Million Dollar PortfolioReal Strategies for Making Money Online

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I hope everyone had a very happy easter and enjoyed some time with their families and friends.

We had a fun filled day at the cousins’ house in Pacific Grove and enjoyed the warm early spring weather. It was sunny and refreshing. We even had lunch outside on the deck, it was great.

Here’s wishing you a Happy Easter!

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On a few of the other blogs I read, they made a “day in the life of” post and I thought I would do the same.  Why?

First of all, I’m not a “Pro Blogger”. I do this part time because I enjoy it and because I’ve become good at marketing what I know and making money from it. Success in blogging doesn’t happen overnight and you can’t expect instant results. I don’t expect everyone to read every single post I make either because not all posts interest everyone. I certainly don’t read every post John Chow or Darren Rowse make. I’m not always interested in what they have to say.  Having said that, I hope you find this interesting. If nothing else, you learn a little more about who I am.

My day starts early. I get up when the alarm clock goes off at 5:25 am. The first thing I have to do every morning is shower. I can’t fully wake up until I’ve showered. For a lot of people it’s coffee first, but not me. I need to feel clean and the hot shower helps get me alert.

Breakfast(after I get dressed of course) is usually either a Protein shake (pictured is similar). It’s a great way to start the morning because your body is usually starved for nutrients after all that sleep. Here’s the recipe:

1 cup 1% lowfat milk
1 banana
1 scoop whey protein powder (chocolate flavor)
1 tsp ground flaxseed
optional:
1/4 cup blueberries (frozen, as it helps thicken the shake)

You can use whatever fruit you like, or add a few ice cubes to help thicken it.

Having sucked down my shake, I check my email and see if there are any news stories around some of my investments in the stock market. At 6:15 I’m out the door for my 25 minute walk to the bus. The bus leaves at 6:45 en route to San Jose, 25 miles north. I get on a train which leaves at 7:45 to take me to San Francisco where I work.

At 8:45 I de-train and walk 15 minutes to my job.

I work full time for the 5th largest bank in the world as a web developer. I’ll let you figure that out on your own. All my work is internal to the bank so you will never see it unless you work for them. 11:30 is lunch time…if you work in this city you have to go at 11:30 or at 1:00 in order to avoid the crowds.

What I love about working in the city is the choice of food. There are hundreds of possible places to go for lunch. Anything from Indian to Greek to Chinese and Mexican foods. Just pick a street and start walking, you’re bound to find something delicious. One of my favorite dishes is “the Tampopo”(pictured) from LongLife Noodle. A lot of people hate this place, but I love the combination of Ramen noodle, pork slices, naruto and bamboo shoots. I always spice it up with some Sriracha and soy sauce to give it extra kick.

After lunch it’s back to work until 3:45 when I head back to the train.

At 4:09 the train leaves and I do any work I need to on the train. Mostly it’s reading or coding, or watching videos on my iPod Touch.

At 5:10 the train arrives in San Jose and I board a bus back home. Arriving in Santa Cruz at 6:30 I then walk the 25 minutes back home.

Now it’s time for dinner, playing with the kid, visiting with the wife, watching some Simpsons or Family Guy episodes I’ve recorded over the weekend or playing some Everquest 2. I also read blogs, check my entrecard accounts and do any marketing or advertising for my blogs. I’m basically a night owl. Around midnight I’ll climb into bed ready to do it all over again. I get most of my personal work done between 8pm and midnight.

That’s pretty much an average day in my life. On Monday nights I hang out with a few friends at a local organic brewery and on Friday nights we play poker a lot. Sometimes we just head downtown, and often I’ll take in a movie (which I podcast about on The East Wing Podcast).

As you can see, I lead a very exciting life! No really, I do.

I just wanted to give you a glimpse of how a blogger like me lives. I don’t drive fancy cars, actually I don’t drive at all…I let my wife do all the driving. I don’t buy $60 burgers (yet) and I am trying live within my means. I make a good living and I do take vacations, just not every month. I hope you’ve enjoyed this and learned a little more about me.

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Just a quick note here.

Tim Sykes is giving away his PennyStocking DVD which is chock full of instructions and techniques for trading pink sheet and otc stocks.

Tim is famous (or infamous) for turning $12,415 into $2 million in 4 short years. By making thousands of trades and taking quick profits, he became a millionaire and started his own hedge fund.

