Tag: how to make money online

Categories
Back Links beginners Lis Recommmends

Right Keywords + Right Platform = Cash!

Gum Digger with His Tools - (Kauri gum made some people a lot of money in 19th century NZ - if they looked in the riight place) Dargaville

Who needs new keywords then?  Well any of us who want to make money online in my experience. As I mentioned recently, I’m using Wizzley to make some fast cash – though this approach will make you money regardless of the platform – so long as the website is in Google’s good graces. 

So does it work? Let’s see – I was aiming for 7 articles/day on Wizzley – hmm not quite – I’m up to 17 articles on my main account on wizzley – so what have I have I earned? 

As as of 13 Jan – I’ve made $46 from Amazon and  as of 15 Jan $30 from Adsense, that’s not bad given the age of most of my articles and how few of them I have.  

I’m also getting a 10% order rate ie from around 450 clicks – I had 45 orders – I don’t have a huge amount of Amazon data to judge this by – but to this looks like a pretty darn good conversion rate. 

Gum Digger with His Tools - (Kauri gum made some people a lot of money in 19th century NZ - if they looked in the riight place) Dargaville

What I am doing with Wizzley is a slightly new approach to me. As some of you will know most of us have been continuously frustrated with Google’s Adwords Tool inability to provide long-tail keywords. I’ve pretty much given up on it myself for long-tails. 

Instead what I’m using is a tool which scrapes queries from Google’s autosuggest feature – Keyword Researcher.  Basically it takes a few minutes to basically give me 500-1000 suggestions on everything I’ve tried it on. 

Now KR won’t give you either competition or numbers searched. But obviously if a term is even in KR it must be searched for more than once (which is by some stats I saw ages ago is about 40% of all Google searches). 

Basically for the length of time it takes me to write a Wizzley page – I’m not too worried about how many searchers there are either.  

  1. I basically throw a seed keyword into Keyword Researcher – and let it do its thing (incredibly fast I might add)!
  2. I add all the keywords I  have into Keyword Strategy tool and sort by search volume – you will see a lot of zeros ie no search traffic, but the term is from Google’s own “auto suggest” –  Google lies – proof positive! 
  3. I basically start at the top – focus on the terms with the most searches and create about five pages – all targeting different, but related keywords. I create exact match urls with Wizzley and I interlink these pages. 
  4. Anything that raises its head in the  top 100 – I start sending links to from SEO Cobra (using a link wheel at the moment – which seems to work great!) . Eventually they will all probably get backlinks – but the ones that show most promise get prioritized. 
  5. Rinse and repeat as they say. 
  6. Wizzley is not my site. They could go away tomorrow – I’m using them as a supplement to my income – they are not my main focus long term.  If I find some nice new keyword groups that I think I can rank – I’ll build my own site and use the Wizzley pages for backlinks and traffic funnels. 

Its nothing new – in fact its almost exactly the approach advocated back in the day when Court from the  Keyword Academy – got excited about Hubs. (well except he was using Postrunner for backlinks and Hubpages not Wizzley) – it works. 

Doing exactly the same thing will work on your own site – it will work faster  if it has authority.  How do you know if a site has authority? Easy, does an easy keyword rank with little or no backlinking? In fact its a perfect tool to use to build out a niche site to be a larger one – you really will have too many keywords to deal with! 

Would I go out and buy Keyword Strategy just to get the search volumes easily?
Probably not – you can get them (about 75 at a time) – using Google’s Adwords Tool – or you can just figure out that if you are going after a competitive term like weight loss – is going to take a while and a lot of links, while going after “travel to Burma” – not so much!

If you are doing a competitive niche focus on 3 or long word phrases. Google will tell you there is no searches of course, but my stats beg to differ, and so does its own auto-suggest tool!

Do You Need Backlinks?
I rank #1 for “wizzley review” and “wizzley scam” . I haven’t built a single backlink for those terms – but this site has lots of authority for “review” and “scam” because of previous backlinks.  For “empower network scam” –  I started at #8 but dropped to #14 – so now I’m building links and I’m back to #11 –  this is a competitive term – some people are making a lot of money with this scam. 

So if you are using a tool like Keyword Researcher to find long tail keywords – you may or may not need backlinks depending on a) how competitive the niche is and b) how much authority the site you are putting content on has. 

Categories
Plan Review

2012 Goals – Introduction

Ugly photo! December 2011 - though they did send me a medium when I asked for an XL!

As I mentioned in passing in my last post 2011 – wasn’t the most exciting year of my life. 

Personal Goals 

Gonna hit big 50 this year, which is cool because it means we can dance in the next age grade in Dancesport ie instead of competing against 35 year olds, we are the youngest couple again (well I am, partner’s 10 years older!).  HOWEVER, we want to compete in Latin again, so I need to look good wearing this: 

Dancing Latin, Australian Nationals, 2005

Let’s face it, I probably won’t be going back to looking like this: 

Jan 1988, when I was 25, and on a diet!

 – but it’s got to better than this!: 

Ugly photo! December 2011 - though they did send me a medium when I asked for an XL!

As of today I’m 108kg, in the 1988 photo I was probably about 70kg (and yes over-weight according to the  wisdom of the day – trying to get to 65kg from memory). Now apparently 75kg is OK weight for my height (180cm) – you see why I have a problem with the weight loss industry!

Frankly if I got down to 90kg that would be a) record-breaking low for the last 20 odd years for me, and b) still “obese” by the stupid “one size fits all charts” , and frankly – I’d look pretty hot in my latin dress (skinny girls got nothing to shake!).  

So goal is to get fit and trimmer by the time we hit the big 50 – April 2012. Oh and to be able to dance 5 dances @ 1.5 minutes/dance without dying. The 90kg  goal would probably take all year. 

