Tag: Making Money Online

Categories
Online Business

2009 Passive Income Goals: 1 Month Update

OK sorry to bore my 2.5 readers – but you do want to know the details of my problems with motivation didn’t you LOL Well really these posts are for me – for some reason writing my words on the great WWW makes me feel like I’m accountable to – well me really!

OK So I going to take my 2009 goals – and report on it every month – something like 99.9% (I made the figure up – you get that on the Internet) – people give up on their goals by now so I’m going to be one of the 1% who didn’t!

Goal Build More Sites

Sites built : one

Sites promoted: none

Excuses – pathetic!

Sites Ranking #1 For MY Keywords

Ranking #1 for keyword: 4

Ranking #2 and #3  for keywords: 14

OK this is the ultimate objective – and my statistics are a bit off because until a few months ago I didn’t know what where my keywords 🙂 These aren’t all sites either: some are hubpages and other third party sites. The reality is that it will take 6 months to get new sites to this point, and some will never make it, and some will rank #1 for keywords I didn’t know I was aiming for.  Some will make me money even though they are stuck at position 9 or 10.

Freelance Writing

Haven’t replaced my part-time real world job but its slowly building and I am getting different gigs from different places too.

Why do I keep getting distracted? Why am I consistently not focused on my main job – to set up passive income sites? Well I think again Monika over at Making Money Freelancing has got it right – I’m procrastinating because I fear failure – I am paralyzed because I may get it wrong!

Well its stopping and its stopping today!

For February I will be:

  • focusing on getting 4 new sites up and backinks built

That’s it – one goal – make it my focus.  I’m stopping  playing in the paddling pool and I’m diving into the deep end! Hope I don’t break my neck LOL

What's the worst that can happen...
What's the worst that can happen...

Photo Credit

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
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!

Categories
HubPages Online Business Rants

Making Money On-line for Beginners

Sometimes I struggle as to where I should publish. I guess I am not a pure internet marketer because sometimes I just have to write about a topic! This weekend its been around the subject of making money on-line. Yes I know its idiotic to try and rank for that term. Yes I know I run the risk of just repeating the same old. I still had to try. So I did and you know I think it came out all right. There is nothing original per se. I am following the big three as usual as detailed in my original Internet Marketing and Hubpages article.

In the end I ended up publishing not one but two hubs, over 3600 words for goodness sake! On a revenue site that I only get 60% of the Adsense, Amazon, eBay, Kontera impressions – why did I do that. Well two simple reasons really:

  • I’m starting to see more and more new people arriving at HubPages, publishing a couple of hubs and then going to the forums and asking what’s wrong I only made 5c in Adsense! I can see this trend continuing. HubPages seems to be winning the race with Squidoo and is attracting more and more people who not only want to write they want to make money online . I know the feeling its what attracted me too. But with the worsening economic crises in the US (and hubpages are predominantly American) I expect more and more people will be looking for ways to make money in a recession I would like them to find the right sources of advice before they get scammed or give up. Although I may not be able to rank for the terms in google search I certainly can in hubpages: I can get my hubs to the first page of “hot hubs” or for a specific search really quite easily by writing good content.

    Fans
    Originally uploaded by John Charlton
  • Again a couple of times recently I have seen people do “so long and thanks for the fish” posts as they depart hubpages for bigger things. Sometimes full-time paid work work so fair enough. But also sometimes because they need to concentrate on developing their own websites you know. I’ve thought about it myself but there is one thing that keeps me publishing useful stuff on HubPages: my fans! Why abandon that list? Sure its not the most focussed list on the internet but on the other I am sometimes surprised at the quality of the people who leave me comments finding my hubs useful, often soon after the hub was published: meaning that they were notified by the email.

Yeah I know celebrity is fickle! No its not that, honest 🙂 . When you become someone’s fan at hubpages you get an email every time that person publishes a new hub (you can turn it off but that’s the default). So every time I publish on hubpages 599 people (as at the time of writing) get told – is that a list or what? Now some of them are beginners: but some are not. I got a number of sign-ups to Article Marketing Automation from my hubpage review.

