I’m not entirely sure I haven’t just bitten off more than I can chew.  My ECZEMA WEBSITE is nearing completion and will soon be fit for public consumption.  To begin some promotion I joined the digitalpoint forum, as the marketing I had done on the warrior forum had been so successful.  I thought I may be able to pick up 100 subscribers or so with some signature advertising.

However, Digital point has a rule that you have no signature until you have made at least ten posts and been a member for a week, so whilst killing time I browsed around and fell into their “Website For Sale” section.  What an unfortunate error that may have been.  I now have 6 more websites than I had 48 hours ago, and need to get them up and running as soon as possible to reimburse my spending.

Now I wasn’t entirely frivolous with my spending, there is a kind of a plan to the madness, and they do fit into my overall strategy.  Infact 2 of them will nicely complement the Finance website I wrote about a little over a week ago.  One is a credit card affiliate site, and another offers a debt consolidation product for sale.

So I have a little work to get through just getting these sites up and running.  Not to mention I need to read over the ebooks they are selling to see if they are worth the effort or need rewriting.  If they are quality stuff, I think I will offer them to my list as a free download for sticking with me.

Speaking of my list, the self-written autoresponder I have been writing seems to be holding up well as the list approaches 200.  Some of the more fiddly features(like unsubscribe - hurray I am not CAN SPAM compliant) are done.  The biggest missing feature is the ability to send out spot messages to the entire list.  I can’t imagine that will take me more than an hour, but I need to check the hostgator mailout rules first to see how many messages I can send per hour before they start thinking I am spamming.  Besides - it’s one more thing on the two do list.

Finally - over the next two days - I have to start PROMOTING a few of my sites.  Outside of a warrior forum signature file I have been very slack with this.  The goal is to get my creditorsdebt.com ready for public viewing and promoted first - and learn from what happens with it.  I’m hoping it’s PR3 will make things a little easier - but it’s time that project starting paying me some money back. 

Well, I posted earlier in the month about “the site that was never meant to be”.  I had a coder bail on the web design, then I had quite a large dispute through rentacoder when I found the writer I hired(lazily) had given me a pile of plagiarized work.  I thought there for a while that this site was never going to happen.

Well it has.

I had a list member contact me about the problems he was having getting writing gigs because everyone expected him to work for rubbish wages.  This was because he was an Indian and his english grammar is not perfect.  I gave this writer a shot on 5 articles, and the quality was pretty good.  More impressive was his attitude to the suggestions I made on how to improve his writing.  believe me this guy will be earning a few hundred bucks a week in no time.

Anyway, I grabbed a template from a free resource site and made a few tweaks and modifications to it.  Then I put up the first bunch of articles.  This is the start of a pretty good information resource, and I’m quite happy with what I achieved in about 90 minutes tonight.

The site itself has a few purposes.  First of all I wanted to work in this niche as I have suffered from eczema for my entire life.  Secondly, it is an experiment in getting a website up from scratch fast.  And finally it has an adsense block and an adsense searchbar on it so hopefully it will generate a bit of income.

While it’s not completed yet, it is fit for public consumption, so please check out my Cure Your Eczema website and let me know what you think.

  There’s a funny thing about Internet Marketing.  It is by nature very distracting.  One moment you are writing an article on something that requires research, and the page you are researching on will have an ad or link that catches your attention, next thing you find you have been reading something unrelated to the work you are doing and an hour has slipped past.  it’s frustrating, and it requires a lot of discipline to avoid doing it.

My two biggest time wasters are currently the warrior forum and the 5 bucks a day forum.  Anyone who has visited either will know what I am talking about.  These sites are loaded with fascinating information and you are learning stuff every time you read a post.  In other words it is procrastination that is easy to justify to yourself.

But ultimately, it is killing my productivity.  I have had to undergo a self imposed ban on the warrior forum these past few days because I had a backlog of over 50 articles and I just wasn’t getting them done.  With the distraction removed I have gotten through the majority of them.  Now I am able to say to myself get through my remaining articles and I can get onto my own websites, which is the work I really want to be doing.

Ultimately, internet marketing is not about reading, it is about doing.  My freelance business is taking up all the time I can dedicate to it at the moment, but it didn’t get to that point because I read thousands of articles or special reports on how to do it - I just went ahead and applied for jobs and figured out what worked and what didn’t.  I am at the same point with my Adsense sites as I was with freelancing all those months ago.  I have seen there is money there to be made, and now it is just a case of making it.

Now ere’s a thought for you.  Did you find this post worth the time to read, or is my writing it and your reading it merely another way of procrastinating?

Late last week I posted about a website I purchased.  I wanted to share my experience with it so far.