Income Goals

I have had a consistent goal of US$5000/month for years, I just sometimes wonder why every time I take one step forward, two go backwards! 

Luckily though I do keep consistent income records – I know how dire doing a tax return is otherwise! I wrote about my simple spreadsheet approach back in January – and its remarkably flexible – as I add or delete new income streams I add, or hid rows as I need to.  

My income hasn’t been so consistent – in January I hit over US$4200, including $2600 in advertising income (the stuff I laughably call passive). That figure was the record for the year, though in November I did at least, finally best the advertising income, coming in at $2700. 

What happened? Panda? No, not really, I still haven’t had a single website Pandalized, most of income issues stream from three issues: 

  • Dropping a client who started having onerous requirements, in response to Panda;
  • Hubpages – reaction to Panda; 
  • Keyword Academy’s slow decline with long-term members. 

The client had already squeezed the price so I’d gone from clearing $1500 a month to $1000, for more work. Their new set of requirements would have seen at least a doubling of my time required. It wasn’t worth it, so I fired them in August.

Hubpages: I’ve written previously about the HubPages trainwreck – that was July, by November they’d announced that as of 1 January we wouldn’t be able to use your own Amazon ID on HubPages and my secondary, mainly Amazon account, had been pandalized (finally in October). Could I have got it back – probably? Did I try, no.  Now  the ONLY program I have the option of direct payment with is Adsense: eBay and Amazon are both via their obscure “HPAds” program. Why is this a bad idea? 

  • they get access to all my sales data; 
  • they pay by Paypal which has a very bad exchange rate, and has its own issues; 
  • I drop at least a tier of my Amazon sales percentage because of the loss of the HubPage’s Amazon sales.  

Do I have a plan? Hell yes – but I can’t write about it here – sign up for the newsletter below – if you haven’t already – all will be revealed. 

The Keyword Academy: From an affiliate point of view its not been good – my best month was March, but my commissions have been is slow decline since then. Why? Because people who have been members for years have quit, and although I still get new sign-ups they haven’t compensated for the losses. Why? I think two reasons:

  1. Panda has worked very well for Google’s actual intention – which was to scare the crap out of would-be Internet Marketers.  There has been massive change, and there have been casualties. 
  2. TKA has moved away from the “recipe approach” of do this, do this, wait this long, this will happen, to a much more robust method of actually training people how to build a business online. That’s scary for many people, and although TKA was never a quick fix – its now an even more scary proposition of work and effort, and engagement, which send some people running for the hills.   

Income Goals 2012. 

Well having just read The 10X Rule I had to cross out my $5000/month income goal- and ended up with a $50,000/month income goal!  OK let’s revise that a bit – what I am able to make (on a good month) is $2500/month – so lets aim for $25,000/month! 

Gulp! – I guess that’s what’s called massive action!? And that in essence is what I need to do. After watching other people succeed at making more money than I do. I’ve figured it out.  My problem isn’t the writing, or the keyword research, hell I seem even to be able to sell the odd item. 

My issue is that I’m a dilettante – I’m an amateur, I’m doing the right thing, but not enough, I still keep on chasing after shiny stuff. I’m over it. I feel great when I focus and actually achieve something. So that’s what I’m going to be doing! 

2012 is gonna rock! 

And its all gonna start here – because I have finally decided that if I’m getting serious about this business, this girl needs a business plan!  So keep an eye out – because if any of you are struggling with the same stuff as I am – you probably need one too (and you can steal mine for free!) . 


Categories
Plan Review

2011 Review Looking Back

looking back
East Harbour Regional Park, near Wellington, New Zealand

Hmm, looks like although I’ve used Chris Guillebeau’s approach to planning before, I’ve not actually blogged about it!  I don’t have a lot of time for most “self improvement” blogs, and I first noted Chris’s site because he has, what I still think is, a stupid idea of visiting every country in the world. Really, I love to travel, but there are number of countries that I’ve never wanted to visit, so why spend money going there?  Anyway I like his writing and his goal setting is quite unusual. This is part 1 – looking back, check back in a few days for when I’ve actually figured out my New Year’s goals! 

Anyway – this is the easy part of the process: looking back:  Pretty much I’m looking at health, travel, business,  in that order, because that’s probably what matters. 

looking back
East Harbour Regional Park, near Wellington, New Zealand

 

 What Went Well in 2011 

  1. Frankly I was kinda worried about reaching that “certain age” that women get to.  I had heard so many bad things about menopause. Well I’ve reached it, and what happened? For the first time since I was 20 I’m not popping a daily pill, had the odd weird dream, woke up hot a couple of times. End of story. Really.  Sorry guys, but the girls need to know, it doesn’t have to be bad! 
  2. We started off the year enjoying the snow in Europe, and coming back via KL for a few days of heat.  Later, we had a great three week break in Phuket and Koh Samui, Thailand in August. The low-cost airline war has finally hotted up big time for New Zealand with heavy airfare discounting  to South-East Asia. 
  3. I bought a Kindle and discovered Indie Non Fiction.
  4. I published my first book: Vacation Packing List: Save Your Back, Time and Money. 
  5. I became a Z-List Blogger, complete with a Manifesto and decided to lose my insecurities and to  start chasing my winners as far as making money is concerned. 

