Posted September 30th, 2008
When I started this blog and my journey into making money online, I had a few long term goals in mind. These are the big, life changing goals that I would love to reach through online earnings.
I tried not to be too greedy, but they are long term goals so I may as well aim high! These might not even seem that much to ask to other people out there, but to me they would be absolutely huge things to achieve.
- To Earn Enough to Buy a House
Yes, this is very high up the list of wants. I’m 26 and live in the UK, haven’t got much money saved and have a wife and three kids to support, and we currently rent a house. With the housing market the way it is, not to mention the state of the economy as a whole, I can’t see us being able to buy a place in the near future. So, a real long shot this one, but this goal is to be able to buy a house outright! I reckon maybe £200,000 or so should do it 
- To Quit My Day Job
This one is probably the number one goal on most people’s list. I think for my online income to be able to just equal my current salary would not be enough, before I would quit my day job I would want to be consistently earning about 150% of what I currently do at work. I would imagine I would need this to cover things like days I’m unable to work or on holiday, or just as an added bit of breathing space should things start going belly up!
Of course it would be fantastic to work from home, work my own hours, spend more time with my family, and get rid of this 4 hour round trip into the office!
- To Make a Million
This one isn’t really as important to me as the ones above (although would obviously be nice ), but if I can achieve the other two then hopefully I’d be on the way to the £1,000,000 mark anyway
Each month I am trying to set short term goals for my online endeavours to help me stay on track and keep a check on my progress. Each milestone I reach is just another step closer to those big goals!
What are your long term goals? Are you as greedy as I am ?
If you want to see how I get on in my journey towards these goals then why not subscribe to my RSS feed?
Posted September 30th, 2008
It’s been a bit quiet on here for the last few days, and that’s because I’ve been having some trouble with WordPress on my web hosting which is driving me insane. I can’t post, when I hit the Save button I get taken to a 404 “not found” page. This still isn’t sorted but hopefully will be soon, in the meantime I’ve just discovered a decent-looking app called BlogDesk which allows me to write a post offline then publish it straight to my blog when I’m ready. Hopefully this works well and my WP issues won’t be such a major problem.
It has been really frustrating me because I’ve made a big effort in the last week or two to post regularly and have a few posts lined up that I’ve wanted to get out in the last few days. Oh well…
Assuming this post makes it up to the blog without any issues then there should be some more on it’s way soon.
Posted September 25th, 2008
Since I started this blog one of the things I’ve thought about is selling advertising on it. Now I know, as it’s still fairly new and doesn’t pull in a high number of visitors at the moment, that advertisers aren’t going to want to pay a lot for the potentially low exposure, but I still wanted to put up an “Advertise here” type page to at least give people the option, so this is what I’ve done! You should notice the “Advertise” tab in the menu at the top of this page.
As a way to kick start advertising here you can now get your hands on either a 468×60 ad at the top of the page (next to the title - only one available), or a 125×125 ad on the right sidebar (six slots available) for one month for just £1 (less than $2)!
I’m working hard at the moment to get more exposure for this blog, get more traffic and of course get the readership up, so why not try out an ad spot here? There isn’t much to lose, it will only cost you £1 and there is no obligation to renew if you feel that it’s not worth it.
To allow people to make an informed decision on whether or not to advertise, I’ll be including the last few months of stats including Alexa rank, Technorati rank, Google pagerank, number of unique visitors and number of pageviews. Hopefully from now on this will show increases in the numbers month to month and show advertisers that the blog in on the up. I was in two minds as to whether I should include my stats at the moment since they are so low, but I’m not trying to hide anything or con anyone into buying up ad spaces so I thought there’s no reason not to.
As well as ads I am also going to try my hand at paid reviews. Right now you can get a well-written, honest review of your site with a minimum of 500 words for just £5 (under $10)!
I’m not offering subscription options for the ad slots at the moment as the prices are likely to change as the blog does get more traffic, but this is something I will look at in the future.
If you’re interested in buying any advertising or paid review on here then please take a look at the Advertise page.
Posted September 24th, 2008
I don’t know about you guys, but I’m the type of person who will come up with an idea and fling myself into a project with tons of enthusiasm, but then I’ll come up with another idea and do the same thing, leaving my original project to wither away. I do this all the time and the end result is that I rarely get one site up and into what I would consider a finished state.
If I’m honest then it’s probably after the initial excitement about the idea dies down, or when it gets to the “boring” bits that I move on from a project. I guess I need to learn how to grit my teeth and just get on with it when I start to get this feeling.
This really does frustrate me as there are loads of ideas which I’d originally had high hopes for that I’ve just left for dead in the past. I think I need to stop this cycle now!
