Sixtyseven-days

2007-07-06T20:39:00.000-05:00

I have had a busy few weeks, the last little while. I have been working my way around the internet trying to absorb information like a sponge. I started this experiment way back when, and had little to no success. I looked at what I was missing. Traffic! You can't make money running adsense ads if no one is reading them. I joined many sites like technorati, to try to get readers to my page. Starting from scratch there was little luck. Even now that this blog is 8 months old, I am getting more traffic now, then when I first started.

So, how do you get traffic? And how do you get it for little or no money? Traffic exchanges. It's a very simple concept. You become a member, and spend your time clicking on pages, and viewing them for a period of time. Once that time has passed, you get credit for viewing the page. Credits begin to accumulate at various rates for various exchanges. These credits, can then be converted to text ads, banner ads, or full web pages. What ever you have to sell, from your own product, to affiliate programs it can be done via these traffic exchanges.

Over the last few weeks, I have been testing which ones, actually bring me traffic, and which ones don't waste much of my time accumulating my credits. These are the ones I recommend.

1) Traffic Swarm : Great way to increase traffic, some great contests and opportunities to score extra credits.

2)Money and Hits: Easy to use, extra credits available, generates good traffic.

3) Roadrunner Surf : I have one hundreds of bonus credits and banner impressions on this site, with a little effort. In 2 weeks, I had 1 thousand hits to my site.

The last site I am going to recommend is Autohitsnow, it is unique it rotates your websites in other traffic exchanges as well as the one on this site. It also allows you to earn many bonus credits, the longer your surf. In 2 days, I had over 3000 credits. This site will also allow you to generate cash for your credits, and has other opportunites to get cash for clicks. Overall this is the more flexible of all the traffic exchanges I have been using. Although, they are each driving traffic to my site. More traffic = more money!

2007-06-28T23:35:00.001-05:00

Interested in getting a free big screen tv? I am, so I clicked and completed the offers. Now I just need a few of you to do the same.

2007-06-15T02:34:00.000-05:00

Here is a great affiliate marketing idea for anyone who is just starting out. It's very simple, sign up to be an affiliate, and the system does the work for you. It will create a web page that combines all the affiliate links it one simple and clean looking web page. The site links to 10,000 different products that you can sell right from your very own page. What makes this system so automatic? Once you sign up, and promote your page, it does all the work for you. Affiliate income will just pile up, and deposited right into you account. 24 hours a day 7 days a week. Isn't that what we all want? What could be easier?

Check it out here

2007-06-14T01:53:00.000-05:00

Pennies still trickling in but where are the nickels?

I now have 3 blogs that I am trying to keep up and running. Finding information or ideas for material is the easy part, as my wife to be says, I never stop thinking. My mind goes like the energizer bunny, the crux of the situation is finding the time to write the articles and post them.

This blog, not being very active over the last little while, is still chugging along generating pennies of income, no matter the level of neglect. So my question is where are the nickels? If I can almost totally neglect this blog, and still have it producing some income, how or what do I have to do to take it to the next level? This surely proves that at some level, even though it is so minuscule, passive income can be made in small amounts, but can it be converted to much larger amounts?

I have changed the layout somewhat, changing how the articles are archived, not by date, but by topic, and I have added some extra advertising on the site to see if I can monetize it even more. I know there is a learning curve to all this. So in the mean time, its back to more reading, and learning, and digging for nickels.

2007-05-30T01:40:00.001-05:00

I'm relentless when it comes to the internet. Always looking for a new income stream online. I found another one that is so simple and easy that anyone can do it. Well anyone 16 and over. I found a site that pays you to browse the web. It's something that I do for hours a time, why not get paid to do it? Its so simple and so easy, I started making money within seconds....yes seconds of signing up. By taking advantage of the online advertising program, as a potential online consumer, you can actually get paid for your web browsing, up to $5.00 for every 30 seconds worth of work. The income you earn is paid directly to you every month. The best part about the program is that as a potential online consumer, there is no charge to register your new account and begin earning money immediately. What could be easier, what could be better than free money. Gotta luv it!!

Check out the banner at the bottom of the page and start earning money immediately!!!

2007-05-08T00:47:00.001-05:00

I have been scouring the web for ideas on how to make money at home. I haven't had very much luck, spending hours and hours looking and researching, trying to find genuine ideas instead of money grabbing scams. I have now turned my basement into a small aviary. I have a love for birds, and an opportunity arose that allowed me to take this small step. I have 2 breeding pair of birds, a pair of yellow sided green cheeks, as well as for lack of a better word, normal green cheeked conures. I do have a blog about what I intend on doing and how it will progress along. If you like to read about it I invite you to stop into the blog http://handfedconures.blogspot.com/ and take a look around. I am also in the process of developing a complimentary site www.handfedconures.com/ but that is at least a month away. Of course, adsense will still be of great interest to me. Maybe I can make a few extra pennies there too.

2007-02-25T23:03:00.000-05:00

So, its been a few months since anything has been posted on the blog, and it is to be expected that there has been no new revenue to report. Like a garden that is neglected, it is obvious that without fresh content, and constant attention a blog can die a quick death.

To be honest, I have spent the last several weeks just trying to recover from the holidays, and a job that schedule changes constantly from week to week. Sleep scheduling, family time and just general time to let my mind wander the web, has become difficult. I have been frustrated in trying to make the time to devote to this blog, and re-examine various ways to make money online. Can it be done, of course it can. I have make some very small steps and have made some small amounts of income, the next step is to increase the amount of income derived, or to duplicate the whole process over and over again, or maybe there is a whole new method of generating income.

I have spent many hours scouring the internet for secondary market information for several clients, now it is a matter of taking those skills and applying them to what I need. As a side note, clients pay much better...they 50% up front. If I could figure out how to do this work and pay myself upfront, that would be ideal. Any ideas??

It's a work in progress. So is this blog.

2007-01-02T16:11:00.000-05:00

It's Over.

Sixty-seven days has come and gone. It's the New Year, and time to wrap up this little experiment. The holiday season ate up a lot of my time over the last few weeks. Little has changed over the holidays as far as income produced. I generated almost $11.00 in adsense income. Not the get rich quick as many report. I have had to become a student of adwords, and adsense as well as some of the other pay per click search engines. I have spent countless hours, reading and rereading ebooks, and articles on how to optimize web pages and blogs. I have also spent many hours typing out articles from that research to provide top shelf content.

It has been great fun, and I admit there was a larger learning curve than I expected, and was lead to believe there are many people who claim to have made their fortunes doing adword arbitrage. I could learn how to make that much money if I just drop "the buy it now or the price will only go up tomorrow" cash.

I know some of my mistakes have been critical to the lack of success of my experiment.

Time. I didn't devote enough time to the blog, or to the behind the scenes experiments. When I was launching the keyword campaigns, I didn't spend enough time scouring for the lower cost keywords that would convert into the higher paying keywords that would generate the higher income. Instead of making dollars a click, I was generating pennies. The trick is to multiply the sites to multiply the pennies. Working full-time at a job, then coming home to bang on the keyboard didn't allow me to duplicate the work on a bigger scale. Sometimes just being too tired to attempt to be articulate in any sense of the word.

