Just an FYI,the free advertising offer is over as of now, all the spots have been filled (3 of them by me, i can’t even give away ad space!).

The first spot went to Alan from AffiliateConfession, not for making a post about my blog, but for giving away a free copy of “The 4 Hour Workweek” by Tim Ferriss. This book has seriously changed my outlook on everything. The information presented is fantastic, and its written extremely well. When you’re done with the book, all you want to do is travel the world and sell drugs. Oh yeah, Alan’s site is pretty Awesome too.

The next spot went to Richard from GreatReefTanks.com. Richard was one of the first commenters on this blog back in December, and as been an active commenter ever since. GreatReefTanks.com, while not related to affiliate marketing is a great resource for people interested in salt water fish tanks. Check it out!

The Last spot im giving away goes to Doylna from TextCapades. Doylna hasn’t given me his banner yet, which is why you dont see it, but it will be up soon. Doylna and myself actually met a while back on a site called cb7tuner.com, which is dedicated to the 4th generation Honda Accord. He is a cool guy and TextCapades has some pretty funny stuff on it.

The remaining spots I filled with some links that i think you should check out including Build a Niche Store (which I have made over $300 from so far), and PepperJam network which is one of the newest affiliate networks to hit the scene. They have some very unique offers and are a far cry from the big CPA networks.The last spot is for SEOmoz which is pretty much the internet authority on SEO. If you are serious about SEO, you better be a member of SEOmoz.

Make sure you check back tomorrow because ill be posting my January earnings report!

Something many people make in 10 minutes, but my highest single day BANS earnings to date (this is from www.digmyhonda.com/store) and puts me at over 30% of my goal!:

On top of that, there were more unique visitors to this blog than any other day thus far (around 200). New inspiration always comes at the best times!

I’ve been doing affiliate marketing now for a couple months and have had some limited success. I guess just the fact that I have pulled positive profits means I’m doing something right, but I’m certainly not going to get rich pulling $200/month. I want to be making at least $10,000/month. I would be completely happy in life if I could pull that off, that would make most of my dreams at least within the realm of possibility. $120,000.00/year surely isn’t unheard of, but thats all I want.

Up until this point I have really been tippy toeing around affiliate marketing, but I’m trying to get more serious. The first step I’m taking up the affiliate ladder is to setup a site that I can hopefully use for years to come to generate a stable affiliate income. I have decided to take on the “online dating” niche.

I know what your thinking…”Are you crazy?”. Maybe. Probably. I don’t know, crazy people don’t know their crazy. Now I don’t plan on just throwing up a direct linking adwords campaign and hope for the best, I’m taking this one on for the long haul.

You cant do that, your not “Super”!

Now I’m obviously not going to try and break into the “general” online dating niche, that would be affiliate suicide. Even if I was the most brilliant internet marketer to ever touch a keyboard, I simply don’t have the monetary means to do something like that. So what’s a poor affiliate marketer to do? Hit the niche at the corners.

Within the online dating niche, there are all kinds of different, target sub niches. For example, there is Christian Dating, Jewish Dating, Interracial Dating, Black, Latino and even Big Beautiful Women! All of these have affiliate programs through NeverBlueAds with moderate payouts at around $5.00/lead. This is where I’m planning my attack, on these smaller areas.

Registering the domain name

The first thing I did was register the domain name. Because I want to target a bunch of sub niches separately, I needed a fairly general domain name. I wanted a .com, and I wanted it to have the keywords “online dating” in it. I went on over to GoDaddy.com and started searching. Do you know how hard it is to find a domain name with the keywords “online dating”? Its like trying to get tickets to the superbowl. You either get them really early, or you pay $1000s of dollars for them.

I eventually settled upon http://www.online-dating-blogger.com, since I was already planning on this being a wordpress blog site, this was the best I was going to get. I proceeded to install wordpress on my server and got a “relationship” or “love” style wordpress theme up and running. I then filled the right sidebar with a variety of different offers from NeverBlueAds. I haven’t decided what I want to do with the sidebar for the long term, but this will work for now.

