Tag: paid tools

Categories
Free Tools Online Business Passive Income Tools

Its Spring! End of a Quarter Report – How To Manage the Dollars

So its the end of another month – another quarter anywhere so how is my journey to passive income online.  Well to be honest its been flat-lining since my record of making over $2000 in one month – in July. Bouncing around at the same level give or take in US$ terms, dropping in local currency because of the strength of both my local currencies (yes I run accounts in two countries – I don’t recommend it!).

Oh and finally spring has sprung – downunder in Perth anyways – finally I might add, so much for global warming its been freezing here for far too long. The photos in this post were taken in King’s Park, Perth a couple of weeks ago – yes we have quite a display of wildflowers at the moment.

New Custom Thesis Theme

DSCF4831I’ve been spring cleaning this blog too – a couple of you have noticed that the design has changed a fair bit.  None of my doing – Costa who makes cool custom WordPress themes at blogigs.com wrote to me saying that my previous design hurt his head and here is a new one. Well OK I can take a hint – I never claimed to be a designer – we played with his suggestion a bit so I am now down the beach (Indian Ocean) with my laptop. (BTW for any of you whose dream it is to sit under the sun umbrella with your laptop -reality check – sand is not good for laptops, sun umbrella as illustrated won’t stay up in an off-shore breeze, and won’t stop enough UV to prevent you coming out looking like a lobster. Leave the laptop at home when you go to the beach- but yes the beach is less than 10 minutes walk from my house! ) . Anyway if you want to know techie stuff like how to remove dates from any WordPress theme then check out Costa’s site. And BTW don’t tell me you aren’t technical – go learn how to do this stuff – its not hard and blogs like Costa’s will give you the right information. HTML and CSS are the basics of the Internet and yes you do evenutally need to know a bit about them.

Tracking Your Monthly Income Online

Anyway back to the subject to hand monthly income and managing cash. I don’t know about you – I am yet to see a QuickBooks or similar version which says – this is how to manage your online money – so I have kinda made up my own version – I thought it might help some of you. From day one its been important to me to know how much I made each month – that was my basic aim – $5000/month – so I really needed to see where I was at – even when I didn’t like the answer.

For the last year or so I have run a spreadsheet – its imaginatively named “income” – across the top I have the months : Jan, Feb etc – down the page I list my online income sources for the month. Note I ignore when I will actually get paid  that income – I just record what I earned that month. This is important – clickbank took over a year to pay me out, Amazon hasn’t yet, some affiliates pay 90 days in arrears. All of that is very relevant to your cash flow – but not to my aim in this case: to track my actual income from the month.

DSCF4823I categorise my income into the following block – and use sub-totals so I know what percentage of my income is passive and what is “active” – currently I am running rows down the spreadsheet which look like this:

  1. Niche Website  income
    • Adsense
    • eBay
    • Amazon
  2. Make Money Online Affiliates
    • various things I flog from this blog and my HubPages which you guys are kind enough to give  me the commission on – one line per an affiliate
  3. Freelancing and Consulting
    • Various writing clients
    • Today.com – yup they still pay me  (a little)
    • SEO consultancy
    • Hosting for clients
  4. Website /Domain Sales

The interesting thing when you split your income up like this – you will see the swings and round abouts far more clearly – Adsense tanked for me in September, but I had my best eBay month ever and a pretty good one iwth Amazon. You can step back and see the weakness in your business model. Basically the income in the first two groups are fairly passive income sources. The income shows up at least a month after I do the work – sometimes several months.

I try a lot of stuff in group two some work well but then the product is withdrawn e.g. NicheDevil, some work well but are too cheap and too niche to make me much (Elegant Themes), some are surprise stars (7 Minute Articles), others just trundle on and give me a sale or 2 a month without much effort (Hostgator) on part – everyone needs hosting from time-to-time.

Analysing Your Data To Plan Your Business

This month I went back through my last few months of the new tax year (1 July in Australia) and identified each item for my accountant – I got to wondering about my expenses – I have never tracked them in detail – they have always been lower than my income (i.e. if there was money in my PayPal account I could afford it – if there wasn’t I couldn’t), but I looked more closely this month. My current on-going expenses are;

Hosting: $25DSCF4808

The KeyWord Academy: $33

Various services for distributing my articles $125

Average cost for domain renewals $40 – this is very up and down because last year I went thru cycles of buying domains and then giving up on new domains for months at a time.

So my fixed expenses to stay in business are around $225 – I don’t know about you – but that’s pretty darn cheap rent where I live! For tax purposes of course I add in the Internet, a percentage of my rent, power bill etc etc – but those are the real costs of doing business – doing business online is not free – but its pretty darn cheap.