Money. The old adage, it takes money to make money, even holds true on the Internet. I was very fearful in setting up budgets for my pay per clicks that were more than $5.00 a day. I know that my budget levels needed to be higher than that, if not 10 times higher or more. It can be cost prohibitive, if your borrowing money, and watching it disappear so quickly, and not seeing a significant end result. As past campaigns have proven, the pay per click search engines do provide traffic, it just a matter of ensuring that the keywords are laser target to the sales page. Tricking the visitor, I have learned is by no means cost effective. Offer truth in your ads, and the higher conversion rates should follow. We have all seen those ads that offer more, the ads that are so tempting but disappoint the second they are clicked.

Consistency. Focus. When I originally intended to do this blog, I made a promise to myself that I would try to write an article every day. I would try to read other blogs,make comments, and be an active participant. What ever excuses I can manage to muster up, all ad up to the fact that I didn't produce the kind of results that I wanted to. This is not a set it and forget it experiment, or recipe. This is hands on, and full time, without a doubt.

So, I am going to take what I learned, and try to be more hands on, more active, and see if it is possible to try to make income online.

2006-12-20T01:19:00.000-05:00

Day 56

Time is passing so quickly. It wasn't very long ago that I started this blog. Now I am almost 2 months into this. It's still exciting for me to take a few moments to write my thoughts about trying to develop passive income. Time is such a valuable commodity to me these last few months. I never seem to have enough time. Work, home life, and the relationships involved with each aspect seem to be pulling me every which way. As Bilbo Baggins said, "I feel like too little butter spread on too much toast." When I spend too much time on one area the others suffer. It's now 1:30 am. The house is all asleep, and I can spend a few minutes writing this, without anyone suffering from my lack of attention. It's these relationships that are so important to me, that make me want to do more, try harder, and learn all the nuances of adsense, and pay per click arbitrage.

My posts over the remaining of the year may dwindle. As much as this blog is important to me, my family is much more important. Over the holidays, I want to focus on them, the ones that truly bring me happiness, even though I seem to be frustrated how things are progressing. I want to devote the season of Christmas to them, because before long, they will all have their own lives. So I want to be greedy....do you blame me? If anyone of you have children, you most likely feel the very same way.

Enjoy the holidays, with your friends and family. Make an impact on their lives, create memories that they will cherish. Donate to your favorite charity, or find one. Many grocery stores accept donations for local missions that provide meals to the needy. Be grateful with what you have, and share with your neighbors. I haven't taken the time to do this the last few months, but I intend on making a difference. I hope you do to.

2006-12-13T20:42:00.000-05:00

Day 49

Today I stumbled upon a product that really excited me. There is always a bunch of hype about products with huge sales pages and sales letters that seems endless. A lot of the products are just hype. But, and I mean but, I have found a product that raised my blood pressure, and made me take all of 1 minute to decide to buy. It's called HyperVRE For someone like me who has been stuggling to make money with those so called free adsense sites that have compiled thousands of pages with 2931 broken links to be exact, and poor content. This product in itself is AMAZING!

HyperVRE can Generate THOUSANDS of fresh, unique content-rich webpages from highly-targeted keyword lists. Ever heard that "Content is King"? That's only half of it... "FRESH and UNIQUE Content is King"!

Add extremely targeted auto-refreshing content to your website by using rotating keyword definitions and put your niche keywords on steroids. Fill each of your webpages with content the search engines will love. When determing how important a webpage is, search engines look at words that are highly related to the main keyword and that are frequently updated. Your rotating keyword definitions will attract the SE spiders like ants at a picnic.

Keep your webpages fresh with unique content by placing several rotating RSS feeds to ensure that all pages are unique and highly related to the topic. This is CRITICAL. Having these RSS feeds will make your pages unique to the search engines and you shouldn't get penalized for duplicate content.

Include one high quality article based around the main keyword for the webpage Insert your unique Google™ AdSense ads on each and every page. By using 3 Adsense code blocks which are integrated into each page you will maximize your clickthrough rates.

Use the power of pay-per-click ads with the potential of affiliate payouts by creating contextual ad links within your content-driven webpages.

Dynamically create unique affiliate links and employ them in the content of your webpage based on the keywords of your website. Use your unique affiliate ID for ClickBank, Amazon.com, and others within your contextual links. (*For GOLD users only*)

Use a perfect linking structure to ensure all of your web pages get indexed quickly into the search engines.

The best part of all this. You can test the product out for FREE!!! You can actually generate pages using keywords and the FREE templates and have unique webpages that you can post in less than 5 minutes, for FREE. HyperVRE give it a try, and you will be excited too.

2006-12-11T20:34:00.000-05:00

Day 48

There are 5 individuals in my family. They have been watching me bang out these blogs, and researching topics for all the different posts. Every so often, one of them will make their way over to see what I am doing. I explain to them, sometimes one at a time, sometimes as a group, that I am blogging to try to make some extra cash, and at the same time it helps me unwind. Now, I have a family of bloggers. My fiance has 4 blogs. She works with children and has a backround as a child and youth worker. Her blogs have some great parental tips and advice for different age groups. It comes in handy to have an expert in the family.

My son, is a die hard music fan. He always is listening to some kinda tunes, either on his computer, or his cd player or his mp3 player. He goes through batteries like they grow on trees, thank god for rechargable batteries. So I have him focused on what he knows best. Music. He is now focusing his attention on music and writing reviews on the music he listens too.

My step daughter is an avid reader. She can finish off a book in no time flat. I'm impressed on how focused she can be when she is reading. The funny thing is, she is a real smarty mcfarty. She is writing reviews on the books she reads on her blog, but they are also doubling as her book reports. Now that is multi-tasking at its best.

My step son is crazy for movies. He can play six degrees of separation with any two movies, any two actors, or any two themes. The come up at some of the most inoportune moments, but its a natural ability that he is proud of. His blog is going to be about movies, reviews, topics etc. He has been working part-time at the moment, so his blog is still in the works.

Now I have the small task of setting them up with adsense accounts, affiliate links, and getting their blog pages set up so they can sit down at their machines and type away. I think it is a good way for them to express themselves, and their creativity. If they make any money in the process good for them.

2006-12-09T21:44:00.000-05:00

Day 46

Just over 2/3 of the way through this experiment. I have made a grand total of $10.81. Dismal. I haven't heard I told you so, or anything along those lines. What I have heard is, you are working way to hard on this for the little you are making. I agree, although, I am clearly not ready to give up. I think I need a few days to regroup, and refocus. Time is important, time of year maybe impacting the experiment. Clicks on the sites have dropped off slightly over the last few days. It seems less and less vistors are landing on the website the closer it gets to Christmas. Very understandable, I know this time of year, many thoughts are of family and festivities, and not ways to make money online. I hope that I have been able to tap into that market a little via ebay. I have posted a few items, no interest as of yet, but there are still 3 days left on the auction. Nothing ever seems to happen in these auctions except during the last few hours. If I can make a few extra bucks I would be greatful. It would cover the costs of hosting for some other sites that I am planning on launching in the new year.

Anyone else having the same results on their sites when it comes to traffic?

2006-12-07T22:50:00.000-05:00

Day 44

I am working full-time right now, and I hate it. It has made me think about all the advice I have read or heard about when it comes to work or a career. I know I have passed on these words of wisdom to my son, but it seems like I haven’t taken my own advice or the advice of many mentors.