What Did Not Go Well in 2011 

  1. My partner had on-going knee issues for the most of the year, which meant, for the first, time we had to pull out 1/2 way through a competition we’d entered in September.  The net result was predictable: my weight went up – by how much I don’t really want to know. I don’t have any other exercise that I really enjoy – so when we are not dancing the weight goes on! 
  2. I have seen more of South America than I have of New Zealand. We decided to go to Northland before Christmas, I’d never been there, and my partner taught there a long, long time ago. It started off OK, but then the rain set in. If it rains in most parts of the world, there are alternatives. With due regard to the NZ tourism industry- you don’t go to Northland for the museuems! We came home early. And about it being the tropical north ? No, its not, if you can’t swim without a wetsuit in December, its not tropical, its a marketing lie! 
  3. Hubpages – I think I’ve said enough on that topic! 
  4. Partly because of HubPages and partly because I lack focus and am the Queen of Procrastination, my advertising income has basically flat-lined this year.  As I fired my last freelance client in August – that means that I am currently sat looking at my lowest bank account balance for years! 

Overall its been a frustrating year – financially I’m looking at a hole in April unless I can up my income quickly to pay my taxes.  I have some hope with that as several of my Adsense niches are strongly seasonal, I think, as this is the first year I get to see the pattern! 

Looking forward? Well that’s my next post!  Haven’t figured out the details yet – but I’m reading, or re-reading these books which I’m finding helpful: 

Categories
Paid Tools Product Reviews Tools

All I Want for Christmas Are Long Tail Keywords – Keyword Researcher Review

Yeah Christmas or whatever you choose to celebrate or not in this happy/stressful/profitable time of the year!  I think its fair to say that 2011 has been a bit of an up and down year in terms of Internet Marketing, maybe I’m just bloody lucky, but really all the bad stuff that’s happened to me has been thanks to the TOS changes with HubPages plus nervous clients. 

Google has been, interesting, but the most interesting thing, and totally bloody irritating part, are their continuing moves to restrict access to their goldmine of data known as the Google keywords tool.

For a long time using the tool direct doesn’t give you real long tail keywords – you only get to about 3 or 4 words: a real long term is longer than that. Its very, very focussed, its not in Google’s best interest to reveal those because a) PPC advertisers would save a fortune only bidding on very specific terms and b) evil affiliate marketers would make way too much money. 

Google’s changes to their API TOS has meant than some previously good tools have gone away – and I am sure I’m not the only one who has found I miss my long-tail search tools 🙁  

But nature abhorrs a vacuum – well Internet Marketers do anyways – so when a tool is lost, and the whinging is loud-  something else pops up to fill its place! 

However because its Christmas – here are three two (third one coming in a day or so – the developer is just sorting out his landing page, and this is getting too long anyways) rather cool ways to work around Grumpy Google: 

Tony’s Keyword Researcher Review 

Easily get all the long-tails that Google provides through “auto-suggest” – really quick way to build out a site or an article.

This cool little tool is based on Google suggest – you know the annoying pop-up that you get when you start typing a query into Google. Its not the only tool that does this – (scrapebox.com is the common one) – but I like this tool a lot more: very, very easy to use, just watch the videos at Keyword Researcher and get on with it! I’ve been doing this for a while and Tony has some different wrinkles I’d not thought of… 

Google doesn’t say how many searchers need to be looking for a phrase before it pops up into auto-suggest, but we can all assume its probably more than a few. 

Now this tool won’t give you the competition figures, but it will give you a pretty long list of suggestions – and you can continue your investigations from there.  

Nice Features: 

  • easy and intuitive to use – doesn’t try to be overly fancy;
  • free download and trial (does everything the paid version does but only on the first 1/2 of the alphabet) 
  • one-time cost and cheap! 

Watch Out For: 

  • the tool is installed on your PC and its scrapping Google results – you’ll get banned (plus anyone else using the same IP) – its not big deal – the tool will point this out to you – wait 15 minutes – try again. 
  • this won’t give you competition or difficulty for your keyword phrase – doesn’t pretend to.  To get these you will need to put the terms through another tool: Google Adwords, Keyword Strategy, or Neale’s No Results Report (review coming this week) – would all work! 

Good For: 

Want some variation on your core keyword – for sub-headings? Want to build out a site? Looking for a few easy pages to rank on Wizzley?  

That evil, self-serving affiliate link again: Keyword Researcher – even if you don’t buy – check out the vids they are worth listening to! 

Tool number two for today (hell a girl’s gotta get her commissions up you know!) is 

Amazon Gold Mine Review 

Provides new lists each week of Amazon products based on their price/popularity/discount/top ratings and lots of reviews. In other words – the products you want to the affiliate for! Also provides a “bargain basement bin” for very cheap products – which I don’t use – but might even save you the fee if you are in the US! 

Lets be upfront – I’m not the world’s most successful Amazon affiliate, I’ve only recently started focussing on it, but I’ve sold enough random products over the years to be constantly amazed at what does actually sell on there (thank you whoever you are who decided to buy $300 worth of textbook and maths teaching guides, and the guy who bought not one, but two $500+ woodworking tools!) And no I am in neither of those niches! That’s the power of amazon-  get the customer to click through on your 99c e-book and suddenly they will remember they need to do thousands of dollars of Xmas shopping – all on your commission! 

Nice Features:

  • the last six week’s reports are available in the membership area – you don’t have to rush to download them. In fact maybe its all the reports since you became a member? Anyways I’m pretty sure on subscription you get the last 3! 
  • sorted by department – so its easy to find your niche. 

Watch Out For

  • to be up front – you can do this yourself – at least the basic query – by using some clever stuff in Google – for me – I can’t be arsed  the easy format and the tagging of which products are “NEW” on the list each week – is worth it for me! 
  • its a monthly subscription – not a huge amount of money – but yeah its money- a pain. Take a note of the sub date and remember to cancel in Paypal if you are not using it – or you have enough results for now. 
  • there’s an up-sell of some AMAZING affiliate system on the front page – I know nothing about it and don’t recommend it – all I know about Amazon I’ve learned from Dave from ZenDuck

Good For 

The criteria for product selection means that its easy for anyone to write a review – so I’m using the list to develop ideas for Wizzley for a new niche. Basically I can try a product related niche out – see if it ranks easily in Wizzley and build out a site later if it works out (and use Wizzley for the backlinks). 

