Archive for 2009
My Early Experiences with Associated Content
If given time and peace, I could type on the computer for hours on end, barely getting up to go to the bathroom and to eat. So I thought it was appropriate for me to sign up for free at Associated Content.
I submitted my first article, How to Reduce Your Energy Bill This Winter, on Nov. 24 for review. I was nervous. It had been a very long time since anyone has had to look at my work. The last time was when I in college so many years ago. I don’t really get nervous when people read my blogs.
Like an insane person, I refreshed the content page to see if the status had changed. And each time, it merely said “submitted”. I was getting frustrated and impatient. I had to keep reminding myself that I was a newbie and that it was my first submitted article.
About 5 days later, the status changed. I received a short welcome message from the staff. They offered $2 for the article. LOL. Ok so it was something, and I now had proof that Associated Content was willing to pay for my writing. So I accepted the payment. From the time I submitted the first article to the time I actually received payment via Paypal, it took 7 days. People with actual jobs get paid weekly or twice a month.
So on Dec. 1, I set out to write 5 more articles. I figured writing 5 articles a day to submit to Associated Content wouldn’t be too hard. Boy was I wrong. Since I’m a stay-at-home, homeschooling mom, I had a ton of distractions, mainly my kids. I was constantly interrupted for one thing or another.
I ended up finishing 4 articles at about 1 am in the morning. I gave up writing the 5th article and decided to submit the four. I was suffering from writer’s block and going crazy over what I had typed up. Apparently, I was “out of shape” when it came to writing.
I expected to wait another week before my articles were reviewed. Shockingly enough, someone reviewed my work the following day. Unfortunately, the reviewer rejected 2 of the articles. But the good news was that one article was offered $2.24 and the other was offered $3.45. That made me happy.
I looked at the comments the reviewer left behind for the rejected articles. One was because the topic was too common and the other was rejected because I didn’t cite my sources. I decided not to resubmit the first one. But I did add my sources and resubmitted the 2nd article. Hopefully it will get accepted this time around.
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Becoming an Associated Content Author
Desperate times call for desperate measures. This year I’ve been overloaded with information on “how to make money”. Some are plausible if given the time and money. Unfortunately, at this time, I have way more time and no money to spare.
The other day, I visited Associated Content. I signed up to be a publisher a month or so ago since it was free to join and I wanted to start writing articles. However, I suffered a massive computer crash and couldn’t write articles at the time.
Associated Content has 2 ways to pay you. The first way is Performance Payments, which pays a baseline of $1.50 for every 1000 views that your article receives. The 2nd one is the Upfront Payments, which pays you from $1 – $20 per article. Associated Content pays the writer exclusively through Paypal, so income earned is almost instantaneous once the article is approved.
I think this is a very viable way to make supplemental income. There are a few out there that are living off the income generated from articles at Associated Content. I’m not going to set my goal that high. Right now, I have a doable goal of making $500 per month steadily. Why $500? Because that’s how I need to make to pay some of the monthly expenses. Once I reach that goal, I’ll move it up to $1000 a month. Years ago I made $1,000-$3000 as an affiliate as well as being a graphics designer. So I think I have a reasonable goal to accomplish. We’ll see how it goes.
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Blogging to the Bank 3.0 review
One of my major problems in trying to make money is taking action. I get overloaded with information. I get excited about the possibilities of making good money. Then I sit and do nothing. Fail.
Well today I was texting back and forth with my friend who just stepped into the world of blogging for the first time. She had set up a blog about her journey losing weight on Blogger. I was trying to explain to her how she would make money with Adsense but unfortunately, she wasn’t quite getting it.
I also texted her about a middle aged woman who created CooksRecipe.com. This woman makes between $10k-$40k off that one site. Fricken amazing! I’d be stoked making $1k a month LOL. I took a look at that site and it wasn’t a mind blowing website. It wasn’t ugly. It had pictures of meals and links to the categories. I checked out a few recipe pages and it only had the recipe, a few banners and good ole Adsense.
So it renewed my interest in the handful of sites that I have. The landscaping one has to wait until my husband gets his license. It’s pretty much going to be a portfolio with contact info. No adsense. The personalization is sort of on the back burner until I can get my lazy ass into gear and draw artwork that will be suitable for sale. The adult site isn’t acceptable to Adsense due to its adult content. The bay area site is also on the back burner until I’m ready to tackle a monstrous content site.
So that left me with my personal blog, this site, my mafia wars site, the unschooling site and that’s about it.
I opened up Blogging to the Bank 3.0 which is the latest ebook by Rob Benwell.
After the intro, he quickly talks about the 3 biggest changes in big money blogging. Funny to say, he only stated 2 out of 3. Oooops. Next he talked about the “5 blogging commandents of 2009“.