What I’m going to do is to pick two projects (maybe three… we’ll see) and only work on those until they are complete. Anything else that I currently have in my list, or any new ideas I come up with, can go into a queue and be worked on once one of those 2-3 slots is free’d up. Hopefully this will mean I can turn out sites much quicker, and more importantly that they will actually be complete, working sites. I’m hoping it will also help me stay focused rather than have a million things on the go.
For now the sites I want to work on are my real estate niche site, an IT related niche site and possibly, if I can squeeze it in, a mashup site that I am working on with a friend. There is enough to do on all of these to keep me going, and if I stick to only these then I think I will start seeing some good progress over the next few weeks or so.
Are you like me with many projects on the go, or do you tend to see each one through before starting on the next?
Interested in following my progress? Why not subscribe to my RSS feed and learn from my mistakes and successes.
Posted September 23rd, 2008
WordPress producing duplicate content is an issue which I’ve heard about a couple of times recently, and it seems to me that it’s something that every blogger should spend a little time in correcting.
The problem is that, by design, WordPress takes your posts and reproduces that content in archive pages, tag pages and feeds. Search engines don’t like duplicate content and will typically exclude pages they see as duplicates. But, they seem to have a habit of indexing those copies of your posts, and not the actual posts themselves. Not only that, but the duplicates that have been indexed don’t get very good rankings at all.
As Paul from themakemoneyonline.net has pointed out, this could be a simple, 5 second fix. However, while fixing the issue on your site might only take a few seconds, reversing the effects in the search engines may take considerably longer while they re-index your pages, as Kirsty found out here.
I think the word needs to be spread about this because as Kirsty proved during her testing, this problem can have a drastic effect on a sites organic traffic numbers, and therefore the overall success of the site.
I’ve actually found that if I search Google for pages it has indexed from my site that alot of my posts are there, so hopefully this hasn’t affected me too much so far, but I am going to be implementing Paul’s fix and also some of the suggestions from Kirsty and hopefully avoid this problem.
Hopefully this also helps some of your guys out there.
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Posted September 22nd, 2008
If you haven’t already been there then you should definitely head over to NicheToRiches and take a look.
The idea behind the site is that affiliate marketers can all get together there and participate in some friendly competition to help motivate them to getting their affiliate sites up and running.
I think this is a great idea, especially for a newbie affiliate marketer like myself as you can get some really invaluable tips along the way through posts and comments by other people there.
Empress (who runs the site) also allows members to publish their own posts, so you could share your own experiences with the other members. To me, in theory, this could turn into an excellent resource as you could see what people have tried, whether or not that worked, and what they’ve learned along the way. In practice people might not be that willing to share too much info for fear of giving their top secret ideas away. I still think that people could share their experiences without giving too much away, and it could still be very helpful.
I’ve joined up and I’m currently in the early stages of putting together a site as part of the recent Real Estate challenge. Already the posts by Empress have helped me alot in figuring out how to go about things and get the ball rolling.
Again, I think the idea of this is great and if people would just share a little bit about what they’ve learned, what worked, what didn’t etc. then the site could turn into a little gold mine of information for affiliate marketers.
Posted September 19th, 2008
I’ve come to realise that I have a bit of a problem which eats up a good amount of my online time… I think I’m obsessed with checking stats!
Even though none of my sites has really got off the ground yet, all get very very low levels of traffic (if any), I still end up spending a fairly long time going through stats for them! It’s crazy since there’s nothing really there to check!
So, I’ve decided that I need to nip this in the bud so that when I do start seeing some better traffic numbers I’m not spending all day staring at tables and charts rather than actually working.
Allocating Time To Check Stats
This is one of the things I mentioned in my last post, allocating time to each individual project. I think this should also be the case for checking on my site stats. What I think I will do is allow just 1 hour per week to check them. It’s going to be hard for a stat-junkie like myself, but I’m willing to give it a try!
Maybe when things have picked up and there is more of a need to keep a better eye on traffic numbers etc. then I’ll do it a couple of times a week, but at the moment I know there’s no point in me checking every single day.
How often do you check yours?
Posted September 18th, 2008
Things have not exactly been going to plan around here lately, I just seem to be going round in circles. I plan to work on some sites and have every intention of knuckling down with them, but then something comes up which severely limits my spare time and I just don’t get round to doing it. This has been going on for the last 6 weeks or so.
I have a fairly decent sized list of sites/projects that I would like to get into some kind of “live” state in the near future, and hopefully this time I can really get stuck into them. Part of that is also to be more active on this blog.
Making Time
This is the major stumbling block for me. Time. I’m not trying to make any excuses because I know there are people out there who are working a crazy number of hours to get their online empire off the ground, but I do find that time to spend on my online projects is just so hard to find.