The obvious thing that struck me once I wrote these figures down is that I needed to spending more money! I am considering a nice resort for Christmas actually – well yes-  but that’s not what I meant. In terms of the business I needed to be investing more money back into it. I don’t know what figures are supposed to be  a good rule of thumb – but  for me I figured I should be spending at least 50% of my passive income into building more of the same – that only makes sense!

Having said that I immediately decided to up my budget for outsourcing writing on my sites and also decided to budget at least five new domains from freshdrop a month – where a dropped dot com costs me $12.45 after using the emma30 code which will get you the renewal for $7.49). Given that I have decided to try look to start selling five websites a month – it seems reasonable to buy the stock at that rate.

I am almost certainly going to buy new hosting – nothing wrong with HostGator but I want to spread my IP’s around if you know what I mean. BTW if anyone is looking for some very cheap hosting check out QiQ who has an offer until the 9 October for a years hosting for £11 ($17) – only one site and only per a customer – but that’s less than $1.50/month!

This turned into another long ramble – but I hoped it was useful to some of you.  As a business owner you need to look hard at your figures to know where to go with your business in the next month. I have found that my start of month routine is less and less about wow I made some money from an affiliate and more and more about he big picture – where is the money coming from – will  it continue?, how can I can I make it continue? how can I diversify? did I achieve what I wanted last month? if not why no? if yes why?

Quick Update

For those of you who are still confused as to which you might want to check out problogger.com – or at least Grizz’s take on Darren’s site!

DSCF4804

Categories
Article Marketing Paid Tools Tools

Article Marketing Automation: After a Month

Well its been month and so will I be cancelling the subscription on Article Marketing Automation which is just about to cost me another $47 ? Hell no!


NYC: Hilton Times Square – “Time and Money”
Originally uploaded by wallyg

As I reported after 2 weeks with AMA I have had a significant jump in the search engine rankings for both a hubpage and a niche blog of mine. Well after another two weeks, nothing has changed: both are still holding their new improved ratings. The count of the times that the relevant articles have been published is now up to 77 and 72 respectively. Is that as far as those sites are going to go the hubpage is ranking #5 the blog #8 for the keywords I targeted for this test.

Why hasn’t the extra published articles pushed me higher? That I have a theory about: I think most of the sites that articles are being published are very new, most people didn’t commit their existing sites to this new service. Now those sites are at most maybe 2 months old a lot of them will start to be getting sandboxed. I expect they will pop out sometime; so all I can see is an upside as my backlinks start to be counted by Google. In fact a number of the sites aren’t indexed at all I suspect because few of the links are actually showing up for either Yahoo or Google yet. So its only a fraction of the potential 70+ links which have actually got me pushed up the rankings thus far, there does seem to be a lot of potential upside still.

The only downside to date: I wish I had written more articles and submitted them! Time to really focus on that side of things I think. For those writing articles for submission to AMA here are a couple of hints which will make sure that you don’t get rejected from MY sites :

  • don’t submit a dozen similar but different articles on the same topic all at the same time. I then get presented wtih the option of 6 very similar articles I tend to pick one or two at most
  • spin the articles: I won’t consider publishing an article which is less than 30% unique

Those links again:

  • for the free version of Article Marketing Automation: allows a limited number of articles to be submitted and an unlimited number of sites to be added.
  • for the paid version of Article Marketing Automation which allows unlimited article to be submitted and sites to be added and costs $47/month

Its all about time and money for me: AMA is saving me more than its costing me, I will be a subscriber for a while longer!

Categories
Article Marketing Free Tools Paid Tools Tools

Article Marketing Automation: After a Week

Well my last post I raved about my initial experience with Article Marketing Automation so this is the update on my first week’s experience.

Just to recap what AMA will do for you: the free version of AMA will allow you to add your blogs to the network. Add your blog, select the categories and/ or keywords you want and articles from the network want posted on your blog and voila: if you allow it relevant articles will appear automatically (or wait patiently for you to approve them). This is great to build some new sites: but for me the real power AMA is the paid version.

With the paid subscription you can create articles: add them to the system; spinning it to minimize duplicate content if you want and the article is available to add to the network. You can add up to 3 keyword anchored links – anywhere in the text not stuck at the bottom in a resource box. And the keyword link can be spun too: from their own statistics says it all:

“Your articles are promoting 9 links via 55 anchor text options.”

The articles I added a week ago have been presented between 20 and 22 times and only rejected once.

The quality of the articles in the network is generally excellent I have only rejected a couple for quality reasons; some more for being in the wrong category.

So after a week the sites I added to the network at the start of the week have between 20 or 30 posts on them: and I haven’t everything offered.

Each article I add gains me around 12 anchored links A DAY. For as long as I remain a subscriber those articles keep on being distributed, though I can withdraw them if I want to. Even if cancel my membership the links I already have remain.

