In Febuary, my online income was $364.31. I set a goal to get over $500 in March. I am proud to say that I have well and truly smashed that target… so much so that I have gotten to a point where I feel a bit uneasy to disclose my income except to say that I can now say that I have finally joined the club.

photo source: Flickr

I started this blog with the goal of making a million bucks. Initially, I tried a few get rich quick ideas but eventually I learned that to make money online takes a lot of learning, a lot of trying, a lot of slowly slowlies - Yes, there are people who get rich on one great idea, but they are the oddities that strike it lucky rather than making it through good planning and hard work.

Whilst I’m not quite a millioinaire yet, I’m well and truly on my way. My current money making avenues include

Adsense

This is where I made my first buck online - and to that, I owe a lot to Google. The way I make money with adsense is to buy old domains with keywords that are fairly popular but not so much so that they are over saturated in competition. I build lots and lots of mini sites by paying someone else to write 20 to 30 articles. Then I start meticulously building as many back links as I can get from social bookmarking sites and do follow blogs until I get indexed by google. In comes the visitors and… ka-ching - residual income in the bank!

Affiliate Marketing

I’ve always thought that affiliate marketing made a lot of sense. With adsense, you are really just adding an extra layer between your site and the ppc guy pushing an affiliate campaign. If affiliates can pay google to pay you to put a link up, then there must be good money here. I tried my hand early on in ppc but I suck at marketing… especially the part of writing the copy! My luck really turned around though when

1. I noticed that ALL the ads on one of my adsense ads were for this one product. This site was making about a dollar a day with a 50% click through rate. That’s good money there so I was a bit hesitant to change the site. I didn’t really like the product on offer but, I thought, if these guys are going to own my site with such ad domination then I’d try and run this offer myself. To my surprise when I slapped on the affiliate ads, my revenue jumped up to an average of $7 a day - that’s a 700% increase! woohoo! From this moment on, I stopped spending my time on creating mini sites for cpc to creating mini sites for cpa!
2. I have always found it difficult to pick an affiliate campaign that I could wholeheartedly push. There are not many companies out there I would buy from myself and also happen to have an affiliate program up. Luckily for me, there’s
   • eBay - everyone buys from eBay… including myself. I always thought it’d be profitable promoting ebay auctions and, early on, I tried putting up a few of their links and auction feeds without much success. I knew that the big players were taking advantage of the ebay api but I never had the time to familiarising myself with it. My breakthrough came when a chap named Wade Wells came up with a plugin that uses the eBay api to populate your wordpress blog with ebay auctions. I could have spent a whole weekend coding away at this, but how much better was paying $49 for phpbay - a ready built wordpress plugin! PhpBay is absolutely awesome… well no I guess I should say that populating your sites with auto-generated content from ebay auction listing is absolutely awesome - phpBay is just an easy way to fast track the build process. For some reason, google absolutely loves ebay auction content and for some sites, I am ranking in the front page of google for two word phrases without me even adding ANY backlinks to the site. If you’re not on the ebay bandwagon, get yourself signed up and buy phpbay today.
   • Symantec and ZoneAlarm - two of the world’s best anti-virus software companies. Which one do you own?
   • SnapFish- Printing online by Hewlett Packard. In Australia, they’ve recently dropped photo printing down to 15cents which finally makes it competitive with printing at the shops. Also they give away the first 30 prints for free.
   • GoDaddy - I register ALL my domains here and so should you.
   • VistaPrint - you get 250 free business cards … sure there’s limited design range but it’s free so why not?

So there you go - a nice bunch of reputable companies to promote! :) The affiliate Networks that I currently use and can recommend are Commission Junction, NeverBlueAds, MaxBounty, and WebGains. I’m also an AzoogleAds member but there was a campaign that I was promoting and I was not getting any conversions… the moment I switched to NeverBlueAds for the same campaign, I started seeing the money roll in - go figure.

