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!!

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!

For those of your who haven’t started reading John Chows blog yet, you should! He has as many helpful pointers as other big time bloggers like Problogger. Today he wrote an interesting article on Beginner Blogging Tips. He has identified five major tips that are insightful, and real.

Reading this post makes me glad I began this $10k journey and has made me even more passionate in reaching my goals.

I was tagged by blogger Carl Pei and asked to give 5 reasons why I blog. Took me a while to think of the actual reasons I blog, but here are 5 real reasons I came up with.

1. Connection: Blogging allows me to share my experiences and ideas with like minded individuals. Honestly, how many of you have more than 1 or 2 friends, offline who are affiliate marketers or adsense earners? I bet not many of you! Learning and trying new techniques for earning online is exciting, but having no one to share that with isn’t.

2. No Downside: Why wouldn’t you blog? You can meet people, share knowledge, make money. What could you possibly lose?

3. Contacts: Most people who read blogs, in my opinion, are above average when it comes to being their ability online. They probably know something or someone I don’t that could be beneficial to me in the future. So being in contact with these people is a good thing!

4. Money: Blogs can make money, if I can write about something I enjoy and that gets me excited, good! But if I can write about something I enjoy, gets me excited and make some money from it, GREAT!

5. Freedom: I can say whatever I want, plain and simple.

Now my turn to tag 5 more and suck them in to this never ending game of gotcha!

1. DoshDosh
2. california
3. Vedis
4. LifeIsRisky
5. MrGaryLee

Well this semester is coming to a close and I’ve got a final exam tomorrow. I’ll be cramped up in a cubicle in the library all day so I won’t be able to give you any awesome posts for about 24 hours! Just a heads up, but check back tomorrow and there will be some new exciting posts!

First of all, welcome aboard to the first fresh post on Pursuit of Profit (all the others were ported over from blogger). I look forward to posting on here and answering any questions or comments you have. Let me know what you think of the new look and feel of this blog!

…Post continued:

import blogger to wordpress. So do not fear, I know there are some people out there who want to switch to the hugely flexible blogging world of wordpress. It was a painless switch and I’m so happy I did it. Also don’t forget to update your bookmarks, links and subscription feeds. The new rss is http://feeds.feedburner.com/PursuitOfProfit so feed away!

After posting that I was considering purchasing my own domain with my first months earnings, I recieved a donation from fellow blogger Dylan who’s also talking about making money online over at WMHaven.com, to purchase a domain name. There are some good tips on monetization, and are definitely worth the time it takes to read them.

Okay so I am pumped that I don’t have to spend my current earnings on the purchase of a domain name, now I can invest them in another way! After realizing that my previous choice of caseysquest.com just got snatched up this week, by what appears to be domain tasters, I had to put my thinking cap on and began searching for domain names.

With a little bit of luck and inspiration from the recent big Willy Smith movie “the pursuit of happiness” I came up with pursuitofprofit.com . I’m just waiting for the domain to go through, so I can get wordpress on there and get to blogging hard on my own domain! It won’t be too long before it’s all loaded and ready for your eyes, I’m thinking Wednesday or Thursday of next week (It’s final exam time for me, that’s why it won’t be up as quick as it could be).

Thanks again Dylan!

Readers don’t forget to update your bookmarks and feedreaders when the big switch to pursuitofprofit.com does happen!

I am seriously considering purchasing a domain name with my current earnings from this blog. I figure it is the best time to switch while the blog is still in its infancy. The only problem is that the domain I was planning on getting, (domain removed, I still may have a chance to snap it up if the register is a taster), just got registered this week! What are the odds of that happening?!

What are some good suggestions for a domain name for this blog?

One of the easiest things you can impliment on a site to make money online is Google Adsense. Basically what it does, once installed, is read the content of your pages and display relevent ads to your traffic.

Installing and displaying the ads is the easy part, but getting your traffic to click your ads is an art form. I’ve found from trial and error that complimentary colors work best for attracting attention and increasing your CTR (click through rate). When I switched from a blended ad layout to a complimentary layout my CTR increased from 3.5% to 5.8%, thats a 60% increase! They don’t blend right in to the background and they don’t look awkward.

My way to achieve a complimentary set of colors is by using a color wheel and colorzilla.

• I first select the background color with the colorzilla firefox extention and set it as the background color in my adsense.

• Next I find the main link color on the site, and open it in a color wheel
• When I have this opened I leave the main gradient of the color and change the hue to an opposite color (ie if it’s blue go red or yellow)

After I have the title and background set I just pick the main text color and use it as my ad text color
For the link I set it as a light grey on a dark background, and a dark grey if the background is light.

As you can see I have added a complimentary adsense banner in the top right corner of my blog using this technique. Another CTR booster is placing your ads high up on your site so your visitors do not have to scroll down to see them.

Hopefully this tip helps you out! Also if you don’t have adsense yet on your site you can sign up here. Let me know how this works for you.

Ok so I have the blogspot blog up and hosted (for free), I chose the name grassroots marketing because that’s what this whole thing is about. Starting with nothing, and making it into something! So let’s break down what I’ve done so far:

1. Found a free blog host
2. Chose my blog name and design
3. Installed Google Analytics (more info below)
4. Pinged a few blog services with my link (I use Pingoat to send out my ping)

Google Analytics is a powerful free tool that Google offers. All you do is sign up and add a simple snippet of code to your website. You can paste this snippet in your template file or html or whatever. It allows you to see where your traffic is coming from, what keywords and search engines they are finding your site with and a whole lot more. If you aren’t using a stats service yet I would recommend Analytics, it really gives you a clear picture of how your site performs and what efforts are working for you!