Next Rob talks about market research. This is usually where my eyes glaze over and I get real bored. Why? Because either I get bored or what they talk about is way over my head… or both. I did appreciate that he dropped a link to a website which allows you to make free keyword searches. You type in a keyword and it will list other keywords and phrases that are relevant.
Step 2 discusses hosting and domains. I pretty much skipped over this step because I’ve had domains and hosting of my own for many years. I also glazed over when Rob explained how to install a blog for the noobs. I already knew how to do that.
But I took that moment to go over to my active blogs and do basic SEO. Yes. Lazy. I know. Thanks for reminding me, Rob.
That’s where step 4 came in: Optimizing the blog. I learned something about permalinks which I implemented in almost all my blogs.
I’m not big on writing all kinds of informative articles. Which is why plr and free article directories are great for that. Unfortunately, 2 of my blogs focus on topics that are rarely if ever seen in the directories. Poop. More work for me.
Step 6 discusses promotion and backlinks. That requires a good amount of work and patience that I rarely have. Then Rob talks about using web 2.0 strategies to get your blog more traffic.
Overall good book.
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Blogs and Adsense
So a friend of mine mentioned that she was thinking of starting a weight loss blog. My assumption is that she is going to blog about her personal experiences from losing weight. I thought that was a great idea. I suggested that she either use WordPress or Blogger because they both offer blogs for free. I’ve actually used both a long time ago and I think they’re great for beginners.
That got me thinking about my own sites. I used to have over 30 domains, most of which catered to the adult industry. I was an adult webmaster that promoted porn for 7+ years. It wasn’t something that I was proud of because I couldn’t show my family what I did for a living and I sure as hell couldn’t work on my projects with my kids in the same room. So now I only have one adult blog that I rarely maintain, but small checks come in once in awhile.
When I dropped all my adult domains, I had my family blog, the unschooling website, this domain which I’ve had forever, and a domain for my husband’s future landscaping business. The latter has yet to be developed.
After a lot of thinking on different occasions, I bought one for my personalization business, another to turn into an events/info/news hub site for the bay area, and domain that will eventually be used as a repository for my toons. My love of toons and drawing them have been reborn once again.
Currently, all domains that I have are using the WordPress platform because it’s free, easy to use, and you can download all kinds of templates and plugins to make it more useful and cool looking. I’ve recently started using Artisteer which is a great software that makes creating new WordPress templates really easy to build. And the best part about the Artisteer software is that you can use it to create templates to sell to the general public. The only stipulation is that you can’t use the images or graphics contained in Artisteer if you plan to sell the templates that you create. You have to use your own. No big deal here.
So most of my sites have Adsense implemented into them with the tips that I read from Adsense experts. Funny, I don’t remember their names. But whatever. My adult blog has no Adsense on it because it would be a direct violation of their TOS. That’s fine. I’m promoting and adult program anyway.
I checked my stats earlier today after I talked to my friend about her blog. I used to make a little over $100 a month from Adsense and the money would get direct deposited into my account. But that was a long time ago. Lots of things had been going on over the past several years that have prevented me from focusing on blogs and adsense. It’s called Life and information overload. Damn those gurus and their constant need to produce more and more products on how to make money. The information overload has gotten me at a dead stand still.
So I checked my stats and it says that I’ve made a little over $60 since my last payment. LOL. I haven’t received a payment from Google in a year or so. I can’t remember. Well I have $40 left to go before I can receive my next payment. If I can make $60 per day from Adsense, that would be progress for me. That would mean an extra $1800 a month to help with bills and groceries. I know hubby would greatly appreciate that. I could think of several bills that could be paid with that money. Maybe that will be my new goal? $60 a day from Adsense. It’s a realistic goal.
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How you can make money quick and easy sitting at your kitchen table in your underwear
Lol. That’s the name of the ebook that I got. It was written by Jeff Paul. On a side note, I do apologize for not blogging about anything for quite some time. A lot of things have happened that were completely unrelated to this blog including a very recent (last week) move to my newer, larger townhouse. Yup, my family got to upgrade, all thanks to my husband’s successfully growing landscape business.
Anyway, back to the ebook. The ebook starts out with a bunch of mouth-watering testimonials from Jeff’s students who have apparently been very successful. One of the testimonials I really liked was the very first one from a guy named Mike who said that he was making between $30-60 thousand a month! Whether it’s true or not doesn’t really matter since there is no way to get actual proof. But it’s definitely nice to re ad about it.
Next I see the nicely laid out table of contents. There are 23 chapters and 116 pages to the ebook.
The first chapter talks about the title of the ebook. The title in my opinion is attention-getting which is what the author wanted, I’m sure. Jeff says that as of 2004, a typical day would bring in $4000, sometimes more… sometimes less. I would love that. Hell, I’d love to have a steady $100 a day. I haven’t gotten to that point yet.
Jeff also talks about his home office and how he still has the very same fold-out card table that he started his business on in the kitchen. He pointed out that he’s not interested in wasting his money on unnecessary things like a large office with a receptionist. I can totally relate as I know that when I start making more money, I would not spend it on unnecessary things. Granted, I’ll still have some nice things but I won’t overdo it.
