I just became aware of a new service that will pay you cash for your timeshare. Those of you that own timeshares know who you are and maybe you are kicking yourself for buying it because now you realize you just can’t get out there to enjoy the vacations you thought you were going to be taking.

Maybe you just aren’t interested in keeping the place anymore but haven’t had any luck selling it. Maybe you don’t know what a timeshare really is and are interested in getting more information about them.

If this sounds like you then you should check out Timeshare Resale Marketplace.

Timeshare Resale Marketplace specializes in buying, renting and selling timeshares. A timeshare is basically a condominium that is owned by several people who all get a couple weeks a year to live in the place should they choose to do so.

It is common practice to rent out timeshares in which case the owning party for that time period would recieve compensation. In September of this year, we spent a week in New York (actually Brooklyn) and we rented out a 3 bedroom apartment which was so much nicer than staying in a hotel and so much easier. This is what a timeshare offers you if you are considering renting for a vacation instead of a costly hotel. Timeshares are deeply discounted compared to hotel rates.

Since it can be difficult to find buyers and renters, you might want to have someone handle this process for you and that is exactly what Timeshare Resale Marketplace does.

To find out more information, go to Timeshare Resale Marketplace and fill out a simple form.

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One of the fastest growing affiliates around is PepperJam Network and they have just started a new contest where you can win $1000 grand prize. If you are chosen from the finalists for their new Store Builder contest, you will win a cool $1000 to spend how you wish. There are 10 prizes in total equalling $2000 in prize money being given away.

To enter, you have to be a PepperJam Network affiliate and then use their Store Builder feature to create a store on your blog. I created a store for this blog which showcases some very nice Movado watches you can purchase directly from my blog.

Click here for full details on the contest. and click here to sign up with PepperJam Network.

PepperJam Network recently unveiled their “Store Builder” which allows any affiliate to build a store based on partner products that are part of the PepperJam Network. The code is even Wordpress optimized so you don’t have to worry about anything coming out funky.

Building a store means you can promote any of the products sold by PepperJam Network partners right from your own website. If you’ve been looking for a way to showcase products that match your blog topics, this is just the thing.

You can build your store in 4 easy steps.

Step 1

Here you select the merchants whose products you wish to display in your store. You choose only products from partners that you are already approved to promote.

Step 2

Next you want to filter the results to show only the items that fit for your niche website or blog. If you have a site that is about Volkswagen cars, you don’t necessarily want to promote weight loss products.

Step 3

You have complete control over customizing the store colors to match your blog or website precicely. They even include a live view of the changes which is extremely helpful in deciding on the color scheme that works best for you.

Step 4

The final step is to copy the code created for you and paste it into a page on your Wordpress blog. I created a store here showing off exactly what can be produced using this simple, yet powerful tool. There is even a product feed code for using in RSS aggregators.

To get started using the PepperJam Network Store Builder, sign up for a PepperJam Network affiliate account and recieve a $10 bonus just for signing up. After that, start finding partners that fit with your niche blog and build your own store to sell their products! It couldn’t be simpler, start today!

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That being said, you should be working on ramping up your affiliate campaigns through PepperJam Network and NeverBlueAds to take advantage of any online shopping people are going to do. Keep in mind also, more people spend time indoors and (potentially) more time on their computers which means you can convert more traffic than usual during the fall and winter.

To make money online, you need to first drive traffic to your site and then convert that traffic to monetize it. That means eyeballs are not enough, you need to get  them to click and buy.

And now without further Ado…

Traffic Statistics

I always like to start out these reports by explaining my traffic. As usual, Google Analytics doesn’t provide the whole picture so I’m just not going to use it anymore. These statistics come directly from my web server using software called Webalizer. Since Webalizer has direct access to the server itself it tells me much more about the traffic on my site including 401 errors, 301 redirects and much much more.

So for the month of October I had 15,784 page views from 7,037 visits. The interesting thing is the majority of visits are split between US and “Network” whatever the latter means, I do not know. I always like to see where my traffic is coming from as it gives you an idea of your global reach and readability. Nearly 2% of my traffic came from the Russian Federation last month.

