TomG.

OK, so let’s do some math here and try to figure out how we can do this in 45 days or less. First, let’s just do some math. If we go linear, $5,000 in 45 days translates to a daily average of $111. So, all we need to do is make $111/day for the next 45 days. Put that way, it sounds so easy.

So how do we get ourselves $111/day anyway? We can go through a whole bunch of scenarios to see.

Scenario 1: Write a bunch of articles each and every day. Demand Studios pays $15/article. That means 7.4 articles/day OR 8 articles one day and 7 the next and so on, and so on. Given that it takes an hour or so to create that article, we’re basically talking about a 9-5 job. For those of you who are out there starving, it is a great way to at least get started and pay the rent.

Scenario 2: Niche site creation and monetization. OK, here we have an opportunity to generate passive income. Without too much detail, the idea goes somewhat like this. Pick a niche, something very specific like “PVC vinyl patio doors” and create a site around that topic. Create 400-600 word articles around related keywords and make sure that the site has 10 or more articles. Get some backlinks to those articles and you should reach the first page of search engine results in 30 days or less if you picked the right niche and analyzed the competition properly.

I put up a free video on niche site creation (I’ll include a link here for reference) Free Niche Site Creation Video. The video is quite detailed and is around 20 minutes or so long, worth a look if you are interested in this method. Now in a challenge like this 45 days is not a lot of time. These sites can make $40-$100 each/month eventually. That won’t cut it in this 45 day time frame.

If we got some income from the sites, we can certainly sell them over at flippa.com (formerly sitepoint.com). Sites that already have some income from organic search traffic, even just a little income can sell for a decent amount of money. Think optimistically $300 or so. I like to plan for worst case scenarios, however, so the low end might wind up being $150 each. Since we must plan for the fees that flippa charges, you need to build more sites to account for this. What are those fees? Well, the listing fee is $19. When you sell the site, flippa gets another 5% which they call a success fee. Also, extras like bold, highlight and bordering the listing will add $5, $10, and $5 respectively.

So, for a site that sells for $150, listing+success fee+extras would cost you $19+$7.5+$20 or $46.50. Your cut would be $103.50. PayPal’s transaction fees are 3%, so you are left with $100-$10(domain reg. fee) = $90 for all your hard work. If you put more than 6 hours into this, then you are making less than the article writing idea above. Clearly, you need to create successful sites or this method will fail miserably. Anyway, at the high end, you’ll be making $300-$19-$15-$20-$10(for the domain) = $236 minus 3% PayPal fee or around $229. So, on the low end of the sale, you would need to create approx. 5,000/90 or 55 sites. At the high end, you would need to create 5,000/229 or 22 sites. Since you want sites that are 30 days or older, you would have to do all this work in 15 days to leave 30 days until the challenge end to have sites aged more than 30 days at the time of listing.

Keep in mind that you don’t have to sell your sites to use this method. In fact, I am just putting out the flippa idea if you actually need that $5,000 in your hand in 45 days.

Scenario 3: Do some offline sales. Now this method won’t work for everybody. In fact, it won’t work for most of us. Why? Well, let’s face the facts. Most of us don’t want to sell things. Most of us are made extremely uncomfortable by walking into places we’ve never been to and selling things to people we don’t know. That is why I don’t get the whole online craze thing. You can get new clients via email, though. Just keep in mind that it will take you 1,000 to 2,000 emails to land one client. If you can get $500 out of them, then all you would need is 10 clients. It sounds so simple and easy, but it’s anything but simple and easy. It’s hard and you will make lots of mistakes doing it. Having said that, I feel that I will add some component of offline client acquisition to the challenge just for completeness.

Now, to sum up, we have 3 scenarios to try. There’s room for success with each method. I think that we’ll shoot for September 7th as the start date. Let me know your thoughts.

TomG.

Please don’t start flaming me, but here goes. There’s a new idea floating around. It’s called SMS Marketing. Basically, you find businesses that have repeat business and get their customers to opt-in to a text messaging list with their phones. Once you get a decent number of subscribers, you pop out a message with a killer promo to fill their place on a slow day.

This sounds like a killer idea. No, really, it sounds great. I’ve tried selling websites to no avail, but this one sounds very promising. I’ve already created a website to sell my services and will add this one to the challenge.

We need to pick a day for the 45 Day Challenge to officially begin. Let’s shoot for Monday. See you all on the inside!

TomG.