I suck at dating

It just so happens that I have been in a healthy, happy relationship now for the better part of six years, so you can imagine that its been a long time since I have been looking for a “date”. Even before I was in a relationship, I was terrible at dating. I’m a pretty socially awkward guy to begin with, so add in attractive females and I become borderline retarded.

How does a guy like me write blog content about online dating? I dont, I let someone else do it, and there are two ways to do that.

• Outsource
• Paraphrase

Since I know nothing about outsourcing right now (although the “4 hour work week” gives a great explanation of the process), I decided to start with the latter option (paraphrasing).

There are literally hundreds, if not thousands of articles about online dating on www.ezinearticles.com. Now I’m not going to promote copyright infringement. In fact, you should do everything you can to create unique content. However, true paraphrasing is not illegal, at least to my knowledge.

By true paraphrasing, I mean writing something in your own words, 100%. This can sometimes be hard to do, but I have found a pretty efficient way to do it. I start by reading the article full through to get the entire gist of whats going on. Next I dissect the articles paragraph by paragraph and start paraphrasing. Its often difficult to read something one way, and write it another, but here is a good trick: Copy the paragraph into your text editer, and read it through once or twice. Next, delete the entire paragraph so that you cannot see the sentence structure. Finally, write down what you remember. Doing this will ensure that you don’t copy the exact sentence structure, or use the same words as the original paragraph. You might miss a few things here and there, but thats fine because often you can include words or phrases from your own experiences!

I have paraphrased about three or four articles so far, and you would be hard pressed to notice it! Iv changed words, sentence structures, and even the order of paragraphs. I’ve probably spent just as much time doing this as I would have if I wrote the original content. The only reason I haven’t written original content is because I simply don’t know much about the subject. Plain and simple.

Making the money

My money making plans for this site are to use the various dating CPA offers that can be found on NeverBlueAds and other affiliate networks. Each blog post will act as a specific landing page for each of the various online dating niches. I have already completed my landing pages for online Christian dating and online Jewish dating, so take a look and tell me what you think!

The next step is to make at least 10 more landing pages, add in some non-landing page content (like “online dating tips”, or “how to stay safe while dating online”). Id like to be getting around 100 organic visitors per day before I even think about hitting AdWords on this one. This will more than likely take months, and some serious link building to accomplish, but Im willing to give it a try. At least that part is free!

So thats all I have so far, I’m hoping to get the rest of my landing pages up and to start building natural traffic soon. It will be an on-going learn process, so we will see how it goes. Unfortunately I have started school full time for the semester, and my course load is pretty crazy. Hopefully I can find some time to not only work on money making, but to blog about it as well. Ill do my best!

So its been a couple days since I last posted, but I have been super busy with online money making. I have been trying a variety of different things, none of which have really paid of yet, but iv learned a whole lot. I have also been reading the “The 4-Hour Workweek” by Tim Ferriss, which is a fantastic read. It gives a front row seat to the life and mind of a successful entrepreneur. I would highly recommend buying this book, it will change your whole outlook on business and life!

Started with Microsoft AdCenter

This is something I have been avoiding up to this point. There is no real reason for it, Iv just been trying to focus my attention on mastering AdWords, which seems to be a life long process. I decided it was time to expand my horizons, so i signed up to AdCenter with a $100.00 click voucher. This would allow me to really practice PPC without loosing any money. Good deal.

The first thing I did with Microsoft AdCenter is copy over my Superbowl Campaign to see how it compared to Adwords. I made a bunch of changes to the landing page, which you can see here:

Vote for your team in Superbowl XLII.

Major changes to the landing page include adding some graphics above the fold, converting the page to PHP from HTML to track keywords and track the actual voting results (using MySQL), and added a pie chart using the Google Chart API to display the results to the voters. I also changed the offer banners from three horizontal leaderboards to two side by side square banners. We’ll see how it goes.

