Pursuit of Profit

This guy is showing his love to Digital Point and Shoemoney. Most people will give a link to their favorite blogs in their blogroll, or maybe even a site wide footer link if it’s a site of distinction. Well this guy went further than that, he went and tattooed his favorite sites on his fore arm.

I think this has to be some kind of viral marketing, and the guy is either getting paid in traditional links or cold hard cash.

All I think about is my affiliate campaign. I check Clickbank constantly to see if I have made anymore sales, then cross reference that with my adwords account to make sure my budget is not getting away from me. The past week and a bit have seen a whirlwind of activity, here is a short list of a few things that have taken place since June 5th.

June 5th Site and landing page are completed traffic starts to flow in from adwords, no sales.

June 6th I got my first sale, now I know my conversion tracking and systems are working.

June 7-10 Sales are increasing, but I am still losing about $70 a day.

June 11-13 Adwords stop running because I have hit my limit on my credit card, time to move some money around.

June 14-15 Sales are still climbing, but my losses are staying the same. Which means this campaign is getting closer to becoming profitable.

June 16 My credit card has hit its limit once again, and my ads are down. I have just called to get an increase on my credit card limit. Also my first pay period in clickbank has come to an end, which means I will be getting my first check in the mail pretty soon!

Every penny I have is on the line on this campaign, I just hope it becomes profitable sooner than later!

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.

I just put up two new ad units for Neverblue Advertising on the right sidebar. I get the majority my CPA (cost per action) campaigns through them. In the next few weeks I will start tracking a few campaigns that I will be advertising for them. So if you want to follow along and create a similar campaign feel free to sign up and get access to their massive inventory of high paying campaigns.

There is some ambiguity in my previous post about how I plan to achieve my goal of $10k a month. First let’s get two things straight!

1. I don’t plan on making my income solely from this blog!
2. I don’t plan on relying on google’s adsense for my income!

Okay now that I’ve said that let’s move on.

Question: How do I plan on making the money?

Answer: I plan on creating multiple streams of income. Okay, that’s probably not the clear concise answer you are looking for. But that’s not what this journey is about. It is about testing and trying new things, and seeing which ones work. The ones that have potential I am going to invest more time and money into to, in hopes of creating highly profitable revenue streams.

Question: Any hints at what kind of systems I am going to try?

Answer: I do plan on focusing on increasing my traffic and backlinks at the beginning of this journey because those are crucial to readership. I also want to give domaining a shot; I have no experience in it so it is very interesting to me. I’ll give arbitrage a go as well as affiliate marketing.

However, I have not ruled out anyway of making money online yet (except things that fall outside my morals). I may even sell on ebay to complete my mission, who knows?

But now that I do have about $10 I am thinking of investing it in a domain name. That way I will be in control of all my content, and the site will actually be mine as opposed to google owning it through blogger. What do you guys think about using this month’s money towards a domain name? Also any suggestions on a domain name?

Now that I got my first goal complete, I’ve gotta start thinking about how I can double the money I made. Time to find a new revenue stream! Should I do some PPC ads for the blog to increase readership? Should I focus on publicity or building a different revenue stream all together like an affiliate campaign advertised on google adwords?

Here’s the deal, this blog will track my progress on making money online and go in depth on what’s working and what isn’t.

So at the end of April I’ll need to make $5 and double that each month for a whole year. The only money I can use is the money from the previous months. Here’s the break down:

1. April $5
2. May $10
3. June $20
4. July $40
5. August $80
6. September $160
7. October $320
8. November $640 (this is where it starts to get interesting!)
9. December $1280
10. January $2560 (from here on is going to take wise investing as well as action)
11. February $5120
12. March $10240

Wish me luck, I think I’m going to need a lot of it!

This is the first step in my plan to begin making the big bucks online. I have designed and run a few online businesses with minimal success over the past 3 years. Inspiration and motivation seem to come in such short lived but extreme bursts. For example I may lay the ground work for a website or blog by purchasing a domain name and installing a script and building a few backlinks, but when it doesn’t perform as quickly and successfully as I would like I feel discouraged.

I’ve done a bit of introspection, and realized that I haven’t been able to achieve my goals for a few reasons:

1. My goals are too high; thus setting myself up for a let down
2. Too many goals; having aspirations is huge, but spreading yourself too thin is a sure fire trip to loser lane.
3. My plans are too long term; don’t get me wrong having long term goals is crucial, but also having a step by step action plan is key to actually accomplishing these goals.

So here’s my plan, my plan that will hopefully get me to wear I want to be: Have a monetary goal of $5 for my first month and double that each month for one year for a final goal of about $10 000 a month. Impossible? No. Hard? Definitely!

You’ll be able to read about my status and how I’m making money. I’ll fill you in on what keywords I’m using, which site I’m advertising at, and basically every step along the way!

This quest to make it from the bottom, starting with nothing but an internet connection and my trusty macbook, to the final goal of $10 000 a month. I know this is going to to take time, dedication, learning and action. I am going to post my results from different online money making techniques and what steps I am taking to get these results. I’ll show you how I try to make cash and report what works and what doesn’t! Should be a fun ride, check back for new posts often.

The official starting month is April! April 1st is when the games commence and until then I will