The Proficient Investor, my other blog also has some good statistics. For October, PI had 22,203 page views from 6,615 visits. As you can see PI, which is a financial/investment blog had more page views than MDP which I attribute primarily to the current fiscal crisis facing this country.

Revenue Report

The following is combined income for both blogs. I document earnings here for your benefit. I can talk all day about SEO techniques, writing quality content and how traffic is going to make or break your online business but I also want to show that anyone can make money online and i’m not just talking about blogging. Income can and should come from multiple sources. Revenue should actually be higher from TLA but they pro-rate sales to the time when the ad was first bought. So even though my current price is $18, if you bought a recurring ad when the price was lower, you get that lower price month to month.

Text-Link-Ads: $84.83 (from 9 ads on PI, 2 ads on MDP and 3 post level ads)
Amazon.com Seller: $14.70 (used DVD sales)
CafePress: $52.96
Adsense: $.02 (anyone still making money from google adsense?)
Kontera ContentLink: $1.29

Total:  $153.80

Not my best month ever, but Text Link Ads continues to be the leader in earnings. TLA is the easiest thing I have ever done to earn money online. Sign up for their program, slap in a wordpress plugin and then all you need to do is get traffic to your blog. The wizards at TLA take care of the rest.

As for the total revenue being less than last month, I’m not really worried about it. October was a tough month for me personally as my “day job” got in the way of my blogging! I also wasn’t able to work on any CPC/PPC campaigns due to time constraints.

What you should take away from this however is that if my blog continues to produce similar results month after month, it’s definitely worth the time I do spend on it. At this rate, assuming an average of $150 a month, that puts $1800 in my pocket for the year.

Keep creating original content, driving traffic to your site and then maximizing the return of that traffic and you’ll have success. There’s no real magic behind making money online but you don’t want the only purpose of your site to be making money…it doesn’t work like that. Find your niche, write what you are passionate about and the rest will fall in place.

What is HomeWalk?

HomeWalk is part of United Way of Greater Los Angeles’ year-round campaign to end homelessness called Pathway Home. Our goal in 2008 is to recruit an estimated 7,000 people and over 250 volunteers to help raise approximately $750,000 through a 5K sponsored walk to prevent and end homelessness in Los Angeles County. In addition to a walk, HomeWalk is also an educational journey, helping participants learn more about the crisis of homelessness and what we can do to solve it.

Last year, HomeWalk raised $500,000, helping over 2,300 homeless individuals off the streets and into permanent housing over the next twelve months.

You can help by donating or joining a team if you are in the Los Angeles area.

Sound too good to be true?

It’s not. Of course it’s not going to be easy, and it isn’t going to happen overnight. There is a sure-fire way to getting rich though.

Wealth, like happiness, is never attained when sought after directly. It comes as a by-product of providing a useful service.
-Henry Ford

You get rich by figuring out how to make a dollar and repeat it thousands of times over. I think there’s a famous quote along those lines but I can’t find it.

When I started my first online business venture my mentor told me about a conversation he had with his father one day. He said to his father, “I’m want to go into business for myself but I don’t know what I want to do yet”. To which his father replied, “Son, find someone who has the lifestyle you want and find out what they do. If it’s not illegal, or immoral and sounds like something you can do, then ask him to teach you”.

It’s really good advice if you think about it. When starting out any new business you are going to have a lot of questions. Where to start, how to start, what to do, where to go, etc. For that reason, you want to have a mentor to look to for advice and ideas and to keep you on track.

Something my mentor told me that has stuck in my mind, and I really want you to think about this is that if you surround yourself with wealthy people, it eventually rubs off on you. That doesn’t mean you get rich by being around rich people. But it does mean you can learn from those people by spending more time with them and that can lead to you being rich if you put those lessons into action.

Why I Want You To Be Rich

Maybe you’ve already heard all this before. Maybe you haven’t. If you are still reading this then you haven’t heard this elsewhere and good, I’m not wasting my words.

Money doesn’t bring happiness, does it? Not really, but it is a tool we can use to do things, buy things, go places. If you think of it this way you will have a much easier time dealing with it. Being rich means you don’t have to fret about the bills or debt or worry about when the next mortgage payment is due.