1. Niche sites. Monetization methods will vary from our trusty Adsense to Amazon.com and CJ, etc.
2. FaceBook Fanpages giveaways. This means giving small businesses a basic Fanpage for free. Read my misgivings about the offline craze in previous posts.
3. The old rank and rent/sell/leads. A model that’s been around for a while. Basically, it goes like this: Pick a hot local niche like “Miami Plumbers”. Build a highly optimized website with a decent number of articles, homepage optimized for 3 variants of the miami plumbers keyword phrase. Get it on the first page and then contact local businesses to either: a) buy the site, b) rent the site, c) buy the leads from the site. I put up a dozen chiropractor related sites back in 2010 and they are on page 1. So far, nobody’s rented any of them. Maybe a bad niche, but still…
4. Use my writing skills and join places like Constant Content and/or Demand Studios. Write articles like crazy. Let’s just do the math on this one. The average pay rate is $15/article. We want to get to $5K in 45 days. So, simple math -> 5,000/15 = 334 articles. So, we need to write 7 1/2 to 8 articles/day. Looking at the feedback on the site, it takes around one hour per article so we’re looking at a full time job here. I am a big fan of passive income, so this one is kind of a non-starter.

OK, those are the methods we’re currently looking at. Please keep that feedback coming so we can start the challenge off right.

TomG.

Those of you who remember the first challenge remember the results. For those of you who are new to this blog, please take a moment to read the last post of the challenge here: 45 Day Challenge Results Now if you take a moment to look at that post date, you’ll see that all this happened in mid-2008. Things are very different now in 2011 and strategies that worked pretty well then are not so great now.

So, looking back at the first challenge and seeing the results, moving forward to mid-2011, how are we going to approach the $5,000 in 45 day challenge? Will it be Adsense again? Niche sites? Small product review sites? Offline madness? Ebooks? Offering services online? To tell you the truth, I’m not sure. There are so many things that can be done that I will have to take some time to think about it.

A word about offline efforts. Please read my post on my offline efforts so far. For the incredibly lazy, here’s the link: Offline Review I just purchased another method of offline customer acquisition. Maybe I’ll try that in this challenge.

Please feel free to drop a comment on this blog as to which approach you want to see. I’m open to all suggestions. Let the comments begin!

TomG.

About 6 months ago, I purchased every single eBook and video course on Offline Marketing that I could possibly lay my hands on. I’ve bought everything that’s come out since then (yep, I even bought something today in fact, but I’ll get to that later). Anyway, Offline Marketing is like the California gold rush of old. The Gurus are promising easy riches and tons of you (me included) are eating up the promises and buying all those eBooks and video training courses in the hopes of striking it rich. Well, I’m here to set the record straight. Here’s the facts:

• Myth: There are tons of ignorant small business owners who are out there just waiting to throw money at you for almost no work.
• Fact: Small business owners are BOMBARDED with all sorts of SEO and website offers each and every day. They know the pricing and many have been burned and are not looking to get burned again. They certainly won’t go for your pitch unless they are related to you.
• Myth: Offline Consulting is EASY! It’s much harder to build websites for affiliate/Adsense/CPA offers, etc. You earn much more money for a LOT less work!
• Fact: Small business owners want results! They don’t pay you because you dazzled them with that lame FaceBook FanPage sample. They will call you and call you and harass the heck out of you if you don’t deliver. Then they’ll want their money back!
• Myth: Getting new clients is easy!
• Fact: I cannot stress this enough. I have tried over a dozen methods of client acquisition and let me tell you, it’s HARD WORK! This part is so important that I have to break out of this bullet format to go over this in detail.

Let’s talk about this for a second. You want to be a success at serving your local small business community, right? Well, for you to succeed, you need clients. The gurus will tell you that $495/month is peanuts for a small business and that clients are everywhere if you just know where to look. OK, on the first one, small contractors do NOT think that spending $495/month for SEO is chump change and in this economy they won’t spend it with someone they don’t know. Now that I got that out of the way, let’s talk about all those clients just waiting for you to come by and take their money. Spoiler ALERT! Here are some of the methods I’ve tried along with my results.

The first client acquisition method I tried was contacting local businesses who were already spending money on the local pennysavers. The gurus tell us that these people are already spending money on advertising and will be receptive to your pitch. Well, I spent a couple of weeks contacting every single business in every pennysaver I could lay my hands on. After a few hundred calls, I had nothing to show for it. The most common response was that the pennysaver worked for them and if I was willing to work for free and show them results, THEN they would pay me! Sheesh…

The second client acquisition method involved cold calling local businesses that I found in the online Yellow Pages and in Google Places. I tried electricians, plumbers, roofers, dentists, chiropractors, attorneys, CPAs, carpet cleaners, auto body shops, photographers, painters, etc. I made over 1,000 calls over 3 weeks. After dealing with rejection after rejection after rejection, I finally gave up. I got 3 lukewarm leads from this effort. Telemarketing works (I’m told), but it did not work for me. It was brutal. I mean soul crushingly brutal.

