Pursuit of Profit

The past 15 days have been crazy! Moving into a new place is something that takes up a ton of time and effort. This was my first major move so I didn’t really know what to expect. Now all the boxes are put away the internet is connected and the living has officially commenced.

Starting a new job is another major event in my life! I am working a late shift and it has really thrown my whole routine out of wack. The adjusting has been difficult, especially when do I work on my own stuff. I was rushed before work and too tired after.

I’ve worked out a routine of getting to bed as early as I can so I can use my waking hours, which are my most productive, for projects.

I am glad that this month’s goal is only $10 because if it was anything more I don’t think I would have made it. If you let your income streams slide for a few days they begin to crumble. You constantly need to work at them to strengthen them! I really need to take my own advice and get back to posting more!!

It’s already May 7 and I have made almost no money online so far! I have earned a whopping total of $2.74 through adsense. I will not reach my goal this month, which is $10 not $20 like I mistakenly stated in a previous post, at thatrate. I will have to bump up my earning power!

This month I want to work on my link building and the affiliate site. For my link building I am going to use a domain I already own and develop it in to a link directory. I will point as many links as I can towards it, and build a solid page rank for the next update and do three way reciprocal linking to Pursuit of Profit.

The domain I am going to use for the directory is www.axonseek.com, so far it has phplinkdirectory installed on it and a template that I need to do some hacking on. I believe it will have it at a PR4 - 5 by next update, so it will be a strong backlink to have.

Another option I was considering for link building was setting up a directory on the Pursuit of Profit domain. So for example something like www.pursuitofprofit.com/directory. The benefit of setting up the directory this way would be all backlinks and recipricol links would be pointing at the Pursuit of Profit domain name and all the traffic involved with both the blog and the directory would be going towards one Alexa ranking.

The affiliate site is still sitting on pause until the landing page is built. Building this landing page is turning in to a more work than I had anticipated, but when it is done it will be my main income stream.

The possibility of earning huge dollars off of an affiliate campaign can make an it the highest work to profit ratio available to us web marketers. You build a site once, update, tweak and continually reap the profits.

Blogs can make money as well, but the effort to profit ratio is extremely small. If you want to make big money online you have to be selling items or services. Tip of the day: Sell downloads or anything you can automate and then pump as much traffic as you can to the site!

That’s all for today, but look out tomorrow for pictures of the basement with the ping pong table set up!!

Affiliate marketing has become the lifeblood for droves webmasters and internet marketers. Starting out can be difficult because people who are earning in this area don’t want to share their secrets and potentially create a competitor. Affiliate marketers guard their holy grail of keywords because it is their lively hood, it is the magic they have found that profitably turns traffic into money.

I have ran and run affiliate campaigns, some took a profit and some took a loss. Here are a few of the tips that I have learned over the years and want to anyone starting out. These are my do’s and don’ts that can make you money, there are plenty more out there. Add your do’s and don’ts to the comments!

Don’t!

1. Pick a product or service you know nothing about

2. Assume your keywords are profitable without researching them

3. Writing one ad for all your keywords

4. Throw up just a landing page without related content on other pages

5. Enter the most competitive markets without any experience

6. Leave your keyword bids the same day after day

7. Continue chasing your loses on keywords in hopes they will turn profitable

8. Think you are lucky and your products will convert without work

9. Believe that you are done work once the site is up and receiving traffic

10. Promote a product based solely on it’s commission amount

Do!

1. Research your competitors pages, ads, and keywords

2. Match keywords and phrase in your ads with your landing page

3. Dynamically insert keywords

4. Tweak! Don’t be afraid to change your layout, colors, content, ads, keywords and everything else related to your campaign

5. Split test

6. Adjust your keyword bids in accordance with their conversion rate

7. Use keyword research tools

8. Categorize your keywords into groups, write ads for each group

9. Make a site that has plenty of related content, a privacy policy and a contact page

10. Realize that affiliate marketing is an on going process

Remember that affiliate marketing is growing and changing. You have to adapt to these changes and continually learn new tricks and techniques or you will be left behind.

To me this month is all about breaking out of my regular routines and getting in to new areas. This is true for both my online income streams, and my personal life. I just moved in to a new place on the first and started a new job!

Tuesday was not the most fun day I have ever had. I got to bed late Monday, started moving at 7am Tuesday and began my first shift at my new job at 3pm. Tim Horton’s coffee was the life saver that got me through this extremely long day. Here are some pictures from the move:

Our Van

Our Real Van!

Filling Up the New Pad

Now that we have all our big furniture, rooms and electronics set up in the new place, it is really feeling like our own place. The media center is awesome, plus there is a tv in almost every room (wasteful sort of, cool definitely).

So nice I had to take a pic twice!

This is Where it All Goes Down

The basement is an unfinished amazing area that will host many poker and ping pong nights.

Endless potential

Ping Pong: like tennis if your were 100 m tall

The new job is very interesting as well. I am doing tech support for a software company that is a big name on Clickbank. Seeing how professional and dedicated this company is to their customers has given me a new found faith in software customer service.

As for income streams stay posted! I have a blog about tea, which I am an avid drinker of (coffee has sneakily snuck its way in to my morning routine lately). This blog was put on the back burner after one post hit the frontpage of Netscape and my old server crashed. But after talking with my partner on the project we both agreed that now is a great time to get back to the blogging action on the world’s best drink, tea.

May is going to be a very exciting month all around!

Well first off thanks for continuing to follow my journey. Month one is now complete and the $5 goal was met and surpassed! A lot happened in the first month of this journey.

I started with a free blogger blog

within a week I had made enough money to get a domain

a domain was donated to my by Dylan (another blogger).

I started up an affiliate site through clickbank, and began sending traffic through google adwords

I have began re tooling the affiliate site!

That brings me to today!

May is another big month for me. I have to make a big $10 this month through my efforts. I know that the momentum will follow from the previous month. Got any suggestions for more revenue streams?