New Week; New Plan of Action (Making Money Online Slowly but Surely)

So last week a lot of crap was going through my head. I had up days, and down days, and frustrations and elations. But I think I finally, after 2 1/2 months of this aimless meandering through making money online with internet marketing etc., have come upon a something that's potent. Something that's going to pull me through to September 1st of next year a couple thousand dollars richer (at least). I can't exactly describe it- just a feeling of almost relief, like you're halfway there, but at the same time a feeling of exhaustion- like when you look at a completely trashed part of your house and realize how far you have to go before you're actually done. Maybe I'll figure out how to describe it as I write this, but anyway, I'm going to get on with the post.

Oh, guess I should start off with an explanation of the pic. I figured that I might as well mix things up a little. Instead of jumping out with a boring old image that has everything to do with making money online, I thought I would post an image that has absolutely nothing to do with anything. Okay, so it does have to do with me, a little. I posted earlier I was a huge anime/manga fan, so this is one of my latest obsessions. Kucabara is the name of the main character and he's what's called a "Defense Devil". He's basically a demonic lawyer. Okay, a more demonic lawyer (sorry to any lawyers out there, we love you, but you have no soul). He takes on cases where a soul is wrongfully being sentenced to an eternity in hell and saves them by proving their innocence. His pen turns into the sword he's holding above and he can completely transform into a freaking awesome looking demon.

With that out of the way... My making money online journey certainly had a lot of tumbles this week. I started the week pumped to get some work done and ended up not being able to finish what I had planned that day. This, plus the fact that I was still working on my PPC campaign with mom and other social things threw that entire last week into a no work zone. I did articles here and there, but most of the time I spent on ChaCha earning some cash for this week. Honestly I was also getting kind of fed up with seeing everyone else making money and me making pennies. The ezines I had submitted were still on the back burner (or getting turned down for reasons that didn't make sense) and so I chilled out until about Friday, when another social engagement I wasn't actually attending got in my way.

Regardless, I had a lot of time between questions on ChaCha and doing meaningless stuff to think and I've decided on a new plan of action, as well as a new direction for this entire blog. It's been about 21 days since I started my challenge of getting to a full time online income online within a year, or 3 weeks. I have 49 weeks remaining or 345 days to start really making money online.

I think as far as this blog is concerned, I'm going to quit it. Not like abandon it and stop chronocling my journey- I think these kinds of journals are inspiring personally, so I would never just drop my own- no, instead I mean I'm going to stop actively promoting it via articles. I don't think I really want this to be ranking for anything like making money online, at least not until I've actually seen the light and started raking in dough. No, instead I'm just going to tell what happens to me as I search for that online income. I'll still toss out affiliate stuff and keep Adsense ads up- I'm not avoiding money, after all- but I don't think I'm going to focus on getting up in a competitive term even though I have a fair idea of how I would go about accomplishing that uphill battle.

I also have a completely new plan of action for those 49 weeks. When I look at internet marketing, I kind of divide it in my head in all sorts of ways, thinking about all the encompassing strategies and tricks for different kinds of marketing. So far I think I've kind of mapped out 4 different ways to market online.

Adsense, Bum, CPA, and MLM marketing.

It kind of disappoints me that MLMdoesn't start with a "D" now that I look at it, but anyway... The ABC...M marketing strategy is what I shall call my new plan of attack (well, probably not, but I'll think of a better name one day). I guess I'll explain how I see the divisions of these marketing methods in my mind before going further into that though:

Adsense- This is probably the easiest- actually I think they're alphabetical in terms of difficulty (making money and implementing) level. Anyway, all I pereceive Adsense marketing as personally is creating sites that are meant to get Adsense clicks. Dozens upon dozens of people make thousands per month with this method alone. In truth, some people are making several thousand dollars with single authority sites, like Lisa Irby, and yet I think most people do it the Grizzly Way, which is to make a ton of lower class citizen sites that pull in a couple dozen bucks a month, and replicate this until you've reached whatever income you're comfortable with. I know Ben K. of Make Money Online with Seo, at least, is making upwards of $60 a day with this method.

Bum Marketing- In truth I should have called this affiliate marketing, but most of my affiliate marketing will probably be studying techniques for bum marketing. Anyway, this is just selling products other vendors own or promote- clickbank, Amazon, eBay, and tons of other companies have the opportunity for you to get paid if you promote their products. This is second easiest if you ask me because you can write articles, create a landing page, and then toss out your articles linking back to the landing page. You don't have to create a landing page, but pre selling seems to work better for most people (I haven't actually sold yet, but I have gotten more hops that went to the order form from my landing page than from no landing page).