Choose something that you love to do.
Find something that you love to do. Ideally, whatever you choose to do, you should be doing it without regard for money. I know my bills still have to be paid, like I am sure yours do, but trust me, if you dig in and do well, doing what you truly like to do, the money will come. However, if money is your primary motivation (which at times can be very motivating) you have two strikes against you even before you start: If money your will tend to make short-sighted decisions, and make mistakes trying to save the extra dollar or spending it foolishly. People who work just for the money tend not to work as hard as those who love what they do. They end up bored, uninspired, just punching the clock to make ends meet. A working zombie.

Don’t let crowded markets frighten you.
I’ve read that people say that “I love this idea, but the market is already over crowded.” In response to that I say “there is always room in any industry or business or market for someone to truly make a difference.” And I can tell you that someone who loves what they are doing often makes a definite difference. People who make these differences tend to stand out from the crowd – they are more passionate, more creative, and have a drive that fuels them to accomplish what they want to accomplish.

When you love something…
My father used to tell me “When you love something, all its secrets will be revealed to you in time.” There is so much truth to this statement. You have to be prepared to listen and respond gently at times, and make your decisions based on income or short term goals. People who are motivated by money never have the time or patience to learn these subtleties.

You have to love what you are doing.
If you decide on a business and you love what you’re doing, there is an excellent chance that you WILL find a way to be different, to succeed and reach your goals. Time will pass very quickly. Hours and minutes will pass by, it rare that when I am blogging, researching or working on websites that I stare at the clock watching the second hand slowly tick off the seconds. I can sit down and lose hours of my day doing this. You, like me will tend to work hard enough so one day, your business will tell you the secrets you need to know that will set you apart from the crowd, and then the money will flow.

So there you have it. Find something you love to do, and figure out a way to get paid doing it. There’s also one more reason why you should do what you love. Life’s way too short. Why spend your time at something that isn’t fun? Sometimes a paycheck just isn’t worth it. Now if I just listen hard enough, I will hear the secrets I need to know to stop punching the clock and start doing what I love to do.

2006-12-03T22:37:00.000-05:00

Day 40

I have had this beef before. The free adsense site that I signed up for. They offered me hundreds of free keyword rich sites, if I paid monthly hosting fees. Well as I always say free is good. One big problem. The more time I spend investigating the html code, the more problems there are. There are missing links, miss labelled webpages, no keywords in the coding, no meta tags, nothing that would optimize these pages for search engines. The also offer hundreds of dollar of free advertising. All the free advertising they offer is based on the condition of making additional deposits on the accounts. For instance if I were to deposit say $50.00 on the one account( I will not name the pay per search programs because they haven't done anything wrong) Then they would subsidize my account with an additional $25.00. Sounds great, sounds like they are earning some kind of kick back on that, but I can't be sure. All I know, as soon as possible, I am canceling the hosting, and going elsewhere. My parents always remind me that you get what you pay for. I guess they are right. My advice, stay away from these so called free websites, unless you have days of free time to optimizing each page, which works out to about 32,000 pages. It would be a good opportunity if the websites were accurate and complete, but they are not. Do I sound bitter, maybe, but they are getting rich and taking advantage of the little guys trying to make an honest buck. Just think if 1000 of us take them up on their offer, take the free site, and just pay for the hosting each and every month, they are making almost $10,000 each and every month. I'm not prepared to add to their pockets, for an inferior product. Even if it is free.

2006-12-01T21:36:00.001-05:00

Day 38

The Adsense formula

C+T+C = Adsense Cash

Let’s break that formula down a bit more. Or what do we know we need to succeed with adsense.

Content – We all know that we need to build pages with great content, but there is a key to this, well actually its “keywords” If we build our content around high paying topics topics we have the opportunity to increase our effective CPM. What is your effective CPM? Effective CPM is a measure of your average earnings, per thousand clicks. You can find this number when you log into your adsense account in the reports section.You can increase your Effective CPM by selecting topics that attract high bids from Adsense advertisers, and building pages and whole websites on higher paying topics.

Although Google doesn't release information on Adsense bids, there are ways around it. You can get a reasonable idea of the top paying topics by looking at information on Adwords bids, or, for that matter, bids on pay-per-click search engines. There are a number of keyword research tools available, both free and paid, that can help you find high paying topics.

Traffic – Why is traffic so important? Well besides the obvious answer, with no traffic, you won’t earn any money, but we also need to know how many impressions our site/blog is receiving. Impressions are the number of times your pages with Adsense ads have been viewed. You can increase the impressions by increasing traffic (preferably targeted traffic) to your web pages. How can we increase the impressions on our blog? We can submit our site to more search engines. We can create more links, primarily links from other sites/blogs. We can buy those links, trade those links with others, or solicit links from other sites. I make sure I read many blogs a day, and leave my url in the comments in hopes of generating extra links to my blog. I can’t forget a very popular option when it comes to linking. You can create relevant articles complimenting the topic of your site or blog and submit them to article sites. Make sure that at the end of the article you include your name, and website. With everyone looking for keyword rich content, your articles will be placed on many sites. Of course with no cost to you. There is another method of increasing impressions. You can buy traffic with pay per click search engines. There is one caveat though. Make sure that you spend less on your keyword advertising than what you could possibly earn. It sound silly to mention that point, but keyword bidding can be a very expensive if not done properly.

Clickthroughs – The most important aspect, because clickthroughs mean cash.
Clickthroughs are the percentage of viewers who click on your Adsense ads. You can increase Clickthroughs by increasing the relevance of Adsense ads on your site, and by tweaking the format and placing of your ads. See the previous article concerning adsense placement.

Although you can't dictate which Adsense ads show on your site, you can
influence the relevance of the ads by maintaining a tightly focused blog. If every page on your site focuses tightly on a few select topics, it’s more likely that the Adsense ads will too. For example, if every page of your site is about affiliate marketing, and the words 'affiliate marketing' appears several times on every page, it’s likely that the ads will relate to affiliate marketing.

The best way to tweak your ad format and placement is view the previous blog entry. Many articles have been written and conclude that the best format is the large rectangle, with background and border the same color as the page behind it, so that the ad blends into the page. The best placement is towards the center or top left of the first screen of the page. Try these suggestions first, and then track and test, to be sure of what works best for your pages.

Adsense isn’t a get rich scheme, but done right, paying close attention to the adsense formula, you can easily build a network of pages that can make you money. A little bit of luck helps too. Just rermember lucky always favours the well prepared.

2006-11-29T20:40:00.000-05:00

Day 36

Recently I was reading some information that might be important to anyone trying to monetize their blog. We have all heard about search engine optimization, but I was never aware there was such a thing as blogtimization. This image on the right is an illustration of ad placement effectiveness on a typical website.

Certain locations tend to be more successful than others. This "heat map" illustrates these ideal placements on a sample page layout. The colors fade from dark orange (strongest performance) to light yellow (weakest performance). All other things being equal, ad placements above the fold (the part of the screen that the visitor can see without scrolling down the webpage) tend to perform better than those below the fold. Ads placed near rich content and navigational aids usually do well because users are focused on those areas of a page.