Now you can learn the techniques he used to make his fortune. This is no BS get rich quick scheme, this involves trading stocks most investors consider a waste of time. It involves speculating and trading companies that may or may not even be making money. You can win this DVD by commenting on this post. That’s all there is to it. Good luck!

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Wow!

General Marketing Blog is having a huge contest and you can win one of several prizes. The total value of all prizes is $11,000.00 and this looks to be one of the biggest contests I’ve seen from a blog.

I’m participating in the prize giveaway by donating a $25 Visa Gift Card. To win this card or other prizes all you need to do is blog about the contest. There’s plenty of other ways to enter though:

1) Blog about this contest 50 entries
2) Include a link to all sponsors in the blog post 25 entries (just copy&paste the list below)
3) Purchase any banner advertisement on our blog 25 entries (see side bar)
4) Subscribe to RSS via email or reader 20 entries
5) Leave a comment on this blog post 1 entry

Read the rest of this entry »

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Are the ads sitting on your site becoming stale?

I just checked my Google Adsense stats and they are horrendous. It’s no wonder GOOG (the stock) has been tumbling end over end. I don’t think people click on the ads anymore. I get plenty of traffic and I know my ads are relevant, which brings me to make a point.

A while ago I stumbled onto a site after doing a search for something and it had to be the ugliest thing I had ever seen. I don’t remember what it was or where, but I remember thinking, this is terrible, why would anyone make a site this ugly. And then it hit me. Adsense ads were all in well place locations. So, this site had been built purposely for the sole reason of getting people there from searches in the hopes they would click other ads that were actually relevant. Pretty sneaky and it probably works. I didn’t click the ads, but I’m sure others do.

That brings me to my next point. How often do you change your ads/affiliate companies? I try to give any new ad program at least a month before pulling the plug. The internet is a fast paced place and ads start looking the same to readers. Loyal readers of your blog are most likely to ignore your ads altogether, which is fine, at least it should be because retaining readers should be more important than getting clicks on your ads. When your readers are loyal, you can suggest products and services and because they trust you, they are more likely to use them and use your links to sign up for them.

For example, my best earner is Text-Link-Ads. Currently I make $15 a month per link. It’s not a lot but it is what it is. With 10 spots available, guess what? That puts my first milestone target right on the money. Remember when I talked about goal setting, one of my goals is to have this blog earning $100 a month. That’s the first stop on the money train for me. If I can make $100 a month, I can make $1000 a month.

So, that all being said, I’ve removed Adsense from my front page. I haven’t decided if I am going to keep it elsewhere, but I have other sites that get more clicks form Adsense than this one so it’s not that big a deal. In place of Adsense, you can now see my Top Spots widget. A spot on there is $15…hey just like TLA…imagine that! That’s the only real change I’ve made to my ad structure for now. I’m giving everything else a little more time. By the way, I also recommend NeverBlueAds for affiliate ad placement, and Dedicore.net for web hosting.

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A major source of income for many bloggers is advertising revenue. Generally, a new blogger starts out by using a service like Google Adsense and later on will add other types of programs to the site to supplement this.

I first got started advertising on my blogs using Adsense but didn’t have nearly the kind of success you read about by bloggers like Darren Rowse. It’s hard for a new blogger to understand just how others can make so much money from advertisements when there is so much competition out there.

Bloggers like John Chow make money mainly from private ad placements but this is only possible because of the sheer amount of traffic he brings in. While it isn’t impossible to generate that kind of traffic and income, it does take a lot of work day in and day out. Even with all the best SEO techniques and the highest Google results, if people aren’t interested in what you have to say, it’s not going to matter.

Blogging is all about niche targeting. Just because you want to write about making money online, doesn’t mean you are going to be good at it. John Chow didn’t start out writing about making money, he only ended up that way because he eventually became successful with what he was doing to start writing about it. Make sense? The best writers always write what they know. It’s great that you love making money…but are you good at it? Are you making enough to make someone else want to know more about how you are doing it? The fact is, you are going to be much more successful in your blogging career if you write about what you know.

Now that we have all that behind us…we can talk about the main thing here. Does advertising really work? For all the millions of dollars spent every year on advertising, is the return worth it? Services like Text-Link-Ads and Project Wonderful as well as Entrecard offer newbies an entry level way of getting ads and placing ads on very small budgets. Over time, these can become quite lucrative if you can generate enough traffic to make it worth the advertisers time.