Changes in the PPC campaign were pretty big. I reduced my keyword list from around 25 to three. (Superbowl, Superbowl XLII, and Superbowl 42), which actually increased my quality a little bit, and hence gave me more impressions. Sometimes less is more! (This was on adwords)

My first impression of Microsoft AdCenter is a little divided. On one hand, the traffic converts very well compared to Adwords, however the volume of traffic is close to non-existent unless you bid like a rock star. I also noticed that AdCenter is extremely sleezy! They love to trick you into taking your money, here is why:

1. I signed up with a $100.00 voucher, and when I started getting clicks, they were charging my account anyway! I will have to call them and find out why I haven’t received my $100 voucher yet.

2. They have something called “incremental bids”. Maybe I was just to retarded to understand it, or I was not paying close enough attention, but they really screwed me over here. Incremental bids work like this: You set your ordinary bid for the search and content network, but you can bid up to 100% more (2X) based on demographic. For example, in my superbowl campaign I might want to spend twice as much for males between 18 and 50 than i want to spend on 50+ year old females. Its great that AdCenter allows you to do this, but It would be nice if they could explain it a little better. When I first saw this, I was convinced that when I was bidding 100% on 18 year old males, I was bidding 100% of my standard bid, and not 100% MORE than my standard bid. This really made me loose big time.

Once I figured out that I was bidding twice as much as I originally thought, I quickly disabled the incremental bid option, which in turn quickly brought my impressions to zero…literally. Bummer.

This was a bummer because had I been bidding what I thought I was bidding, I would have actually made some PPC money! Unfortunately, most advertising costs far outweighed my conversions, and I was back in the red. Let this be a lesson to you.

Out of these 40 clicks, I got around 9 conversions at an average of an dollar each. Thats a 17.5% conversion rate, not to shabby!

Another pet peve I have with AdCenter is that it is a pain in the ass to use. Its slow, and half the time the pages time out and I have to redo everything Iv done already. I found that this was only an issue with Firefox. I switched over to IE as an experiment, and everything ran smoothly. I wouldn’t doubt that Microsoft does this on purpose.

Yahoo Search Marketing

Since I was starting with AdCenter, I figured I might as well start with Yahoo Search Marketing, which I also had a $100.00 voucher for. I really don’t have any statistics to measure the performance of Yahoo, but I do like their interface a lot better than AdCenter.

The downside is that I have had the same superbowl campaign running for over 24 hours and I haven’t got a single impression, never mind a click. I’m not sure why, but I’m going to let it run for a few more days before I make any real judgments.

Other stuff in the works

I’ve decided that this “find a campaign, throw some keywords together with a direct link and hope for the best” thing is getting old, so its time to take some real decisions. My new approach is to take approach PPC from a high level Niche standpoint, and drill it down from there. For example, im starting with “online dating”. Today I registered Online Dating services (little SEO link building going on right there), which I plan on promoting the 40+ Dating offers available on NeverBlueAds. I am going to spend the next month or so developing blog content, and getting it indexed naturally before I create my first PPC campaign. This is going to be a real deal, hardcore campaign. I plan on making targeting posts about Christian Dating, Jewish Dating, Interracial Dating, etc etc. We’ll see how this works!

More on that tomorrow, I have to get to bed so I can start School again at 8:00am!

I recently made a little “spurt of the moment” AdWords campaign that failed miserably, and I figured I would share it with everyone so you can see how much I suck at this game.

Are you ready for some Football?

When January rolls around, and the Patriots are in the playoffs (I’m from Massachusetts, so don’t give me any lip about how much you hate the Pats!), I turn into a huge Football fan. I watch every game, including pre and post game reviews. This season has been even more special than normal for football fans in New England, as I’m sure some of you know the Pats are one game away from doing the impossible, a perfect season.

So after the game on Sunday I decided I would see how Football was for an online niche. With the Superbowl just two weeks away, I know there is going to be a surge in interest, so I figured I’d cash in (easier said than done). I was all excited about this, I did some preliminary Google research on the most obvious keywork “Superbowl” only to find that there seemed to be ZERO competition, not a single Ad showed up. I thought I must have hit a gold mine, I was wrong.

