Hello BHW. The following is an introduction and a [potentially long] messy drawing board as I get toward having this all crystallize in my head. You'll see how much I know, how much I don't know and where the gaps in my knowledge are. I'd appreciate a smack in the face when those are revealed. As for what I'm sure of, I know I can make this happen. I understand the basic concepts involved and I know where to look to find what I need.
I've lurked around here on and off through the years picking up this and that but I never really followed through. It was never for a lack of motivation. Money, along with sex and survival, is a large enough motivator for most people to do anything - myself included. I was, and am still to an extent, lacking these two ingredients: Most importantly, I'm lacking the confidence to pull the trigger - it's very intimidating. Lesser so, because I know I can pick this up over time, is that I lack knowing what I don't know - it's also very confusing. I intend to grow some stones and learn new things here over the life of this thread. Should I succeed, aside from the money, I should hope what I will write here will help those standing right at the edge of breaking into making some money that are too timid to just go and try.
What I have done so far.
I'm not so arrogant as to pretend I am anything but a newbie. However, I have tried the following to get my feet wet:
The running theme here is that while I did have the courage to try things out, I ultimately failed because 1. I didn't have a solid idea in place and 2. I didn't stick to it long enough. I have however learned some valuable skills along the way, namely web design and development, graphic design, and some video editing. Out of potential interest, the affiliate network I went with every time was CJ.
This time around, I'm going to pour all of my energy into planning and preparing then launch rather than go off too soon and get bored trying to find my feet.
Here is where I am right now; my thesis, if you will: First I will create a handful of small earners to make some money I can invest into bigger ideas, then I will spin that off into selling my own products to raise my earnings, then I'll make the jump to something potentially bigger but with less creative work on my part.
Act I: In which I learn and learn by failing.
To begin with, I have ZERO money that isn't tied up into things like living. Thus, I'm going to need to create some small-ish earners to break in and raise some money to move further.
Here's the plan, as it currently sits:
I've chosen a market to work in, insanely competitive but can potentially earn if I do this right and stick with it. Within the market I'm going to choose 16 niches (and maybe microniches if I am so lucky to find some) and aggressively build blogs for each. The content will be largely unique (edited works by others) - mostly images and text with some video. 12, 24, 48 posts a day per blog.
I'm thinking of sort of link wheeling where, let's say, for each niche I have 3 blogs each on different blogging platforms content-wise, barely unique from each, mostly in keywords, titles and posting dates for the same posts. So, Post #1 gets published on Blog #1 on Day #1, published on Blog #2 on Day #8 and so on. Staggered. Combined with this, each niche will have it's own 2.0 pages and accounts and link around and return to the blogs.
For more links, I was thinking about Squidoo and/or Hubpages and the like to write articles about blogging about/making money with the niches I choose as well as share on forums and other community based sites (namely Reddit) where I'll contribute to the community but also push my sites.
As far as the content goes, simply scraping images and copying (and then editing) the text. Finding video clips and images to make slideshows and videos for Youtube.
Money.
How I earn is still much up in the air. Likely affiliates and CPA or PPC.
My goal is to get around $50-$300/mo to start. This should be doable if I plan and prepare.
My timetable for this is 1 month planning and preparing and then earning over the course of a few months. Most of my costs for the future will be hosting, domains, advertising, buying followers/likes/links/comments and so on.
Act II: In which I expand.
By now I've built some traffic and hopefully some real subscribers so here is where I want to push things further. This section is probably the most work in progress because I could just as easily cut and run from the niches all together, drop this idea out and plug another idea in here with whatever I earned in the first act.
Ideally, I will take all of my content from my blogs and repackage them as e-books while still keeping the blogs fresh. With an average of 28 posts per day, over the course of 70 or so days I would be in pretty good position to saturate Amazon pretty quickly. Each post would be dragged out from a few pages to 5 and I'd combine a few relevant posts into one short e-book collection. Three per ~15 page e-book at about 2 bucks profit a pop. I figure per niche I could have around 40 e-books. By by playing keywords right and having all link to each other, I could build up a pretty fantastic link wheel. Alongside this, I would (or could) set up a site and sell direct. I would be basically leveraging all of my followers/readers and trying to convert them.