When working with a blog, you're facing some interesting ad implementation challenges: a predetermined page format, highly targeted content, and regular visitors, among other things. To make the most of your readership and content, here are a few suggestions:

Blend ads into your blog

To increase the likelihood that your readers will see and click on your ads, blend your ad units into the background of your blog. Choose a bold color for the ad title to help draw attention to your ads, then make sure that the background and borders of your ads are the same color as the background of the area where the ad is placed.

Experiment with multiple ad formats and locations

In general, wider ad formats tend to be more reader-friendly. Placing an ad unit after the first post will likely catch your readers' attention. Also, consider placing a Skyscraper (120x600) or vertical link unit on the right side of your blog. This being said, it is also important to keep in mind how many ads you are placeing on your site. Google will allow you to have 3 ad units on each page. Their is a danger in this, if you have too many ad units on your site, there may not be enough ads to be served in your ad units if you are monitizing a niche topic.

2006-11-28T14:16:00.000-05:00

Day 35

Lately I have read so many articles and ebooks on how to make tons of money with Google Adsense. In fact, many people are making the claim that adsense sites can earn higher revenue then an affiliate marketing site. This I am unsure of. Many of the guru’s are claiming they are making thousands of dollar’s monthly using Google’s Adsense.. Equally there seems to be the same amount of affiliate guru’s claiming they are making more than the Adsense sites. So what is the average guy do?

Which is a better online business – Affiliate Marketing sites or Google adsense sites?

Google Adsense

How would you like the idea of earning money without dealing with angry customers or answering nasty email? This is possible when you run a Google Adsense site or blog. With Adsense, you can have a virtual passive-income that requires little maintaining once the work is done, but it takes a lot of work, research, and writing.

They are perfect for people who run information sites that have no related affiliate products; you can set it and forget it. Once the work is done, creating the content page, it can sit there in perpetuity doing the work for you. The key is building content that will draw visitors to your site. Remember more visitors means the potential for more income. It is only a potential though, there is no guarantee. On the brightside however, once created it can be easily duplicated again and again.

These sites are dependent on search engines. Most Google Adsense sites make the mistake of depending on search engines for the majority of their traffic. If the SE algorithms change then your income might drop significantly. The key is to generate keyword rich content pages that will speak for themselves.

Affiliate Marketing

Being an affiliate marketer is great for those who want build a theme site. With this type of business, you can easily create web pages around a topic and get people to buy products through your products. If done correctly, you can easily build a loyal following that will help you make money for years to come. The key here? It’s the same as with Google Adsense. Build solid content, keyword rich sites. Find affiliate programs that will supplement your content, because it’s the content that will deliver the traffic to your site in the first place. Free of course, and free is always a good thing.

Here are the positives of Affiliate Marketing:

A great advantage of affiliate marketing is that you can build a long term business that will bring in a revenue stream for years. If done properly of course. There are affiliate marketing programs that will continue to pay you as long as the customer keeps coming back and buying from them.

However, you have to learn how to write persuasively and get people to purchase the products that you are recommending. For many people this is a difficult skill to learn. Each Affiliate Marketing site requires a lot of effort. You must spend a lot of time writing product reviews, building your email list and creating web content, not much different than writing a blog.

So which is better: Affiliate Marketing or Google Adsense?

The answer is they are both great. They are the one two punch for anyone that wants to generate significant income and together they are great solutions for an online business. Instead of choosing one over the other, you should create websites that can take advantage of both.

So how do you accomplish this you ask? Ok, maybe you didn’t but here goes.

Create a content site on a topic that has your interest. If you’re like me, if the keywords pay well then I am interested in it. Next, integrate your Google adsense ads into the menu bars and the top of your web content. Have them blend in, like they are part of your navigation bar. Then add articles or web pages for affiliate-products.

Then create optimized web page articles and content that focus on the specific keyword phrases. Place your Google adsense advertising in these blocks in the content to make it look like they are a part of the article.

By focusing on both Affiliate marketing and Google Adsense you will create great content, and all the while offering great products to your visitors, thus resulting in more cash in your pocket.

2006-11-27T21:42:00.000-05:00

I have been working on the layout of this blog, just to see if some tweaking and positioning of the adsense ads matter. I know it's only been a few days since I have been working on it, and I can say this. I have been getting more ad clicks than with the old layout. The text links on he top of the page have been the culprit in helping out the income on this blog. The links look for like navigation links. They are in the colour and style of the blog, so the adsense ads blend into the site. I think this makes the visitors more apt to click on them since they aren't blatent advertising. Anyone else have similar results? I'm off to do more reading, I just wanted to share this exciting bit of news. It may still be only pennies, but each penny is one more than I had yesterday.

2006-11-27T21:20:00.000-05:00

Day 34

How important is your health and ethics when it comes to the workplace? Today I realized just how important it was. I have been burning the candle at both ends, trying to keep some income rolling into the household, while trying to work on this site. Today, I have decided that running myself down for a meagre paycheck, and working in a place that is unsanitary, especially for a restaurant is just too much for me to do. I have worked in many a restaurant, where cleanliness was far more a priority than excess sales. The whole time I was working there, all I could think to myself if the customers who got their food here only new what the conditions were behind the scenes, and how the food was kept and prepped, the restaurants sales would drop dramatically. I have worked in some harsh conditions, doing disaster restoration, fires, floods, and sewage backups. My stomach is not weak, but I have found myself on the verge of losing my stomach contents on several occasions. I don't want to name the restaurant, for fear of legal action, but I will say this. I will never eat food from there again, at any location in the US or Canada. I have never been happier and more content leaving a job, no matter how much the paycheck is needed, even at this time of year. I will be better off because of it, and so will my family.

2006-11-24T02:28:00.000-05:00

I am in the process of updating the format of this site. I have read a few articles that suggest a few alterations may increase my adsense revenue. I am trying to put them into practice now. It may take a few days, but I will keep you posted on the results.

2006-11-24T00:34:00.000-05:00

Today is a critical point in this experiment. I have put hours into trying to master adsense without much luck. The article I read the other day, sparked my interest once again. But, if I were to try to follow that model, then without a doubt, it will need to run much longer than 67 days to say the least. I haven't tracked the hours that I put into this but to say the least this is a great learning experiment. I have read countless tips, and ebooks on the topic, and all have promised that if I followed their plan, step by step I would make a signifigant profit. My results, not so spectacular, I have been frustrated at times. So, do I read more, or do I spend more time tweaking. I have read many books, looked at some scripts to even quicken the pace of progress. I aquired one of those adsense sites that are free, provided you pay for the hosting, to see what the end result would be. I have tried to take many adsense shortcuts, but as in life, it seems the school of hard knocks is where I have to get my education. Read, read and read again. My empire so to speak will be built one web page at a time, thereby ensuring quality, and in the end I will have no one to blame but myself. I visited ebay the other day, and to my amazement there were programs there that I found on other sights being flogged for $20 - $200 for a measly $1.00 or even less. Will wonders never cease. I think I spent less than 1% of my budget, and purchased all kinds of goodies, more ebooks to read, more articles than you could imagine, more guru's sure fire methods to make my fortune. I know one thing, if I ever need some sort of software or script, thats where I will be looking in the future. Only one small problem. I am not an html master, making some of these so called simple installations, and php server scripts nothing more than gobblygook. I may have to turn to my 14 year old and see if he has yet mastered this. If not, I'm sure it would take him a matter of minutes to figure this out.