So if you are not already a member of hubpages get signed up and become my 600th fan: if that spot is taken its OK I will be accepting 601, 602 etc as well! Of course if you do sign up via my any of the links in this post I will get 10% of your earnings: but from the hubpages.com share. To be honest it amounts to bugger all but that’s because most people sign up and either publish nothing or just one hub! Drop me a comment here if you do sign-up and I will become your fan too!

Categories
Marketing Online Business Rants

Marketing: My Struggle

Marketing and I have come a long way in the last year – its possibly one of the most important insights have got to this making money online game!


Picadilly Circus
Originally uploaded by msmail

My first degree is in science and analysis is one of my strengths. Twenty years after my first degree and I did a graduate business diploma and was horrified by some of the courses. Marketing was the worst: they had “laws” about how to sell. I remember a big argument I had with a rather shrill marketing lecturer when I challenged her contention that you sell the dream not the product. She claimed it was a law: I pointed out, correctly I believe to this day, that it was an unproven hypothesis or even just a statement, it wasn’t a law. The fact that the apple will drop from the tree is a law, that the sun will rise tomorrow at a certain time is a law: that I will buy a certain brand of toothpaste because it will help me make friends – is, to be blunt, and I was, an un-tested theory. I lost the argument though: she had the microphone and no one else in the class could understand the difference between a law and a marketing hypothesis!

That pretty much sealed my view on the marketing industry. Self-serving, lacking in rigour and a waste of space. I continued to ignore marketing and scorn it. I understand the appeal of consumer products to kids and even to those who lack the basics of life: my first car will always live in my heart – because it was my first taste of freedom! Now cars are just a form of transport: I buy the one that best fits my needs and the price I can afford to pay cash for. I am a car salesman’s nightmare 🙂

So then I decide to become an online marketer – logical right? Its taken me about a year to figure out that is what I am you see. I thought I was going to develop a website and people were going to be so impressed with my wonderful content and I would make money. How was I going to make money – well I was a little hazy on that point: but the wonderful content is still there on my over-30’s independent travel site

You see I couldn’t be a marketer, that’s as a bad as being real estate sales agent isn’t it? And remember I don’t understand marketing or think its worthwhile. Real estate I know a bit about: a lot really, more than most of the agents I have dealt with as a customer. I still use agents to help me buy property though. Why? Because the top 2% of agents that I trust are very,very good at property and know the market inside out. Sometimes they have told me to run not walk from a deal, and I have. Now they are not the agents who win the top agents awards – which are really top commission earners awards. But they are long-term agents who make a comfortable living doing it. They know their product so I turn into their repeat customer.

That’s the sort of marketer I’m going to be online. I am going to be a good and ethical one. I won’t make a $20,000/month doing it – but that was never my aim. Half that amount would see me comfortable for life. And yes you have to sell something to make a living online! That’s how you get paid ! Duh! It just took a while for me to figure it out!

Categories
Blogging Freelance Writing HubPages Online Business

Tips from the First Year On Line


Happy Anniversary!
Originally uploaded by bruno1378

Since my last post on Freelance Writing we have had a quick trip back to New Zealand for the New Zealand Dancesport Championships. This is my anniversary post. Sept 2007 was when we arrived in Perth, Western Australia and decided to stay awhile. We decided that I would try to make an online income to replace my IT salary (US$1000/week round figures) – I gave myself until December to do it – LOL

I know I wrote how my online business was going up until May – yes ignore the date time travel is alive and well on blogs.

March I found a new approach to making money on-line. Wish I could remember how I found it but I found Vic’s Make Money online site around then. He’s responsible for the name of this site because the initial idea was to buy 100 info domains.

Well I set up some sites and waited for Google to index them, and waited, and in fact I’m still waiting. Almost simultaneously info BANS sites fell out of favour with Google. I was a little pissed to say the least – in fact I cried in frustration quite literally. Everything seems to have worked for people last month or last week – but as soon as I touched it poof – gone. I was in no doubt that Vic was explaining how he made money to me – but the search engine’s rules appeared to change every time I tried what was being recommended!