The Landing Page

Right away I started designing a landing page, and I used all of the tricks I have learned over the past few months to try and optimize it for Google’s dreaded quality score. I had keyword rich H1, H2 and title tags. I had Legal disclaimers and Terms of service in the footer, and some unique content I wrote up within the page.

From what I have read, whenever big “buzz” worthy events like the Superbowl emerge, (other examples would be news scandals, like the Michael Vic story), people have really cashed in on creating “Polls” that are linked to affiliate offers from places like Azoogle or NeverBlueAds. The Idea is to ask a question like “Do you think Michael Vic should go to jail?” with a simple “yes” or “no” button. When a user casts a vote, they are brought to a “Thank you” page and are told that they are eligible for a free gift just for voting. It sounds like a great concept, so I gave it a shot.

CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE LANDING PAGE!

I have recently changed the landing page described in this blog entry. To view the original landing page, please click here.

The offers

This was a tricky part, choosing which offers to promote. Searching through NeverBlueAds, there was nothing related to the superbowl, football, or anything even remotely related to any kind of sports. The closest thing I found was this offer for a Free pack of Gaterade…blah!

I didn’t feel that was a very good offer, so I went out on a limb and chose some random ones, completely off topic. Instead of looking for something related to my campaign, I was now looking for something that converted easily (first page email or zip submit), and paid a decent amount. I definitely wanted the offer to be of the “freebie” variety, so I did some research and chose two more offers which appeared to have good conversion rates and EPCs. One was for a free Iphone (everyone wants an Iphone, right??) and the other was for a $250 grocery gift card (I could sure use one of those!). Looking back now, this was a completely stupid idea and I have no idea what I was thinking. I probably should have used something health related, like a dietary supplement. A lot of guys who watch football probably like to lift weights and do other manly activities to increase their bicep size, but i digress. Here are the other two offers:

Setting up the campaign.

Once I had my landing page ready, I fired up Adwords Editor (By the way, if you havn’t downloaded this, DO IT NOW.) and started planning things out. I created a new campaign called “Superbowl” and started my first AdGroup, which was going to be focused on the generic keyword “Superbowl”. I did a little research on freekeywords.wordtracker.com and found a bunch of related search terms that people were looking for and placed them into my adwords campaign.

Download the keyword List.

Next up was writing the AdCopy. I’ve said in the past that I really hate this part of Adwords because I am simply no good at it. I never know what to say! This time was especially difficult because there were no other competitors to “borrow” ideas from, I was all on my own. I ended up creating five different ad copies that I planned to split testing, and thought they were fairly decent. Check them out below:

Setting Bids

For this campaign I set my daily budget to $100.00 and my maximum search bid to $0.20. I opted to enable seperate content network bids, and set those a $0.10. I was a little worried that I was going to get a surge of impressions and clicks (you know, because this was the best idea ever) so I was very conservative on my bidding, in fear of getting owned by “curiosity clicks”. This was probably one of my bigger mistakes, looking back at it now.

With the Ad Copy written and my bids placed, I was ready to upload my campaign to AdWords and watch the money roll in. This was going to be my big break, I could feel it.

The First 20 minutes

The first twenty minutes this campaign was up and running, it looked like I was right on the money. I got 20 impressions almost right away, and my first click. I was sure this was going to be the one, and I shutdown my laptop for the night and went to sleep with dreams on wads of cash in my NeverBlueAds account.

I woke up the next morning a little late, so I had no time to check how the campaign was doing. It wasn’t untill about 2:00pm that I finally got a chance to check the status. To my dissapointment, I only had a combined total of 40 impressions, and my lonely solitary click from the night before. What a bummer that was! Looking into the issue further, I found that every single one of my keywords was marked as “inactive”, and i was slapped with a poor quality score across the board, yeilding $5.00 and $10.00 minimum bids. Dream shattered.

