Affiliate Marketing Secrets

It’s set in a conservative, small Irish town in modern times.
Rosie Hammel, 17 years old. Relatively tall and thin. Pale skin with wavy dark brown hair. Light blue/grey eyes. Very pretty. Wears ‘quirky’ glasses. Often wears plaid shirts, skinny jeans and converse. Introverted, tries to fit in but just can’t. Intelligent. Accidentally outed her former best and only friend Jacqueline to their entire all-girls Catholic school on their first day back. Will she now face being alone now that her only friend isn’t talking to her? Has a 22 year old sister in college in Limerick. Her parents, Bob and Patricia Hammel and herself all live together in a small bungalow. Bob is a postman and Patricia takes care of the elderly and invalids. Middle-class. Both Bob and Patricia are easy-going and would let Rosie do almost anything she wants, mainly because Rosie is always stuck at home and they feel a bit sorry for her.
Jacqueline O’ Hara (A.K.A. Jack), 17 years old. Tall and in good shape from playing volleyball. Long blonde hair, tanned. Big green eyes and full lips. Often wearing designer clothing. Very well-dressed. High-femme. Loves wearing blazers and teaming bright coloured skirts with socks and heels. Moved from Dublin when she was 13 years old. Desired by many boys around the town but Jack always has an exuse to turn them down. Popular, but since being found out as gay, her friendships have shaken. Very laid-back, chilled personality. Outgoing. A bit of a badass. Only child. Her parents are Peter and Vanessa O’ Hara. Originating from Ballsbridge, Co. Dublin, she is a D4 girl. Her dad sees a niche in the market for a big shopping centre in the town and decides to start construction as soon as possible and they move. High-upper class. Her father is a multi-millionaire business man and his wife isn’t required to work for a living. They live in a big mansion on the outskirts of the town. Her father is always working so they don’t have that close of a relationship and she also isn’t close with her mother. They don’t relate. She sees her mother as very superficial and shallow whereas Jack doesn’t like how she has everything at her feet. She faces no real adversity.
Tómas Scully, 16 years old. Average height, average body type. A bit on the pale side. Deep blue eyes, thinnish lips and a strong jaw-line. Skinned head. Opts to wear tracksuits on a daily basis. Foster adopted by Séamus and Marie O’ Hara (Jack’s parents). Has a thick skin from the rough years in foster care and has become apart of a gang. He finally feels accepted and belonging to something with people of similar backgrounds. But deep down he knows what they are doing is wrong. When Tómas was eight, he was out playing football with his twin sister. The ball went out onto the road and he told her to go and get it, but then she was hit by a car and killed. Was put into foster care when he was just 11 years old because of neglect at home. Was in and out of homes but was never taken in because his ‘rebellious’ nature was too much for certain households. When he was 15 years old he was fostered by the O’Hara’s and finally adopted at 16 years old. Came from a lower-class background but now can live life comfortably with the O’Hara’s.
Rodrigo Sanchez, 17 years old. Kind of small and slim. Black curly hair with blue highlights at the tips. Tanned with brown eyes and thick eyebrows. Very pretty. Loves to wear coloured skinny jeans with vans. Usually combined with unusual jumpers or colourful shirts. An eccentric bisexual who is a foreign exchange student from Spain. When Rodrigo is caught with a man, his deeply religious host parents try to get the ‘deviant’ out of him. Sick of being mistreated, Rodrigo runs away with no money and will do anything to survive. He finds a ‘sugar daddy’ but then he falls in love with a girl called Adia. Two older brothers and one older sister. Oldest brother is in prison but his other brother is a successful model. His sister is settled down with a family and husband. Lower-middle class. Wanted to get out of Las Ramblas, Barcelona and experience the rest of the world, he payed for his foreign exchange out of the money his father left for him and was sent to Ireland. His father, Juan, was unemployed, and abandoned his family for a life with another woman when Rodrigo was 14 years old. His mother, Alva, works in a shop.
Adia Achebe, 16 years old. A little shorter than average. Curvy. Rocks an afro. Dark eyes, almost strikingly black. Very delicate facial features. Loves prints and she is often seen wearing colourful patterned leggings teamed with a nice short jacket and wedges. Known around the town as ‘easy’, Adia wants nothing serious as she fears it will distract her from her studies. (Also a fear of her strict Nigerian father). But when she decides to get a taxi home from a night out and things go terribly wrong, it is unlikely she will ever be able to trust someone again.