Making money online, which was so easily described in most of the ebooks as something you can do part-time in a matter of a few hours a week can easily be a 50 hour a week job, with little or no pay. I hope I am nearing the top of the learning curve, and that in a short time, the pennies I am managing to get will be turned into dimes, and dimes, into quarters. I'm not giving up yet, just digging in.

2006-11-23T17:26:00.000-05:00

Day 30

Today is my son's 14th birthday. I know that it has little importance when it comes to what I am trying to accomplish on this site, but he is the biggest reason why I am trying to accomplish this. Time is our most important commodity. I want more time to spend with him. Not that I didn't want to spend time with him more when he was younger, it's different now. He has grown so fast in front of my very eyes. Taller, smarter, and more of a friend than a son, and not to forget he is a fierce gaming competitor. At my age, I have about an hour advantage when we get a new game, then I am eating his dust. Happy Birthday Bud!! I love you lots.

2006-11-21T21:12:00.000-05:00

Day 28

So is it possible to make money online blogging? Well not that I have been having some serious doubts about it, since the few pennies here and there don't really add up to much for the amount of work I am doing. I know that I have been slacking the last few days, but this new job has been fairly demanding on my time, but I digress. Here is a moment of inspiration. John Chow from John Chow dot com is making a small fortune with his blog. You can find the article here He claims that his blog generates almost 60,000 page fews and made almost $420.00 in one day. Want to find out more about how he uses adsense? By the way adsense only accounts for $160.00 of what he brought in. I got some good tips from the article, so check it out.

2006-11-19T14:37:00.000-05:00

Day 26

Life can be too busy. Family life, with 3 teenagers, and a job that I am working nights, isn't a great combination when your trying to develop income streams online. Yesterday, it was flu shot day, errands, laundry, and of course teenage angst. Too much drama. Today, I have an hour to try to get this blog updated, update and optimize some of my webpages, and attempt to get 2 campaigns up and running. Well I will settle for the blog and one set of my pages optimized. It's difficult to type right now, I have a green cheeked conure that is chasing my fingers while I am typing away on my laptop. 3 letters forward, 10 letters back. So much fun.

Anyways, I have spending a few hours after work each night trying to unwind by reading and learning. It seems there is a lot more too adwords, ebook upon ebook each professing they are the end all of google adwords mastery. I have found a piece of software that just might help. I am sure that a lot of you have already heard about it, some of you might be using it. It's called keyword elite.
Does this program live up to all the hype? This program will not only help you generate high paying keywords, but help you create targeted adsense webpages. To me that is a bonus all in itself. It would be something that I could control, instead of being at the mercy of what someone else developed like my last project. Read the sales page, and see if you are moved as much as I am about the potential for it. I am making a measly .20 cents or so a day with my adsense campaigns. I would love to be able to do 1000 times that, so I could be in control of my life once again. I see a lot of the hype, with the guru's all showing us how much they are pulling in money wise, but I guess the real question is ...just how much are they spending to accomplish this? Food for thought.

2006-11-15T12:54:00.000-05:00

Day 22

So I'm almost a third of the way through this little experiment. Grand total made to date $7.64 on 1447 impressions and 24 actual click throughs for a whopping 1.67%. Total cost to date $36.98. Doesn't seem all too profitable. With numbers like this it is difficult to say the least to convince all the naysayers out there (can be read fiance) there there is money to be made online. I've hit the proverbial brickwall, but with more reading and more knowledge, I am hoping to bust through that wall sooner than later. Much more reading and tweaking to be done, and in all fairness, I haven't had any campaigns running, only parked pages, and the blog being active. I am in the process of a ramp up to get something going this weekend, as per last post.

I also mentioned that I have a site that was content rich, and completely turn key for adsense. Well the old adage that says you get what you pay for....stands the test of time. I mentioned all the error, grammatical, and spelling. There is A LOT and I can't stress that enough, of information missing on these sites. There is no meta data, there are no keywords on most of the pages. Search engines will most likely laugh and run away. Not good. Back to the drawing board on this one. Just be advised, free doesn't always equate with good. It's a waste of time, and energy from what I can see.

2006-11-14T15:26:00.000-05:00

In an earlier post, I mentioned www.67days.com website. It is a content and keyword rich that once indexed by the search engines, would produce adsense clicks. Firstly it was free, and was set up by a company for me as long as I purchased hosting from them. ( 10 bucks a month, no big deal. I now have the files stored locally on my computer and I can upload them to a much cheaper server at a later date.) There are thousands of pages in the site. I figured out a few things very quickly. Firstly, there are TONS of spelling mistakes on the pages they set up. They are very cookie cutterish, (is that a word?), anyways, I spent the better part of last night after my shift to produce new banners for each of the pages. I need my pages to stand out more than the thousands of people that will end up doing the same. I figure if I found them, others won't be too far behind. Am I going to invest the time in correcting each and every page. Likely not, I have slave labor.. errr I mean teenagers to do that for me. What I will do is find all the index pages and see if there are meta tags and keywords for the main pages. If they are keyword rich, then it shouldn't be too hard (fingers crossed) to get that complete. That should give me an edge over all the others. So I hope.

2006-11-14T14:24:00.000-05:00

Day 21

It's been a very few busy days. Starting a new job....yet again, and trying to keep on top of home life, without it imploding on me. I am spending most of my time in front of my laptop, reading article upon article about adsense. I have been stopping in on blogs and seeing what other people are up to. I've noticed that traffic has picked up some on the site, thank you to all that have stopped by and offered some advice. Every little bit helps. My www.67days.com site is up and running, now the debate is this. Do you register your website with the search engines or do you let them spider their way to your site and hope it doesn't take months to get there? I have read that if the search engines spider on their own, you may get better rankings as opposed to submitting the url to the search engines. Time being of the essence I have chosen to register my site with a bunch of little known search engines, and left google to stumble upon it. I'm not sure how it works exactly, but I thought that dividing it this way may give me a better idea on what to do the next time. Anyone else have any suggestions. I would think, but this is pure speculation, that google would find the pages more easily since it is serving ads to the page? Is this far fetched? I guess time will tell on this one.

Adsense and understanding the fine details is still at the bane of my existence at this point. I am reading all the books from the so called guru's, but it's very time consuming. I think I will spend the rest of this week on this one, then try to move on to some affiliate marketing and adwords campaign. I'm gonna start small again just to test the results. I will need a few days to find some good products to promote and see what happens. I'll post the results as soon as they are in. I'm hoping by Sunday of this week to have it up and running. I have some housekeeping to get done on my blog, and a few of my sites. More later.

2006-11-09T21:26:00.000-05:00

Day 18

Here is an interesting blog for all of us that are trying to eek out a living via adsense. http://www.pluginprofits.co.uk/ There is a lot of information on this site, that many people have paid for. There are several articles to read with valuable information. Give it a read, it might just give you the little tidbit of knowledge that will add fire to your adsense campaigns. Read the article and let me know what you think.