What Did I learn?

Even though, from a profit stand point, the campaign was (and continues to be) a complete failure, I did learn a few hopefully valuable lessons.

1. Using Exact match keywords will get you search impressions.

One thing that I have been unsuccessful at in the past is getting search impressions. I think I have only gotten a handful of them in all the campaigns I have tried thus far. Everything has come from the content network. This campaign was a little different. 98% of my impressions came from the search network this time, which was cool to see. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to capitalize on it.

2. Inactive keywords still yield search impressions

This was something I wasn’t aware of previously. Did you know that even if your keywords are marked as “inactive for search”, you can still get search impressions? I’m not sure exactly how it works, I’m hoping someone can fill me in, but i would assume that Google throws you a handful of impressions here and there just to see if your CTR is high enough to bump your quality score. That is just my uneducated guess though, so who knows!

3. Quality score is a bitch

Pardon my French, but I can’t really express it any other way. Quality score appears to be even more difficult that I had first imagined. I honestly thought this landing page was going to at least give me an “OK” quality score because I had done everything everyone said to do. I’m still not sure what I should have done differently, I guess there just wasn’t enough content, or enough “pages” on the domain for Google. Better luck next time!

What is the campaign doing now?

I actually let the campaign continue to run, especially since I wasn’t getting any clicks, and hence it wasn’t costing me any money. Each day the number of impressions grows a little bit (im up to about 200 impressions per day), but I still have only that 1 click, and of course zero conversions. I’ll probably let it sit until the super bowl is over. Im going to modify it and remove the Green Bay Packers and San Diego Chargers from the vote, since they will obviously not win the superbowl. Other than that though, I think im just going to take a hit on this on and focus my attention on Valentines day. Vday seems to be quite a bit bigger, and I have a couple ideas Im going to try.

Even though I stopped updating my blog, I certainly did not stop trying to make money online. In fact, I hit it double time, and it really paid off! Since January 1st I have Grossed $169.00, with only $25.00 in expenses, yielding around $145.00 or so in net profit as of last night. Want to know how I did it? Read on.

Build a Niche Store

If you haven’t purchased a Build a Niche Store license yet, you are simply missing out. Plain and simple. I know there has been a bit of controversy over the software, but I can tell you from personal experience that it is worth every single penny. The more you use it, the more you realize just how powerful it can be. I only have two niche stores setup, and they have yielded 98% of my profits for this month. BANS has paid for itself almost twice over already, and iv only had it running for less than a month. If you havn’t tried BANS yet, BUY IT NOW!

Some of you have already seen my first BANS store (check it out here if you haven’t). Its a store focused on Honda automobiles and the Honda Tuning scene. There is actually a small network of BANS stores working together there, where each Honda model has their own separate store. (Civic Store, Accord Store, s2000 Store, etc). This has really worked well for me so far, and it integrates very well into my existing site at www.digmyhonda.com

I have also created a new store since I last updated my blog. Long ago (back in october) I was on a domain buying spree and I had purchased the domain www.tire-depot.us, in hopes of using the www.tirerack.com affiliate program (which is run through commission junction) to start some kind of PPC site. Unfortunately I got wrapped up in other things for a while, and the domain name was just sitting and collecting dust. About a week ago I decided to do something with it, I did pay for it after all.

This was a perfect candidate for a niche store! I threw together a quick, cheesy header image, tweaked the BANS store colors and added some Ebay categories related to tires. All of this took maybe a half hour of work (including installation), and the store was ready to roll. Within two days I was indexed in Google and I had already made my first sale with it! It was only around $5.00, but for something that took so little effort to get started, that was pretty good! I have since added some content and made things a little better, so hopefully Ill start ranking for some good keywords. Check out discount tires at the tire-depot.

Link building is important!