And the down side is: I haven’t really found one to be honest.
Click register for the free version of AMA

Click here to register for the paid version of AMA

UPDATE 30 September
One of my first articles submitted 10 days ago and now been published 30 times and I am now seeing the first few new links appearing in Yahoo

Categories
Article Marketing Free Tools Paid Tools Tools

A New Article Distribution Tool: Very Cool!

I have been planning on discussing on this blog which tools I use and why, but have been holding off until I was making a bit more money – so I had more credibility – at least in my mind!

There’s a new player in the game though and I am so excited that I am throwing caution to the wind and reviewing Article Marketing Automation my latest investment, and yes this one really is worth the price, although there is a free version too, read on.

Many of you will have heard of Article Marketing where you write a short article which includes a link back to your site. People use article marketing to develop backlinks for their site and sometimes for traffic too. Now you can choose to submit your article to a few directories: of which EzineArticles is one of the best, or you can submit your article to literally thousands of other directories. Many people want to submit to many directories, again to develop the backlinks, rather than the traffic. I have been wanting to do this for some time: but I haven’t moved further on with this for one main reason: I couldn’t find the right software/service for me.

I have my choice narrowed down to two products: one of which uses software to at least semi-automate the submission process: the other is a service which has your articles submitted manually. Both options I had serious problems with:

  • the software solution doesn’t work well for me because my niches don’t fit neatly into the categories found in most directories ;
  • the service solution had some issues with customer service; and I want someone to communicate with me if I am paying 100’s of dollars for a service!

So I sat on my hands and did nothing! Well what happened last week was exciting : I started seeing blogs I trusted talking about a new service called Article Automation Software: its different so bare with me you need to work through this to understand what’s different.

With AMA you submit articles, there is a spinner as well, to allow article variations, but you don’t have to use it. Articles must be at least 300 words. You can include your links anywhere in the article (in fact you can spin your keyword anchors in your links- to mix them up a bit) – this is important because your links are in the context of your article rather than stuck at the bottom in your “bio” or “resource box”.

Also you can add youtube videos l – and anchor link them: video is the future I’m told but I haven’t tried this option yet!

Now it gets interesting – the articles aren’t submitted to article directories: they are submitted to other blogs of people who have signed up for the network. Blogs which are hopefully focussed on the topic of your article: there is no guarantee but many people will have blogs which are niche or foccussed. The blog owner may add their own links, may alter your text, may add ads and images, can in fact do anything like with your post – but they have to leave your links: contextual links here we come!

Will Google like it? Well they probably won’t know. There is no obvious footprint: the blogs aren’t owned by AMA: they are owned by you and me. They support WordPress (self-hosted only), blogger and tumblr blogs to date. Probably others as well if they have the right API – that bit was a bit technical for me!

Are the articles edited? Are they rubbish? Well to date I have been impressed by the articles: I’ve seen worse on EzineArticles and Hubpages! There is no formal acceptance, editing process for articles but for every blog you add you can choose to either allow articles to post automatically or for the articles to remain unpublished until you approve: I do the later. I also check the links in articles to make sure I am happy linking to the site, that they are not bad neighbourhoods: they haven’t been so far. I’ve seen people say that the blogs they set for this service are now gaining comments from real people – so the quality is more than fine IMHO.

Do I know where my article is published? No, not directly – you will have to wait for the backlinks to show: or include a “signature” piece of text in each article which you can search on once the blog’s post is indexed.

What sort of blogs do you add to the network? This is important! Don’t add personal, flagship blogs. I wouldn’t add this blog! This is my flagship blog and its my voice! But I also wouldn’t include directly blogs which I make money from. I could – but I’m not at the moment because I really don’t want the other internet marketers to know which sites those are! Instead I have set up some new blogs just for this experiment.

The site itself: the interface is slick, quick and works well. Its easy to follow but they have some cool videos as well if you are the type who likes to read the manual.

OK Where Do I SignUp
There are two options: paid and unpaid.

The free version of Article Automation Software allows you to add blogs but NOT to submit articles. So if you have a whole lot of domains lying around doing nothing: throw WordPress onto them and get some free content and indexing! Also if you are curious about the quality of articles in the network this would be an easy way to check it out yourself.

UPDATE: You get five free article submissions with the free sign up – an excellent marketing ploy to let you try it out and well worth taking up!

The paid version of Article Automation Software is this link which will take you to their sales page :and its not as obnoxious as most either! The bottom line is that the cost is $47 /month – its a subscription. No its not cheap: but its good value for me. You can cancel at any time and if you cancel in the first month you get your money back.

I am an affiliate and I will get paid if you use my link – I think that’s reasonable if you found them via my link – if not hack the link to take my code out!