Yeah and here’s that evil self-serving link again: Amazing Gold Mine – or take the criteria they use and develop your own queries! 

THE BIT AT THE BOTTOM YOU SHOULD READ!

I’ve found a cool wrinkle on the hubpages fiasco – but I don’t want to shoot my foot here – I will be saying something to subscribers later this week – so sign up OK – that’s the honking bit form just below here – that one -the big one you can’t miss! 

Categories
Making Money Online

Making Money Online – Your Mind is Your Biggest Enemy

Its just a little bit broken, Christchurch earthquake damage

I cocked up a client’s site today -well not their site -the new website is just fine and they are happy, but I stuffed up their email. I hadn’t realized that I needed to add a MX entry to redirect the mail sub-domain to ensure that mail still went through their current provider. It took me a few hours to figure this out between several calls to find out who the email provider was and then get the right tech details from them, and a live chat session with Hostgator to make sure I didn’t fuck it up further.

I was working under pressure, people’s email was heading out into the interstitial void instead of their inboxes. I didn’t know WHAT an MX record was at the start, I just knew I must have caused the problem. I chased the people I needed to find the right technical info, I learned a lot about how email works on the Internet, I implemented the solution.

I focused and worked and sorted it out.

I looked up after 3 hours, decided the dog needed a walk and I needed a coffee.

Then I wondered – why? Why can I focus that well on a technical problem, and yet I struggle so much with focusing to write the bloody books I need to write, develop the sites I need to develop. Get to the income goals I need to reach?

As I walked I thought about why I was good at technical support.

Its just a little bit broken, Christchurch earthquake damage

I learned how to do technical IT support before I even knew what the job involved. I arrived in London in 1986, with no money, the right to work, and desire to work in London and not the North Sea (thereby precluding working in my actual profession – geology).

So I became a typist, a legal typist to be exact, it paid better. I could touch type, I re-did my resume and I started working for a small agency based in the City specializing in secretaries for legal firms.

This was before Windows was invented (yup Word was not the first word processor. Google: DisplayWrite, WordStar, Word Perfect). I ended up being their troubleshooter – there were bazillions of WP packages and quite a number of operating systems (CP/M anyone?). No standard operating system, no plug and play printers. The “network” was large floppy disks, usually poorly labeled. There was no email, or google to find the answer. They’d usually lost the manuals. If the secretary was away and the partner needed a contract printed out for a client – they needed me. It was fun, I had no fear, and nothing to lose, I was well paid and I learned a ton in a short space of time. I don’t remember ever failing either.

A few years later, back in New Zealand, I set up a unix network from scratch. By myself, with a mixture of toll-calls to the supplier in another town, and the manuals. It was mission critical, and it worked well. I had no unix qualifications, no experience, in fact I didn’t know what a systems administration WAS, but someone had to do it – that turned out to be me. I worked stupid hours for months, I was well paid, I learned a ton. I don’t ever remember thinking I would fail, or what if we didn’t get it working right, or what would happen if something went wrong.

These days you’re not allowed administration access to similar servers unless you have a several qualifications, and lots of years experience. From what I’ve seen in more recent work places, they fuck it up more often than I did. But at least there’s always a paper trail and someone to blame. Must truly dreadful doing IT support these days for most corporates.

Which gets me back to – WTF does Lis’s ancient history have anything to do with making money online? It explains something – well to me anyways. It explains why, when faced with a white screen where a website should be, I fix it. When the emails get lost, I find them. I don’t panic, I don’t worry about whether or not it can be fixed, I just find out what I have to do, and I fix it.

So I have this other problem. My income has declined significantly this year. There are three main reasons:

  • hubpages stuffed up
  • the US$ collapsed (I’m paid in US$ but I don’t spend US$ at the supermarket)
  • I fired my long-term client who had got way too picky about their backlinks

The first two were out of my control, the third was simple ROI investment decision.

The net result was that last month, for the first time in a VERY long time, I spent more money than I earned.

So what did I do – did I deal with it by say, figuring out what the problem was, finding out the solution, and then working hard? You know just like when I had to do technical stuff which scares the crap out of lots of people?

Nope – I panicked. I couldn’t focus, I flitted from Facebook to Twitter to G+. I wasted over a month.

And the really, really stupid thing is – I don’t actually have to problem solve. I know how to fix my income problem, I need to build more websites, build more backlinks, write more books, sell more books, and ensure people go Christmas shopping while using my Amazon Christmas link!.

I just have to do the fucking work. How dumb – one wasted month. Time to start writing.

I’m no good at this pop-psyc stuff – but if you aren’t succeeding have you looked at the guy in the mirror lately – he may be the problem…

Categories
Making Money Online Online Business Passive Income Plan Review

We Don’t Need No Stupid Badges!

View From Our Hotel Window, Royale Chulan, Kuala Lumpur

The Keyword Academy has this absolutely infantile, ridiculous scheme where you can apply for badges to match your (verified) income – I mean its like pre-primary school right? Except for some odd  reason it does seem to matter to me – and today I made it – I made the next badge up – in the last month I earned $2500 in passive online income and I have nice pretty badge to prove it. Half of that was from Adsense and that figure represents a 50% increase over December’s Adsense figures. So how long does it take to make at total of $4000/month of online income? So in answer to the question “Can You Make $1000/month with Adsense”  (written almost exactly 2 years ago) – is YES, I DO. And yes at the time, I really didn’t think it would be ME that did!