You can start on this path to riches by making some very small changes. So small in fact you probably don’t realize how quickly they add up.

Let’s look at a typical day of a commuter to a 9-5 job in a big city (hey, that’s me!).

5:15am - Wake up, shower, get ready for work
6:15am - out the door, 30 minute walk to bus
6:45am-9:00am - commute to work via bus/train
9:00am-12:30pm - work work work
12:30pm-1:30pm - lunch
1:30pm-5:00pm - work work work
5:00pm-7:30pm - commute home via bus/train

OK…now let’s say sometime in the morning you get a coffee (let’s say Starbucks, everyone loves them right?) that’s what? $5 for a mochachinofrappawhatever?
Coffee for one week: $25, one Month: $100, One Year: $1200.

Just by bringing your own coffee to work, you can save $1200 a year! Funnel that $1200 into a 4% savings account and you are making your money work for you.

Ok, now let’s say you buy your lunches out at various restaurants every day as I know some people do. In San Francisco, where I work, just about everywhere you have lunch it costs about $10. That’s $50 a week, $200 a month, $2400 a year.

Bring your lunch from home and you now have $3600 a year you can be using for investments, business expenses, etc.

Do you see where I am going with this?

When you begin tracking your expenses you can cut down on some little things to make big differences. But that isn’t going to make me rich! No it isn’t but it’s the first place you should start. I’m not saying never eat out and never buy coffee…just cut down and you’ll have money to invest in your business which can make you rich.

Here Comes The Sales Pitch

Oh great, now he wants me to buy something. Actually, I want to give you something. I want to give you the opportunity to earn $10 right now. After you earn that $10, you are going to earn another $50. Then you are going to earn that $50 month after month.

What am I talking about?

I’m talking about the power of Affiliate Marketing with PepperJam Network. Right now, you can get a $10 sign up bonus just for opening an affiliate account with PepperJam Network. That’s right, sign up today and get $10 just for signing up. Then to earn another $10, make a blog post about the network.

This is the Blogger Incentive Program from PepperJam Network. Each blog post you make about the PepperJam Network Blogger Incentive Program earns you $10 up to 5 posts per month. See, I just gave you a way to make $600 this year with your blog.

Why join PepperJam Network?

They are one of the fastest growing affiliate networks on the web and you can choose from hundreds of companies to promote. Some examples are New Line Cinema, Sesame Street, ReviewMe, Cartoon Network, Ben Sherman, Baby Phat. There are literally, hundreds of companies willing to pay you to promote their wares.

Welcome to the world of Affiliate Marketing.

If you are new to affiliate marketing you are going to want to read my primer on how to get started. You can get that by signing up for my newsletter. I guarantee you the information in the primer is worth much more than the FREE price I am giving it away for!

That’s the headline I’ve seen countless times on other successful blogs and I hate to regurgitate but if you are serious at all about being a successful blogger, entrepreneur, online marketer or internet guru you need to consider that what you are doing is a business.

It’s not the traditional “brick and mortar” business like you see at your local strip-mall but it is nonetheless a business.

You’re going to have expenses, revenue, advertising budgets, possibly employees, perhaps even office space, equpment purchases and other overhead. These won’t amount to the same as traditional business but you will still have them.

At some point, assuming your blogging business becomes very successful you will add to this mix an accountant, a lawyer and a financial advisor which also means a few added expenses.

These last three are extremely important because without them your business is likely to fail. In fact, 9 out of 10 new businesses fail within the first year for various reasons. Either the owner loses interest, realizes he has nothing to say or runs out of capital. The latter should be the easiest problem to solve. The first two things are huge problems.

Failure Isn’t A Bad Thing

First of all, if you lose interest then you’ve started this whole venture with the wrong idea. I’m not talking about your actual idea, I’m talking about the fact that you are doing things for the wrong reasons. If I were to ask you why you do what you do, be it blogging, making cakes, selling widgets, whatever…If I asked why you did it and your answer is “to make money” I can tell you right now, you are going to fail. If your only passion is to make money, you are going to quit within the first year when you realize the thousands of dollars in cash you dreamed of isn’t flowing through your mailbox like water.

