Forum Moderators: skibum
1. Move back in with parents
2. Get a job at burger king
Now, you might be thinking to yourself that, while not particularly appealing, niether of these options is really all that terrible. And you would be wrong. I won't go into why this is the case at this point, but for now it should suffice to say that I would rather sell my body to complete strangers. And before anyone tells me to just go ahead and do that, I'm far too ugly to make anywhere even close to $100 a day, so don't bother.
Believe it or not, the mere thought of either of these things is enough to get the hair on the back of my neck to stand up on end, and as the complete financial meltdown gets closer, my psychological state is deteriorating ever more rapidly. Whilst only a few days ago I could push the thoughts of impending doom to the back of my mind, now I wake up with cold sweats on a regular basis. Yesterday my girlfriend told me I started hysterically screaming 'do you want fries with that?' and 'you can upsize that for 70 cents' at random intervals throughout the night.
To save my sanity and avoid emotional castration, I had to come up with a plan. Unfortunately, as well as being lazy, I'm also not the sharpest tool in the shed, so my plan is really not all that good. Basically, it goes something like this:
Step 1: Start up a website
Step 2: Find a related affiliate/advertising partner
Step 3: Get hits and sell stuff
Step 4: Bring in $100/day on a regular basis within 3 months time.
Step 5: Avoid asylum
So yeah.. that's, uh, pretty much the master plan...
Now I assume at this stage most of you are either shaking your head or laughing at me (or a combination of the two).
You're perfectly justified in doing so, but I'm still going to try. Although the odds are stacked against me, I do have a few factors working in my favour.
First, I've got lots of time on my hands. Theoretically, I could work 8-10 hours a day for the next 3 months on this.
Second, I've got reasonable web design skills. While I don't have any official qualifications, I'm decent at HTML and Photoshop, so I can at least create semi-professional looking sites.
Third, I've got about $400 that I can use as a marketing budget - pretty much what's left of my savings after I budget for 3 months of rent, food & misc. expenses.
Fourth, I have a basic understanding of affiliate marketing and SEO, since I occasionally read WW when I see something interesting.
And finally, I really, really, really don't want to move back home or work at burger king.
Now the purpose of this thread is to doccument my quest. Every day I will post a status report that details what I have done as well as how much money I have brought in. I'll also write a breif reflection on anything I've learned, and probably rant on about various unrelated things as my emotional state continues to deteriorate.
I hope you come along for the ride and whether I succeed or fail I'm sure it will be quite entertaining and I hope that you'll leave me a little tip, some encouragement or a scrap of advice once in a while.
Day 1 of 90 starts tomorrow - I hope to see you then.
Jonathan
Or to relate more closely to this thread - yes, you could fail. Learn from any failures and try again. You may not succeed on the original plan, but you should learn something along the way.
What is the worst that could happen? You could learn some valuable stuff that pays off handsomely some time later. I know I did when I failed at affiliate marketing.
Guess the guy is either back with his parents or at Burger King.
Why so much negativity? Why, every time he goes ten days without posting, as requested of him by the admins do people always jump on him and accuse him of somehow failing to live up to some purported bargain?
He's doing just fine. He'll post when he posts. As long as it is at least two weeks between updates, that's his choice.
And apologies to everyone for not posting an update sooner, I had an assignment due so had to put the blogging on hold for a few days.
Actually, in truth there's not that much to report. I still haven't put up any ads for some reason - I guess I'm a little freaked out by the possibility of no one clicking on them, as absurd as that sounds. I have identified quite a few perfectly suited affiliate programs though - so I suppose I should just man up and take the plunge.
The good news is that my traffic has been steadily building. One of my posts briefly made it to the second page on a certain popular social news site (not sure if we're allowed to mention names, but the site in question rhymes with 'Schmeddit'), and that got me 1500 visits in the space of a few hours. Indeed, I expect that sometime in the next week I will have received my 6000th unique visitor to the site, which I think is pretty damn good for only 6 weeks worth of posting.
Again, I know I say this every time but I just wanted to say thanks for everyone who has PM'd me (especially one awesome lady who is too shy to actually post on the forum!), and to everyone who has posted in this thread. Hopefully I'll have some more interesting news to report soon.
By the way, for anyone who's giving this blogging thing a shot, here are a few things I've learned so far (please feel free to add to this list if I've missed anything):
1. Post often. I try to hammer out at least one quality article per day. I think people generally have a daily routine when it comes to checking out websites, and I want to give them something new each time they visit.
2. Network. I hate that word almost as much as I hate the word 'blogosphere', but you really do need to get the bigger fish to notice you. I try to leave intelligent comments on related blogs every few days, offer to write guest posts for anyone and everyone (I'm hoping this will really pay off when Google does its next crawl or whatever it's called) and hang around at popular blogging forums.