This is something I have really come to learn over the past couple weeks. Of all the SEO methods I have been trying to learn and implement, link building is by far the most effective. I was able to get www.tire-depot.us indexed in Google within 48 hours because of some simple, but strategic link building. For example, I have been using my stealth forum linking method, but in a more strategic method than I had been in the past. Instead of just posting links on any forum I could find, I have targeted my link building to high PageRank forums which allow both links and images in your replies. The best example I can give is the forum at www.nbc.com, which is a PageRank 7 site, and does not use “nofollow” tags.

That last part is extremely important. If you are trying to get backlinks, make sure the site you are posting in does not use nofollow tags. The easiest way to determine whether or not they use nofollow, is to simply look at the HTML source code and search for other, existing outgoing links. Check to see that the anchor tags are nofollow free, and you should be all set to start posting.

As I said, I was posting links over at the members forum on www.nbc.com, which in turn has sub forums for each of their shows. I happen to be the biggest “Scrubs” fan on the face of the earth (I have all 6 seasons on DVD), so I fit right in under the Scrubs sub forum. I would post something relevant to the thread, but include the following code.


[URL=http://www.tire-depot.us]
[IMG]http://www.digmyhonda.com/store/images/blank.gif[/IMG]
[/URL]

blank.gif is a simple, transparent 1×1 pixel gif, which is just about impossible to see. This is the exact method I used to get the site indexed so quickly.

Google Adsense

Although my BANS store was the biggest earner, I am also having a record breaking month with Google AdSense. I have already matched my December AdSense earnings, and it seems like I am doing better with it every day. The thing that has really attributed to this is a steady increase in organic google traffic to www.digmyhonda.com and www.hondoogle.com. It seems that the longer these sites are online, the more traffic I get. I have also tried to do a little bit of link building for them as well, which has probably been the cause of the increased traffic.

The moral of the story is that if you havn’t purchased Build a Niche Store yet, you really need to do it today. The longer you wait, the less money you will make. Focus on SEO and link building, and you will be on your way! In fact, I’m challenging all of you to surpass my earnings! (If your already a successful affiliate marketer, you don’t count!)

Anyone who has read my blog in the past, might notice that I have completely changed the theme I was using. I got a few complaints about it being somewhat hard to read, and I agree that it could have been better. So I found a new wordpress theme that I liked and made a couple of personal customizations to it.

As you can see on the right hand side (thats over there —>), I have replaced my experiment progress meter with  a line graph showing my Profit, Expenses and Net Profit. So far im up to over $200 in net profit, which is about 20% of my target $1000!!

How can you cash in?

Along with the new template, I have added six new 125×125 advertising spots (there were none previously). Since I dont get nearly enough traffic here yet to actually charge people for ad space, im going to give them away for FREE until further notice. All you have to do to get one is to make a post on your blog about the $1000 Afilliate experiment and leave a comment under this post letting me know you did so. The first FOUR people to do so (Two of them are taken already), will get at least a months stay in my ad spots. If you are unfamiliar about what the experiment is all about, read up on it here.

I’ve Been naughty!

Ok, so I realize its been over two weeks since my last post, and I realize that I fell a bit short of my “Post for 30 days” goal, but  hear me out. There were a few reasons I stopped posting. The first one is that I started school again, and blogging fell pretty low on my priority list. Because I had school in the morning, I am being forced to work until around 7:00 at my 9-5 job, then I have a one hour commute home, so its at least 8:00pm before I get home. Add in homework, social time, and sleep….well, you get the idea!

Another reason I stopped posting was because I was loosing money. I had no real advertisements on my blog, and I never made a dime from it. Considering that each blog post took an hour at the minimum, it was honestly just not worth my time, and I gave it up for a little while.  I found that my time was better spent (In dollars per hour), working on things like my BANS stores and other things related to making money online. To be honest, it has really paid off!

Why the change of heart?

I have decided that I am going to keep this blog alive, but I am going to try and use it to my advantage and maybe make a few bucks here and there with it. After winning the book from Alan’s contest, I realized that I really enjoy writing in my blog, and I enjoy sharing my failures and successes with the world. I hope someday when im raking in 10, 20, or $50,000.00 per month and beyond, that I can look back at these early posts and reflect on what I have done. I also hope others can learn from my mistakes and not loose as much money.

