Setting up my savings goal.
Welcome back! Have you joined my mailing list yet?
Well, I finally got around to setting up an actual savings account (the first one I've ever had). Not bad, actually. And for the first time I've paid myself first...by putting 1% of my paycheck directly into the savings account.
Granted, that's not a lot, but I don't have a lot of wiggle room to work with. My paycheck was about 15-20 hours shorter than it should have been thanks to a slowdown at work. But, it should pick up again soon, and with my second stream of income (the karaoke gig), I should be able to survive the week...if I'm careful and don't blow money that I don't need to.
So far, I've set an initial goal of $500 in my savings account. I'd like to do that by the end of the year. Four months to go! I'm hoping that I can make that happen somehow.
The income breakdown in my head (because it's not on paper yet) is like this:
- 1% from Paycheck goes to savings.
- 25% of any web income goes to savings.
Now, that's not a lot of money, especially since I've stopped pursuing the make money online strategy. Of course, that doesn't mean that it won't emerge in the future as a significant source of income. Ok, I haven't completely given up on it, but I've shifted my focus to dealing with my personal life rather than trying to make a passive income source. It'll happen soon enough. But for now, I'm just setting small goals and making sure that my fundamentals are in place.
Do you have any savings goals? What would you recommend that I do about mine? What changes would you make?
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!
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!
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!
2008 Income Report
One year ago, I decided to give blogging for money a shot. I figured that it would be nice to have a little bit of spending money in my pocket, and I really didn't have much to lose in trying to make some money online. My first priority was to set a goal that I felt I could reach (or at least come close to). With that in mind, I decided to set a goal of earning $500 online this year. Fortunately, I was able to reach that goal in the third quarter of 2008. But you know what? I passed that goal up. Want to know how much I've made this year? I knew you did...
Let's start with a quick look at my quarterly earnings so far:
Q1 - $140.36
Q2 - $224.45
Q3 - $396.94
Q4 - $142.88
The fourth quarter showed a major drop in momentum due to my starting a new job that keeps me away from the internet for up to a week at a time. This sucks. Bad. However, as soon as I can stop spending on necessities and get a decent laptop, I should be back in business during the week.
Project: Sugarbuzz 2008 Earnings Total: $904.63
Not too bad for a $500 goal, eh? I'm hoping to do more than that this coming year. I'd like to break $1000 in 2009, but if I can at least match this, I will be happy.
Oh, I will be updating my 'Money Makers' page soon, to keep you posted on the methods I'm using to make money online. Who knows, perhaps we can help each other make lots of cash in 2009!
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!
Why Spend Money to Make Money?
"It takes money to make money."
How many times have you heard this in the course of your online money making career? Do I even need to ask that question? We all know that it's a common mantra that is used far too often. For me, it's almost nauseating to think that there are people out there who believe that this is a set-in-stone fact of life. There is no law (unwritten or otherwise) that says that you must spend any money in order to put cash into your pocket. Sure, investing in a plan can be a good thing, and there are plenty of ways to make your money work for you to put a nice fat wad of bills in the storage space on your right (or left) butt-cheek protector. But to believe the false statement that you MUST spend your cash to make money is an outright lie by someone who simply wants you to invest in THEIR program.
Are you serious? I think you are lying...
When I started this blog (about a year ago), my goals were simple: make some money without investing squat. To be fair, yes, I have purchased a couple of domain names, but really that's all I've spent in this whole venture. But I can tell you this: I earned the money I used for the domain names from this blog BEFORE I invested any of that on anything. That's right! I was able to make money online without investing one red cent! I'll be honest, it wasn't exactly the easiest thing to do, since I didn't know anything at all about what methods I would use to pull it off. I had no decent hosting, no domain name, and no clue about where to find programs to make money. That's when I decided to get sneaky and Google my way to the cash.
In the beginning...
I knew that no matter which method I used to make money, I would need a website or a blog. In the past, I had built several sites (none of which were very fancy, a couple of which were a touch on the darker side of the internet - no, not those kind...they were 'security sites') but after much consideration, I decided to give WordPress a spin, since I had been hearing great things about it. The problem was that I couldn't afford to pay for hosting, so I set up a blog on WordPress.com. I found that it was very easy to learn to use, and that I could get some really awesome looking designs for my blog without having to hack away at HTML all night (as I had become accustomed to doing). The problem, as I would soon find out, was that they didn't allow sponsored posts or many different forms of moneymaking.
Learning to adapt...
Well, crap. I had the blog, but I had no way (that I knew of) to make money without getting banned from WP. Then, as luck would have it, I noticed something on a few of the other blogs that I was reading that were also hosted on WP:
*this is a sp0_s0_ed post (or some variation of that text string)
That was a bit odd...why would they be changing up the words? Then, as the gears in my head figured it out, I realized that it was to HIDE the fact that they were getting paid while still indicating to their readers that it was a paid post. This is where the lightbulb appeared above my head.
I started checking the web for good programs that would pay me to make posts on my own site. The first two that I found were ReviewMe and PayPerPost - and I promptly signed up for both sites and patiently waited for that first paid post to come around. When I took the first offer, I made my post and used the obfuscation trick that I had seen, and submitted my post for approval.
It worked.
That was a cool feeling. But what would happen if WordPress.com caught on?
Eventually, I got to the point that I was thinking they wouldn't really care. I mean, they hadn't cared yet...so I decided to stop the obfuscation of the 'I make money with this post' stuff. Pretty soon, I received a warning asking me to remove the post.
What could I do? I was waiting to get paid...and I sure didn't want to lose my blog to the rules of WP. My old hacker nature got curious...I wonder if they check these posts by hand...so I re-wrote the disclosure, complete with obfuscated characters.
It worked again.
Wow. I mean, really...checking posts for compliance with a script? That's so free hosting-ish...
Armed with that little bit of knowledge, I proceeded to make paid posts on my WordPress.com blog...carefully.
Eventually I moved the blog to some better hosting that was donated by my brother in law, and then the whole ballgame evolved...which I will cover in another post!
Be sure to stay tuned to learn how I made even more money without investing a freaking cent!
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!
Recent Posts
- Multiple Income Streams – Getting Pumped!
- Setting up my savings goal.
- Harry Potter and the Child Support Payment from Hell
- Reinventing myself – setting goals.
- It’s time to do some house cleaning.
Best of [ ! ]
- A Page Without Page Rank Ranking on Google's First Page
- The Importance of Good Employee Relations
- Twitter Followers Versus Blog Subscriptions