Any Questions?
After my last post about networking, I received a handful of emails from all over the world. Most of them had questions ranging from “how do I tweak this campaign or website” all the way to “how do I get started?”. I’ve replied to each one with as detailed an email I can get to push people in the right direction, but it seems a lot of questions I get are repeated.
With this in mind, if you have any questions about affiliate marketing in general or anything related, drop me a message via my contact page and I’ll publicly answer all the questions I receive soon in a blog post. No question is too big and no question is stupid and too small.
If you drop your name and URL in to the email too I’ll link your question to your blog, so you get an answer and hopefully a bit of exposure that my blog can offer 
Get asking!
Networking is Crucial
After reading John Chow’s book on blogging, I made a lot of little changes around here, one of them being adding a contact form. I didn’t anticipate the contact form being used much and thought of it more as a cosmetic improvement to give the blog more of a personal feel. Wrong.
Make Money Online: Review
I was lucky enough to get a free copy of John Chow’s latest book ‘Make Money Online: Roadmap of a dot com mogul‘. Since it arrived yesterday morning, I’ve already read it cover to cover and left a few sticky notes highlighting useful pages, so what did I think of it?
Read more »
Facebook Demographics; Deeper Than Newbies Think
One thing I’ve learned over and over from every affiliate marketer is that you’ll get better results if you know your target demographic. It’s common sense. Advertising your latest product to build biceps on a site about knitting probably won’t get you many conversions, even if thousands of people see your ad daily. Stick that ad on a forum about fitness or similar and chances are it’ll perform a lot better.
The beauty of Facebook advertising is how much it will let you target a given demographic. If you want to sell your product to homosexual, african american males in the USA who like skateboarding (just an example) – you can. I’m no expert (yet), but friends starting up do ask me to look at their campaigns and help, usually it’s pretty obvious what they’re doing wrong…
The Road I’m On
Today my copy of John Chow’s latest book arrived, a gift from a friend of mine, Jonathan Volk (review to come soon!). As per usual when I get a new book, I blasted through the first few chapters straightaway to get a feel for the content.
After chapter one I had one of those “Oh crap” moments, where suddenly everything you’ve been doing wrong appears in front of your eyes in plain english and slaps you across the face.
John focuses a lot on the difference between a successful person and an unsuccessful person, something that can help classify yourself. Right now I would classify myself as the latter, but that’s entirely my own fault. Lately I’ve been treating making money online as a hobby, a gimmick, something unimportant that’s just money on the side. This is where I’ve been going wrong, I have 18 months away from University in order to make it online, making a living online should be my number one priority.
There’s quite a lot of I’ve realized today after some soul searching and figuring out what I want out of life (both online and offline).
My Problems
After sitting and thinking about it, my two main problems are focus and priorities. Let’s start with focus. This blog is a prime example of where my lack of focus comes in to play. I love web design/coding, photography, marketing, fast bikes/cars and a lot of other stuff – but squeezing all of them on to one blog is tough. It seems I’m trying to please different readers, some of which I don’t even have, and keep myself busy.
Because of this, I’ve decided this blog should have a clearer more defined focus – which I feel should be about making money online. If I want to write about other subjects, I should contribute my content to other blogs or maybe even start another blog about that subject.
My second problem, prioritization, is a biggy – I think it’s where I’ve been going wrong a lot lately. I’ve been doing guest posting for other blogs lately because I enjoy it and it pays. The pay isn’t enough to live off by all means, but it’s a nice bit of pocket money for doing something I enjoy. The problem is writing can take a lot of time up, and when you divide how much you’re getting paid by how much time you’re spending on it, you start to realize it’s not making you as much as you think.
For example one site I’ve been writing for pays $50/article, which sounds great until you have to do 2-3 hours of research and image gathering (or image creation) before writing the article and proof reading, which can take 4-5 hours again. Before you know it you’ve spent 6-8 hours on an article for 50 bucks, or $6 – $8 an hour.
Since I’ve been writing, I haven’t had a single chance to concentrate on any marketing, PPC or SEO, or even write content for my own blog. Although I’ve managed to pay off any debts I had and get back in to the clear, I now need to re-prioritize my workload.
My Solutions
I’m going sort this out by cutting down on my freelance writing. As much as I enjoy it, the amount of money you get in is directly linked to the amount of time you put in. That’s not where I want to be, I want to be where everyone else wants to be – earning passive income. Sure to make any money you have to put time in, but if you put 2 hours in to an article or 20, you’re still capped at $50. With affiliate marketing if you put 20 hours in to an SEO campaign, you could be making anything from $50 to $5,000 in a few months.
So from today, I’ve quite a few writing jobs and made a small list of well-paying blogs that allow me to create interesting content I enjoy writing. This will give me more time to concentrate on my ultimate goal of living off money made online and still allow me to enjoy creating articles on cool subjects.
Expect some blog changes around here too, I’m looking in to getting nested comments enabled, a newsletter and maybe re-enabling the top commentators plugin.
These are exciting times. For me anyhow.
Where Am I?
The blog hasn’t been as active as I’d like it to of been this past week or two, I’ve been working hard now I’m back at home trying to get setup for this next year of strictly online money making. I’ll be making a blog post about my plans for the next 18 months, goals and a few things I want to roll out on my blog pretty soon!
Sorry for the delay, stay tuned!