View From Our Hotel Window, Royale Chulan, Kuala Lumpur

In fact I blame Mark Butler (from the Keyword Academy – yup you can get a personal consult for free within the Academy – its smart move by them – but unbelievable good value for members) – I had a consultation with him a few weeks ago – and I wrote on my white board – make $2500 by April 2011 (my anniversary date with Keyword Academy and my birthday). Oops looks like I will have to revise that LOL. Even my long-time goal of US$5500/month is starting to look reasonable – that would mean about US$4000/month in passive income. I can now see that happening this year – so long as I stop my obsessive stat’s checking and go back to work! Especially when I consider that my income has jumped while I’ve been on holidays – I thought  I might resent working while I was travelling but instead

Why that figure – it would cover all our regular household expenses (so long as the US$ doesn’t completely collapse). That’s called freedom – for both my partner and I. Coincidentally it would also be about what I earned as a highly paid, bored, stressed out, IT professional – that would be sweet revenge!

So How Can You Make $2500 / month in Passive Income?

I don’t flipping know – I don’t know you – but I can tell you what has made a difference to me:

  • understanding I wanted a business not a job. Freelance writing is a job. Developing websites for other people is a job. Developing your own websites which produce more income even when you are on holiday – that’s a business.
  • outsourcing. Hiring a writer not only freed up my time – it made me become more organised because I had to tell him what to do – like duh!
  • having a range of sites in totally unrelated niches – sites I thought would be winners – no traffic. Sites I thought no one would EVER buy THAT online – they buy – go figure. I’m too stupid to figure this out in detail – my fool proof method of knowing if there is traffic for a keyword – get to page 1 and see if there is!
  • learning to believe my own stats – rather than what people are saying about the death of SEO, Google changes, Supersite, niche sites are dead, etc, etc. The best information on how to grow your business will always be found in understanding your own statistics – maybe I should write a post on that!
  • I don’t know how to say this without sounding like a paid placement – but I really do credit the forum over at TKA for being part of my success – I really don’t think I would have have hung on this long without the help support and I get there. I rarely ask for it – but just seeing people going thru the same stuff as I am is so incredibly useful and encouraging. Lets face it – few of us have anyone in the “real world” who understand why we play on the Interwebs all day – its nice to have some online friends who do.

Thanks for listening – now I have a lot more work to do…

Categories
Making Money Online Online Business

Building a Legitimate Online Business – Two Years On

Its been two years that we’ve been based in Perth, two years since I got my partner to agree to support me while I developed my online passive income business – he asked how long – I said Christmas…

In fact this was the blog post on my long-defunct blog of the time:

I think it just hit me that we’ve signed a 6-month lease on the flat! It seems a bit odd being in one place, but it feels even odder not going out and looking for a job. Although I have done the odd bit of travel in fact since I left uni I have either been employed or travelling. So its a little strange to be sitting here on a laptop trying to develop a self-employed online income without actually having an employer! It does have some benefits, like no starting time, but also some disadvantages, like no finishing time. Its weird to be honest – but I do “know” (in the virtual sense) people who are making over US$1000 month doing this so I think its worth a try. I seem to be able to write but at the moment I having problems with the technology setting up another blog.

Its been an “interesting” two years- in fact just after “that” Christmas, I quit thanks to dodgy programs like Teaching Sells and got myself a part-time job – two for a while. But the dream wouldn’t go away – and although I am somewhat of the school of “if you don’t succeed – walk away and don’t look back” – this dream of an online income really seemed like a much better lifestyle than working for real!

So what have I learned in two years? Well I can tell you I rarely have technical problems setting up sites anymore 🙂 And yes I can write – but I prefer to write on topics I like – not necessarily topics that pay me! Also I learned that neither of those skills are very important – better to learn how to do it yourself – but outsource if you really don’t want to.

There are well known phases of learning which you’ve probably heard before:

  • not knowing what you don’t know
  • knowing that you don’t know
  • knowing but having to consciously think about it
  • automatic knowledge

When I started online – I thought that I would write some great content and I would make some money – seriously – those are the only blogs I found – you wrote about stuff you were an expert on and then figured out how to make money later. I don’t even think I realised what search traffic was, I certainly didn’t know what a backlink was!

Here’s  all stuff I’ve now learnt:

  • how to chose keywords which are profitable and not too competitive
  • how to set up websites
  • how to find/write/outsource content
  • how to build links

But that’s still the technical stuff – its easy enough to learn if you are of even average intelligence.

I wasted probably about 18 months learning that stuff – you can save yourself the time by either buying Janet’s Nomad’s Guide e-Book or enrolling  in The Keyword Academy.

Neither program will guarantee to make you money though – no legitimate online businesses do.  But given the cost of wasting 18 months of frustration learning this stuff the hard way they are well worth the price.

But they actually don’t teach you the most important thing that I’ve learnt in the last two years:

You Must Learn How to Sell Online

learn-to-sell
Kids Selling in Cambodia - they are some of the world's best street sellers

You can learn all that technical stuff and still not make money though. And I had an incident on the TKA forum today which made me reflect on that. Someone reviewed a product that I use and am an affiliate for – he didn’t include an affiliate link. Someone else on the thread asked for an affiliate link – I jumped on and provided the link, called myself a  shameless whore and also included a link to a hub which was my fairly long review of the product – I went to bed – its a timezone thing. Someone else seeing my link thought that was pretty spammy of me –  others waded in with views ranging from only the bold win and whores make good money. I saw where the thread went this morning and really did laugh out loud. It was really funny – because two years ago I would never have added my affiliate link. It didn’t seem nice somehow – you know – a bit commercial.  I would have felt uncomfortable about asking for money.

And that people is the key – if you are going to be successful in any business – and certainly in an online business you have to be able to close the sale – how do you close a sale ? You ASK!  Seriously – its really that simple! Don’t laugh that was a huge light bulb moment for me!

