The Cardinal Sin of IM

[Mercury_Hg]

I've been a member of this site for five years. In that time my interest in IM and SEO has waxed and waned, with me alternating from fervently reading threads eight hours a day, to forgetting about IM entirely. I've gained a lot of insight into IM through other people's experiences and ideas, however I'm guilty of the number one cardinal sin of IM: not taking action!

That's about to change.

My modest goal for this journey is $30/day passive income. My time frame to achieve this goal is dictated by how long the money I have saved ($3,000) will last me. I am quitting my job and expending all of my energy and focus into this project. I need to succeed or I face eviction and hunger. This decision might seem drastic however it's absolutely necessary to keep myself motivated and productive. This is more than about making money for me, it is about happiness. I am not happy with my current job and I am determined to escape it.

My plan is to start off using manual processes, and then progress to custom automated solutions.
My method of monetization will be through the Amazon Associates program.
My traffic will come from targeted email acquisition and autoresponders, with recipients further funneled through my landing pages (possibly with redirection) to Amazon.

So far I have a domain, hosting, a wordpress installation, and a premium theme. My immediate tasks are to create personal plugins to make the process of authoring my landing pages easier, fill my domain with content, secure an Amazon Associate account, and begin testing the viability of my method using manual processes. Wish me luck!

 

[asap1]

Do not quit your job until you are making a stable IM income or you will be flat on your ass if this does not work out.

 

[Cherry]

It's never too late to start again. Good luck!

 

[Zwielicht]

Good luck, but heed asap1's warning. Too many people quit their day jobs to start IM only to fall on financial hard times.

 

[iamthefox]

Do not quit your job until you are making a stable IM income or you will be flat on your ass if this does not work out.

I will recommend this too, IM need to use money to make money so get your job now, and just use spare time to spend on IM, that's should have less risk.

 

[Mercury_Hg]

I have contingencies in place in case this doesn't work. Most notably freelance bot development, which I have made money with before. I appreciate the concern, however I wouldn't worry about me.

As a note to others I don't condone just quitting your job to pursue your dreams. I wouldn't want to inspire anyone to do anything rash. I am a fairly resourceful and intelligent individual and I wouldn't be proceeding this way if I felt I had any chance of failing.

 

[blackiesap]

Your goal is very do-able. Will take some time until you see the results .Put the theories that you read in to action. You will see that some will work and some will need your own twist.
anyways I wish you all the best!

 

[Mercury_Hg]

In order to get a sense of the scale required to reach my goal, I've broken down my process into variables, each weighted with a rough estimation.

var postings = 3000 //the number of posts I have active at any given time
var emails_per_ad_per_day = 10 //the number of prospective emails I receive per day in response to each post
var email_reads = 0.8 //The percentage of response emails that will be inboxed and read
var email_clickthrough = 0.5 //The percentage of clickthroughs to my site from my email
var amazon_clickthrough = 0.05 //The percentage of clickthroughs to amazon from my site
var amazon_conversions = 0.05 //The percentage of people who convert at amazon
var amazon_avg = 25.0 //The average dollar amount spent at amazon
var amazon_com = 0.04 //The commission rate through affiliate sales

Multiplying these values together results in $30/day. My postings can be divided into 50 categories, and further divided into 20 subcategories. That's three posts per subcategory, which is entirely realistic.

I'm also using abysmal values to make this calculation. Short of something breaking or one part of the process failing entirely, I should not make less than this. I expect my emails per day, email reads and clickthroughs (believe it or not), and amazon clickthroughs + conversions + commissions to all be higher than stated. I will be using tracking to record these values over time and will use extensive A/B testing to optimize everything from start to finish.

 

[Mercury_Hg]

Last night and this morning I scraped ~30 articles for my site. Because my traffic is not coming from Google or other search engines, I can get away with straight ganking content from other websites without it impacting my traffic. All articles require formatting and some editing, so I'm working on that. The perfectionist in me is making this a slow and tedious process but I'm making good progress. I'm also going to rewrite the articles over time until it's 100% original content. In the meantime I have a nofollow noindex noarchive in the head so hopefully Google won't take notice of my scraped content and penalize me for the future in case I want organic search engine traffic too.

