Multiple Income Streams – Getting Pumped!
Welcome back! Have you joined my mailing list yet?
I am so excited about this! I'm getting ready to dive into another home business opportunity. This one should be easy to set up and run.
What, you think I'm going to tell you what it is?
Yes. You know I will. My first priority though is getting the money to start up the venture. I'm already over half-way there. And actually, I'm helping out my mother with this. We found an opportunity that has potential, is safe, and I personally know a person making money from it.
And the best part is that it's going to help everyone out. It's a win-win situation! But hey, that's what you've got to do to make money online, find situations that benefit people and hit them hard.
We are working as fast as possible to get that launched soon. I'm totally stoked about this, and you should be, too. If you want to find out more, I'd recommend joining my mailing list. As soon as it goes live, I will be sending out information, so if you aren't on board, you need to get there!
If you like these posts and want to stay in the loop, please subscribe to my RSS feed and follow me on Twitter. And if you really like this stuff, you can buy me a coffee! Oh, and if you like being an insider, be sure to join the mailing list...I never spam, but you will get some insider specials!
Use Your Skills to Your Advantage
Right now is a very turbulent time in my personal life. As some of you know, I've been driving a truck for the last few years. It's been decent, but it's hardly the lifestyle that a man with young children needs to have. Of course, you have to take care of them and support them, so you do what you have to do.
Until last week, when they fired me. Some other personal issues had a serious negative effect on my job performance, and try as I might to keep them from interfering, they did. So now, I have some very hard decisions to make.
Monday I will be starting a new job in a call center, doing support for a major company. I've done work like this before, and let me tell you it was stressful. At least supporting those blasted Compaq Presario systems was. In addition, I'll have to get a second job if I want to afford a place to live. On top of that, I have to be out of where I'm living now this coming weekend. It's a bit overwhelming...heh.
But I say all of that to lead into the real topic of this article. You see, a year ago I tried to get this same job at the same place and was rejected because of a lack of "recent relevant experience". Any of you who have ever changed careers know exactly what I'm talking about. You have to find a way to use what you know to your advantage, both in the analog world and when you want to make money online.
I was looking over my resume, trying to figure out just what it was that I was lacking. I mean, I had plenty of relevant experience, but customer service...well, it was there. You just couldn't see it when you looked and saw the title "OTR Driver". The fact is, we dealt with our customers at every stop. We had to do what it took to keep them happy. We had to sometimes diffuse tense situations when tops came in damaged or we were running late.
Bingo. You need to analyze what it is that you do in order to find out exactly which skills you do have.
How can this apply to making money online? Well, when I looked over my ridiculous work history, there were several things that I've done that I can leverage as experience. I can apply that not only to my analog job, but also my digital one. Here are a few of the things I've managed to leverage:
Blogging, Freelance Writing, Affiliate Marketing - I've been doing this stuff since the end of 2007. It's made a bit of money. I am responsible for tracking my income, finding new clients, producing content, communicating with clients, editing my work, tracking invoices...you get the idea. With that much experience that would normally be taken for granted, I decided to put that on the resume under the header 'self-employed'. It took time to develop those skills, and there was enough to justify putting it down on paper.
Radio/Voice Work - I've done a couple gigs in radio. I have also noticed that, while rare, you can find jobs on Digital Point recording spoken testimonials and stuff. So I decided I should leverage this and put an ad on DP offering a great deal on a 30-second bit of audio (complete with editing).
Basic Math - While it is true that this might not directly help you make money online, it can definitely help you when it comes to keeping your sanity and getting paid a fair amount for your work. Yesterday I was asked by a client (hey Ryan, :p) what my price was for doing link building. Since he was asking for a monthly price based on 8 hours per day x 5 days per week, I quoted him $1500 per month. Of course, he freaked out. He wanted to only pay me $150 for that same amount of work, which breaks down to around $0.94/hr. I do understand that he, being from India, has a far different currency system that we do here in the US, but I think most people who are regularly doing business on DP tend to expect everyone to work for the same low rates. Right now, it takes about 49 Rupees to make 1 USD. From what I understand, it only takes about 15 to buy a decent meal in India. But here, it takes a bit more. I really couldn't justify spending that amount of time working for that small of a payment. Not that I didn't appreciate the offer, but it just wasn't worth my time.