3. Don't get too obsessed with your reader numbers. I try to ignore them, or at least view them impartially. While they are a useful guide in determining what articles people find interesting, the fluctuations can really mess with my emotions. A couple of weeks ago I wrote what I thought was a really good article and the next day my reader numbers dipped a bit. I got really, really depressed. The next day they were way up and I was euphoric. Moral of the story: Looking into your reader numbers too much will give you bipolar and/or manic depression.
4. When inspiration strikes, make the most of it. This one is really important. If you're on a roll, don't stop - keep going until your fingers ache. Remember that for every day you're in the zone there'll be a day when you just can't be bothered. It'll help if you have a stockpile of quality articles saved on your harddrive.
5. Don't be afraid to try new things. Kinda cliche, but good advice nonetheless. I honestly have no idea what my site's demographic is, or what my readers are interested in. Indeed, I think that readers themselves are often not sure what they're looking for until it smack them in the face, so I'm trying as many different approaches as possible.
6. Make it personal. This is a HUGE one, especially (I think) in my niche. There are literally tens of thousands of boring, dry finance articles out there. The only thing that will separate me from the pack is if readers can 'connect' with my writing. I've tried to draw on anecdotes (both real and fictional :), and have even tried writing from a few different persona's. It's kinda sneaky, but if it helps me reach my goal I won't be losing much sleep over it.
7. Take the bad days with the good. Some days you will just feel like throwing in the towel, and some days you will feel like you're going to be the next Bill Gates. I'm not 100% certain, but I'd bet my kidneys that most bloggers fail not because they can't write, but because they don't last the distance.
8. Write for skimmers, not readers. I've found that writing for the internet is quite different to writing for 'offline' mediums. I try to use lots of sub-headings and bold font for my important points, so visitors can pick out the most crucial info at a glance. No one likes being confronted with a wall of text.
Well, that's it for now. Will post again soon.
Jonathan
What analytics are you using? You should be able to see things like
- what keyords they search on
- geographic distribution
- where they came from
That tells you a fair bit. If you aren't Google-phobic and sign up fro Webmaster Tools you can see which pages of yours show most often in searches, and which ones get clicked the most often. The difference between those two sets should tell you something.
Finally you have services like HitTail that automate some of that and try to tell you which phrases brought people to your site on a page that doesn't match the phrase well - that's the low-hanging fruit for future articles.
And put an affiliate banner on your site already!
>> most bloggers fail not because they can't write, but because they don't last the distance.
As a writer and a webmaster, I think you'll find this post interesting:
[webmasterworld.com...]
And put an affiliate banner on your site already!
Just made my first affiliate sale - I wrote a piece on Gas Credit cards a few days ago and included a couple of relevant links. I'm now $45 richer!
made for some interesting reading... how people react.
good luck
The past few weeks have been 'interesting'. No new sales. As a matter of fact, I'm having a bit of crisis of conscience about the whole thing.
For those interested, I made my first (i.e. only) money by strategically placing an affiliate link in an article I wrote about Gas Rebate cards. Someone clicked on the link and proceeded to successfully apply for a credit card.
To be honest, while my first sale was a huge buzz, I still felt kinda uneasy about it. It was almost as if I was selling out, somehow betraying the few readers I had to make a quick buck at their expense.
Don't get me wrong, the product I linked to was a genuinely excellent way to save money, and was a great deal relative to most other cards of its kind. But still, I couldn't help but feel... well, bought.
I've also received (and turned down) a half-dozen requests for text link ads or product 'reviews' (yeah right...). Apart from the fact that they're unethical, they are - so I've been told - a great way to get penalized by Google.
That brings me to another point: Will it hurt my chances of success if I monetize my blog too early? I've been thinking that perhaps it'd be better to build up a bigger user base before I introduce advertising into the mix, even with my time constraints.
Incidentally, my traffic has jumped significantly since my last post. I'm looking at my stats as I write this, and from the 1st to the 24th of April I've had just over 10,000 unique visits meaning I've already doubled March's total. Probably looks a little pathetic to some of you WW regulars, but I'm pretty impressed with myself :)
Sadly, unless my analytics program is way off, most of 'em don't stick around - I only get 1.21 Pageviews per visitor!
I my opinion this dismal statistic is the result of 1 of 3 things:
(1) Most of the traffic is untargeted
(2) My site is just not all that engaging
(3) A combination of the two
I'm inclined to go with (3).
Most of my traffic is at best poorly targeted. This month, Reddit and StumbleUpon have 8 of the top 10 spots on my Referrals page, and the vast majority of users who arrive this way don't really know what they're getting themselves into. Reading about credit cards isn't exactly most peoples cup of tea, and frankly, I don't blame them!