I come from an English/New Zealand background where in general talking about money and making money in a “in your face” way is not really considered “nice” – its changed a lot in the 1980’s but still the majority of people would find it hard to ask for money up front. I certainly did. I had to get over that – and if its an issue for you – you need to get over it too.

Does that make you the same as every other spammer marketer on the Internet? Well I hope not – I have a clean conscience – and this is how I do it:

  • I  only sell products that I use and that I like. If you see my name on it here, on HubPages or on  my new blog – I’ve used the product or at least bought it and read it if its informational;
  • I try to explain which people a product will work well for – and who will be wasting their money because they either know the information already, or don’t have enough knowledge to effectively use it ;
  • I try to recommend products which either have a free trial period or a money-back guarantee – this is not always possible but I try.

Think of it this way – if you find a great new restaurant do you tell people to do there? if you have a fantastic holiday do you recommend the destination to your friends?  Would you do the same if you got a commission?  Would your friends follow your advice? Would they be happy for you to earn a commission?

Now don’t get me wrong there are heaps of commission salesmen out there who are close to being crooks – some Mortgage Brokers spring to mind.  But I use a Mortgage Broker and I am happy for him to earn the commission from the banks (you don’t pay a broker direct in my country) – I know which institutions he can’t represent, therefore I know the limits of his advice. But he saves me time and money – I’m a happy repeat customer. He provides me with a service – sure I could get a the loan from the bank without him – but he makes it easier.

So seriously if you are going to do affiliate sales you have to figure out how to provide value to your customers so they will buy from you – in fact nothing has really changed in the whole history of commerce – its just a different media these days!

And I still can’t believe I wrote a post about how to sell online LOL

Photo Credit

Categories
Blogging Making Money Online Marketing Online Business Passive Income

Online Income: One Simple Secret to Success

OK this is a bit of a follow up on my recent post on clueless bloggers.  It probably reflects that I’ve been spending too much time on the HubPages forums recently too and I have decided that online there is a single reason why most people don’t make money online, and why online income remains just a dream.

People who fail to make money online don’t fail because they can’t write, or don’t understand keywords. They don’t fail because they don’t have enough technical knowledge, they don’t have a degree, have too many kids, don’t have the support of their partner, or live outside of the developed world.

They fail for a totally different reason. And I have finally figured it out. In fact its stunningly obvious now that I have though of it – and I should probably pad it out to an e-book and sell it for $97! Instead I’ll just make this post a bit long.

Do you want to know what the secret of making online income is? Drum roll…

962281_key

You have to treat it like a business!

No kidding right! Seriously though I wonder what some people think they are doing, whatever it is, its not being in business. Think about it. What does a business owner do:

  • they develop a business plan – they have an idea about how they are going to make a profit;
  • they work the plan -they put lots and lots of hours into their business with the hope of pay off down the line;
  • they invest in their income in terms of tools which save them money or by outsourcing tasks which can be done more efficiently elsewhere;
  • they develop relationships with others in similar businesses so that they can help each other in the future, the play it forward.
  • they monitor and adapt as the environment around them changes. They don’t complain about stuff they can’t change – they move on.

Now I think the best way to illustrate how I personally came to this not so original conclusion, is to give some examples – both people who are working a business-like way and those who aren’t so much. Now I am not calling anyone out here but I really think there are some useful lessons here ..

So here are my first every Online Income Case Studies!

Focusing on a Business Can Make You a Social Outcast

This post as in part inspired by Chloe from Ben 10 Toys, who left a comment on my Effing Clueless Bloggers post. She said she was excluded from  some of the other parenting/mommy bloggers crowd because they:

“seem to sneer at the fact that some of us are trying to make a few pounds from our sites.”

Now not being a mother I hadn’t really come across too many of the “yummy, mommy blogger crowd” until I joined today dot com in order to build my own backlinks and get paid while I did it. While there I met the crowd who like to make some “pin money” but then whinges that they are underpaid!  Now we have the mob who are above even earning an income – nice for you love but hope your husband doesn’t get fired/gets burntoff/run off with a younger model. Then maybe you will think earning some income is important!

Look  some people write beautiful sites and don’t make money from them.  That’s fine – but why does someone like Chloe who provides a useful site which gives me personally way too much information about a boys toy thats popular should feel like she’s not part of a community? They are losers Chloe move on – get yourself ranked for your main keyword and get popular with real buyers and make some real cash!

Travel Bloggers Need to Focus Their Energies

This one is a close to home – I am a travel blogger at heart. I would love to say I have a wonderful travel site which is a labour of love and which truely provides useful information.  Travel for the Over 30s is really a topic I know a lot about. I’ve just never cracked the market – yet.

Matt over at Nomadic Matt’s has. I’ve been aware of Matt for a while, because of our mutual travel interest, and because he published his e-book on How to Make Money From Your Travel Blog. (Well worth it BTW if this is your niche.) He’s just got back home to the US but has spent at least the last six  months travelling. And during that time he has got his income up into respectable four figures.  For me its a lot harder to build a business with all the distractions of a new interesting destination around you and having to deal with finding a reliable Internet connection, so hats off to Matt.

Now in contrast is Kirsty over at Nerdy Nomad I have been following her for at least three years. She was a member of the first forum I ever joined at Working Nomad and at that stage she seemed to be living the dream, my dream, of travelling and making enough money to pay for it. Don’t get me wrong, I love Kirsty’s work dearly and her blog is excellent – but her recent post on her June earnings gave me pause, because  I earned more than she did in June (including freelance income).  Why was that – well I think its really simple – I have put a whole lot more work into my business especially in the last six months.  Now what Kirsty is doing might well be right for her so this isn’t necessarily a criticism, after all she has been investigating free and cheap volunteering opportunities in Nicaragua where the Internet access is not so good.  But building business seems to involve an awful lot of hard work in the beginning, with payoff time further down the track.  Until you get the business to the level that the passive income is nicely diversified and recurring – you are vulnerable.