This is the heaviest as far as creativity goes but could yield good profits - potentially good enough to just leave it at that. But my goals for this are fairly humble I would think, taking a step up from the previous act and going up to $500-$1000/mo. over the course of around 3 months.
Once all of the e-books are up, I'm done with it. They sit there and passively earn in the tail while I take my early profits and move on.
Act III: In which I change course.
At some point you must have asked yourself, "why all this trouble? why not just build some strong niche sites and affiliate with Amazon?" And you're right. I've looked so far into doing that that if I felt the immediate need, I could probably just start right now. The trouble is, I can't affiliate with Amazon in my state.
So all the profits I have in hand at this stage are going to be used like so:
Then I'll move into making a network of niche sites and use Amazon. Biggest hurdle here? The niches. But I have some in mind already.
To me, the prospect of Amazon is the most appealing because even by just taking a quick stroll through the forums here, you can see it can be a good earner if you're diligent. I can dig through research quickly and develop sites in hours. I could have quick turn around on launching things and move into maintenance mode while earning. The goal here is to work this way long enough to save for huge investments (offline). So there's an indefinite timetable with this one, but ideally I'd like to earn over $1,000/mo and within 4 months earn enough to both keep spinning sites out and buy some undeveloped lake front property that I've had my eyes on ($3k+).
So that's it. The show begins. Hopefully it doesn't go over like a lead balloon.
In the meantime, questions I ask myself while thinking all this over:
I've lurked around here on and off through the years picking up this and that but I never really followed through. It was never for a lack of motivation. Money, along with sex and survival, is a large enough motivator for most people to do anything - myself included. I was, and am still to an extent, lacking these two ingredients: Most importantly, I'm lacking the confidence to pull the trigger - it's very intimidating. Lesser so, because I know I can pick this up over time, is that I lack knowing what I don't know - it's also very confusing. I intend to grow some stones and learn new things here over the life of this thread. Should I succeed, aside from the money, I should hope what I will write here will help those standing right at the edge of breaking into making some money that are too timid to just go and try.
What I have done so far.
I'm not so arrogant as to pretend I am anything but a newbie. However, I have tried the following to get my feet wet:
- Attempted to build a brand in a niche by blogging useful information. Tried to earn via affiliating. Couldn't keep it together and ultimately couldn't stick to consistency for long enough to build an audience. Lasted 6 months.
- Another blog, this time a review site whereby I'd generate income from selling ads directly to those whose products I reviewed as well as using ad networks. Struggled to find the audience (beyond the creators of the products) and it died after 12 months. I might revisit this later as I did really enjoy it, even if it was the hardest to keep up. Still own the domain.
- Image blogging on Tumblr. All I did was scrape images, post-date them to publish. Income via affiliates and ads. Failed in 2 months. Wouldn't convert. I did manage to build a small following. Maybe if I stuck with it and found a better way to earn it could have been something. As far as I know, I still have those followers. The blog is still live.
- Smaller things I've done: build referrals for GPT sites, adsense on Youtube, built a small following on Facebook (couldn't figure out how to monetize)...
The running theme here is that while I did have the courage to try things out, I ultimately failed because 1. I didn't have a solid idea in place and 2. I didn't stick to it long enough. I have however learned some valuable skills along the way, namely web design and development, graphic design, and some video editing. Out of potential interest, the affiliate network I went with every time was CJ.
This time around, I'm going to pour all of my energy into planning and preparing then launch rather than go off too soon and get bored trying to find my feet.
Here is where I am right now; my thesis, if you will: First I will create a handful of small earners to make some money I can invest into bigger ideas, then I will spin that off into selling my own products to raise my earnings, then I'll make the jump to something potentially bigger but with less creative work on my part.
Act I: In which I learn and learn by failing.
To begin with, I have ZERO money that isn't tied up into things like living. Thus, I'm going to need to create some small-ish earners to break in and raise some money to move further.