On the other side life, I have made a small decision. I am quitting my tech support job and have picked up another position with a company that will let me work mostly nights. I am a nighthawk, and this will work much better for what I intend on doing. Now, back to trying to crack adsense.

2006-11-08T19:39:00.000-05:00

Day 17

www.67days.com is now up and running, a whole 2 days ahead of schedule. I can't believe that it actually came together so quickly and easily. I have set up a special channel on my adsense account to track traffic from just this site. It's a huge site, with many many content rich pages. Each page has several adsense ads strategically placed. Now it's time to wait. The site has been put together, links have been put up here on the blog, and I have submitted the url to other search engines but not to google. That's it. No other marketing has been done today. I do intend to run an "adwords" type campaign using the same methods as before. I will not spend more than $25.00 as a trial. I won't start the campaign until after the weekend, when I have more time to concentrate. I find by 6:00 p.m. at night I am spent. Getting up at 5:00 a.m. everyday sure drains my concentration later in the day. My fingers are crossed that this generates more income, and secretly I think my fiance does too.

2006-11-07T21:40:00.000-05:00

Day 16

Today I am excited. I bought a new domain. Big whup, right? Well I bought the name 67days.com. It's not set up as anything yet that's why I haven't made it a link. It won't be up for 3 days, and it will be a very bold move on my part. I don't want to say too much right now, but like I said, I'm very excited. What I will say is this - I will be using every opportunity to generate income from adsense. If I can get it up and running sooner I will. No peeking!

2006-11-06T19:57:00.000-05:00

Day 15

I ran a "adwords" type campaign to see just what kind of traffic I could generate and how much ad revenue I could generate. The final tally is in. $25.00 in key words netted me a grand total of $7.64. Definately not the get rich quick type scheme that everyone is hyping on the internet. On the bright side though, I did generate a fair bit of traffic for the $25.00 I spent. I set a $5.00 daily limit on a total of 9 selected keywords. I bid no more than 15 cents on any keyword with the average price of about 9 cents a keyword. Very cheap traffic. Now, from this its evident that traffic can be bought. The hardest part seems to be converting the traffic into $$$. I guess this is the question that everyone is asking. I'm looking at the "adwords" on google. Some bids for the words that I used were upwards of $15.00. Now how did my clicks generate so little income? I'm not sure, I'm still scratching my head. I know that I am sounding a little bitter, since the internet guru's are promising a cornocopia of cash just waiting to be harvested. Like the thanksgiving reference? Anyways, if this trend doesn't turn around my budget of $500.00 will soon be gone. So, the other option is trying to develop more qualifying advertisements, or try to niche market using not so expensive keywords. How much traffic would I have lost, if I cut out my most expensive keyword(s) - 126 clicks or $16.29. Now, just to make things even clearer I made sure that I was never in first place with any bid. I settled on 2nd or 3rd position to try to generate high traffic with less cost. I relied on the draw of my ad to drive the traffic to my site in hopes of converting the visitors. It clearly worked too. The traffic was there. But, the question is this, could I have extended my campaign if I didn't use such an expensive keyword to frame in the ad? That's a challenge for next week. Out of the 9 keywords I selected, only 6 had generated any traffic. and 2 of them only drew 1 vistor each.

I intend on trying 2 different ads to see which one pulls more traffic. 1 will have more expensive keywords, while the other will use the less known complimentary keywords. So I have my work cut out for me. Test, test test. Now if this job wasn't just taking up all my time, maybe, just maybe I could figure out how to get this moneypress known as the internet up and running full tilt.

2006-11-02T19:31:00.000-05:00

Day 11

Adsense. What is so heavily marketed, as a way for webreprenuers, as one of the end all and be alls of making money. I made a whole $.30 cents today. Spending almost $4.78 to generate that income. It's not that I haven't done my research. Domain registration was the main keyword I used. I went to google adwords, and determined that that keyword could generate as much as $18.00 plus dollars a click. So, my question is this, if this keyword is being bid on google for such a high price, then why wouldn't a keyword rich page generate that kind of income per click. My site is generating about $.08 cents a click for this keyword. What gives? What is the secret of getting the high paying clicks to your site? My ad campaign has generated over 140 clicks to my site in 2 days. The traffic is there, the ad clearly draws traffic to the site, it's just a matter of finding the secret to the higher paying keywords. This is still making me scratch my head. Any ideas?

2006-11-01T20:09:00.000-05:00

Day 10

Adsense, google says you can make money. Well, after 1 full day using my advertising program I made a whole $7.09. Not bad for one day right? Multiply that by 30 days and you get $212.70. That total sounds great, I just need 10 other websites to generate that kind of income. One catch. To make that kind of money, I spent $7.90. So, for the month at that pace I would lose a grand total of $237.00 for a net loss of $24.30. What have I learned? It's possible to make money online. Now, I just have 57 more days to turn this loss into a positive. Is it tweaking, or better priced keywords? Not sure. I expect to analyze which key words are generating the traffic, and the cost for each click. I don't want to go for only one days results. I want to get a full week of data in to give me a better idea. I get this is the school of cold hard cash. I just hope my cash doesn't run out before I figure this out.

2006-10-31T20:27:00.000-05:00

Day 9

Well today, I realized that getting up so early is not a benefit to what I want to accomplish here. I have read a few blogs today, left some comments, and tried to get some new ideas.
My adwords will lauch tomorrow, because it was a new account there was a delay. All is good now.
My next plan is to see if I can find a mentor. I had no idea that the learning curve was so steep. This weekend I think I am going to have to step it up a notch. Something to ponder.

2006-10-30T20:44:00.000-05:00

Day 8

First day at work, had to be up at 5:30 a.m. To some people, that is a piece of cake, but to someone like me, it was like bamboo underneath my fingernails. I am a night hawk, where 5:30 a.m. is more of a bedtime than a wake up call. Well, I made it there, barely awake, but I made it. After all was said and done, I'm glad it was over, only 2 weeks and 6 days before this early shift is over, then I intend to start working nights...thank God.

After months of unemployment the phone has started to ring. Go figure. I had another interview tonight after my shift. Better money, we will see.

After a full day at work, it was time to do something I much more enjoy, the challenge of trying to make money online.

I started a pay-per-click advertising program to promote my site. Now, it is time to just sit and wait. My budget, a whole $5.00 a day. I'm going to run it for a week to test the ad. I'll keep you posted.

2006-10-29T19:25:00.000-05:00

Day 7

Day of rest? Not so today. www.domainpricesslashed.com is now up. Well at least the first content rich page. This page's adsense ads are extremely targeted. Low priced domains and hosting, just like the name implies. It's an experiment in seeing if extremely content rich target pages will attract traffic, with the visitor's visiting the specific advertisments from adsense. Now its time to wait, and see what develops. I'll keep you posted. Off to work tomorrow, have to be there by 7:00 am. Did I mention I'm not a morning person?

2006-10-28T20:44:00.000-05:00

Day 6

Saturday today, and now I am employed with a tech support firm. It puts a small wrench in my plans, but it will allow me to keep paying the bills for a few months longer, without tapping into my savings.

I'm in the process of setting up my website, and something that was supposed to be so easy, with a wysiwyg editor online. Seems it takes forever to update, text and code seem to be disappearing. Frustrating to say the least. My focus for today and tomorrow, will try to at least get the first webpage completed, and posted including all my adsense scripts. It may not be pretty, but it will be done...fingers crossed.

