5000 Dollars In 45 Days - My IM Voyage

Hello everyone,

Here’s a post I made over at the WF. It shows some detail about how I made my first cash with NMOC blogs. Enjoy:

Yes, I made $273.10 with two blogs passively in affiliate commissions. How did I do this? Well, here’s the sharing part so listen up!

1) I bought Niche Marketing On Crack from a link in the forum here (thanks Allen).

2) I read it and took action.

NMOC teaches you how to setup niche blogs to sell products. Most people are not very successful at selling and neither was I. I figured that I would fail at this like I did some other times I dabbled at affiliate marketing. This time, however, I did things a little differently. Here’s what I did:

I got the mechanics down regarding creating niche blogs. Once I knew how to setup my blog, I needed something to promote. I saw some kids at the local pizzeria watching television. I sat down near them and listened to their comments. It was clear that some things were cool and others just weren’t. I took some notes on a napkin (I refrained from wiping my face with this one). I then went to our local mall and listened to conversations at many counters there, all retail varieties from cell phones to makeup. I took more notes.

I went home and put up two test blogs of hot products that people were raving about. I wrote four articles and submitted two to ezinearticles.com and the other two to isnare.com using their article distribution service.

Results: Page one for both products (even manufacturer is lower than me!) and my articles fill up page one and half of page two!
Results: $273.10 with no more effort on my part. I believe that this will continue to grow.

Well, that’s all. I talk about this more on my blog. I hope this will help someone to get off their duff and do something to make money!

TomG.

OK, I am almost ready to get this challenge off to a great start. I have thought of many ideas to get this challenge to be more successful than its predecessor. Some of my ideas include having a super site with smaller sites pointing to it, a network of sites all interlinked, redirected domains all linking to a mini-site, etc. OK, here is a place where you the reader can make a difference. In the comments section, please feel free to indicate your preference of things I should try that you maybe were curious about. This can include what type of blog you think I should try, niche that you suggest, traffic approaches to try, etc. Hopefully, this will create a more interactive challenge. Well, that’s all for now.

TomG.

OK folks, it is time for the next phase of my Internet Marketing (IM) voyage to begin. I said that this time around, we would take the most profitable, least work intensive income stream from the first challenge and apply it full time to the next one. That turned out to be the Niche Marketing On Crack blogs. Since I am not a person who thinks only of short term objectives, I will also take the niche websites I built in the first challenge and create an exclusive membership site with them. I looked into this and over at various forums, even in WSO’s (WarriorForum Special Offers), each non-exclusive website was at least $27. Most started at $39, even at that level it was reasonable. Now I will offer 2 complete niche websites each and every month. I am thinking of pricing this membership at $37/month for the readers of this blog and members of the WF. Please feel free to comment about the project. This membership site will differ from others in that I will offer hosting, site editing, tutorials on how to actually make money with the websites, tutorials on website flipping, etc. All this will be worth many times the membership price. I am trying to help you all make money. If you keep up with the membership, you will eventually have a nice monthly income. How long it will take depends on how hard you promote your sites.

I will get back to the main part of this challenge. As you know from the last phase, I made around $230 from the two blogs I created using the Niche Marketing On Crack method. Let’s set the bar pretty high this time. My goal is to create 2 niche blogs and promotional articles each day! Whew! I will also change the rules a little. This time, I will only count weekdays when counting the challenge time. Since I do not work on weekends, it is not fair to count them when counting elapsed challenge time. I hope you will not hold this change against me.

OK, so to recap, I will create 2 Niche Marketing On Crack blogs each day of the challenge. If they perform as well as the first two, the maximum profit would be 90 x $135 = $12,150. Now I have to say that the blogs created at the end will not have time to get to profitability so a more realistic number would be around $5000. That will satisfy the $5000 in 45 day spirit of the blog. Also, as to costs, all we have is 90 domains times $9, or $810. Actually, that’s a lot of cash! Hopefully, we’ll get some startup capital from our new membership site (shameless plug inserted here). Also, it is helpful to note that we won’t be registering the domains all at once so the even distribution of expenses should help a lot. Well, wish me luck. Oh, I will be creating a list for all you 5000′ers to join. Everyone who signs up will get insider info on which niches I am targeting, so it will be well worth subscribing and you won’t get bombarded with emails on the next great guru launch, I promise you! Well, wish me luck!

TomG.

OK everyone, this is going to be a long one, so please go get a cup of coffee or tea, go to the bathroom, whatever you need to do to make yourself comfortable for a spell. For those of you who have been following this challenge and who have given me encouragement and great comments/questions, I say thank you. My gift to you is this post, I hope it helps in your own efforts.

I guess the question that everyone is asking is did I make $5000 profit in the 45 days of the challenge? Well, yes and no. I say yes because I produced/acquired over 40 websites in 45 days. I also made some money with niche marketing and ebooks on the 40 websites. Together, the value of the websites and the money from ebooks/niche marketing/adsense totals over $5000. I say no because I don’t have $5000 in my bank account at the end of the challenge. Let’s do a breakdown of all the efforts.