Consulting

As a result of some of my sites and this blog, I have helped a small number of people with technical work - predominately setting up mediawiki and wordpress mu. I’d prefer to work on my own sites but of course, everything has a price and I set my opportunity cost of not working on my own work at US$100 an hour. That might sound like a lot to those peddling around at $2 an hour but anything less is really not worth my time.

So there you go, March was awesome and April is already looking up! Adsense clicks seem to be worth more and eBay has a new geo-targetting tool which means you can now redirect visitors to the eBay of their country - kaaaa…ching! :D

Popularity: 7%

I’ve just been reading MarketingExperiments.com and it looks to be a gem! Two articles there that stole my attention are:

1. PPC Advertising - There’s details of a few adwords experiments and the results of different texts used. The main take away here is to provide a landing page that exactly matches what the user was searching for, then try to funnel them to your sales page.
2. Harnessing Social Media - In this experiment, they were able to get 90,000 + unique visitors for a total salary cost of $3,000. This was compared to their 2,000 visitors for $1,250 in adword clicks for the same sites. Take away here is that it can be quite profitable to hire someone else to do the blogging for you!

Overall, this site has some of the most well written articles and reports I’ve come across this year. Well worth the visit for anyone new to internet marketing.

Popularity: 5%

Febuary was an intense month for me. I’ve been:

1. Juggling the blog theme redesign
   As you can see, I’ve almost removed all traces of the copyblogger theme I started with - it’s still a work in progress though. I’m glad I’ve done this cos whilst mandigo was nice and flexible, copyblogger loads a million times faster and now I can say there’s no other blog that looks as crap as as unique as mine
2. Searching for and registering domain names.
   My domain count is now at a massive 97! That’s 3 more to crack the ton! Whilst there’s still the temptation for me to grab that exact matching keyword dot NET domain, I’ve learnt that the age of a domain is vastly more important than its keywords. This has prompted me to be buying domains that are at least 2 years or older. Whilst this has costed a bit more, the rewards have been worth it. These domains get indexed faster and I’m finding that (for my cases anyway) google seems to look at the keywords in the path more than the domain name itself. So what this means is that instead of getting a brand new domain like FindASoulMate.com, I’d rather get DatesOnline.com if it is 2years + old. I’ll then make it a mini dating site and have a page with the path datesonline.com/find-a-soul-mate/.

   This actually makes sense to me and I think it’s a smart change for Google. Often the best sites on the net have meangingless domain names (from a keyword perspective anyway) - Take techcrunch and mashable for example.

4. SEO’ing my mini sites
   this has been the most time consuming and boring part of the process. Trying to obtain endless links for my sites has become to labourious and I’m researching the best options to either outsourcing this or automating this. More on this in a later post… I hope.
5. Increasing my PPC and Affiliate knowledge
   There’s a growing tidal wave of affiliate bloggers out there and I’m soaking in all I can. Apart from putting a few ad buttons here and there, I’ve always been lazy about pushing affiliate programs because I’ve had the impression that it’s a dodgy industry and I hate faking / lying in an ad copy just to get the sale. Let’s face it, 90% of people who sell affiliate stuff have never used the product themselves so how can they endorse it with a massively long landing page that proclaims it’s the best thing since sliced bread? Apart from the dodgyness of it, I’ve also lacked to passion to promote stuff that I’m not interested in (online dating??, dieting??, ringtones??, etc.,) Well, in the last few months ( and more so last month), I’ve stumbled across a few programs that I absolutely think rocks, passes my ethical / moral test, and I have no problems pushing to even my best friends. More on this later… I hope again.

So what has all this meant for Feburary? A grand total of $364.31 for the whole month.

I know it’s still way less than what I earn in day offline but I’m happy that it was more than Jan - as you can see I was flat out in Feb and I haven’t had a chance to monetised all 97 of my domains. March looks more promising though, especially with the changes to the Adsense T&Cs (which reminds me, I still need that adsense compliant privacy page) and my affiliate endeavours. I’m aiming to break $500..! :D

Popularity: 15%