I work full time, Monday to Friday, and I “enjoy” a 2 hour commute (each way), so that’s 12 hours out of my day. I also have a wonderful wife and three great kids who obviously want to spend time with me in the evenings and at the weekends, and I want to spend time with them too. That usually leaves me with some free time from about 10-11pm, and since I have to get up at 5am to start it all again, I’m usually a tad knackered by that point and can’t get my head around anything.
So, the plan…
Well since I moved house and acquired an extra hour (each way) commute I thought it would be a good idea to get myself a laptop so I could work during the 1 hour+ train journey. I was after an Acer Aspire One, but instead have managed to get my hands on a Lenovo X61 from work. Lovely. So this is a good start, giving me roughly 10 hours a week. That’s not bad.
I’m going to also try and actually take a lunch break every day (gasp!) and also use this time for online work. If that goes to plan, it’s another 4 hours (I play footie on Friday lunchtimes).
At weekends I’m going to try and set aside a couple of hours for me to lock myself away from distractions and get some work done then too.
All in all I’d like to be able to find at least 15 hours a week. I think in that time I could definitely get into the swing of things and start seeing some positive results, seeing as I’m barely spending an hour or two a week at the moment.
Getting Organised
This is another thing I need to work on. At the moment what I tend to do when I do get the odd hour is to work on whatever comes to mind at that moment. This usually means that each of my projects never gets a chance to gain momentum as it’s only getting the odd bit of attention here and there. I’m also terrible at keeping to-do lists, so never really have any good indicators of how that particular project is progressing.
I’ve now started a to-do list for each of my projects, along with some basic goals for them. As I complete each item on the list I’m hoping the sense of having achieved something will spur me on to keep it up.
I’ve also started to prioritise my list of projects, so I can see easily which ones I want to get rolling first and can then dedicate more time to those.
I was considering allocating specific blocks of time to specific projects as well, but I’m not sure how well that would work (do you do this? Any comments welcome).
So there you have it, this is my plan for helping me get back on track and start to get things done and hopefully see some results.
How do you make time to do your online work? Care to share any tips for freeing up those extra hours or organising your workload?
Posted September 4th, 2008
Today I got my first cheque through the post for my online earnings! Woohoo!
The cheque was from Pepperjam and is for my July earnings ($37.00 - about £20). I know this isn’t exactly a huge sum but it’s quite exciting to see that figure on screen turn into some real cash.
Just to give anyone reading who’s thinking about joining Pepperjam some motivation, here’s some proof that they do pay…
So there you have it, a real cheque for real money!
If you haven’t joined Pepperjam yet then I would definitely encourage you to do so straight away! They currently offer a $10 bonus just for signing up, and they will pay $7 for anyone you refer to them. As if that wasn’t good enough, they also run their excellent bloggers incentive program, so if you have a blog all you have to do is post about their services and they’ll pay you $10 per post!
Posted September 3rd, 2008
Here we are again folks… my online earnings report for August.
I actually did briefly consider not posting one this month since I’ve barely had time to do anything and the numbers are a bit dismal. But, for the sake of consistency, and since I should really be posting about the lows as well as the highs, here it is.
- Greasy Palm (cashback / GPT site) - £12.38 ($22.11)
As I’ve mentioned a couple of times, unless you get alot of referrals to these types of sites (as long as they pay for referrals of course) then I don’t think there is any way of sustaining a very high income from them. However, just by referring one person and completing a couple of quick offers I managed to make a little bit.
- Affiliate Earnings - £0.48 ($0.85)
As with last month, because I haven’t really setup much in the way of affiliate sites yet, the only income was from the eBay program, and it was only one lead.
- AdSense - £1.95 ($3.50)
Seeing as I’ve done nothing this month, this isn’t a bad increase on last month’s £0.60 ($1.19).
- In-Text Advertising - £0.58 ($1.03)
In-Text ads were new to this site and a couple of others I have last month. Only a few clicks though so nothing great here at the moment, but I am pleased it made anything. Hopefully this can be a good income stream once I get traffic numbers up for my sites.
Total = £15.39 ($27.49)
Expenses = £0.00 ($0.00)
Total Profit = £15.39 ($27.49)
Considering that most of August was a complete write off I can’t really be that unhappy with this. Again, the bulk of this income was from Greasy Palm, so I’d really like to start getting the other income streams up.
In July I also made a good amount from the Pepperjam Network, but again as my time has been so limited lately I didn’t have time in August to take advantage of their bloggers incentive program, or to promote them or their affiliate programs in any other way.
Another income stream that was lost during August was direct advertising. I can’t really blame Market Leverage for not renewing, and thank them again for buying those slots during July! Once I get traffic and RSS numbers up then I will look at direct advertising again.
I’ll post my goals for September in the next couple of days, and also reveal my plan for how I am going to try and get more time to work on my online projects.
