When you're successful with affiliate marketing, you should start thinking about how you use your earnings. Most of us do the usual things - buy a new car, upgrade the house, go on vacation, etc. But there comes a time when you can be earning more than enough money to cover the luxuries in life. So, what do you do with your excess funds? Invest them is usually the answer. But invest in what? Property, stocks, bonds, crypto, art and other weird and wonderful opportunities that come along. One of the best ways to make money, when you have it, is to make it work for you rather than letting it sit in a bank earning less than inflation. Almost 5 years ago, I knew absolutely NOTHING about trading. Then I started dabbling in it, mostly trying to trade cryptocurrencies and, as you can guess, I got burned. Still, it was only money I was willing to lose, not rent or food money. I'd never tried trading regular stocks but I have bought some along the way - to hold and keep. I've looked at few crypto-trading courses over the years and, to be honest, they've all been quite expensive. I never looked at stock trading courses because stock values and movements were dwarfed by what happened in the crypto markets. One name in the stock trading space that I kept coming across was Sean Donahue. I've looked at the courses/training he's sold over the last couple of years and, again, the courses were too expensive. He really seems to know his stuff and he's been trading for 26 years. But his latest training really piqued my interest, especially with it being only 47 bucks. There are no upsells, OTOs or hidden fees. The training runs over 5 days - September 7th to 11th and you get an AI-powered trading tool to keep and use after the training is over. Now, I did buy the bundle package which is more expensive but absolutely not needed to add missing or extra components to the basic package. So, Monday I'm attending Sean's first class on Trading Using His AI Trade Tools

If this post sounds like a pitch, I guess it is. I've joined a ground-floor opportunity that could change people's lives. You've probably heard a pitch like that before but this one is definitely different. "Changing people's lives" usually means the affiliate/marketer could earn life-changing income. While that idea does apply to this business offer, it has the potential to change many more lives, not just those of the people who promote/market it to others. If I seem vague, it's because I have to be - I signed an NDA that prohibits me from disclosing any more information about it until it is publicly launched (on October 1st). You can get in at 3 levels, depending on your budget. One is affordable to most people. The other two, less so. The 2nd option is a over $1,000 dollars per year (paid annually). The 3rd option is a couple of thousand dollars per year (again, paid annually)... ...𝗯𝘂𝘁, 𝘂𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗹 𝗺𝗶𝗱𝗻𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁 𝗘𝗗𝗧 𝗼𝗻 𝗦𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗮𝘆, 𝗔𝘂𝗴𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝟯𝟬𝘁𝗵, 𝗺𝗲𝗺𝗯𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗵𝗶𝗽 𝘄𝗮𝘀 𝗮𝘃𝗮𝗶𝗹𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝗮𝘁 𝗮 𝟳𝟱% 𝗱𝗶𝘀𝗰𝗼𝘂𝗻𝘁. This is the option I chose because it offered the biggest savings and the biggest earning potential. That 75% discount is locked in for life, if you avail of it. After Sunday, the discount dropped to 66% for new members (this is the current discount). The 66% discount may remain in place until the doors open to the public on October 1st, when the discount, whatever it is, will likely disappear forever. There is a document that explains what this business opportunity is (it is not a typical marketing business) and how it works, but you will need to sign an NDA to access the document. You will also get access to a private Facebook Group where you can find out more, ask questions and watch webinar replays that explain the opportunity. 𝗧𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝗶𝘀 𝗻𝗼 𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗶𝗮𝗹 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗺𝗶𝘁𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 - you are free to read the document and access the Facebook Group without having to commit to becoming a paying member. If it's not for you, that's okay. The NDA is there to prevent you from talking publicly about what you learn - once the opportunity goes live in a few weeks, the NDA will no longer apply.