2006-10-27T15:10:00.000-05:00

Just a quick note: My blog is having some issues when it comes to internet explorer. In firefox the blog shows up fine. In internet explorer the sidebar gets all messed up and shows up at the bottom. I hope to get this straightened away soon.

-Don

2006-10-27T14:52:00.000-05:00

Day 5

Right now I am sitting in a parking lot freezing my butt off while I am waiting for my fiancé. It’s cold, and it is raining, almost snowing, so I figure this is as good a time as any to start getting this entry done for the day.

My fiancé asked me how things were coming along, and I told her, about the domain I bought yesterday, www.domainpricesslashed.com. She asked me what I intended on doing with it, and I looked at her like a deer caught in headlights. I’m thinking to myself, she sure is being nosey. So, I hemmed and hawed, and said, I’m going to use it to make money. I thought that was going to be the end of that. No such luck. She says to me, “how are you going to make money with that domain site?” With that statement, I thought about one of the first blogs I read. It was called “Start a blog without planning is like driving to work naked.” That’s exactly what I felt. I had good intentions to go register a domain name, it was very direct, and descriptive. No matter though, I still didn’t have a plan. And good intentions don’t generate income.

This weekend is the weekend I will dedicate to making a plan and begin to execute it. I have a domain name, a site to host it, now I will put together some good solid content, and tie it into the google adsense program. That’s step one. Step two, submit the url to the major search engines, and try to generate some traffic. That’s the plan. Hopefully those plans don’t change too much this weekend.

As for my fiancé, I asked her to give me until Sunday night, so she could see what I have done. Any ideas, please feel free to leave a comment or 2.

One other thing, before I forget, she did remind me of an “investment” that I made a few weeks back. I found this site called Europe Trade. Europe Trade (UK) Ltd. is an independently owned and operated company consisting of nothing but experienced highly-trained financial professionals. Established in early 2004, they first offered their unique services “offline” only. The results were so positive, and the feedback so tremendous that they decided in December of 2005 to offer their services to the entire world. I checked out their site, seemed very credible, so I made a small investment. I went out on a limb and invested a whole $24.00. To date they haven’t missed a payment, and my intial investment is now worth $34.85.

Date	Type	Amount
2006-10-25	COMPOUNDED INTEREST	$0.62
2006-10-24	COMPOUNDED INTEREST	$0.61
2006-10-23	COMPOUNDED INTEREST	$0.60
2006-10-20	COMPOUNDED INTEREST	$0.59
2006-10-19	COMPOUNDED INTEREST	$0.58
2006-10-18	COMPOUNDED INTEREST	$0.57
2006-10-17	COMPOUNDED INTEREST	$0.55
2006-10-16	COMPOUNDED INTEREST	$0.54
2006-10-13	COMPOUNDED INTEREST	$0.53
2006-10-12	COMPOUNDED INTEREST	$0.52

When all is said and done, my meager investment should $702.89. Is it possible or is it a scam? I’m not sure. But to me it is worth the risk.

2006-10-26T20:35:00.000-05:00

Day 4

It's been a very busy day to say the least. I am only about 10 hours behind tonight. It's one of those days where life happens, and it takes priority. Parent teacher interviews, early school dismissal, teenage angst and drama. Oh yeah, it was my turn to make dinner tonight too. So, after all this was said and done, I read a few blogs, made some comments, and then spent time writing on a topic I have been spending a lot of time on. Domain registration.

Domain registration is the first and most important step in setting up your online presence. If you’re registering a domain name for your own personal use, or if you are in the process of becoming the next great web entrepreneur this is where the process begins. This domain name or name(s) will be your brand, or what your visitors will remember you by. Your domain name must be easy to remember, easy to spell, and tells the visitor what your website is about. A good name in itself will help your visitors find you again and again. Sounds easy right? Well not necessarily. There are millions of people just like you that are trying to establish a web presence by registering their own little piece of cyberspace.

So, how do you find a good cheap domain name that fits all the criteria discussed above? Sometimes it will take hours to sift through the names, or sometimes by the luck of the draw a domain name that someone else has previously purchased has expired. What makes this task even more daunting are the speculators. Just like in real estate, where there isn’t an endless supply of property, there is not an infinite amount of cyberspace especially in the top level domains such as .com, .biz, .net or .org. These speculators hoard internet domain names, and attempt to sell them at a profit. Some make a great living purchasing cheap domain names, and sell these domains they registered at hundreds, if not thousands of times the original purchase price. You need to focus on simplicity, have a brainstorming session, think about your site, think about what you’re attempting to accomplish, and the theme of your website. You can be creative with your name, and sometimes out of necessity you may have to substitute words and numbers such as the number 4 instead of the word “for”. Short forms for words work as well such as “u” instead of the word “you”. Just remember keep it simple, watch out for getting too involved in text lingo, unless of course that is your target market. Another caveat, be careful of double letters in multi-word domains. This site, www.domainpricesslashed.com has the double letter “s” in it. It can confuse potential visitors to the site. It was an acceptable domain for me, since the word “slashed” is such an attention getter. Just remember this - when anyone types in a domain name - .com is almost automatic.

After you have brainstormed your list of possible domain names to register, find yourself a reputable domain registration service - many can be found on this page. Once you a domain registration service you are happy with, start trying the domains, one at a time to see which domain names are available. Some of the so called experts say you should, if you can register all the top level domains with your name. For example, if you attempt to register www.incomeblizzard.com , you would register all the other domains as previously mentioned (.net, .org, .biz). This will ensure a lock on the market and the speculators would be locked out, preventing them from receiving any spillover traffic that was meant for your site. This leads to another issue. This site is called www.domainpricesslashed.com anyone can register any deviation of the name, or miss-spelling, in hopes to steal traffic. The bottom line, be protective of your domain, and try to register as many combinations as you can, all the more reason to find cheap domain names.

Are you still skeptical of registering your own domain? Free domains and free hosting are everywhere, but how do you think that impacts your sales or traffic? These services will place advertising on your site to help cover the costs of providing the service too you. Having your own domain registered, and your own site, will allow you total control of what appears on your website, eliminating all the “noise” that can distract your visitors and cause them to leave. It allows you to focus entirely on what you want to do. You will score better in search engines, and allow you to specifically market your domain.

It's lots to consider, and with a little luck and determination, you will find just the domain you need.

Have you had any bad experience with domain registration? Feel free to leave your experience in the comments.

2006-10-25T17:57:00.000-05:00

Day 3

Today was job fair day, a day to get all dressed up in a shirt and tie, and parade around doing the meet and greet. I wasn't overly impressed, it was at a great place, and packed with the usual headhunters, government agencies, and of course all of the MLM'ers out to try to convince you that if you join their upline you will make a fortune with only a small investment. One of the busiest booths, and kind of funny at the same time was an Avon booth. That in itself isn't all that funny, what made it funny was the booth was staged by a couple of potbellied men. Their hook? They called themselves the Avon guys, and they were just cashing in. Sometimes you just have to shake your head.