Lately, Republican candidates are taking shots at Mitt Romney because in his private equity life he had some failures. Democrats have made no secret that they are going to go after Romney because in his private equity life, he had to shut down some unprofitable plants to save businesses. Heaven forbid, other businesses he invested in went belly up. I am not here to defend or advocate for any particular candidate, but I do think that Americans need a much better perspective on failure.
Why are we so hard on failure?
One of the things the start up community does is embrace failure. When a company goes under, you learn from it. I have invested after tax dollars that were hard to earn into many companies, and not all of them have worked out. One went belly up. One is marginal, one is on fumes, and the rest are operating, but like any company they have challenges. I have had some exits too. But, even those had many twists and turns along the way and the company could have gone under.
Being in business isn’t easy. It’s risky. If it were easy, we’d all leave our cushy government and corporate jobs and go on our own and start entrepreneurial companies. But, statistics show that fewer than 30% of all start up businesses make it ten years. Starting a business isn’t rocket science, but it’s a heckuva lot tougher. But, encouraging people to take that risk leads to gigantic gains for our entire society.
To give you a little perspective, you need to know what Romney engaged in. He was in what is called Private Equity (PE). Most people confuse Private Equity with Venture Capital (VC). Venture invests in newer companies that have a new technology. Private Equity invests in an existing company that has been operating and reinvents that company. Usually, PE firms use a lot of leverage (debt), to generate returns. Extra leverage on the balance sheet magnifies the rate of return if the company can afford the debt load. If the company can’t afford it, it either restructures again or goes bankrupt. The reason it’s called Private Equity is that the money for the fund comes from private sources, not government sources. The companies that the PE firm buy and run are not listed on public markets, but closely held. The big payoff for PE comes when they spin the companies back out into the open market through an IPO or acquisition. Private Equity firms take risk.

Critique, be honest!
“With my powers, I shall end this world,” cackled a young, tall, slender man hovering high above the ground. It was nighttime, the sky was pitch black and clear, and the moon lit like a candle in a dark room. The man’s messy cobalt gray hair, tanned skin, and dark purple eyes glowed. He wore a black ankle-length robe, and on its back, it had a purple circle with craters on it, resembling the moon in the sky, except that on his clothing red and blue clouds blanketed the moon. He wore purple sandals over his yellow socks. Surrounding his body was a dark, violet, and mysterious aura. He hovered above the largest forest in the world of Unnatural, the Forest of Life.
Beneath the robed man were broad, giant trees, which he tried to destroy with the purple beams that fired from his palms. When these beams touched anything, that thing would instantly wither and die. Within the trees lived a small civilization known as the Forest People, who were once outcasts of the Grass Nation. Most of them tried to hide by staying in the least noticeable trees so the robed man would not notice them, but they all failed in hiding from the man. While he was in the sky terrorizing them, some of the more daring and intelligent Forest People threw rocks at him, but none of them came close to his body. Within minutes, the man destroyed more than half of the population in the Forest of Life.
“Run, run, run,” laughed the man, with dark aura from his body gathering in his hands, and his smirk becoming bigger and bigger. “With this spell, I will end you all and there’s nothing you can do about it. Darkness Attribute: Void!” He looked down at the Forest People he was terrorizing as his dark aura transformed into an assortment of weapons, including knives, swords, and arrows, which rushed at the remaining Forest People and killed off every one of them, one by one.
“Now how’s about we make a deal,” the robed man yelled, floating around in the sky, pivoting his head to seek for yet another person on his mental death list. “I know that someone is still alive. I sense someone’s aura. I think you know what I’m looking for, so if you give me the information, I won’t turn this search game into a very unfriendly match of hide and go kill.”
“That’s a nice dress you got on Niche,” laughed a loud voice from a faraway distance. “Were you hoping to die in it?”
“Oh, shut up,” Niche scoffed eerily, spinning his head from side to side, trying to work out where the sound was coming from, while his dark aura disappeared from view. “This isn’t the time for a family reunion. And I am in the middle of something and I’d rather you not interrupt me.” He paused for a minute, before rotating his head a full one hundred and eighty degrees to his backside and laughing. “Or maybe it isn’t too bad. I can take you out now before you end up interrupting me later.”
“You shouldn’t try to insult your elders, especially your older brother. You used to be so quiet, scared, innocent, and even brave and now look at ya, full of fear. I wonder if that’s the reason you left the nation and turned to the terrorist organization, Full Moon, because you were scared of me, wasn’t it?” chuckled the voice, which, although becoming louder, it also seemed to be echoing from different places at once.
“I know where you are!” Niche yelled maniacally. “Don’t waste the little amount of aura you have on such a waste of an illusion.”
In a split second, a man, young-looking and tall like Niche, but much more muscular, materialized right in front of him and swung his fist close to the back…