The third client acquisition method I tried was (drum roll please)… EMAIL! Here’s the gist of it. I tried several different twists. The first twist was sending a link to a video in the email. The video showed the client’s site, the fact that it wasn’t ranked and what I could do to help. These videos took around 15 minutes a piece. I sent out hundreds of them and it took weeks. Full disclosure, I did get a couple of clients and did make over $1,000. Although it worked, it was so much work and it took so long that I could not keep the pace up. I also tried several other email tactics. I sent several thousand emails with each method to see if they would work. More weeks of effort and the results were uneven at best.

I figured that there had to be a better way. So, I tried another promising method. What could that be you ask? Simple, it involved flyers. Yep, flyers! I spent over $300 in ink and paper (I have a color laser printer). I mailed them out to small businesses, I put them on contractor’s trucks in the Home Depot parking lot, I convinced local pizzerias to put them on pizza boxes, etc., etc. Number of clients acquired from this MASSIVE effort? Zero, nada, nothing. By the way, feel free to use any of these methods for free, nothing to buy!

The last method I tried involved more flyers but with a more humiliating (for me) twist. I became a local door-to-door SEO salesman! Yep, I went from office building to office building, storefront to storefront. I talked to everyone from the doctor’s gatekeeper to salon owners and everyone in between. I spent several weeks pounding the pavement. Oh the rejection. I’m actually a likeable guy so most people were actually very nice to me but I really just could not close the deal. I did get some leads after visiting several hundred small businesses. The jury is still out on this method because it’s the most recent one I’ve tried. Again, though, a really tough game and most of you reading this will not want to put yourselves through this particular meat grinder.

I really hope that I’ve helped you guys to get a realistic idea of what’s involved if you want to go for “Offline Riches”. I spent a lot of time writing this in the hopes that it will help someone. Here are the cold hard facts. You need discipline to succeed. You must be a people person because you’ll be dealing with real live customers with real live expectations. You need to have the gumption to pick up the phone and talk to people and get the business. Last, but certainly not least, you need to treat this effort like a real business because it is. You cannot do it part time and succeed. Those customers will call you day or night and you must be available.

So, if you are looking for passive income streams, “Offline Consulting” is NOT IT!!! If you want to work on your own, at your own pace, programs like Google’s Adsense still can’t be beat. Even small sites monetized with Amazon.com or ClickBank products can bring passive income. In conclusion, “Offline Consulting” is not for the faint of heart. It’s hard, it’s not fun, but it can be ultimately profitable if you’ve got the stones (forgive my French please).

You think I’m right, wrong, or just plain full of it? Sound off below.

Wait, one more thing! I promised you that I would talk about my latest “Offline Gold” video course purchase. Ever the optimist, I bought yet another course on making money with local small businesses. It involves opening the door by giving away FaceBook FanPages. Some of you will know what I’m talking about. As I said earlier, this is NOT a sales pitch, so you’ll see no link anywhere here. To be fair, I’ll give this a shot and give it my all to see if it works. If there are enough comments requesting it, I will update this post or write another detailing my results.

To your success,
TomG.

PS – Please spread the word and post a link back to this post wherever you think it might help someone. Thanks!

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I’ve had a bunch of inquiries regarding a membership that builds Authority (Supersite) websites. I’ve thought long and hard about this idea and how to make it doable and affordable. I came up with a really good solution. The result is the SuperSite Builder Membership! Here’s how it works. On month one, we propose a niche. Let’s say it’s weight loss (yes, I know, that’s a hard one, but it’s just an example). On month one we research the niche, come up with keywords, write the content, setup the site. Month 2, you have the option of A) adding another month’s worth of content OR B) creating a new site. That way, YOU control the flow of the membership based on your preferences. To illustrate, let’s say you stayed with the membership for a year. You could have either 12 smaller sites OR 1 big site, OR anything in-between! It’s all up to you how big we grow the site. When you think a site is big enough, we start another one. You can stay as long as you want. OK, that’s the overview. Here’s the particulars:

1) Full keyword research for each proposed niche.
2) Professionally built WordPress blog with all the SEO plugins properly configured.
3) Free setup and hosting on our servers – you don’t need a hosting account!
4) 20 400 word articles written by our writers here in the US.
5) Article submission to EzineArticles.com.
6) Promotion/backlinking of the site via Web 2.0 properties (hubpages, squidoo, etc.). We create accounts on these services and get you backlinks.
7) Integration of your choice of monetization options.
8 ) Profile links from one of our partner’s distribution networks.

