Pursuit of Profit

Vancouver is an awesome city and I had an awesome trip to the Google Adwords seminar. To start the trip off we flew over in a helicopter which was amazing. There was a pod of killer whales as we were flying out of Victoria and we caught a glimpse of these amazing animals in their natural habitats undisturbed by humans.

Scenery from the flight.

After a quick shopping trip over at the mega mall Metrotown we headed over to our hotel and we checked in. We threw down our bags and headed right to the pool with some Coronas. It was a smoking hot day and some cold beers and a dip was just what we needed!

That night we met up with a friend and ate at a Mexican restaurant called Los Margaritas. The meal was massive and the margaritas were amazing. Then it was time to head back downtown for another quick shopping spree where I got a few t-shirts. It was getting dark and we were looking for something to do, so we popped in to a Irish pub/ club called Cailies. It was pretty dead on the floor where we had settled, but someone told us to head up to the patio for a special event. Once we got up top we saw a bunch of gorgeous girls on stage getting ready for a swimsuit contest.

The bikini contestants.

The next morning was pretty tough getting out of bed, but we troopered though it and got our seats. Our speaker was Brad Geddes of Local Launch, an adwords professional who has a deep understanding of pay per click marketing. He started us by walking us through the basics, such as keyword selection and ad copy writing. After lunch things really picked up and we learned about tracking and how to make the most out of our data, among other things. I even met one of my affiliate managers, who was also attending the seminar. More to come on the tips and techniques discussed at the seminar.

Our speaker Brad Geddes.

The end of the seminar.

The 3 day trip was just what I needed before heading back to university for the fall semester. The food was good, the seminar was informative and the bikini contest was amazing. I hope you enjoy the pics as much as we did taking them.

The format of my goal has changed. Instead of doubling my profit each month I’m just going full throttle for my 10k goal.

The reason I deceided to do this is because, as the old saying goes “you gotta spend money, to make money”.

I have realized this the past few months to be more than true. Affiliate marketing requires you to spend a lot of money, before you see a dime of profit!

So you will see me post updates on what I am making my money on, and maybe some of my sales stats to show you that the money is coming in. Month to month there will be updates on my profit, if any, but not monthly goals. The monthly goals are too short term and can stifle the overall goal of $10,000 a month profit!

May was a pretty uneventful month for me online, but made offline. I started a new job and settled in to a new place. I was lucky enough to make $15 through adsense which allowed me to complete my May goal of $10.

Here is a snap of the earning statement.

I have now realized that I am not cut out to be making big adsense checks and I am not wasting anymore time and effort trying.

I am soley focusing on Clickbank affiliate marketing at the moment. My site is now up fully loaded with keyword rich content, contact page, privacy policy, and a killer landing page.

I had to get out of my comfort zone for doing this. I am spending up to $300 a day on adwords in hopes that my campaigns will become profitable, but for the time being I am continually losing money each day.

Yesterday I had to go get a new credit card with a bigger limit so I can cover my costs while I wait for my first check from clickbank to come in the mail. Obviously I am stressed out and even contemplating pulling the plug, fortunately for me I have friends in the game and they give me positive reassurances that my campaigns are doing fine, and they will level out over time.

On the plus side with my new credit card I’ll be getting airmiles out the wazoo!

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!!

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?

Well my affiliate site is up and running, but it has a major flaw: It is not converting. There is no sense in keeping it the way it is praying for a lucky purchase. So I have just paused my adwords campaigns and am working on a new landing page.

This is pretty frustrating, especially after putting in hours and hours of work making the original site. However this time around there is a lot less work to do. I already have my unique content, privacy policy, and campaigns all directed at the site.

The only real changes I have to make are going to be on actual landing pages and the actual URLs that the adwords point to. I am aiming to get longtail traffic, which are very specific keywords that relate to your product. For example, going back to car stereos, a longtail keyword would be a product name and model number such as ‘Alpine 9857′ as opposed to a general keyword like ‘car stereo’.

Longtail keywords are generally cheaper due to lower bidding competition, but they generally do not convert as well as name brands and very general product keywords. There is a trick to making them work for you though! Tailor your landing page to the longtail keywords. Use your imagination on ways to do this. That is what I am trying to do right now!

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!