I'm sure there are tons of other skills you have. You just need to step back, look at what you have done or are doing, and enumerate them. Then, milk 'em!
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Diversity in Monetization
It seems like every time I'm hanging around on the Digital Point forums, I see somebody ask questions along the line of 'how can I make money online with my site?' only to be bombarded with a salvo of answers that contain one piece of advice.
Not that getting a random persons favorite network (most likely Google AdSense) is a bad thing, but many people fail to branch out beyond one network at a time and simply choose to sit around scratching their heads wondering why they aren't putting money in their pocket.
If you have ever watched any stock market advice shows, or listened to Dave Ramsey, you already know the best method. The answer is simple: diversify!
First, if your website is getting a ton of traffic, then Google AdSense might be a good thing to run. However, if you only rely on AdSense for income, you are not playing with a full deck. You are simply trusting that some of those visitors will click on the ads. Since that's not guaranteed (and many people tend to get ad blindness), you need to do more than just run AdSense.
You might look into something a bit more mouse-catching, like Kontera. No, I'm not saying replace AdSense...run both! Kontera, at least for me, gets more clicks because many people are curious about the double underlined keywords in my articles. Not only that, but there are many people on the net that aren't quite as marketing savvy as some of us, and see a link that looks a bit funny and are, for some unknown reason, compelled to click it just to see what happens.
Yeah, those are the people that want you to fix their computer on the weekends because their kids broke the dang thing on that internet...whatsit...
But lets' take this a step further. You can have all of the good traffic in the world, but if people don't click your AdSense or Kontera links, you get nothing. That's why, if you are pulling good traffic, you need to also get hooked up with a CPM ad network like ADSDAQ or AdBrite. That way, you get paid based on the number of impressions the ad makes, regardless of whether people click it or not.
Also, if your blog is well established, you could probably sell some adspace directly to readers or other bloggers in your niche. Pure profit is a good thing!
If you are only using one or two monetiziation methods on your site, you are missing out on untapped opportunity. Branch out! Get paid!
If you like these posts and want to stay in the loop, please subscribe to my RSS feed and follow me on Twitter. And if you really like this stuff, you can buy me a coffee! Oh, and if you like being an insider, be sure to join the mailing list...I never spam, but you will get some insider specials!
Amazon Associates: How To Get More Customers
I'm sure that there are many of us who are members of the Amazon Associates program. We all know that it can be tricky to get sales, especially in a down economy. However, I've found a way to provide some good deals to your customers that will be like a call to action, thereby spurring your economy.
First, you need to find good deals on Amazon. There are a couple of ways to do this, but for the sake of making this super easy, I've found a tool online to take the hassle out of URL hacking. This tool is called Amazargains, and it's actually great for finding those items that have been given deep discounts.
Fire up Amazargains and use it to generate a link to items in your chosen category with discounts applied. Then, select the discounted items and create a link to them in your Amazon Associates account.
You know, things like computer RAM, flash drives, and other memory is hard to pass up when it's 80-90% off...
I think you can figure out how to make this work from here. Good luck, and happy selling!
If you like these posts and want to stay in the loop, please subscribe to my RSS feed and follow me on Twitter. And if you really like this stuff, you can buy me a coffee! Oh, and if you like being an insider, be sure to join the mailing list...I never spam, but you will get some insider specials!
Stimator: Find the Value of Your Website!
Somehow I was wading through a list of links that brought me to something interesting. I found a new tool that can help you find the monetary value of your website called Stimator.
Stimator digs through six different things (which I will not detail here...you will just have to try it out for yourself) to come up with a rough estimate of what would be a decent value if you were to try to sell your website. This would be useful if you were, indeed, planning on selling out. It would also be very useful if you just wanted to gloat that your blog could fetch more cash than your friend's blog.
As you can see, the report generated can be very useful when it comes to finding out some areas you need to work on to increase the value of your website. In addition, Stimator also gives you this nifty little widget in your reports to show off to your readers:
If you like these posts and want to stay in the loop, please subscribe to my RSS feed and follow me on Twitter. And if you really like this stuff, you can buy me a coffee! Oh, and if you like being an insider, be sure to join the mailing list...I never spam, but you will get some insider specials!
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