I've gotten my Amazon Associate account setup, and also gotten my Amazon Product API key so I can integrate and manage products using the product ASIN. I also tweaked a bit of my theme; I now have a custom header and background, and I've made lots of CSS tweaks here and there. Overall I'm very happy with the theme, it's very clean but still stands out.

Before I do my initial test run I need to finish my site plugin, setup some analytics, clean up the rest of the articles, and flush a little bit more of the site out for Amazon's manual review. The anticipation makes me want to jump to gun just to see what will happen but I will wait patiently.

 

[wolvenreign]

Always good to set up a time frame. Truth is, procrastination is built into us humans. It takes a lot of logic to outwit your own laziness.

 

[autonomica]

Brave decisions to spent all your savings and quitting the job. I personally had bad times with Azon associates program banning my accounts but that's me. Good luck with your journey.

 

[Mercury_Hg]

Always good to set up a time frame. Truth is, procrastination is built into us humans. It takes a lot of logic to outwit your own laziness.

Very true. I struggle a lot with depression and fatigue so I'm trying to powerhouse my way through this.

Brave decisions to spent all your savings and quitting the job. I personally had bad times with Azon associates program banning my accounts but that's me. Good luck with your journey.

Thank you. I'm not doing anything too shady (as far as Amazon can tell) so I should be safe. If not and I get banned I'll just lick my wounds and move on. I have other ideas on the backburner ready to go.

Today I finished cleaning up a few of my articles, and got my newsletter autoresponder set up. I still need to finish my Amazon product plugin for my site. There are off the shelf solutions but they don't work for me out of the box and it'd be more work to try and modify them instead of just starting from scratch.

I did run into a snag. I'm not going to be able to get people's emails directly from my traffic source. Users are going to have to respond to my ads by going in the body of the listing and manually retrieving my email. My intention was to automate my responder to send specific emails based on the subject and body generated by the source, but I'm going to have to get creative instead. Because a user can put anything they want in a subject or body I'm going to have to use LSA to determine which article they're actually responding to. If my program can't determine with any certainty what the user is interested in, it will send a generic email instead.

I'm getting close!

 

[23cromij]

Weather you believe you can, or you believe you cant. You are correct.

awesome thread i will be subscribing, good luck

 

[93chandu]

Quitting your job is the last thing you want to do. Don't quit until you start seeing stable income from IM

 

[David2772]

YIKES! Well I'll echo what everyone else said about this being very risky, but hopefully it pays off. Also, where do you live where you can get by for 900/month less taxes?

 

[V]

Good luck on your journey mate We know that you can do it

 

[Mercury_Hg]

YIKES! Well I'll echo what everyone else said about this being very risky, but hopefully it pays off. Also, where do you live where you can get by for 900/month less taxes?

Right now and for a long time I've lived a very lean lifestyle. $600 cleared is all I really need to get by. The real objective of this journey is not just to make this income but to make it passively. Not because I want to do nothing all day long but because passive income opens me up to further projects and further passive income. Etc.

Good luck on your journey mate We know that you can do it

Thank you!

I've been excessively busy these past two days and will continue to be for probably the next 6. That hasn't stopped me from working on this project though. Yesterday I worked on my site and also developed a more detailed long term plan. As everyone knows scaling isn't without costs and at a certain point those costs can be a lot. Quality proxies, dedicated hosting, bulk pva accounts, and time spent automating each part of the process are costly. I've broken down the progression of my journey into stages, each with costs and payouts in increasing order of magnitude. My first step into automation will have low risk and should give me a clear idea about the validity of my system as-is.

 

[LoftPower]

Good luck to you on this journey. Rooting for you.

 

[Mercury_Hg]

I finished my product plugin. Last thing for now is whatever remaining articles I have left to edit and format. Maybe tomorrow I'll send out my first feeler emails!