The next chapter starts off with Jeff talking about how he and his wife bought a house with 50% down, an impressive feat since they and their 3 boys were living in his wife’s sister’s basement a year before. His story really appeals to me because I can fully relate. Hubby and I plan on buying our very first house a year from now. Anyway, Jeff talks about how he wanted to test his method on other people so his mentor told him to do seminars where he spills his guts on how he make money. I definitely couldn’t do that because I’m a rather shy introvert and the thought of going on stage and talking to complete strangers freaks me out. But that’s not what this ebook is about lol.
The 3rd chapter discusses what the ebook is not about.
The 4th chapter delves into more of Jeff’s personal story. My heart tends to go out to people who find themselves in debt as I’m dealing with it right now. Although I do admit our financial health is slowly getting better and I thank god as well as my husband’s mad skills in landscaping.
In the 5th chapter, Jeff talks about how he got into mail order. Apparently that’s what this ebook is about. I don’t remember reading about mail order but that doesn’t matter. I’ve always been interested in getting into that business but certainly didn’t know how to do it. I’m also drooling at the numbers Jeff is throwing my way as to how much he started making after going to his mentor’s seminar.
Jeff starts off the 6th chapter discussing the 10 components that make up his system. I’m not going to tell you what they are as you need to buy the ebook to find out! ;) He briefly goes over each component one by one.
In the 8th chapter, Jeff talks about using prerecorded phone messages as part of the lead generation. I liked it because it made sense after he explained the reasons why he uses it. Plus, from a potential customer’s point of view, I hate calling a number and getting hit by a relentless sales person.
I’ve already gone through 10 chapters of this ebook and I’m still on page 33. I feel like I’m only at the tip of the iceberg. So far, Jeff has discussed how bad his situation was before he got into mail order, the 10 components that make up his system, and the reasons why his system works well.
The following chapter talks about whether or not you can use Jeff’s system online. This perks my interest. I know that I’m gonna try out his system offline but it’s the internet side of this business that I’m really interested in getting involved in.
From what I’m reading, the online mail order system is almost similar to the offline version except for a few minor differences. Both ways require you to do some work to set them up, but you can’t expect to get something for nothing.
In chapter 12, Jeff finally talks about how to get started in setting up the business. And in the following chapter, he reveals who his mentor was. I’ve heard of the guy and have a few of his products. He’s definitely a legend in his field. But I couldn’t picture myself spending thousands of dollars that I don’t have to listen to him speak at a seminar. But he does know what he’s talking about. He’s not full of bullshit. I also realized that this mentor added some good advice into the book as well. He uses an example about the “roach coach”. I hate roaches but it has nothing to do with insects LOL. He was referring to how roach coaches are successful despite their shitty tasting, overpriced food. Why? Because these roach coaches go to places where people are starving for food. I can vouch for this because when I was getting my degree in multimedia, I was always starving by the time lunch rolled around. Sure, there was a small cafeteria room with vending machines. But me and hubby preferred to rush to the roach coach and buy food. I do admit the french fries tasted real good. But everything was overpriced, yet there was always a long line of hungry people waiting to buy the food.
I love how Jeff begins some of his chapters with quotes. Maybe I’m biased because I love reading quotes, especially ones that “speak” to me.
In chapter 14, you learn about the 5 basic things that must be included in your ads and sales letters. I’ve always had an easy time when it came to writing in school, whether it was articles, essays, or term papers. But I found out later on in life that it was a lot harder for me to write attention-grabbing ads and sales letters. Go figure. In fact, my “skill” in writing English term papers is one of the mistakes that Jeff insists that you shouldn’t make. Makes sense.
Jeff suggests that you read more about copywriting and sales letter writing. He even listed a few titles that he owns and still refers to. I enjoyed reading the 7 tips his mentor added about this subject. Of course, it helps that he knows this subject inside and out. One of the tips that the mentor discusses is that you should focus on getting one objective done one at a time. This hits me at my core because I have a hard time doing that. I’m a total multi-tasker. I want to do a bunch of things all at once. I have this idea that if I do a lot of things at once, I will get more things done in the least amount of time. That’s not usually the case and it’s a bad habit of mine.
The next chapter discusses the importance of testing. You just can’t assume that once you create a product, you will suddenly be successful. For all you know, it’s might just be a major plop. Which is why Jeff says not to be emotionally married to your products. Anyway, I really liked the fact that he lists 7 step plan for testing your products.
Hmmm… I clicked on the publish button and came across an error that kept me from publishing the entire post that I had just typed up. How irritating.
My recommendation: I highly recommend the ebook by Jeff Paul. It lays out a systematic way of starting and building your mail order business, whether you choose to do it offline or online, or perphaps both.
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The only place where I buy my domains
