my own sanity and yes, I am sad I have to do it, but again, I HAVE TO DO IT. It's required and I know I'm not gonna regret anything.

So whatever you're doing this month to celebrate Pride, whether you're going out with friends or going to a party celebration or spending a quiet time at home alone, you do you boo. Enjoy it! I'm just as proud of myself this year for Pride as I have been for all my Prides before and I am working on finding myself again. :)

Until next time kiddos, this is Disco Donny signing off! Happy Pride everyone!

[tutorialstep]

The 5 Minutes Facts about Affiliate Marketing

I immediately realized that having a quality product is essential if you want to succeed in business and be able to pay your debts. And this is true for every kind of business: You need to provide a good or useful service if you want to succeed in life not just in terms of doing business.

And this is the very essence of affiliate marketing: You have a good product or service that people find useful, therefore you sell it. In exchange, you receive a commission from the business selling the goods if a customer purchases your item or subscribes to the service you are promoting.

Easy enough? But there's a problem!

What I'm about to tell you in this article will help you make LEGITIMATE money as an affiliate marketer. As a result, I believe you have a much better chance of success.

I'd suggest you grab a cup of coffee or something since this is going to take some time because the following few lines are packed with actual instances from real-life situations that show what I'm talking about, along with precise cash figures. The good news is that you should have a lot better understanding of affiliate marketing by the end of this essay, and more importantly, whether it is the best business strategy for you.

Now let's get started

First thing first, promoting stuff you don't believe in = not profitable

Expertnaire was the first platform I joined when I began using affiliate marketing. They had about 5000 things to advertise when I signed up. So I believed "Hey, 5000 things to market—this should be simple! All I need to make millions of naira is a website! ". How stupid was I?

I quickly found out that promoting all those different products on one small website/landing page was not only extremely difficult, but also extremely unprofitable. Let me explain why by using an actual example:

I was promoting an ebook about dating coupled with some other products. Sounds enjoyable? No, because I was essentially competing with myself. I now needed to sell twice as much in order to make more money!

Because of this, after beginning with Expertnaire, I had to also get the 72IG which I didn't before and this informed my decision to only market goods that were highly targeted and, hence, had a far higher likelihood of earning me money. I was able to sell half as much and still make the same amount of money as my commissions began to increase by 50%.

This is why I believe affiliate marketing is more profitable when you promote targeted products. But what does "targeted" mean exactly?

Let's talk about targeting your niche

What do I mean by niche? It's just a fancy word for a group of people that share the same interests, problems or needs. It could be anything really: gambling, cooking, weight loss, web design… the possibilities are endless.

The more targeted your niche is, the easier it will be to promote your product to them and the easier it will be for you to make sales. So if you're struggling to make money with affiliate marketing, I suggest you take some time to think about possible niches that you're interested in.

Some niche examples to milk your way to more cash

Ebooks

Digital Courses

Membership sites

Personal coaching

If you can come up with a targeted niche, which you're interested in and is profitable, the next step is to find a product that your audience might be interested in buying. But there's a how and what need to be done.

Let's get into the fun part now, shall we?

How to find affiliate products to promote

This is the methods I used to make about 8million:

- Find a product yourself on the platform expertnaire check the commission and values the product promises.

- Find someone else who already promotes the type of products you're interested in and ask them for their advice or if they can recommend any specific products. This is where 72IG comes in, it will help guide you from 0 to becoming a pro in affiliate marketing and quickly turning you to a 7figure earner.

To know more about Expertnaire click here to read the article I posted few weeks ago

One thing to keep in mind here is that not all products are worth promoting. Again that's where 72IG comes in

For example, you might see a product with fantastic sales numbers, but the actual product sucks. So it's up to you to determine if the product can still be profitable for you, even though its sales numbers may tell you otherwise.

But let's say I wanted to promote an ebook about dating advice. I would simply read up on the end value of the ebooks currently selling on expertnaire.

Now it's time to get even more specific!

You can then use this numbers to determine which products you want to promote, based on the following criteria:

- Sales– How many sales has the product made? You should avoid promoting ebooks/digital course that haven't made at least 25 sales in the last 30 days.

- Conversion– How many sales does the ebooks/digital course get you for every 100 sales? I'd recommend not promoting ebooks/digital course with less than a 1% conversion rate because it's too difficult to make any sales.

- Price– How much does each sale of this ebooks/digital course generate for affiliate marketers? It should be at least N30,000 per sale, which means you'll need to promote an ebooks/digital course that's at least N60,000 in price.

- Commission Rate–How much are you being paid to sell each copy of this ebooks/digital course? You should avoid promoting ebooks/digital course with less than 50% commission rates because you're not going to make any money.

