Long-term income (6 months to years)

I know for fact that in any enterprise you can make large sums of money throughout the year, many times with the money you make on a scaling factor of the work you put in.

I have drive and I'm intelligent, creative and logical..

But I'm a lurker who's slowly working on projects by himself.

I've yet to have major success with any form of IM.

I'm interested in hearing success stories, with specifics of what you do in detail, if you're going to say, "I affiliate market and made XXXXX$ last year" don't bother.
Incomes that will last 6 months or years to come, whether that's a fluctuating X-XX dollar amount or more. I'm not the type to say, "the less maintenance the better" so if you have 20 sites that you manage with the effort it takes most to manage just 1, let us know what they are, list them all and any tools you use.

Any tried and true methods that don't use the word niche in a manner that you're trying to hide "your pot o' gold" while mentioning "success is possible".

I'm also working on the site to provide some resources for people to use to get them a headstart, some of it information I've gleaned from this forum and others, whether it be methods or CPA, Affiliate and Ad site sources.

Give me all you've got, more than just me will thank you.

And if you don't mind competition, give me access to your thinking, projects you've done, sites you have up currently that are making money. A whois and webtools site with a ton of traffic? An information repository site? A software downloads site? Let me know, please include the url of your site and if you have intentions of letting me run with your ideas, post an attached .rar or zip or link to a hosted archive of any scripts that your site uses that are key or useful.

Warm Regards,

l0cke

I think you are positioned very well as an independent marketer, but you must really find your own path(s).

As you know, there are many tactics, strategies, plans and knowledge bases in Internet Marketing. My own approach was very much the same as yours

1. Develop an independent perspective on the world (its my own responsibility for succeeding or failing - nobody else's).
2. Reduce outgoings to an absolute minimum
3. Get a computer and research every area of Internet marketing for as long as it takes (do everything as cheap as chips - purchase only where its going to hurl you into the best places)
4. Cherry pick the plans and strategies that you believe in
5. Evaluate these plans as to their potential
6. Select only a handful of plans that you believe will return the most profit
7. Start rolling out campaigns for these plans.
8. Tweak all campaigns where required
9. Absorb as much expertise within - only outsource where economical
10. Even learn to program php when you can

Some day....hit one or two serious gold seams.

Rinse and repeat.

Did you know that - 9 out of 10 businesses that fail - start with no market research?

best

Rudy

Rudy that was very well said. Most people in this business just jump out there and start going without a clear picture of where they want to get. I know I was guilty of this and only after I put a viable plan in place did I start to see success.

I heartily agree with you too fellows. My goal now, somewhat referenced by the mention of my compiling of IM and like incomes was to get a steady stream of successes that people can model, not necessarily by using their targets. I'm a big proponent of modeling people and people's ideas when successful and tweaking them to work for yourself.
Counterpoint to your statements, though, I've seen markets and successes far from the realm of my mind skyrocket, take off or otherwise steadily prosper and while research helps, I don't believe in too many markets for a static income source.
Right now, with our state of world economy I'd lean towards mentioning that cheap entertainment is going to do well such as radio and t.v./video until at least the end of the year. If this is a common recession then by November or December the markets will cease their failing.

If anyone has legitimate (hey, some of you do I bet) business models they wish to post that we can take away some experience from, post here. I might wish to start this thread in other forums as topics including money or business ideas don't do well here as many are tight-lipped. Begging for software is apprently fine, though.

l0cke

l0cke, if you don't mind working, then get a 1000 pages indexed in google. Better would be 2000. On one site or on several does not matter, but my suggestion would be to have at least 100 on any one domain.

Search the google keyword tool for good ideas of topics and then write keyword rich( not spammed) articles for each keyword you think people may search for. Look at trends for ideas on what is normally hot. Search for Insights is good for this too.

Once you get your pages indexed and we are getting 5-10 visitors a day average to each of your pages, then the money will just take care of its self as you can make money a lot of different ways. don't do blackhat nothing on these domains, just grow them and let them age

This is the only way I know of to make long term sustaining income without constnatly need to tweak and build new domains.

Of course then there is also the adwords > CPA approach but you need money to really make a go of it and if you don't know what you are doing you can lose your shirt to Google

For me, someone who likes to jump on their horse and ride off in every direction, it's all about focus. Many times on this forum I read about multiple, multiple ways to make money, many work, if you work them. Often (and I'm speaking to myself mainly), I'll get very excited about something, at least till I get excited about the next thing. My resolution for this year is to stick to a gameplan.

That said, you can make money in IM, and it doesn't have to be the make money niche, but it isn't a "Field of Dream", where if you build it they will come, this, like any business requires work to achieve success.

But IMHO, it is far better than punching a time clock.