It comes down to what’s known as CPM or Cost per thousand impressions. For every 1000 views your site gets, a cost can be associated with it depending on how much you charge for advertising. For example, A Text-Link-Ad on this site is $15 a month. Last month I had nearly 1000 page views. Since last month this blog made roughly $32, I can figure out the CPM. This is easy…because I only had about 1000 views. eCPM is $32 per thousand.  or .032 cents per view.

Not great, but this is a new blog and it is growing by the day. A text link on this ad has a CPM of $15 or .015 cents per view. As traffic increases, the CPM decreases but ideally, your CPM should stay about on par with your traffic increase because as your blog grows, so should your advertisers as well as the price those advertisers spend. It’s simple economics.

The true test of whether advertising works or not, is whether those advertisers come back. Entrecard is a great way of testing this because the cost is zero. I’ve found that I get the same batch of advertisers on my entrecards because the price is right compared to the traffic that results and that’s the ideal situation no matter what the cost.

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I’ve decided this year to post my monthly income reports this blog makes to give you an idea of how difficult or easy it is to make money blogging. I don’t do this full time because I already have a full time job as a web developer which pays me quite handsomely. I do want to give some perspective to making money online because with all the hype out there it seems like anyone can just put up a wordpress blog, set up some advertising like Google Adsense or other similar ad program and they are on their way to millions.

Well, sadly that isn’t the case. Blogging, and making money doing it takes a lot of hard work and constant testing until you get the right formula that works for you. What may work for one blogger may not work for you. This is one reason I mentioned in a previous post how important it is to set goals.

By setting goals for your personal and professional life you can gauge month by month how well you are on your way to succeeding.

And now without further ado…

Total Blog Income For February 2008: $31.61

• Google Adsense: $1.03
• Text Link Ads: $29.98
• Kontera: $0
• NeverBlueAds: $0
• Ad-Toll: $0
• Project Wonderful: $.60

Traffic stats according to Google Analytics: 449 visits and 594 pageviews, 1.21 pages per visit, with an 86% bounce rate (that means people don’t stick around too long before leaving). I’d really like to see this traffic increase. The bounce rate can probably be attributed mainly to Entrecard as many people simply want the credits and don’t bother to actually read anything on the site.

Here’s some more interesting stats about traffic:

If you aren’t already using Google Analytics to track site data you should. This kind of information is invaluable when you are trying to get things rolling.

As you can see, this doesn’t add up to much but I am on my way to achieving $100.00 a month. That’s my first goal. My largest earner is Text-Link-Ads and it’s the easiest way to pull in advertisers for me. If you aren’t using it already, sign up today. The thinking behind that is if I can make the first $100, then making another $100 should be just as easy if not easier. Then I can start looking at new goals such as doubling or tripling my income. Subscriber growth continues as I have now reached 20 RSS subscribers. I use RSS subscriptions as a bellweather for my growth because it shows continued interest in the blog. I would however like to see more participation from my readers in terms of comments and entering contests.

Speaking of contests, There have been no correct guesses for my last contest so I have no winner to announce yet. As soon as someone correctly solves it and sends me the answer via email, I will announce the winner and give away the $25 Visa Gift card.

So why do I even bother to mention how much (or how little, depending on your perspective) I make? You see, for big sites like John Chow, you see figures in the thousands of dollars per month but even he started somewhere. Also, if you consider what I have made, it at least pays for my web hosting which is great.

What is painfully obvious to me is the usual suspects in terms of banners and graphic ads just aren’t working, with the exception being Project Wonderful and Entrecard. I get a lot of traffic from both and I am slowly building up my PW funds which will allow me to advertise on other sites using the same system.

So my goal for March is to double February’s income. It’s a tall order but I think I can do it. I just need to get my brand out there more and find some quality advertisers. Speaking of which, right now you can get an ad through that nifty peel away ad for pennies…literally. For $.40 you can get a huge peel away ad.

You can get this peel away ad on your site, just go to Ad Toll and sign up for an account. Once your account is created you can begin promoting AdToll as well as advertise on my site or others like mine.

I hope this gives you a little insight on the beginnings of a dot-com mogul, If I may borrow the phrase from John Chow. I’m excited about March and the coming warm weather even though it means traditionally that advertisements tend to slow down.

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