- Affiliate Ranking–What's the rank of the affiliate who's promoting this ebooks/digital course? You should avoid promoting ebooks/digital course with affiliate ranks of under 50 because it means they're struggling to make sales.

If you have any questions kindly let me know.

[sigmaleph]

I really don’t know how to explain to you that the Disability community and the Chronic Pain Community and Every Woman Who Doesn’t Want Kids has had a completely different experience of the medical system than you have.

I didn't say "doctors never pull this shit". I said "when doctors pull this shit, it's fucked up and they shouldn't".

Or is the implication that if I was more seriously disabled I'd be more OK with medical dishonesty?

Can you actually point to some scientific disagreement?

Psychic powers aren't real, the position of the planets at the time of your birth does not affect your personality, you can't learn tarot from spirit visions, and interpreting randomly drawn cards will not give you useful financial advice.

Is there any actual discernible difference in advice or outcomes?

They don't actually say anything definitive about the quality of their advice, so I cannot exactly point you to a sentence where they say "Tarot advice leads people to make correct decisions 25% more often than default" or whatever. The implication is that it's worth listening to (maybe) and that it comes from the same kind of source as psychic visions and the mystical influence of the planets in astrology (completely wrong), which I think risks people overestimating the quality of advice. Because "the mystic forces of the universe picked this card to draw as especially relevant to my situation" gives a lot more credence to whatever advice is given than "it was a random draw and some ordinary human person is making up a story to go along with it", if you're the sort of person who believes in the mystic forces of the universe.

which the people going to these websites absolutely are, see above re: how many of them advertise psychics.

P.S. I still think the bolded section in my last reply is a pretty reasonable “no, this isn’t magic, just advice”.

They are denying (weakly) that it has any non-advice-based magic powers. They are not, actually, denying that the advice itself comes from magic sources. "Aids you in your journey of fulfilment" is perfectly consistent with the aid being magically-originating advice.

And. like. That line is from the same website that has at the top of their tarot page "What does the future have in store for you?". From the same page that sells you a past/present/future tarot read. ("Know what led up to this, what’s happening now, and what will likely happen in the future." how do they know what is likely to happen in the future, I wonder). The same page as this advice for shuffling cards:

Begin by shuffling the deck while contemplating your question. You may want to cut your shuffled deck into three piles and then reassemble it before pulling your cards, or you may not—do what feels right. Likewise, you may want to spread the cards out face down and move them around before picking, rather than splitting the deck. How you shuffle is entirely up to you—the most important aspect is your unwavering concentration on the question you want answered.

Why is keeping your unwavering concentration while shuffling important? The most important thing, even. Why would ordinary mundane tarot not work equally well if you decide your question after shuffling but before drawing? Because they think what you're concentrating on affects the order the cards end up in and which one you draw is not a uniform distribution out of 78 but mystically guided to be relevant to a specific question.

The people selling tarot claim they have magic powers, act as though they have magic powers, think there's magic going on when they draw cards, offer to sell information their cards could not tell you about if it was a mundane process, and advertise themselves in websites for people who believe in magic.

A lot of people who do tarot readings and other forms of neopagan divination do not purport to tell you the future, even in an “An Army Shall Win This Battle” kind of way. (And a good tarot reader will tell you that up front.) Modern tarot is less a tool for telling you what’s going to happen and more a tool for helping you parse what’s currently happening. Every tarot card is Full Of Symbolism; by making free associations between that symbolism and the stuff you’re trying to get a handle on, you can get a different perspective.

Tarot reading, in the modern world, is a gig somewhere between ‘being a pastor’ and 'being an agony aunt’. You are using randomly generated symbols to jostle your client into thinking about what’s going on, you are trying to help them interpret the situation they’re in, and 90% of the time, the answer is “dump him”, “no, seriously, this relationship is abusive, dump him”, or “seek professional help”.

I am frustrated by the motte-and-bailey nature of this argument. Responsible people who realise cards don't have magical powers will absolutely tell you, yes, tarot reading is just playing free association and trying to see what thoughts that prompts. the problem is I keep looking at tarot reading advertisements and the number that actually say this up front is, uh. discouraging.

I did a search for 'tarot' and looked at every website offering tarot readings for money, trying to see how long it'd take until I found one that unambiguously said there's nothing magical going on. I did not actually succeed at finding one before getting tired. possibly this is just a testament to my lack of willpower, but nevertheless; where are all these good tarot readers that tell you this up front, and how much market share do they have?

(meanwhile, the ones that unambiguously claim they do have magical powers, either re: tarot itself or via advertising psychics and astrologers and witchcraft lessons on the same page, are much easier to find)