Another thing that has made me want to continue with my blog is the recent influx of RSS readers. For a while things were kind of stale and fluctuated between 10 and 13 readers. In the last week or so, however, my RSS count has shot up to 22 readers, which really makes me feel like people are interested in the blog, and that I’m not writing to myself. The more people who subscribe, the more I feel inclined to write blog posts in increased quality and quantity. So if you haven’t subscribed to my RSS feed yet, DO IT NOW!

What you can look forward to

Tomorrow I will be updating everyone on my current progress as an online affiliate marketer. Just to leave you with a cliff hanger, I will tell you that i have tripled my December Profits already this month, and am on target to at least quadruple them by the end of January. Ill let you know how I did it tomorrow, so be sure to check back!

One more thing: thanks to everyone who left me hate mail and hate comments about not updating my blog for two weeks. That was really nice of you. I’m not really kidding either, I mean it. If people are angry enough that they take time out of there lives to writing me nasty comments because I was not posting, it tells me that I just might have something worth reading!

I have won a copy of “The 4 hour workweek” by Timothy Ferriss and I cannot wait to get it and start reading! I won the blook in a contest run by Alan over at www.AffiliateConfession.com. It was a pretty simple contest, all I had to do was subscribe to his RSS feed and post a comment in the contest’s blog entry. I had already been subscribed to Alan’s RSS for a while now, but he was nice enough to allow his existing readers to enter the contest by just posting a comment. I have heard many great things about this book, and was planning on picking it up eventually. Lucky for me, I dont have to go buy it! Alan also did a great review of the book that you should check out.

If you havn’t been to www.AffiliateConfession.com, I would highly reccomend you check it out. Alan isn’t quite a “Super Affiliate” yet, but he is well on his way and gives great tips on how to make money online. One of the best qualities of Alan’s blog is that he gives tips on how to make money online in different ways, aside from the big CPA networks and CPC search engine marketing. He has done extremely well for himself with the Ebay affiliate program, and offers some great advice how you can use it to make some extra cash online. He also does very well with Google AdSense, and I am waiting for a post about how he does so well with it! It is by far one of my favorite blogs.

So thanks a lot Alan, I’m looking forward to diving into this book and learning a new way of looking at being “Wealthy”.

Yesterday I posted my monthly (which also happen to be my yearly) earnings. While its cool to say I made $50.00 dollars this month online, its really not anything impressive. I have never been one to settle for anything less than spectacular, so I wrote down some goals for 2008 and beyond, along with some of the things I will need to overcome in order to achieve those goals.

Affiliate Marketing Goals

This was a tuff goal for me to set because there are so many unknowns for me in 2008. I will be in school for almost the whole year straight (Winter intersession, Spring semester, Summer classes, Fall Semester), and will be fighting for an official “full time” position at my current 9-5 job (I’m technically an intern right now, at least on paper). Because of this, Its really hard for me to predict how much time and focus I will be able to dedicate to making money online.

So the goal I have set for myself is to be making a solid $1000 per month on average by the end of the year. It doesn’t seem like this should be too difficult to do, especially if I work hard and really put effort into it. Since starting this blog on December 5th I made over $160.00 in gross profit, which averages out to a bit over $6.00 per day. In order to make $1000 per month, I would have to turn that $6.00 into about $30.00 per day. Thats in increase of five times, which I feel is probably easily attainable.

To be honest, I haven’t really put as much effort as I could into making money online. I still haven’t gotten over my cold feet, and have yet to really take a dive into this. I think with some hard work and dedication, I could realistically double my goal and be making over $2000 per month before we ring in 2009.

I can see all obstacles in my way

Making $1000 per month wont come without obstacles of course. There are a lot of things I am going to need to overcome in order to achieve that goal.

