$100 / day or it's all over

[jleane]

I'm 22 years old, a part time college student, and I live with a few awesome friends in a shared house. For the first time in a long while, I'm happy. Life is good - but not for long. Unfortunately, due to my extreme lazyness (compounded with some rather 'questionable' purchases), I am pretty much flat broke. I've done the sums, and in 3 months I will have a net worth pretty much on par with a cashew nut. Unless I'm able to start bringing in roughly $100/day by some time around my 23rd birthday (9th May), I will be forced to make one of two decisions, both of which will utterly annhialate my already fragile self esteem. These are:

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

[soudou]

Well I'd say both avenues have merit to them, but which do you have time for? Anyone else I'd say go for whatever you want so long as both are done professionally and tastefully. But at the end of the day, as you say, you only have a month left for this project. You have to prioritise. It'd be very difficult to build up a loyal, dedicated and expansive readership *and* only then later try and implement relevant advertising *and* then tweak and test those adverts to earn the best... in less than 4 weeks... It can probably be done but as you're simultaneously also trying to deal with affiliate marketing from scratch which take time to kick into gear, I wouldn't really advise it for your particular situation.

There's merit to starting off how you intend to proceed too. Showing that a site *will* have advertising from the getgo means no surprised readers later on.

Also as far as I understand from prior research, this topic is somewhat null once you look into options for controlling how your ads are shown. Here are just a couple of methods for displaying adverts without them being seen by a loyal readership:

I'm sure theres a boatload of other methods and plugins out there for blogs and sites. Just have a Google and I'm sure you'll find various articles on it.

Therefore it seems there's no longer a real need for an either/or choice. So get stuck in!

[edited by: jcoronella at 3:52 am (utc) on May 25, 2008]

[SnowDevil]

@soudou - I'd completely forgotten about that concept! This is pretty much the answer for jleane, allowing him to have his cake now and eat it too.

@jleane - expanding on what soudou was saying; I am pasting a link to a great article below on exactly this topic. Essentially, the idea is to use a cookie to track readership. As soon as someone visits the site say 5 or 6 times, the ads stop displaying for that person. 99% of people who click are passers-by; that is, people who are not regular readers. Regular readers to any site get desensitised by ads on your and don't click them anyway, so doing this allows you to get your ads online straight away and maintain a loyal readership. I would simply warn them in advance what you're doing and how you respect them as loyal readers so as soon as they've been back a few times, the ads will automatically go away for them from then on.

[edited by: jcoronella at 3:52 am (utc) on May 25, 2008]

[jchampliaud]

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.

It took me years before I did anything more than cover hosting costs. I’m not making what you’re looking for, but I make enough to give my family half a second income. The web is like anything, you don’t get good overnight, it takes time and trial and error.

[BrandNewDay]

Jleane, your time is up. What's the deal?
By the way, congrats with your birthday!

[jleane]

I decided to cheat and give myself until the end of May, since that's when my savings will run out :)

Going to be a close one, I think. I doubt I'll reach my 100/day goal, but I don't think it's unreasonable to shoot for half of that, if I work like a banshee for the next 3 weeks. That would still allow me to avoid BK, although I'd be surviving mostly on Ramen.

Thanks for the happy birthday, by the way!

[BrandNewDay]

Thanks for the quick reply. I thing most of us would be interested in some kind of update about your earnings, the sources of income, the traffic and the way you generate your traffic.

[SnowDevil]

jleane - you're going to have to do *something* to monetize your site soon if you want an income from it. I still see no ads of any kind anywhere, or any other kind of monetization effort. I see a newsletter subscription, though I suspect you're just using that to help people who don't want to use RSS.

What's the hold up? Did you read the superfans vs noobs article?

[ildarius]

Jleane - all of this time you have been talking about writing articles and submitting them on blogs.
Why don't you write high quality articles and submit them to article submission directories (can get a lot of inbound links, some of them from High PR places)