So, each month, you get 20 fresh articles with tons of backlinks to each article. This will result in a flood of traffic to your site by months 3-4 and beyond. We’ll be working hard to build and promote these sites. YOU decide how big they get. When a site is big enough, you tell us and we’ll start a new one.

I hope you see the tremendous benefits here. We find profitable niches and keywords and build you a blog empire. You are in control of how large each site becomes. For now, I think we can take on 10 members. I look forward to helping you build a successful blog empire.

To Your Success!
TomG.

So fellow reader, you might be asking yourself “Are small niche websites dead?”. That is a great question. The truth is that good content and useful sites will always have a place in the search engines’ hearts. I know, that’s a vague answer. Let me be more specific.

Tiny niche websites picked up steam around 2 years or so ago. It was discovered that by simply having your exact keyword phrase in the domain name you could outrank older more authoritative sites fairly easily. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, search for this phrase in Google -> red microwave. See that first result? Yep, that’s what I’m talking about. Still not convinced? How about this -> red blender. Look familiar? Google has been looking to squash these sites, especially the ones with the dreaded X-Factor template. Chances are if you have this template still on your site you are just asking for trouble.

Well, now it seems like the party’s over. I have a lot of experience with this. My team and I have built over 4,000 websites in the past 18 months or so and we are seeing the same trend. If you put up a site with very little content and expect to rank just because you have a keyword rich domain name, you are in for a rude awakening. Another red flag is having 3-5 articles ALL with the same main keyword in them. Here’s an example: red microwave, red microwave oven, buy red microwave oven, red microwave oven review, best red microwave. I would suggest that you refrain from doing this.

Right now you might be thinking that the red microwave website is still ranking so why not duplicate it? The problem is that Google has a basic mistrust of new sites. The normal pattern has always been something like this: new site with new content -> Google gives it a new site/content bonus for a few weeks, new site then disappears, people cry “I’ve been sandboxed”, then months later (if you build links and add content), the site reappears and starts to climb up the results. So what’s the moral of the story? Are niche websites dead and if not, how do we build them? Let’s see…

We start with the premise that solid, useful content will rule the day. This means we should strive to become an authority on our subject and bring value to our user’s experience. Google also gives us tools to make this easier. If you do a search on a topic like blenders for example, in the sidebar you will see a link for more search tools. Click on that link and you’ll be presented with another set of links. My favorites are the Google Wonder Wheel and Related Searches. From these, you will discover what Google thinks are topics related to your main keyword. Sometimes the tool is very wrong. Use your common sense here. Anyway, using these tools, you can get complementary keyword phrases and create articles around those topics.

There is a lot more to talk about, but I just wanted to touch on this subject. We’ll get into more details in upcoming articles. Just keep in mind that Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines want useful, relevant content. Create your blog around a small niche and own that niche.

Keyword research is still crucial to your success, however. You will not dominate the search engine results with weight loss as your main keyword. You need to start a bit lower on the chain. Keyword research is part art and part science. If you need help, we have a Niche Research and Content Membership which delivers high income low competition niches straight to your door each and every month like clockwork. For more information and to signup, Click Here!

That’s all we have time for now. I wish you all the best of luck!
TomG.

TomG.

First off, what are your expectations for making money online? Are you expecting to make $1000 per month with no website and no experience? If so, please drop me an email and let me know how you expect to do that. If you are still with me, then a good hard look at your expectations is in order.

If you are looking to build a solid income online, please set aside at least a year to see some results. Yes, a year is the very minimum you need to see income and get encouraged by the results. If you see nothing after a solid year’s worth of effort, then you did something really, really wrong. This is not the business for you. OK, now that the get rich quick online people are gone, let’s get down to business. Am I saying that it takes a year for you to see any income online? No, I am saying that it takes a year’s worth of effort to see any significant earnings. There are exceptions, of course, but let me define my parameters.

First off, I am talking about making money online with websites and free search engine traffic. I am not talking about using paid traffic. For paid traffic techniques, you must look for another website because I really suck at PPC (pay per click) advertising. Alright, let’s get back to our parameters. I would like to say that at a minimum, you should shoot for $1000/month online in a year. That is a reasonable goal. Let’s see what it will take to get there.

