Posted August 25th, 2008
I’m back online at home now, but have only just now had a chance to sit down and figure out where I was at a few weeks ago. I’ve realised that at least one of my projects has passed a kind of important deadline, which I hope is not a killer. I’m going to try and work on that tomorrow and get it up to speed then hopefully make up for lost time on that one. This site is not selling anything and is free to use. It’s more of a hobby type site for me with potential for alot of returning visitors, so I hope to monetise it with affiliate banners and possibly adsense.
I’ve got a few others I should also be working on, mostly ebay/affiliate type sites, again I hope to find a bit of time in the next week or two to get back on track with those.
Although I will post an earnings report for this month, believe me it’s not going to be anything special at all, but I think this month has been pretty much a write off for online work/earnings so I’m not too worried about that, and hope to do much better next month.
I also want to try and find some time to post some helpful information up on this blog, I have a few posts in mind to start with but want to find enough time to make them half decent quality rather than incoherent ramblings.
That’s where I’m at right now, just getting the wheels in motion again. Hopefully you guys are faring better than me at the moment.
Posted August 18th, 2008
I’m back at work now after a week and a half off while we were moving house, and so I’m back on a normal Internet connection! Unfortunately it’s been a busy day in the office today so not much time to really get back into reading through my RSS feeds, checking on my sites etc. Also, hopefully our home broadband connection is being turned on tomorrow… so fingers crossed that goes without a problem.
As long as all goes well this week then I hope to get a post or two up here by the weekend, as well as work on my sites.
In terms of meeting this month’s goals, I think that is highly unlikely, at least in the making money online goals. It looks like it’s going to be a really really poor month (looking like around 10% of last month at the moment 
), but you never know what could happen in the next couple of weeks…
So, hopefully normal service will resume shortly and I can try and get back some momentum.
Posted August 10th, 2008
Actually, no, i’ll stick with the same goals, but… it’s going to be a bit harder going because I moved house on Friday and, as well as being in a totally new city, we have limited internet connectivity for up to 2 weeks. Ouch! This might sound stupid but it honestly didn’t dawn on me until yesterday that it’s going to be hard work getting things sorted for the next week or so, not to mention exploring our new surroundings, getting a feel for the place etc. And that added to the fact that we’ll hardly have any internet access has made me realise that maybe, just maybe, it might be a tad more difficult than I thought to achieve my online goals this month.
It’s obviously going to be harder to post here very often over the next week or two (has anyone tried using WP Admin from their Blackberry before?!), let alone work on other sites/projects, but we’ll see how it goes.
Rest assured, as soon as we’re settled and back online, i’ll re-double my efforts to try and make up for the lost time, i’ll keep the same goals in place, it will just be more of a challenge that’s all!
Posted August 3rd, 2008
I’ve been thinking lately that it’s about time I set myself some goals to aim for both in making money online and for this blog. The reasons for this are quite simple… 1) I think it will be motivating to be working towards something; 2) It will be a great way to track my progress, so I can look back when I’m a millionaire (stop laughing!) and see how far I’ve come.
I’ve never really formally set goals for myself before, so I want to try this out and start with some fairly modest goals for the month of August and see how I get on.
Online Earning Goals for August
Last month I thought wasn’t too bad at all for money earned online, but as I mentioned in my July Earnings post a large portion of that was from a cashback site (Greasy Palm) that, although very good for some quick cash, I’m not sure whether you could sustain any decent income from it following the initial spate of higher paying offers available. Keeping this in mind I’m actually going to set my August earnings goal to £50 ($98.70), less than what I managed to earn last month.
Although I will keep doing offers on this cashback site (and any other decent ones I can find), I would like to see my affiliate and adsense income make up a bigger percentage of this months total income. I’m still working on a few affiliate/adsense sites which are slowly but steadily starting to increase in traffic, so hopefully this will happen naturally.
Blog Goals for August
I really would like to build this blog into not only a journal of the things I am doing to make money online, but also as a helpful resource for others who are just starting out and need help to kick things off. I know there are plenty of blogs out there with tons of information on this subject, but I’d like to bring everything that I think would be helpful to a newbie into one place and try to have almost a step-by-step guide with plenty of specific details at each stage, which will walk anyone, no matter how technically minded (or not…), through what they need to do to get started.
This month I want to start this off with a couple of beginner articles with all the information I can find and links to some of the best resources out there, the ones that I’ve personally found the most helpful.