I had purchased a finance website on the claim of it earning ‘around $300 adsense revenue per month’ and also it being a PR4 website.  The latter I could obviously verify, the former I could not.  Within a day of buying, and before the transfer was complete the website dropped to PR3.  This was obviously pretty disappointing.

When I got the website files I had to re-integrate adsense into them all, and I have found the adsense return to be well below the $10 per day I would need to pull in $300 per month.  This is also disappointing.

Having said that I’ve already learned quite a bit from picking this website to bits, and that was the real value I wanted to receive from the purchase.  I’ve been able to backtrack where the traffic for this site is coming from, and that has given me some pretty interesting results.  For those who run a website and don’t know how to work your traffic logs, I suggest you check them out in the cpanel.

My initial plan of having this website sit and see what happens has been seriously revised.  It has a PR of 3 and an alexa rank of over 2.6 million.  This site is the closest I have to a ‘ready to go’ adsense site, so I am going to work the heck out of it and see what I achieve.

At the very least I would hope my investment will pay for itself over the next few months.  At the worst I have a PR3 site to place some links into over the next few days.

Quite on impulse I purchased a website yesterday. The details are still being worked out, and the domain isn’t fully transferred over yet, but I am confident it will do well. The website is an adsense site at CreditorsDebt.com.

The site was monetized purely with Adsense, and of course the seller removed all his adsense code before handing it over. So I spent most of this morning first working out how to reinsert it and then doing it across 25 odd pages. I bought this site for 2 reasons:

• Number One - I expect it to do well in itself. I hope it pays for itself quickly and I can see a number of ways to monetize it beyond the Adsense I have slapped up as a quick fix. The Site is PR4 and already generating traffic.
• Number Two - It’s a nice example of an established site that is earning income, that I can learn from and with any luck replicate.

At any rate, as you will see from looking over the site there is plenty to be done with it. I need to fix a lot of spelling and grammatical errors and also look for suitable affiliate programs to market through it. I can imagine that it will be a good one to sell an ebook or two through as well in the near future.

My plan however is that once I have fixed the glaring errors I will let it sit for a month or two so I can see what is ‘normal’ for a site of this nature. After that, I will try every promotional trick I know of to get traffic to it and see how much it can be worth to me.

Feel free to visit the site and let me know what you think.

Well folks, I am in the process of moving towards making my online income more passive. My work so far has been quite successful, and I have a few thousand dollars more than I would have otherwise, but the ultimate goal of everyone working online is to create passive streams of income.

During December of 2007 I made the decision to develop a number of Adsense websites towards this end. I have had a little success previously with a Warcraft Site and a Runescape Site. But this was my first attempt at taking things to the next level. I hired a writer to produce 50 articles and a professional web designer to put together a template. Both of these have fallen through on me. The designer simply never produced the work, and the writer produced first substandard and then outright plagiarized work.

I was beginning to think the site was never destined to be, but then I thought to myself - you can do the web design yourself. You can write the articles yourself. Don’t be lazy - get to it. And that is what I’ve been working on since I got back from my break. I have about 50 articles to be written for a couple of customers, and then it’s full steam ahead on the first of many content sites.

Hi folks,

I hope you all had a fantastic Christmas and New Year. Mine…could have gone better. I had my family up to the lakes near where I live to share a Christmas with my wifes family. I got to meet my two youngest Nephews for the first time(One from Australia, one from my hometown of Timaru here in NZ) and everything should have gone well.

Then I heard one of the boys was sick, then his mum got it….then everyone did. The writing was kind of on the wall. However, as Christmas Eve came and went I allowed myself to get my hopes up. Foolish me…..

At 2am on Christmas day I was carrying my wife to the bathroom where she stayed lodged for around 4 hours. She couldn’t use the one in the house because my sister in law was rather busy in there. The bug hit me around 6:30am, and two of my nieces at about the same time. I spent 90% of Christmas day in bed, and the remainder alternatively sitting on or kneeling in front of the toilet. Fantastic.

Throw in a twisted ankle, a collapsed tent and a dose of flu and things could have been more fun. But by New Years the weather was beautiful and we had the lazy lake side holiday we were all waiting for.

The news perked up a little more when I got back online and found that my Bread and Butter Guide seemed to have been well received, I had been paid for two jobs I finished before I went and I got a rather nice Christmas Bonus from two of the marketers I produce work for regularly.

This is the great thing about online Marketing. For the first time in…..possibly ever….I have taken two weeks off work and I come back to find people paying me while I am away. Sure, it’s not the riches that some of the more optimistic sales letters promise, but it’s something. It’s my start. And I am grateful for it.