Work Hard and Measure Your Success – But Do it Right

Which brings me rather neatly to the one of the hardest working guys on the Internet Ben over at Make Money Online with SEO. Now I am not going to repeat how Ben makes over $100/day with HubPages (which he started with in May BTW) – because all of that information is on his blog. And he still gets people asking him why they are failing – to which the answer is always the same – they are failing because they aren’t working hard enough! So check Ben out Ben if you want to be making money online the right way.

Now what has got Ben such a high profile so quickly is that he has been reporting his income figures and they have been spectacular.  What he mentions to is the number of hubpages/infobarrels/niche sites he has published each day/week. There is one thing he doesn’t talk a lot about though – he doesn’t mention the number of hours he worked.

Which brings me to my final case study Joel over at The Keyword Academy Scam Experiment. Now Joel is new to this game as he says so himself – but I was concerned when I saw his blog’s byline

“If their system can’t make me money within 6 months, they get the boot!”.

Maybe that is the downside of mentoring sites such as the Keyword Academy – people externalise it -“their system”, “make me money”. The only person who will ever make you money in business is yourself – if you don’t believe that you will make money – you won’t – it sounds insane I know, but its true. Something in your brain has to believe in your business – if that doesn’t happen you will always be looking for the next best thing.

The other thing that I think Joel is doing wrong with this sits is quite simple: he’s tracking his time and adding it as a cost against his income.  Two things wrong here: he’s inexperienced in his own admission – Joel I learnt to buy domains and my hosting without any step-by-step video – the fact that you have one probably saves you hours – but I think its totally unfair to then say that the cost you X hours x $8.50 (being the minimum wage in his part of the world). You’re learning – its going to take you longer  that’s your problem not the “systems”.  So stop expecting any approach to being in business to pay you to learn.

But ultimately you can’t rely on any one system to make you money. You will learn sound principals at the KWA and if you keep on working – you will make money – but it will only really become your own when you believe in your business and your ability to succeed with it.

Being in business on the Internet has a big a learning curve, if not bigger, than setting up a florist’s shop or starting a computer repair service. Imagine if I decided that I was going to open a florist’s shop tomorrow? I don’t know anything about flowers, I don’t know how to arrange them, I don’t know where to buy them, and I don’t know how open and promote a shop. Do you think its fair to think that I will be in profit in 6 months? I’m more likely to be bankrupt because of the significant costs that venture would have entailed.

Making an online income is different – you don’t have to risk bankruptcy to do it – but there is a huge learning curve. And if you are struggling and missing something I’d like to suggest that its not a deep misunderstanding of how to find buying keywords or how to optimise a WordPress blog – its how to think like a business owner!

You need to focus on your business if you don’t know enough yet to have a business plan – focus on learning enough. Then develop a plan they work, a lot, and keep on moving forward. The rules change all the time, you need to keep up.

Sorry for the marathon post – its partly an SEO experiment because longer does seem to be better with Google at the moment- but also because I suddenly had an insight – and that doesn happen very often 🙂 So are you in business or are you just playing?

Categories
Passive Income

Can You Make $1000/month With Adsense?

The title of this post is a quote from a question which was posed by an new writer over at hubpages – the question was naive – the questioner probably actually wanted to know how to make money online, or even how to make passive income online,  not with the specific Adsense program.

The reality is that Adsense is a tricky beast. It appears deceptively easy to earn a little money with Adsense, most people at HubPages make more from Adsense than the other options available there (eBay and Amazon particularly), $50 a month, $200, $500 even -but a $1000 is it possible?

Sure its possible to earn that sort of money -some make much, much more than that.  One of the few sources of reliable information on the internet that I’ve found is a Canadian who lives on a frozen lake who goes by the name of Grizz and writes all about how to make money online with Adsense – go on go and have a look, here’s a nice bear picture while we wait

Take Care in the Woods!
Take Care in the Woods!

You see I knew you’d come back pretty quick, or you won’t be back for weeks one way or the other 🙂

If you came back quickly you probably thought I sent you to the wrong blog eh – I mean its a blogger blog for goodness sakes!  (EDIT  not anymore – long story) Its UGLY, its hard to navigate (hint use the archives to navigate there’s no other way!). It looks boring -there is no visual interest- its not pretty. Did you notice the comments – did you notice how many comments each post has – do you notice how rarely Grizz posts? He has 2500 subscribers too. And makes a lot of money from that ugly blog – and he tells you how to make it using Adsense only. But guess what – those subscribers don’t make him money – its the search engines that do that.

Oddly I see a parallel between making $1000/month with  Adsense and ballroom dancing (that would confuse Adsense if I ran it here!).  Its easy to learn to waltz a little – anyone can learn to do it – a little.  Its easy to look good in your average social dance, and yes my partner and I do – people tell us so and ask us how we learned to dance so well.  Its quite simple – we’ve taken 1-2 hours of private lessons and practiced another few hours, every week , for the last 10 years.   Are we going to be Australian ballroom champions anytime soon – no – we’re too old, too fat, and my pain threshold is just too low. We don’t have the talent – however much we practice.

And learning to waltz is easier than learning how to make a $1000/month with Adsense – why? The waltz has a set of very,very strictly defined rules, the way to hold your partner, the timing, the position of the head, the footwork – its all defined, its all written down – there is no debate, there is only one way to dance the waltz properly.