In order to be really successful at ANYTHING, not just blogging, you have to have a real passion for it. Think about what motivates you to get up in the morning. If you have a crappy job that only just barely pays your bills and you hate going to it every day, why do you keep doing it? Because you have bills to pay, mouths to feed, car payments, food, etc.

I don’t care. We all have that going on. We all have reasons to give up. Do you listen to those reasons or do you accept there are going to be obstacles and challenges along the way. Ask any successful person how they got to where they are and they will tell you they failed until they got it right. The truth is nobody can tell you definititively that what they did is going to work for you. You’ll have to find that out on your own.

That being said, there are steps you can take to limit the number of failures you are going to experience in your journey to success. If you treat the whole process as a business and understand the choices you make and the strategies you employ are meant to be long lasting business decisions you will likely find success before too many failures. Each failure should be treated as a learning experience and then move on, move forward.

I guarantee you there isn’t one person who is successful in their niche that can tell you they woke up one morning, had an epiphany, got some money and put it into action and instantly it worked. Not even the so-called “overnight millionaire” has that kind of luck. There’s always an enormous amount of work behind each successful venture even though it may appear as though they sprung up overnight. These people had failed first ideas, growing pains and other problems along the way but had a good support system in place to keep them going.

Spending Money To Make Money

It seems counter-intuitive but when it comes to marketing, you need to spend a little money in order to make money in the long run. A simple text link on an appropriate site that has thousands of readers may be all you need. That link may end up costing you some good money up front but if your content is worth anything to anybody that small investment could pay off big time in the long run.

I have several online businesses at varying degrees of success, at least what I consider success. The commonality in them all is the support system I have in place to keep me going. I know from month to month what is and isn’t working which allows me to know where to “trim the fat” so to speak. If an advertising program isn’t working and I’m spending more than I’m bringing in, changes have to be made. You don’t get rich by writing checks all the time, but you also don’t get rich if nobody knows who you are or what you do or sell.

Advertising has to be part of your spending budget. Organic traffic will drive a certain amount of revenue if people are finding what they are interested in on your site but there’s a reason companies like Coke and Pepsi are still in business after all these decades. Like it or not, advertising does work. Not all advertising is paid either. Word of mouth is one of the most powerful (and free) advertising methods around. These days it is called viral-marketing. In other words, “word of mouth” that spreads like a virus, nearly out of control. It can also shut down an improperly prepared web server.

So if you treat your blog or website like a business your chances of success are much higher than they would be otherwise. Take the time to research your niche and decide if it’s what you are really passionate about.  Understand that 90% of all new businesses fail in the first year and focus on not being one of those statistics. Lastly, expect to spend some money getting your name known and realize that you aren’t going to be successful if a) you quit and b) if you don’t accept that all good things take time.

First of all, what is Twitter?

Think of Twitter like micro blogging. I don’t always have time to make a full blog post and Twitter is the perfect place to just let you know what I’m up to without having to make a big time commitment to a full post.

Even in these harsh and trying times, I feel the need to give back to the community that supports me. Though you guys really need to step it up a notch and help yourselves by signing up for all the affiliate networks I keep talking about.

Just a little heads up. My Text-Link-Ads revenue is going to be much higher this month because I sold all my ads! That’s right, there’s no room left on The Proficient Investor which means either the price is going to continue to go up as demand gets higher. There’s still 8 spots left on this blog though so I haven’t completely maxed out. But I digress…

What I really wanted to let you know is I now have 90 Twitter followers. Just 10 more followers and I hit 100 (yeah I know, you can do math). So what that means is I want to give something cool away for the 100th follower. I’d really like it to be something personalized but you always have to order those things in Bulk and what I want to give away would cost way too much right now to buy 100 of them.

Suffice to say this is something that everyone can use. At least everyone who reads this blog, as I assume you are at least somewhat tech savvy. So, if you aren’t already following me, you should do so now because at the rate i’ve been gaining followers, 100 isn’t far off.

Right now, TechTod is giving away $225 in cash and a Sony Digi-cam. All the details for entering can be found at TechTod. The contest runs until November 25 at which time 3 winners will be chosen. The more entries you have the better your chances of winning!