Chinese startup DeepSeek just released a new AI model with "drastically reduced" costs, more than a year after it stunned the world with a low-cost reasoning model that matched the capabilities of US rivals. Hangzhou-based DeepSeek burst onto the scene in January last year with a generative AI chatbot, powered by its R1 reasoning model, that upended assumptions of US dominance in the market. The new version, DeepSeek-V4, features an ultra-long context of one million words. The company claimed that it was now world-leading, with drastically reduced compute (and) memory costs. A model's context length determines how much input a model is able to absorb to help it complete tasks. A "preview version" of the open source model is now available. Experts say V4's release marks an "inflection point" in terms of hardware and cost. This version addresses the long-standing issues of slower performance and higher costs associated with long context lengths. If ultra-long context support becomes a standard feature, long-text processing is expected to move beyond high-end research labs and enter mainstream commercial applications. The new V4 is released as two versions, DeepSeek-V4-Pro and DeepSeek-V4-Flash, with the latter being a more efficient and economical choice because it has smaller parameters. V4-Pro has 1.6 trillion parameters while the V4-Flash has 284 billion parameters, which refine models' decision-making ability. The model has also been "optimised" for popular AI Agent products such as Claude Code, OpenClaw, OpenCode and CodeBuddy (Chinese company - not available in all countries). As things stand with world knowledge benchmarks, DeepSeek-V4-Pro significantly leads other open-source models and is only slightly outperformed by the top-tier closed-source model, (Google's) Gemini-Pro-3.1. The previous version of DeepSeek performed at a similar level to ChatGPT and other top US offerings, but the company said it had taken significantly less computing power to develop.

Avatar V Record one 15-second clip and generate full upper-body video of yourself across different outfits and settings, with the same on-screen presence. This is HeyGen's most advanced avatar model yet, built to retire reshoots. Seedance 2.0 HeyGen is the first avatar platform to integrate Seedance 2.0 with verified human faces. The same Digital Twin you built for Avatar V gets cinematic motion, dynamic camera work, and up to three avatars in a single scene. Instant Highlights v2 turns long-form into clips Drop in a podcast, webinar, keynote, or interview. Type "the part where she talks about fundraising," and the AI finds it. Face tracking, multi-speaker, captions, translation into 175+ languages and dialects with lip sync in 4K. Same-day clips in your audience's language. Video where you already work New integrations live with Gamma (decks to avatar-narrated video) and Granola (meeting notes to recap video). Video stops being a separate project and becomes the natural step of work you're already doing. For builders, video is now code HeyGen open-sourced HyperFrames under Apache 2.0, a programmable video engine developers can fork, extend, and ship with. Compose scenes in HTML, drive them with JavaScript, render production-quality video from the CLI (Command Line Interface). Your agent can ship video with a single prompt. If you want to try HeyGen out, you can create up to 3 videos per month on their Free Plan. You can create videos up to 1-min long and create 1 Custom Digital Twin. Video exports are limited to 720p resolution though. The Creator Plan (the one I have) is $29/mth or works out at $24/mth if you pay annually. I was able to get a deal to get the first three months at a reduced $24/mth. I don't know if this is still available.

I've decided to run an experiment on how I promote a couple of products. Instead of me just putting a picture of myself at the bottom of a bridge page (I try to keep optin / lead-capture pages as clean as possible), I'm going to also add a picture of my cat so that the offers are co-branded by the two of us. I do already co-brand a couple of offers with a product creator because they're so associated with their product so adding co-branding for my cat, Tango, is a new twist. Why would I do this? It sounds nuts, doesn't it? Well, chalk it up to a brain fart or out-of-the-box thinking. Most people love animals and if they see that I have a pet, they'll know that I love animals as well. That's a bit of a barrier broken down - they already know something about me and maybe it's something they can resonate with. So maybe they'll be a little more predisposed towards buying from me. And if they end up on my email list, I can send them stories about Tango to keep them entertained along with the usual news and promos. Will it work? I don't know; it might even hurt my conversion rates as someone seeing a picture of Tango might think "This guy's not serious; I'm not buying from him". So that's what I'll be testing. Can Tango become a brand ambassador? Can he represent me? Can I send entertaining emails as him? Anyway, I'll keep you posted on the success... or failure... of this venture. So, let me introduce you to my cat, Tango, a rescue who's now 3 years old. He was the runt of the litter and didn't have a great start in life and so he's on the small side for a cat. I've had mackerel tabbies for the last 30 years(!) but after my last cat disappeared without trace, I waited 18 months before thinking of getting another cat. When I felt the time was right, I started looking at cats in local animal shelters. A couple I looked at were snapped up quickly so I missed those opportunities. Then an orange kitten about a year old popped up in the listings for cats needing homes.