Adsense is different, making good money from Adsense is much harder, because Google, who owns Adsense, doesn’t publish how to make money from Adsense – how to get $4 a click instead of 4c.  Google won’t explain where to place the Google ads for the best revenue, the best type of content to write, or the best types of visitors to get. Neither will I – go back to the ugly blog and find out how to make $1000 a day with Adsense from Grizz. Oh and yes its a a PR0 blog now – because Google really doesn’t want this information out in the public!

No you won’t be seeing Adsense on this blog anytime soon!

Photo Credit

Categories
Back Links

Using Twitter for BackLinks

Not sure what a backlink is and why you need them? Check my earlier post on why backlinks are important. Check here for an update on using twitter for backlinks.

I haven’t been convinced yet of the value of Twitter for building my passive income online business. I have however just found a twitter ap which may be about to change all that.

Photo Credit:
Photo Credit:Tees for Twits

I only started using Twitter to follow Vic @ Bloggerunleashed random live chats – he twits before a chat.  A couple of months ago I started following people I knew from other forums or whose blogs I liked. I still wasn’t that impressed.

Twitter For Breaking News

Then I started doing some trends blogging with my Australia News blog.  Then I found a use for twitter – I knew about the airplane that ditched in the Hudson about 3 minutes after it happened – it was a tweet. I saw a tweet about a $100k job to work on a Queensland Island job The first post I wrote on the subject got 200 visitors in one day.  The job applications don’t close until the end of February so I am expecting long-tail traffic on this one for some time.

So twitter stayed -as an information source – but I still didn’t like it for promotion – I just don’t get that much traffic from tweets and I and the links to them on my Twitter Profile were NOT do-follow, and I am the only one who actually like to read the url before I click it rather than just like a junky shortened url?

TwitWall is the answer to my problem with twitter – the limit of 140 characters. I find it way too limiting – and yes I hate SMS on cellphones to, call me luddite if you want 🙂

TwitWall For Backlinks

So I get to talk more on TwitWall

I get to include anchored links which are DO-FOLLOW.

I get to add photos which can be useful for a bit of traffic too.

The downside – people – who click my tweet will go to the twitwall and will need to click again to actually come to my blog – so they may not come!

At the moment I am using a combination of twitwall and normal tweets.


Categories
Online Business

2009: The Year I Make it?

balls_prioritesWell this is my New Year’s post – we had a great holiday and no  I didn’t run out of things to do or find any stunningly cheap internet – so no work got done.  Time to take stock:  the back story is here if you care from when I started this blog in April. What have a learnt in the last year.

Biggest challenges of the year:

  • “getting” the marketers mindset.  Understanding that I am in the business of selling things – but reconcilling that with not wanting to rip someone off. BTW I just noticed someone bought a Asus eeePC from one of netbook review hubs – that made me smile – because I love that little notebook!
  • focus – I keep on getting distracted and I need to balance where I want to get to and new ideas which keep on coming from left field!

Biggest Wins of the Year:

  • managing to make some affiliate sales and being able to sleep at night. I have decided that   I will only promote on this blog what I use myself and find useful and explain why  I use it and why. This does seem to convince the occasional person to buy from me – I thank you 🙂
  • finally being able to rank a site based on the keywords I wanted to rank for – it doesn’t sound like much – but trust me it was the “proof of concept” I really needed  – sometimes you just have to do it yourself to understand that it will work for you – dumb but human I think.

So 2009: what is happening going forward.  I am torn, and have been for 6 months, between being an internet marketer, a freelance writer, and more recently a blogger. Unfortunately I am instinctively more comfortable in the social role of blogging or the contractor/employee role of writer  – but where  I need to be is an internet marketer.

Internet Marketer

I have learnt a few things over the year  and now have several sites developed and slowly starting to make me money.  There is money to be made, though at the end of the day its not content which is King, but links and search engine rankings.  That said I still try to make my sites to have some useful content in them, and so far  I have not had any issues with them being taking down as spam so  I think I am doing OK there.

Freelance Writer

Ironically I have made around 60% of my online  income by writing for other people. This was an unexpected development as I never thought of myself as a writer  but like any skill the more the do you the better  I get, and understanding something of how search engine works is definitely an advantage in this area. At the end of the day  Freelance writing is hardly passive income   – as any writer will tell you. Instead I am using it as a way to buy leverage for my main business that is sites and yes content too.

Blogger

I got involved with today.com, initially anyway, because I thought that I could get some easy backlinks to other sites and make some money on the referrals.  I was right on both counts  – but also found that I quite enjoyed the interaction and given that  I was being paid for traffic directly  I could play with some of the social networking stuff such as Entrecard.  Both blogs  I started in November are now PR3 Australia News is more a trends blog while Travel Over 30s is turning into a general travel flagship/social blog.  Basically the idea with both of them is to use them to not just get backlinks but maybe attract a few would be entrepreneurs over to this site or to my hubpages cotent.

Goals for the first 1/2 2009

  1. Get more organised and focussed on the important stuff so that I can achieve the following:
  2. Develop at least 10 more niche sites developed and promoted and ranking in the top 10 for my keywords
  3. Develop at least 1 e-book out a month  – to be also promoted via my own website which involves learning a few technical bits and a hard thing – how to write a sales letter!
  4. Maintain this blog, Passive Income on a regular basis – sorry can’t promise better than that –  I try not to post unless I have something to say – or a question to answer – so if you want more posts ask more questions 🙂
  5. Maintain my two today.com blogs – trying to blend social blog with trends to get a lot more search traffic to them – and do some entrecard dropping at least in the short-term.
  6. Uses AMA more frequently to support my money sites and other blogs.
  7. Maintain and diversify my freelance writing income – probably to replace the part-time, real-world job I have, which is looking very shaky at the moment – mineral exploration anyone?

Hell that’s rather a long list!  The bottom line is though –  I need to start making a decent income – which around here is at least A$1000/week and I am not close yet! But  I will be!