With regards to numbers, I’m still very low on the stats at the moment, but this month I want to start to go about changing that. Here are the goals:
- RSS Subscribers
Of course, getting massive amounts of people reading your RSS feed is one of the main things most bloggers are looking for. At the moment my feedburner account says I have a whopping 6 readers, so by the end of the month my aim is to have at least 20. I know what you’re thinking, “he’s crazy, no-one can get THAT many people to subscribe in just one month”, but I’ll give it my best shot anyway.
- Unique Visitors
Another highly regarded metric, and probably more important in my eyes as these are actually how many unique people are browsing on your site. Google Analytics tells me that I had 155 visits last month, or an average of 5 per day. Based on that, I’m going to set this goal at 250 visitors.
- Page Views
Again, Google Analytics says I had 349 page views last month. I’m not too impressed with that as it means that the average number of pages a visitor reads is only 2.25. I’m going to look into some ways of making the site more “sticky” and try and give people some reasons to stick around a bit longer. Hopefully this will also help with the RSS numbers.
I think that will do for this month. I’ll be a happy chappy if at least some of these can be met, but I’ll work hard and see how it goes.
Posted August 2nd, 2008
I’m quite pleased that I can already do a post like this, I didn’t really think I’d make much money online (if any) by this time so it’s quite nice to have made a little bit.
There’s not really much adsense/affiliate earnings just yet as I don’t yet have any one site that I can say is 100% complete, although I do have a bunch of site which I’ve been working on and have started getting traffic and the odd AdSense click or eBay lead.
It’s been a good month for PepperJam earnings mainly because of their blogger incentive bonus, but I’ve also managed one referral (woohoo!).
As you will probably notice I also added some ads to the sidebar and header of this blog. This was mainly a response to being approached about advertising, but I had been considering doing it anyway. I’d like to take this opportunity to say thanks to Market Leverage for being the first advertisers on this blog! So… thanks Market Leverage!
Apart from the above, I’ve also found Get-Paid-To (GPT) or “cashback” type websites can be an easy and fun way to earn a bit of cash online. I was contemplating not including this in my earnings post as it’s not the sort of thing I was thinking about when I started my “make money online” journey, but then I thought “well it IS money earned online, so why not?”. I know that I probably couldn’t earn a massive amount from this income stream, and it may not be possible to sustain a decent level of earnings every month (I’ll let you know how I do as time goes on…), but I do think it can be something that you can spend a couple of spare hours on during the month and make a little additional cash with. The site I signed up with and have used so far is Greasy Palm. This is a UK site, so is perfect for me, but I know there are plenty of these types of sites out there and plan to check some more out in August!
I didn’t have much in the way of expenses. I already have a hosting account which I can host unlimited domains on so no expense there. I bought 10 .info domains as GoDaddy had a sale on those, and this is what I’ve been building some of my sites on.
So, here’s the rundown of my online earnings this month. Drum roll please…. 
- Greasy Palm (cashback / GPT site) - £44.47 ($87.78)
This has been quite a fun way to earn some quick cash. Once you’ve signed up for the site you can find tons of (free in many cases) offers you can sign up for and get cashback. There is actually £59.47 in my Greasy Palm account but I did have to deposit £15 total in a couple of gaming sites to get some of the cashback (those sites gave a combined cashback of £32.50 - so I made £17.50 and got to have a bit of fun playing some games for money!).
- PepperJam Network - £18.74 ($37.00)
This great affiliate network not only has some really good affiliate programs available but also has some great ways to earn extra cash that I took advantage of last month. Apart from a $10 signup bonus I got just for joining them, I also got $20 in bonuses for blogging about their services. I also managed to get one referral through this site which I’m pretty pleased about.
- Direct Advertising - £10.13 ($20.00)
As you can no doubt tell I added some ads to the sidebar and site header, this was because I had an enquiry regarding advertising here. I didn’t think I’d get any advertising on this blog just yet so I’m happy about this as well.
- Affiliate Earnings - £0.65 ($1.28)
The only affiliate program that earned me anything last month was the eBay one. I’ve started setting up a few sites using my own mashup script (still in development… hopefully I can release something here in August), and one site in particular has been getting some clicks through to ebay items and a few people have gone on to make an eBay purchase. It’s only been low value items so far hence the low earnings, but hopefully this can get better this month.
- AdSense - £0.60 ($1.19)
Again, not really much to shout about but it’s still more than nothing . The Adsense earnings this month were from a few clicks on a couple of sites.
“Grand” Total = £74.59 ($147.25)
Expenses = £7.50 ($14.80)
Total Profit = £67.09 ($132.45)
Well, I don’t think that’s too bad at this early stage. If I could make at least this amount every month until the end of the year I think I would still class that as a relatively successful 6 months.
Next post… my make money online and blog goals! Keep an eye out for that one in the next day or so.
