Total Newbs Journey to $100/day from scratch

Hello everyone,

I'm pretty new here but have been lurking and reading all I can for a few weeks now and I'm eager to get started. I think I've settled on Adsense and or affiliate marketing to make my money. Some background, I'm a computer science major and I'm still working on finishing up my degree. I have some experience in programming and web design, additionally a good friend of mine builds Wordpress sites for a living so I believe technically I'm all set for IM. My reasoning for beginning is I recently lost my job (no big loss, just retail work). Additionally I have an 11 week old daughter, who I would love to be able to stay home with and take care of so IM seems like an excellent way to be able to earn some money and be able to spend time with my daughter, instead of say paying 1000 dollars a month to send her to a day care with strangers.

I have not done ANYTHING in IM in the past so I'm starting as a total greenhorn here and any and all advise is more than welcome. Right now I've been wracking my brain trying to come up with some decent keywords to begin working with. I had a couple of ideas for websites that I would like/enjoy making but I don't think there is money in them. I just got market samurai and I've been bouncing ideas of that so hopefully I'll land on something I can work with. If anyone is willing to lend a hand with finding keywords, or just let me know if you think either of my two ideas could be profitable it would be appreciated.

Bluematters journey thread to 100/day gave me great motivation and a lot of tips to work with so I absolutely think I can make this happen. I'm hoping that by Monday I can nail down a keyword and get hosting and a domain.

Good luck on your journey.

Best of luck on your journey.

You got your skills in programming and webdesign start using them and sell designs/make programs

I started by creating 3 different blogs on 3 different niches/keywords
For the blog that i had the most traffic i built a website.
I have some pretty much views now

SpaceDaddy said:

Best of luck on your journey.

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I could do this, the main problem is I'm not so confident in my abilities yet.

Alright, I believe I found a decent keyword. Between Market Samurai and ubersuggest I was able to take some of my interests and come up with a few potential keywords I can use. The one I am most excited for is one in a niche I personally enjoy a lot has 9,900 average monthly searches a medium competition and CPC of $2.70. google comes up with 400k results for it and the top site looks like TOTAL cap. I don't know if i can out rank them but I can definitely make a more attractive site.

uffda said:

Alright, I believe I found a decent keyword. Between Market Samurai and ubersuggest I was able to take some of my interests and come up with a few potential keywords I can use. The one I am most excited for is one in a niche I personally enjoy a lot has 9,900 average monthly searches a medium competition and CPC of $2.70. google comes up with 400k results for it and the top site looks like TOTAL cap. I don't know if i can out rank them but I can definitely make a more attractive site.

Click to expand...

good luck with your journey man ill be following along

keep in mind when your looking for potential sites to build and rank for you need to look at your competitions backlinks to decied if it will be easy or hard to rank. a site may be shitty visually but if it has a million backlinks its gonna be tough to outrank them. you can try the site below to check websites links and what words they are actively trying to rank for.

www.ahrefs.com

Ventio said:

good luck with your journey man ill be following along

keep in mind when your looking for potential sites to build and rank for you need to look at your competitions backlinks to decied if it will be easy or hard to rank. a site may be shitty visually but if it has a million backlinks its gonna be tough to outrank them. you can try the site below to check websites links and what words they are actively trying to rank for.

Click to expand...

it comes up with 4.2k backlinks URL rank 40 ahrefs rank 50

As planned today I purchased a domain, hosting and setup my WordPress I haven't selected a theme yet but I've got a good idea which I'm going to use. Right now I'm looking for plugins I may need, based on bluematters thread I've got:

Google Analytics, XML Sitemaps, Quick Adsense, Sociable, All in one SEO, WP DB backup, Yoast, WP-PostRatings and WP Super cache. If anyone else can suggest others, or thinks I shouldn't be using any of these any input is appreciated!

Additionally, I also purchased a MNS from luhasr just to have a bit more going for myself.

Sorry for the lack of recent updates. I've got my set setup, I'm in the process of adding content. My site from luhasr is coming along well and looks great so far, definitely will consider buying another one depending on how things go with this one. I've realized I can also direct some traffic to my site from Pintrest but the biggest problem I'm coming across is finding good quality photos for my content. Does anyone have any suggestions? do you just take peoples photos and flip them/modify them etc so they're harder to search for?

Additionally, if anyone has some pintrest boards they would be willing to invite me to it would be most appreciated! The main niche I'm looking at on pintrest right now is a specific type of recipe (I know its saturated right now, but I'm hoping since my niche is pretty specific I can still drive visitors to my content)

Alright, long break in there where not much got accomplished. The two sites were getting mediocre traffic at best (2-6 visitors a day). I decided I needed to try something different. I built a new site in a different Niche yesterday, and it looks like this is going to work out much better. in the last 24 hours I've had about 34 UV and 65 page views and that is entirely from 3 pinterest posts. I'm currently waiting to hear about about the status of my adsense account that I applied for on the site I had the most hope for, so I can apply it to this new site. Hopefully I can maintain some momentum with this traffic but I'm a bit worried about what happens when Pins fall off the top of the list. I'm doing everything manually, though I did purchase scrapebox I haven't gotten much use from it yet.

I actually got adsense approved with the new site I made. This didn't make much sense to me as the site had less than 200 words on it, no original information, no privacy policy yet, no about or contact page either. After I passed the first part of the test I added those pages, copied my ad code in and today my site is fully approved.

I've made $1.67 so far today, which is the first and only money I've ever made online. We'll see how it goes! currently still building social media traffic through tumblr, pintrest and twitter. Pintrest has been my only success so far. I got lucky and was invited to a rather large group board that repins like mad, and doesn't have that many contributers. If anyone has any good group boards in the health or recipes niches I'd love an invite.

Doing good! Congrats on your first earnings!

Now keep it up!

Made $1.99 yesterday with 3 clicks, only up to $0.76 today. My traffic keeps growing, today stumbleupon came out of nowhere with almost 50 page views and its pretty much on auto pilot. I'm Using the free SNAP wordpress plugin to autopost to stumbleupon, twitter, delicio.us etc. I think my site is doing alright for only being 7 days old with more than 600 page views

You've got the right attitude, so I wish you to not grow lazy over time and keep trudging. Concentrate on daily goals for motivation, and don't count your ducks before the eggs hatch. Good luck!

Good luck on your trip!

I wanted to post an update here. I am still trudging along with IM though I have moved away from adsense. I started an amazon affiliate site In July, which began slowly. I promoted primarily through pinterest and somewhat facebook and tumblr. I've managed a couple 200-300 dollar months with payouts, but what reminded me of this journey was when I checked my amazon stats for yesterday. I had made $80.81 in one day, getting close to my original IM goals.

I remember being so happy with my 5-10 visits a day, my site had 9000 views on 12/13/14. So far for December I'm at $720.44 by far my best month yet.

I'm sort of necroing this thread in hopes of giving some newbs out there some hope, if you stick with it, you can make money. Find something that is sustainable and that you enjoy. It took longer than I thought, and hoped but it's coming around. If you've got any questions I'll answer anything I can without giving too much away.

some proof:

traffic:
.
yesterday:

month to date:

Pretty much , took me about 1year to bank some decent money , my method died and I am just focusing on ranking some sites , the rate is pretty slow but patience man , actually I am not one of these patient guys but as for irony SEO is kinda teaching me being more patient
So Good luck and scale that up

This thread is like watching a pokemon evolve. Makes you feel all happy and excited. Good job man. Hope you're enjoying the extra time you get to spend with your daughter as a result of starting on this path, you earned it.