CPA- I have to admit, this is probably the one that interests me the most. I also technically made my first money online with CPA- I was just on the other end of the promotion. For those in the dark, CPA is Cost Per Action, and it's basically getting paid money for people doing simple stuff like entering their phone numbers or zip codes. You can go into a CPA network and go for a higher paying offers, but you likely won't get as much (from what I hear). I say I started out here because the first money I earned online came from Treasure Trooper, which is a GPT site. How do GPT sites work? By the site owners being CPA affiliates who incentivize completing offers and pay out a percentage of the money they get when a member completes an offer and keeps the rest. An ingenious idea- everybody's happy because the company that wanted the lead gets it, the lead themselves gets money, and the web master gets a cut of the change as well. I was, of course, an offer completing fool back before I learned about making real money online. Now I'm kind of lax with Treasure Trooper. Anyway, I find CPA so interesting, but also damn hard to wrap my head around. Part of the problem is I haven't come up with a website I think is good enough to get me into a network (which are notoriously hard to get into, I hear).

MLM- Multi-level marketing is probably the oddest and the hardest of all of these. It's stuff like ACME People Search where you build a downline of referrals who also build a downline which then builds their own downline and it goes on like that for a specified number of levels. Cool concept, but you have to keep getting referrals if you lose some, and you have to hope all your referrals aren't losers who can't get their own referrals. If you fill out the matrix with a group such as GDI, however, you can start to earn a lot of money residually. It's hard to market MLM programs, though, because of the setbacks and the fact that they cost initial money.

So with that out of the way, let me explain my new plan of action (and hopefully end this post this century). Having 49 weeks and 4 marketing strategies means I'll have time to devote just about 12 weeks, or almost 3 months, to each. I think I might mix and mash sometimes, and probably carry over a lot from one project to the next, but either way I want to fully learn as much as I can within the year about each method.

The first method I'll under take will be... Bum Adsense! Okay, that's so not a choice, but as I was looking back at things, I thought "bum marketing and Adsense really do go hand in hand... hmm...". For the next 12 weeks I'm going to pound the pavement every day- hopefully I'll be able to create enough content to start getting sales bum marketing. I'm going to use places like Hubpages, Squidoo, Howhub and Infobarrel for a small percentage of the articles I write as a double whammy. My theory is that if I target low competition long tail keywords that are even remotely able keywords, I'll get a few clicks. Essentially I'll be focusing on writing with long tails that have a relation to the products I'm promoting through clickbank, but I think I'll write the more commercial keywords (read: buyer keywords) that may generate clicks into an article on Hubpages, Squidoo, Howhub, and Infobarrel. I think I'll also make my landing pages one of these sites or maybe a blogger blog with Adsense on it (this doesn't particularly appeal to me as I don't want to miss out on a possible sale, but I might try it once I figure out what works with actually getting sales).

So basically, these next 12 weeks I'll be working a ton on monetizing with affiliate products. I think I'm going to venture into 5 different niches, and bum market on them all. I'll do 20 articles a day on various keywords in the niches five days a week. Days 6 and 7 of the week I'll do tweaking/backlinking of the campaigns. I figure I can devote a day to each niche, then use whatever leftover time to do whatever. 20 400-500 word articles would take me about 10 hours, of course, so I won't likely have a lot of time left over. I figure I'll keep going with the first five niches for at least 6 weeks, doing 20 articles daily. I'll figure out what is working and not working as I go along, of course, but by 6 weeks in I'll be ready to lop off least profitable campaigns (not stop work on them completely, but drop them from a priority) and restructure. Another 6 weeks and I'll be at the end of bum marketing phase, hopefully a little richer.

Well, that's the preliminary assessment of things as for now. I'll keep everyone updated on my status.

Oh, one more thing- I've made some real money with Adsense now. Not a lot, but much more than I was making before (which was zero). I think that's where my new motivation to continue, and see this thing through till the end working as hard as possible comes from. A screenshot of my earnings, which are pretty sad right now, but will only grow as time passes:As you can see (I hope) on one day last week I made a whopping $2.11. Not much, but to me, the world. It only gets better from here, right? Good luck to all my fellow make money onliners, and I'll see you guys later,

Broke