Posted October 1st, 2008
I know, this is the post you’ve been waiting for all month, the c-online earnings report. Well, the wait is over, it’s October 1st so that means it’s time for my September Online Earnings!
Seriously now… I have only really got stuck in properly to the stuff I want to be doing in the last week or so, so I haven’t really seen much progress in terms of earnings just yet. However, a little trickle of passive cash is coming in… I just need to turn that into a flood.
- Greasy Palm (cashback / GPT site) - £10.00 ($17.78)
Not really done much on this site as I think the number of offers I can actually do are drying up, and I really don’t want to be buying new home insurance, car insurance, 10 credit cards and taking out loans just to get some cashback! I think this is probably the last time I’ll include this kind of site in my online earnings as it’s not really what I’m after.
- Affiliates - £1.93 ($3.43)
Again, the only affiliate income I’ve made is from eBay. OK I guess since I haven’t touched the site that uses it in about 2 months.
- AdSense - £1.46 ($2.60)
A bit less than last month, I was hoping for at least a little bit of an increase but I guess that will come when I start getting visitors to my sites!
- In-Text Advertising - £2.23 ($3.98)
I’m pleasantly surprised at this figure as it’s alot more than last month, and hopefully will keep on increasing as I build up traffic.
Total = £15.62 ($27.80)
Expenses = £0.00 ($0.00)
Total Profit = £15.62 ($27.80)
Again, nothing to shout about, but I am pleased that my passive streams of income have increased a little on last month, and hopefully they will continue to increase as I keep working at this. I am aiming for October to be the first full month that I work on my online projects without any major interruptions and fingers crossed the earnings will reflect that.
How did you do last month?
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 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.
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.
Posted July 22nd, 2008
OK, so I’ve been messing around with the mechanics of how my affiliate mashup sites will work, but have come to the point where I think I need to start getting some static content (articles, info pages etc.) on to these sites too, in order to get more hits from the search engines for search terms related to my sites.
This may be obvious to most people, and I have heard the term “content is king” mentioned by pretty much every blogger I’ve read in the make money online community, but I think I was maybe slightly naive in thinking I might still get some decent traffic to my sites without having to write lengthy articles or setup a blog for each niche site.
So I’ve been looking into whether it’s possible to get some good content related to my niche for free. There are a couple of methods I’ve come across that i’m interested in:
- Free Articles
There are a number of sites where you can get your hands on articles on pretty much any subject you need. These can be used free of charge, as long as the article and byline (with any credits to the author and even any links they want to stick in there too) remains as is.
A couple of examples of sites you can get these free articles from are Articles Base and Ezine Articles, but a simple search on Google for “free articles” show that there are many other sites out there.
- Wikipedia Content
You can find articles on Wikipedia for pretty much any niche that you’re interested in. The beauty of Wikipedia content is that you can take it and modify it before putting it on your site. So you can start with the base Wikipedia content, then edit it as you like and essentially end up with some semi-unique content for your site.
Here is an excerpt from the Wikipedia license (see the full license/copyright text here):
“Wikipedia content can be copied, modified, and redistributed so long as the new version grants the same freedoms to others and acknowledges the authors of the Wikipedia article used (a direct link back to the article is generally thought to satisfy the attribution requirement).”
Out of the above two methods for gaining content, I’m leaning towards modified Wikipedia articles. This is for a couple of reasons.
- To at least have some uniqueness.
- I’ve heard that Google and other search engines can penalise heavily sites/pages that they deem to be duplicates of other pages on the web. I would imagine a direct copy of a popular article from one of the free article sites could get used by many other sites out there, and so there would be a high risk of your page being penalised as a duplicate. At least with modified Wikipedia articles you have some chance of avoiding this, if you modify it enough.
Does anyone else use either of these to get content for your affiliate sites? Do you always write your own? If so, even on niche subjects you may not be an expert on? Do you use another method/resource?
I’d love to hear any comments on this subject.
Posted July 18th, 2008
I’ve been looking more at the Pepperjam Network, and I think I am going to try out one of their features… PepperjamADS.
“pepperjamADS is an affiliate marketing widget that you can use to serve customized contextual ads from one or multiple Pepperjam Network advertisers at the same time. The ad units come in various shapes and sizes. You can mix and mash ads from any of your merchant partners. For instance, you can create a fashion widget by selecting various ads from multiple fashion merchants. Likewise, you can create a specific widget with ads from any one merchant.”
These ads look quite similar to Adsense ads, and apart from the Pepperjam logo in the bottom right corner they could me made to look practically identical (although I think you could get in trouble with Google if you did make them look exactly the same and used both on the same site/page). The big differences between Adsense and PepperjamADS (as far as I can see) are that; a) you choose which ads you want to be shown; and b) they are not pay-per-click, but instead you are paid whatever you would normally be paid for that particular advertiser, ie. on a sale or lead.
Pepperjam have also created this video tutorial to help you get started with PepperjamADS.
I may try a PepperjamADS unit on this blog, and i’m also going to test it out on a site or two I have setup - once I actually get round to finishing them off! I want to concentrate a little bit more on finishing off some affiliate sites and try not to get distracted by constantly tweaking code to do clever things that could wait until another time.
Don’t forget that Pepperjam are offering a $10 Sign On Bonus for All New Pepperjam Network Affiliates.
Posted July 10th, 2008
As you may well have already noticed i’ve changed the blog theme! I think this new design is much cleaner and easier to read, and just generally looks better than the old one. This new look is based on the Corpo Geek theme, which i’ve changed a little bit to how I want it. I’m still tweaking it so don’t be surprised if you find that something changes quite suddenly.
Other updates
I’m still working on my own mashup software which I hope to have ready for at least a free release in the next couple of weeks (i’m also considering a paid “Pro” version). I seem to be working on this software more than actually trying to put together affiliate sites, but i’m enjoying it and hopefully it will make setting up those sites easier and be more profitable in the long run.
I’ve decided to try and post more often here, for this month i’m aiming for at least 12 posts (average of 3 a week), which I then would like to build on in future months once I get some momentum going.
I’m also starting to get a bit of cash in from my online endeavours, so I think July might warrant my first monthly earnings report! Ooh, getting exciting now!
Posted July 7th, 2008
On my travels around various blogs over the last few days I have come across this great affiliate network - Pepperjam! Dubbed the “Next Generation” in affiliate marketing, this network boasts some pretty big name advertisers (eBay, Playboy, Cartoon Network and Text Link Ads just to name a few), and a web 2.0 experience for affiliate marketers.
They also have some pretty nice looking incentives for signing up, referring others to the network and even just blogging about them! Here are the details:
- $10 Sign On Bonus for All New Pepperjam Network Affiliates
That’s right, get $10 put straight into your Pepperjam account just for signing up and becoming an approved publisher! How easy is that?
- Earn $5 for every new publisher you refer
That’s not bad in itself, but for the month of July that’s increased to $7, so get referring!
- Earn up to $50 a month for just blogging about the network
This, for me, is probably the best of the three. You can get $10 per blog post that promotes the Pepperjam network or any of it’s network tools (more on these later), up to 5 posts per month.
Join Pepperjam Network and Receive a $10 Sign On Bonus
So there you go, all sounds very good to me. I was accepted as a publisher within a day or so, this is quite a bit quicker than other networks i’ve joined in the past.
I’ll definitely be taking a look through their list of advertisers over the next week or so, and will also post some info about the other affiliate marketing tools they provide. Watch this space!