Fear

The first thing I need to do is to learn to let go and just do it. Like I just said, I still have a case of cold feet when it comes to affiliate marketing. I like to think I work hard for my current income, and its not easy for me to just spend money without 100% assurance that I will at least break even. My mother raised me for most of my life as a single mother with a fairly low income, so she has always tried to show me the true value of a dollar, and that money doesn’t come easy.

Procrastination

Another personal obstacle I will need to overcome is procrastination. It seems that the older I get, the more I procrastinate. When I was younger I was really good about getting things done, and I think thats one of the things that really helped me achieve some of the great things that I did (All star little leaguer, National YoYo champion, Massachusetts state Architecture champion, High school Valedictorian, etc). Lately, however, I feel like I am always putting things off to the last minute. I have started doing homework and school papers the night before they are due, I get to work as late as possible, and I even put off writing blog posts until 11:30 at night.This is habit I really need to break, and it is especially concerning to me because I have never been like this in my life.

Focus

Another thing I have really been struggling with lately is focus. I think this has become a problem because the older I get, the more things I need to focus on! Right now I have school, my job, my girlfriend, my friends, my mother, my car and my web sites to focus on, and I am having a hard time allocating enough time for all of them. One of the big reasons behind this is that I have been getting distracted a lot easier lately. For example, since I started writing this blog entry, I have checked my commission junction stats, my Adsense earnings, checked my Adwords campaign, checked my online message boards, talked to a few friends over IM and stumbledUpon a few sites. I really need to retrain myself to worry about one thing at a time! Life is so much more simple that way.

Inspiration

I firmly believe that the best way to meet the goals you set is to remember the inspiration you had for setting them. I have a ton of inspirations for making money online is easy for me.

UberAffiliate

The biggest inspiration I have to make money online is Paul from www.uberaffiliate.com. Paul is a 19 year old Affiliate Marketing Mogul who has only been in the business since February of 2007. Since February, he has built his monthly earnings up to over $100,000 per month! My life goal has always been to simply make $100,000 a year! Paul has made me see how much larger the possibilities really are.

Moving out

As much as I love my mother, and as grateful as I am that she has provided me with a roof over my head for the last 22 years, it has come the time where I just want to get out. I want to be able to come home to my own house, make supper on my own stove and go to sleep in my own bed. Of course, without a good sum of money, buying a decent house in America is getting harder and harder. Many people end up financing the entire cost of the house, leaving them with a mortgage that they will be paying off for most of their natural life. This is something I don’t want to have to do. I want to be able to make my mortgage payments without any worry (or just pay off my house all together!). I have watched my mother cry about almost loosing the house we live in one too many times, I will not let that be me.

My girlfriend and I have also decided that we would ultimately like to move away from New England when we are financially secure enough to do so. Don’t get me wrong, Massachusetts is a wonderful place to live and raise a family, but it gets down right freezing in the winter. I absolutely hate cold weather and will do anything in my power to avoid it. Along with cold weather comes snow, and while it is certainly pretty to look at, driving in it is an absolute nightmare. Me and my girlfriend have decided we want to move to either Florida, Southern California or even Virginia (yes, I know it still snows there).

Fast Cars.

After food, water, and shelter, the next thing on my list of things needed to survive is my car. I have a somewhat unnatural obsession for things with motors, and for a while they were all i lived for (that has since started change as I grow older). My ultimate goal in life is to have the following in my garage:

SUV to haul things and to use in the snow (Acura RDX?)

Daily driver (Acura TL or Acura RL?)

Sunday Sports car (Honda NSX-R).

The long term

Yes, I realize that $1000 per month wont buy any of these things, but that is only a short term goal for the comming year. I actually hope to be making more than that by the end of 2008, but I think thats a good place to start. Within the next 5 years, I hope to have just about everything mentioned in this post. While I may or may not ever make $100,000 per month like Paul does, there is no reason not to try. Even if I fall short and make $50,000 per month, $30,000 per month, or even $10,000 per month, I think I will be doing ok for myself. How many people can really say they make almost double the average U.S. income in a single month?