I was pretty very close to giving up then – I was also participating in Vic’s trends blogging contest: where you blog about current news – which did at least make me realize that the trick to getting traffic was to write about something that people were actively searching on – duh! Vic said in one of video posts something that stuck with – “proof of life” – (according to the movie of the same name this is the first thing that hostage negotiators ask for) . So I did my own little experiment. I had already bought a info domain which was the same keyword phrase of my best performing hub page. I knew how many people searched for the phrase – because my hubpage was normally ranked #1 or #2 in Google, I knew it wouldn’t make me a fortune but I just wanted to know I could get my own site on the first page. I put a niche blog on the domain using Court’s Keyword Sniping.

Well it worked. For the last couple of months my site is regularly on page 1 or 2 of the Google results for a number of its keywords. For weeks it alternated from being not indexed to being in the top 10 pages. It seems to have settled down now. It the CPC is rubbish – it will never make me more that $1/day – and its made me nothing to date because I haven’t yet dared put Adsense on it –I want it to be more consistently on page #1 before I do that. I’ve done it I have proven to myself I can get a site indexed and ranked even on an info domain.

I was concentrated on my freelance writing when the other day I got an email saying that eBay had paid me – $10. I went an checked my eBay earnings for the first time in a couple of months and oddly some of those un-indexed BANS sites were getting clicks and a couple had made me a little bit of money. I did further investigation: Google still hated me but Yahoo loves me! And it wasn’t even that sites which I had developed properly – think of the potential if I actually put some more pages on the sites 🙂

So now after a year I can happily report that my actual website online income is about the same as it has been for month. BUT – and its a big but, I definitely feel I am at the end of the beginning at the start of the real beginning … To Be Continued the fun has just started!

Categories
Free Tools Search Engines Tools

Where to publish your best content

I’ve been focusing very much on learning a whole lot more about SEO and winning the Google game to get myself ranked. One of the “light-bulb” moments I had as that content isn’t king and writing good content is not, in its self, enough to make you money from your own sites.

Another of those “oh God its obvious now” is that content is important: but not so much own your own site or your target money maker. Instead your best content should actually be in guest blogs, or articles or hubs or lenses that you write elsewhere. Why? Because these backlinks sites serve too purposes:

  • to get backlinks;
  • to drive targeted traffic to your site.

Now sites such as Quassia basically provide just a backlink, no traffic. However sites such as ezinearticles or hubpages can provide qualified traffic looking for whatever you are selling.

Categories
Online Business Rants

Do you need a Website Builder

I must admit when I started online I didn’t really investigate website builders all-in-one solutions. It never really occur to me that I would want to rent my website and not own it – after the cost of ownership are so low.

Don’t Rent your Website
Now what I am talking about with website builders are the ones which


for sale
Originally uploaded by netan

offer all in one: domain name, hosting, templates, keyword optimization, statistics, the lots. Just one easy payment often a month sometimes annually. Now I suspect that a lot of these products are marketed to actual bricks and mortar small business owners. These people aren’t developing an online business they just see the web as another form of advertising for their real-world store. Even shop owners should be worried though that the content that they have been developed is not freely available to them and this is why.

These packages effectively don’t give you ownership of your site and your content. Why because they bundle in the domain name and the hosting package. If you want to pick up your website and move it another host can you? If you can’t you don’t have full control over your asset.

Oh top of that of course these packages are offering you a long list of features for one low price: amazing things like submission to search engines and statistics on your key word density. That’s worth something surely? Well actually no: you don’t actually need to submit your website to search engines: but if you do it can be done easily in a couple of minutes on the only two that matter: Yahoo and Google. Keyword density: lots of tools available. Checking on competitors: again free tools or sophisticated paid for software. That type of software costs maybe $100 / once for ever regardless of how many sites you use it on. Costs for a domain: $10/year; costs for hosting: $6/month.

Oh they offer you a support forum and EBooks and Videos: all of these are available online too. Check out digitalpoint forums or webmaster world or smaller more specialised forums. The internet is full of very helpful people: and if they are charging your for advice as a newbie: run a 1000 miles

Categories
Online Business

Great content will make you money NOT!


day in the life: lunch money
Originally uploaded by emdot

I guess I went through the normal phases of someone starting off online:

Start a Free Blog
This is still where I’d tell a lot of people to start: its great fun, its easy to get started especially on blogger and its – well free! My first blog is basically an online diary which changes topic as I change direction (about once every 6 months on average). To be fair I didn’t start the blog to make money – which is lucky – because I didn’t make any! The only people who read it were friends and they didn’t want to buy an E-Book on how to make money online!