I should pause and mention here that you really must have some idea of how to write keyword based articles. Keyword based articles are articles that are written specifically around a keyword that you have researched and believe will make you some money. Generally, you should strive for articles with a length of at least 500 words or more. Your articles should have your keyword phrase in the first and last paragraphs at a minimum and you should have a keyword phrase density of around 1%. For a 500 word article, that is 5 times in the article. There are lots of tricks and methods to writing these articles, but I won’t get into them here as I would like to remain on topic, that is making at least $1000/month in a year’s time.

How many websites does it take to make $1000/month with adsense? That is not an easy question to answer. I will attempt to estimate the number for you. If you are looking at a website with fewer than 20 articles on it, I would say that you should be able to make around $40/month with adsense provided you did some keyword research. So, assuming you can fairly easily make $40/month with a website given a year’s time, how many websites is that? 1000/40 = 25 websites. Each website should have at least 5 articles on it, preferably 10 articles.

How long will it take to write the content for 25 websites? Well, I would take a shotgun approach. I would write 25 articles and register 25 domain names right at the beginning and see which sites take off. If spending around $250 for domains scares you, then test the waters with free websites like blogger.com or hubpages.com. You can write articles and post them on those free sites to see how they fare. If they work, you can then go and register the domain name and create a link from them to your new site. If you write one article per day, you can get all the content written for your first 25 sites in under a month. If you keep writing one article/day for the rest of the first year, your websites will have at least a dozen articles each. That wasn’t so hard, was it?

Wait a minute! What am I supposed to write about? What’s a keyword? To answer some of those basic questions, go signup for my free adsense eCourse -> Click Here To Get The Free Adsense eCourse! OK but to summarize, use Google’s free keyword tool to get an idea of traffic volume, cost per click, competition, etc. Once you find a keyword phrase with weak competition that can generate at least $100/month income if you are at the top spot, you’re ready to go.

Once you have decided on the keyword phrase, see if the domain is available. For example, if your keyword phrase is “big ugly gold watches”, then go see if biguglygoldwatches.com is available. If you are using free networks, then see if biguglygoldwatches.blogger.com is available. If not, add some filler to get there. Put the filler at the end. Examples of filler are “411″, “abc”, “online”, etc., like this: biguglygoldwatchesonline.com. Register the domain name and/or put up the free blog and post your article.

Nothing is going to happen without links! Nobody will find your article or website. Since we are depending on free traffic, we need to tell the world about our site. I find the easiest way to get a link to our site is by submitting an article to article directories. One of the top directories is ezinearticles.com. There are lots of others, but I would start from there because Google likes EZA a LOT! Submit an article written around your keyword phrase and make sure you have proper anchor text. Make sure that your links are varied. You don’t want 10,000 links to your website with ” big ugly gold watches” as your anchor text. You want “gold and ugly watches”, “find big ugly gold watches online”, etc.

Once you submit to EZA, wait a couple of weeks, rewrite the article and submit to 10 other directories. Examples include buzzle.com, goarticles.com, articledashboard.com, ideamarketers.com, articlecity.com, iSnare.com, etc.

If you follow this plan, you’ll have one EZA link and at least 10 other links to each page of your site. That’s over 120 links to your 12 article site. If you choose a very low competition phrase, that’s all it will take to get your website to the $40/month level. What else can you do?

Social bookmarking is another favorite of Internet Marketers looking to make money online. You can quickly build links to your sites this way. Currently, digg.com and propeller.com and stumbleupon.com and some others are good for this. Register an account at these sites and bookmark all your articles. Also bookmark your author’s page. If it has an RSS feed, submit it to RSS feed directories. Now, don’t forget to bookmark other sites and stories so that your account does not get closed for spamming.

Blog posting is good for links too. Go to your favorite search engine and find other blogs that are similar in topic. Post comments there and try to get some links back. This will help in your rankings. You can offer to write an article for the blog owner if the blog is popular in return for an in article link. These links are gold!

So, let me summarize. If you want to make $1,000/month online with Google adsense in about a year, find 25 low competition phrases to target that are worth at least $100/month for the top spot. Register or use free properties which share revenue and create your sites. Get links from EZA and other top directories. Use social bookmarking to strengthen your article links. Add more links through blog posting and/or guest authoring. Repeat each month until you have 25 sites with 12 articles each.

I hope this helps you to get motivated and start earning money online. If you need some free help, please feel free to Click Here! Do it today, the clock is ticking.

TomG.

PS – My friend Regina has a post on making money online that she wrote to share some more ideas. Go take a look.