Here's the plan, as it currently sits:
I've chosen a market to work in, insanely competitive but can potentially earn if I do this right and stick with it. Within the market I'm going to choose 16 niches (and maybe microniches if I am so lucky to find some) and aggressively build blogs for each. The content will be largely unique (edited works by others) - mostly images and text with some video. 12, 24, 48 posts a day per blog.
I'm thinking of sort of link wheeling where, let's say, for each niche I have 3 blogs each on different blogging platforms content-wise, barely unique from each, mostly in keywords, titles and posting dates for the same posts. So, Post #1 gets published on Blog #1 on Day #1, published on Blog #2 on Day #8 and so on. Staggered. Combined with this, each niche will have it's own 2.0 pages and accounts and link around and return to the blogs.
For more links, I was thinking about Squidoo and/or Hubpages and the like to write articles about blogging about/making money with the niches I choose as well as share on forums and other community based sites (namely Reddit) where I'll contribute to the community but also push my sites.
As far as the content goes, simply scraping images and copying (and then editing) the text. Finding video clips and images to make slideshows and videos for Youtube.
Money.
How I earn is still much up in the air. Likely affiliates and CPA or PPC.
My goal is to get around $50-$300/mo to start. This should be doable if I plan and prepare.
My timetable for this is 1 month planning and preparing and then earning over the course of a few months. Most of my costs for the future will be hosting, domains, advertising, buying followers/likes/links/comments and so on.
Act II: In which I expand.
By now I've built some traffic and hopefully some real subscribers so here is where I want to push things further. This section is probably the most work in progress because I could just as easily cut and run from the niches all together, drop this idea out and plug another idea in here with whatever I earned in the first act.
Ideally, I will take all of my content from my blogs and repackage them as e-books while still keeping the blogs fresh. With an average of 28 posts per day, over the course of 70 or so days I would be in pretty good position to saturate Amazon pretty quickly. Each post would be dragged out from a few pages to 5 and I'd combine a few relevant posts into one short e-book collection. Three per ~15 page e-book at about 2 bucks profit a pop. I figure per niche I could have around 40 e-books. By by playing keywords right and having all link to each other, I could build up a pretty fantastic link wheel. Alongside this, I would (or could) set up a site and sell direct. I would be basically leveraging all of my followers/readers and trying to convert them.
This is the heaviest as far as creativity goes but could yield good profits - potentially good enough to just leave it at that. But my goals for this are fairly humble I would think, taking a step up from the previous act and going up to $500-$1000/mo. over the course of around 3 months.
Once all of the e-books are up, I'm done with it. They sit there and passively earn in the tail while I take my early profits and move on.
Act III: In which I change course.
At some point you must have asked yourself, "why all this trouble? why not just build some strong niche sites and affiliate with Amazon?" And you're right. I've looked so far into doing that that if I felt the immediate need, I could probably just start right now. The trouble is, I can't affiliate with Amazon in my state.
So all the profits I have in hand at this stage are going to be used like so:
- Invest and save
- Grease the wheels to get an out of state ID, address, and bank account
Then I'll move into making a network of niche sites and use Amazon. Biggest hurdle here? The niches. But I have some in mind already.
To me, the prospect of Amazon is the most appealing because even by just taking a quick stroll through the forums here, you can see it can be a good earner if you're diligent. I can dig through research quickly and develop sites in hours. I could have quick turn around on launching things and move into maintenance mode while earning. The goal here is to work this way long enough to save for huge investments (offline). So there's an indefinite timetable with this one, but ideally I'd like to earn over $1,000/mo and within 4 months earn enough to both keep spinning sites out and buy some undeveloped lake front property that I've had my eyes on ($3k+).
So that's it. The show begins. Hopefully it doesn't go over like a lead balloon.
In the meantime, questions I ask myself while thinking all this over:
- It feels like there are things missing in my plans, what are they?
- What are the tools I need to pull this off?
- Intellectually it makes sense and is a sound concept, why is my gut unmoved?