Build my Dream Website
This one took me months – admittedly I was working full-time. I bought Dreamweaver, developed it all from scratch. It has fantastic content but again it didn’t make me any money. It taught me a bit of html and I had fun writing down a lot of information I’d had in my head for years but at the end it makes me : oh on a good month maybe $1! Well did until I took the ads off – more on that later!

Discovered HubPages
Found an revenue sharing site where the ads on my “hub” articles could make me money! I found HubPages from a post on a forum but in fact there are number of these sites. What I thought at the time was it was great being able to write on a topic without having to commit to an entire blog. What I soon discovered though was that, unlike on my own blog where I never got a comment on HubPages I started to get comments and feedback! I even made money writing on their “flagship program”. My writing improved: I’m proud of most of my content on HubPages but again although they’ve earned me more than my own sites, the hourly rate is still nowhere near $1!

In retrospect though HubPages has been valuable for me:

  • Its given my page rank (PR) on both my profile and most of my older hubs. Google loves HubPages: the site has a high standards and relatively little spam, this means that pages on HubPages not only rank high on Google searches but also acknowledges pages with good PR.
  • I met a group of people who not only improved my writing but also seemed to be using HubPages for other reasons that I was: which was basically to write on what I wanted. These people were using HubPages to gain authority for their “money making sites” – which didn’t sound anything like the sites I had!

Categories
Online Business

What I’m in Business?


Anonymous Flight Attendant
Originally uploaded by laszlo-photo

I guess I had to change some of my ways of thinking about what I was attempting online. I was having great fun writing at hubpages.com – but I was making little money with it. My writing had improved and got faster but I didn’t want to be a copywriter. Ironically just as I made this decision I had a couple of offers from people via hubpages.com which would have taken me down this route. Why didn’t I take this route?

In the end I want a business not a job. A job gets you paid when you do it, it might even give you some paid holidays and sick leave, but at the end of the day you get paid for your time. A business generates passive income. Income is stuff that happens when you are not working. While we travelled Australia we made $1000’s a month: every month our tenants paid us regardless of whether we were working! (We do employ property managers otherwise it wouldn’t have been passive income!). Content writing (for someone else) and endless other “work from home opportunities” will pay you for your time or output: but that’s not a business. In the same way as buying a lawn mowing franchise is not a business.

So how is a business different from a job?
A business takes time and knowledge to setup: a decent, legal business is not a get rich quick scheme: if someone offers you the opportunity to earn $X in Y days its a con – fullstop.

A business is not necessarily all fun and glamour: the people making $20,000 a MONTH on the internet – you never heard of them. They are quietly making their cash by providing a product consumer wants to buy. They don’t have famous blogs with 1000’s of subscribers showing on their feeds: blogs don’t make money : well making money online blogs certainly don’t.

Categories
Making Money Online Marketing Online Business Rants

So Why this Blog?

One of the common methods of assessment at university is to get students to keep a “learning journal” – I hated the dammed things – used to write the thing at the end of semester after the fact. It was good idea used inappropriately. I find as I try to learn this bizarre world of Internet marketing that I need to keep a learning journal. Unlike the well structured university environment who tells you at the start of term what you are going to learn and then proceeds to teach you item by item until you have been fed all the learning outcomes, I am not sure where my learning on Internet Marketing is going. I know where I want it to go: I want an online income that will approximate my professional off-line income: say US$4500 /month. How am I going to do it? I don’t know to be honest. I have some ideas, more ideas than I ever had about how to build this business but I don’t have a step by step plan.

No one has given me the leaning plan on this one! I do know that I need a plan though otherwise I risk running around in circles and not being able to measure and adapt my experience to achieve my income goal.

So this is my on-line learning journal: trying to write on what I’ve learnt and trying to record enough that to work out what works for me and what doesn’t.