I spent a lot of time last night, as I was so gently reminded by my better half, looking, reading, and learning more about this whole blogging for cash idea. I realized then that there is a large learning curve ahead of me. So, today I have my sleeves rolled up yet again to dig myself a little deeper to see what kind of income I can uncover.

I looked at my blog because someone, who shall remain nameless pointed out a spelling mistake, you know the kind that doesn't get picked up by word? Anyways, I saw this google adsense ad on my site. It made me laugh out loud, and as I made the rounds to the rest of the family, they all chuckled. It was an adsense ad for the Rich Jerk. Now incase you have seen the ad it goes like this:

You are extremely ugly
So am I. But I am extremely
Rich. Don't be poor and Ugly.
www.richjerk.com

Now I almost broke into tears when I read this little ad of his. Since it is frowned upon to click a link from your own site, I just went into my browser and went to his website. What I saw was pure genius. The slap you in your face marketing style was pure magic. Spend a few minutes reading the material and his sales page and watch what he does so annoyingly easy. He cuts through all the crap, and does what we all want to do, make huge amounts of money. So without any hesitation, I signed up for his "free website" and gave away my email address, to see what other ideas I can "borrow"

Seems to me, that with the two examples above, being a little different, or changing your approach just might achieve the results that both you and I are looking for.

I stumbled upon a fantastic eBook the other day as well. I haven't had much time to look at it until last night. It's a freebee but it is packed with a ton of good useful information, with step by step guides, jam packed with screen shots so even my teenage sons could follow it. If you understand the concept of Adsense, then I am sure that you know about Adwords. If you don't, you should. It's a very effective way to generate traffic, and generate excess income. You can make tons of money fast simple and easy for anyone That is the file name, it's free to download and share it amongst your friends. I'm excited about this one. I'm going to try to get it up and running asap.

btw: my ranking at technorati: Rank: 1,129,468

2006-10-24T12:06:00.000-05:00

Day 2

Well its well after 1 pm in the afternoon. It's one of those days, that no matter how well you plan to make time, everything else becomes a priority. It should have been a simple day. We all get up at 6:30 am, and are out the door by 7:10. After everyone gets dropped off, I have exactly 1.5 hours to do what I need to do. Simple enough. Well, not today. Internet was down most of the morning...Dishes, errands, and a quick trip to the hospital for some tests on one of the kids. I had time to get some resumes and cover letters done for the job fair tomorrow. (I know its a good thing, but it will take me away from my experiment for most of the day.) So, before I knew it the morning slipped away, and it was lunchtime.

Now back on track. I spent most of the day after my first post, trying to find out what makes a blog successful, how to draw traffic to the blog, making links, and reading tons of other blogs to try to get some idea about the extent of work that I might have to put into this. I say it that way, because like most people they follow the simple quote " If you build it they will come." Well according to some of the blogs I stumbled upon, there are many ways to drive traffic to your site, but just posting it...just doesn't cut it.

After countless hours, of reading and commenting on other blogs, (seems that this will help with increasing exposure to your blog) I stumbled upon PaulStamatiou.com article on how to boost your traffic to your site. Very informative. After reading this I ended up joining Technorati. If you don't know what this site is or does...its very simple. Technorati is the recognized authority on what's going on in the world of weblogs. They help people search for, surface, and organize bloggers and their daily posts. Simply put its a place where you can find some great blogs to link to, or comment on, to help drive traffic to your site. If they notice you they just might link back to your site, and before long, traffic should follow. My rank today - 1,690,830.

So, next on my list. I went back to some of those internet marketing guru's to see if there was any consensus on how to cash in. It seems it's all about passive income. How can I make money without being active in producing it. I want to figure out a way to make money 24 hours of every day. You have heard the saying before..."Set it.... and forget it". I may even try to develop 3 or more independent streams of income, you know the old adage; "don't put all your egg's in one basket".

Affiliate programs seem to be the way to go. No product, little or no money down, no merchant accounts or angry customers to deal with. Just grab a product link and advertise the hell out of it. My searches lead me to Clickbank. Clickbank is simple, fast, and free to setup. They have over 10,000 products to promote, with some commissions as high as 75% of the purchase price. So now that I have signed up, I have to spend sometime deciding what product(s) I should focus my efforts on. It's just as easy promoting a product and make $5.00 a sale as it is making $25.00 a sale, and you have to sell less of them. Just a quick look at the site PaidSurveysonline.com is offering $21.77 for sending people who enroll in their program. Get paid to take survey's online. Simple enough for anyone who has access to a computer, and wants to make some extra spending money at home, or who is a stay at home mom.

I'm going to spend some more time today taking a look at some of their programs, and see if there are any other ways that I can take advantage of this affiliate program. Any ideas would be grateful.

I am also going to look at some blog scripts, or some quick lessons, just so I can tinker with the way things look.

Oh, I almost forgot. I have setup an Google Adsense account. They place a targeted (the ads are based on the content of your site or blog) advertisement or group of advertisements on your blog. If anyone visits your site, and clicks on one of the ads, bingo! Another few more cents of passive income. It all adds up. (no pun intended)

2006-10-23T12:20:00.000-05:00

Day 1

Maybe I should begin with who I am and what I am doing. I am 39 and holding and unemployed. I have a backround in business administration and marketing management. I also have a wonderful fiance whom I love dearly, and who loves me unconditionally even through some of my hair-brained ideas. More about that later. I have a 14 year old son, (soon to be 14 that is) and have grown extremely close to my fiance's two kids, both teenagers ( girl 13, and boy 16). Needless to say with 5 of us in the house, and raging hormones, it can get a little excited at times.

I have relocated to be with my fiance and her kids, so we can all live under one roof, shaking my head at times -with 6 computers, 6 tv's some or all going all at the same time it can be a little much.

Back to my hair-brained ideas. We have all heard about internet guru's that make thousands of dollars online by selling anything and everything. Ebay guru's , internet marketing guru's, you name it there must be someone online claiming to be a guru of somekind, making more money in a month than I have made all last year. So, talking to my soon to be missus, I said, if these people can do it....why can't I? Wait did you hear it? For those of you without a significant other, that sound was the sound of someone rolling their eyes. She smiled in her most loving smile, and said "How long is it gonna take you?" I honestly had no idea how to answer her. I thought, just how long does it take to make money online? Suddenly, "67 days" was what I answered. Why 67 days? I wasn't too sure why 67 days, but it sounded good at the time. It just also happens to be 67 days till the end of the year. Or the year that I was born, or whatever answer seems to be appropriate. Whew!

So, where to start on my experiment or way to financial freedom? Good question. Seems I should have thought a little more about it before opening my mouth on this one. Today, I will make the day of research. I will let my ever faithful google run amok on the internet, see what kind of schemes or scams I might find, and see if anyone out there is making an honest day's living on the internet. Of course, I must make the rounds of all the jobsites to see if there are any job prospects waiting for me, be available as a parent, be a bestfriend, and fiance. Sometimes it makes for a very busy day...and I wouldn't change it for anything.

There is the premise for this blog. 67 days to generate income online without breaking the bank doing it. I'm setting a $500.00 limit, but I would prefer keeping as much as that as possible. Am I doing this to be rich? No, I'm doing it to provide for my family. I am already rich in every sense of the word. I love you guys, you know who you are.