In the beginning, I posted an ad at sitepoint.com advertising my niche website creation service. I was offering a complete website hosted for an entire year on our servers for a very reasonable (I thought) $345. That included niche research and customization for the customer’s selected monetization methods. Well, I got one sale, so add that to the total. I learned a few things from this experience, though. First off, I got lots of tire kickers. I wasted a ton of time answering all sorts of questions. Part of the problem was me not stating right up front what the price was. I did this to get more inquiries. Did I get more sales? Probably not. Second observation was that my ad only stayed up top for a few days. Even though I paid for a featured listing, it was basically buried under the other featured listings in about 5 days. This effectively turned my ad into a 5 day ad, not a 30 day ad. Take $50 from the total and also chock it up to experience. Third, and most importantly, the creation of a 15 page website is a lot of work! Also, this income stream is not one that I would say works on autopilot. Synopsis: eventually, you can build a website creation business by outsourcing the web development and the article writing. You will be on the hook for coordinating the efforts and talking to your customers. Final thoughts: viable long-term income generating method, lots of work involved.

Niche website acquisition/flipping. OK, one of my strategies was to create and/or acquire niche websites. I did this very diligently for a few weeks. I now have over 40 websites. I bought around half of them. Most were bought for $50, so add 50 x 20 or $1000 to my bill. I have not sold any of them. The reason for this is that I intend to create a membership site with these websites and show people how to take the two websites I give them every month and make money with them. If I sold them, they are all more than 30 days old, so they go into sitepoint.com’s established website section (meaning more money for me). As such, they are worth an average of at the very least $300/site. So this part of the effort yields 300 x 40 or $12,000 minus the $1000 acquisition cost or $11,000, roughly. Synopsis: very work intensive. Final thoughts: yes, you can make money with this method. If you troll the webmaster forums, you can find great website deals. All you have to do is add nice graphics and clean up the grammar/spelling. Then promote and sit. In two months, you’ve got a site that will bring in nice money. Another long term viable income generating strategy but again, does not run on autopilot.

Niche marketing: I did my niche marketing as outlined in Andrew Hansen’s Niche Marketing On Crack ebook. I did not put a lot of effort into this and I see that this was a big mistake. I created two blogs as outlined in the ebook. I promoted them on ezinearticles.com with a total of 4 articles. Today, both blogs are on page one of Google’s search results for the products promoted. The total income here was $230 in affiliate commissions from CJ. If I had put as much effort into this as I did the website creation effort, I would have around 60 blogs. If they each did the same as the first two ($115/each), then I would have another $6,900 and I would have this in the bank and succeeded with flying colors in this challenge because there is no money outlay and I don’t have to deal with customers. Synopsis: very promising income generating method, requires work in the beginning, but is a semi-autopilot business model. Final thoughts: this is a viable mid-term strategy. Even though I need to test this further, you can make money hands off with this method. You must be aware of a couple of caveats. The first is you must monitor your website’s standing in the SE’s and write an article every so often to keep the traffic going. The second is you must keep researching products to promote as your success is directly related to how hot a product is.

Let’s go with miscellaneous items. Adsense in all of this was about $35. This is totally hands off. It is also abysmal. Ebook sales came in at $57. Not bad considering the fact that this was from pretty much zero promotion. Definitely, this method has much more potential than adsense.

Here are some final thoughts for your brain. I have to say that the biggest barrier to my success was me and my attitude and my surroundings. As some of you know from this very blog, I had a hernia and complications which sent me to the hospital. The situation has not been completely resolved yet. Lesson here is your health is your number one priority. Another main issue is work environment. I gave up my office at the beginning of this year because I discontinued shipping physical products from TMG Computers, Inc. This website was generating around $4000/month in income. I stopped it cold turkey to focus on IM. In retrospect, maybe this was a little premature and probably very stupid. Oh well, you live and learn from your mistakes. The problem right now is having a home office has really eroded my productivity. If you have children, you know how bad this can get. I am in the process of building a separate office in our basement. Let’s do a breakdown of all the income streams:

1) Niche website service: $295 profit
2) Niche websites: $11,000 virtual profit - not acutalized
3) Niche Marketing On Crack: $230 profit
4) Adsense + ebooks: $92
Total actual profit: $617
Total virtual profit: $11,000

So, it is up to you the reader to decide if I made it or failed. Here are my next steps. If you want me to create an ebook of these experiences, I will do it and make it available for free. Please post here if interested. I will also be restarting the 45 day challenge armed with my experiences from the first challenge. In the spirit of this blog, I will do the challenge with a different approach every 45 days. Please feel free to post comments/suggestions. Thanks for listening and have a successful day.

TomG.