Still, 1.21 is utterly pathetic, and there has to be at least some room for improvement.
I'm thinking it might be worthwhile to do a redesign. I can't list my page here obviously, but I suppose it could be a little more inviting.
I'm also wondering if I should branch out into other areas of personal finance.
Anyone have any tips?
By the way, I'm excited to report that I'm starting to see organic traffic from Google. It's only a tiny trickle, 3 or 4 per day, but it's a start. Frankly, I thought I'd be waiting at least 6 months to start seeing any G traffic, especially in a niche as competitive as mine. I'm hoping to get some PageRank in the next few weeks as well, but maybe I'm just getting cocky :)
I have to ask you something: is it possible that you are too squeamish to make money this way? If that one credit-card "sale" bothered you (and it didn't cost the visitor any money out of pocket!), then how will you feel when dozens of people per day are buying things through your site, including, perhaps, some products you don't approve of.....
Think about it.
Consider that most people expect that you have to try and make some money for your efforts; very few people will begrudge you that. I would recommend lightening up on yourself for a bit and just saying what the hell and trying out a few monetization schemes. Remember, the point of this was not to have a lovely little readership that you don't annoy with ads, but to build yourself a $100/day income.
Perhaps plan a few different ad placement schemes and just bite the bullet and try each of those schemes out for a week or two before switching to the next. And this means not placing a single ad on one specific page that you've begrudgingly accepted you'll try, but by making sure you have something on every page. (Some people prefer not to do so on the front page, but that's up to you to experiment with)
Bottom line, nobody is going to hate you for having a few ads, especially if they aren't the kind that pop out and get in the way. Learn to sell out at least a bit. That's why you're in this to start with, remember?
Why jleane Why? Are you doing some kinda social service by just wasting visitor’s time that read your blog and close their browsers window?
Do they gain anything - NO!
Do you gain anything - NO!
You did this to earn 100 dollar a day - don’t forget that.
Get up mate, just sign up for a good ad program and see money trickle to your account.
And as far as your fear is concerned that they might not click - then Hello talk to me. I did the same mistake a few years back and then realized if your site is really good and the ads are targeted - people do click.
Just do it – NOW!
To be honest, while my first sale was a huge buzz, I still felt kinda uneasy about it. It was almost as if I was selling out, somehow betraying the few readers I had to make a quick buck at their expense.Don't get me wrong, the product I linked to was a genuinely excellent way to save money, and was a great deal relative to most other cards of its kind. But still, I couldn't help but feel... well, bought.
Your point only holds if the guy who ended up following your link and making a purchase otherwise had no intention of buying any card in the first place.
If that person was already scouring the web to find and buy the best offer card they could find and when they came across your article you gave them the final piece of info they needed to have to commit to a purchase... then you haven't been bought by anyone.
You've just earned a well-deserved referral fee.
Remember, the point of this was not to have a lovely little readership that you don't annoy with ads, but to build yourself a $100/day income.
But good job Jleane, looks like you're pulling through and nobody's going to blame you or think that you are cheap if you're selling something on your web-site, that would make all of us here look cheap too...
the point of this was not to have a lovely little readership that you don't annoy with ads
Actually, IMHO, if you want to build a low maintenance $100/day income, then attracting a lovely little readership that you don't annoy with ads is a very effective way to do it.
You research, you write, they lap it up, and whenever they want to buy something, they buy it from you. You never have to go out and actively sell stuff. It's a "pull" model rather than a "push" model.
Good luck and now I should probably catch up with the rest of the thread to see whether you are hopeful, suicidal or plain happy
Cheers
As you all know, my deadline is rapidly approaching, and I feel like I'm in a bit of a dilemma. I definitely hear the 'this aint no charity' crowd, and you're right - I am, first and foremost, in this to make money. Having said that, part of me - a big part - is thinking along Ronin's line: that the best way to make money is to think long term by building up a readership base.
As far as I can tell, there is a great deal of merit to taking such an approach, not the least of which being that even if Google, Yahoo and MSN all simultaneously decide that they don’t want anything to do with you, you’ll still have lots of traffic coming in. Some of your readers might even do a little promotion on your behalf – if you’re providing useful and entertaining content on a regular basis, why wouldn’t they tell their friends and family about your site?
What’s more, I can’t help but feel that if you don’t suffocate them with ads, and if you’re straight up about any affiliate programs you’re running, they’ll trust you – and your revenue will (eventually) reflect that.
Time is running out, and by the end of May I’ll have to get a ‘real’ job, or move back home if I don’t start making some more money with the site. The thing is though, I really feel like I’m onto something good here, and I’d rather suffer in the short term if it increased my chances of long term success.
Looks like I have some thinking to do...
