I’ve been posting progress reports for each month dating back to October 2010. That’s when I first started making money with my little hobby niche site. It’s now June 2011 and I’m still playing catch up by writing a new report each week. These reports document the income and the traffic that my niche site has generated, and how I achieved both.

This week I’m going to talk about my results from February 2011.

What did I do in February?

Before I get into income numbers, lets take a look at what I did in February.

The first half of February was spent working on my theme redesign. I saw some decent traffic starting in late 2010 but wasn’t happy with the content or look of the site. So, in December 2010 I created a bunch of core content that I wanted to be available to new visitors. Then in January I started on an overhaul to the theme. This was supposed to be finished in a week but ended up stretching well into February.

I had to create a bunch of graphics to go with my new theme which was something I had never done before. Most people use Photoshop for graphics editing but that is really expensive. I tried gimp instead, which is the popular free alternative to Photoshop.  I found it too difficult to use. So I ended up using a program called paint.net. It’s free too, but way easier to use.

Eventually I got the theme merged with all my latest content and up onto the live site. This happened around the middle of the month.

After I was done with updating the theme, I began looking at what articles were the most popular on the site. There were 2.

1. A post I created that featured a downloadable PDF of a manual for a particular product in my niche.
2. A detailed post, full of pictures, for upgrading/repairing a particular product in my niche.

I decided to try and reproduce my own success by duplicating what I had done before. So, in the second half of February I wrote two posts similar to the ones above.

1. I created a post featuring a link to the downloadable PDF of an even more popular product in my niche. This manual was already available for download but I complimented the page by also including a link to a quickstart guide and an ebook. The ebook link is an affiliate link to a paid guide that expands on the manual and provides a bunch of advanced tips.
2. I created a second upgrade/repair post. This post  was for a different issue, but the same product as last time.

The manual post should be interesting. My original manual post had no direct income potential. It attracted clicks from google but there was nothing for visitors to buy. Hopefully people liked what they saw on my site and stuck around. We’ll have to wait and see what happens with both of these new posts. Will they be as popular as the originals?

Income Sources

• Physical Product Affiliate Earnings: $37.81 [down from $51.15 last month]
• Ebook Affiliate Earning: $11.96 [up from $5.98 last month]
• Adsense: Earinings: $6.53 [up from $4.20 last month]
• Total For November 2011: $56.30 [down from $61.33 last month]

I’m down about 5 bucks from last month. Not too bad considering that the Christmas traffic has all died off as you will see in the traffic report below. Phisical product sales are down, but the odd Ebook sale is helping to pick up that slack.  I have no explanation for how my adsense earnings are up despite the the traffic numbers below.

Traffic

• Page Views: 6,041 [down from 8,964 last month]
• Absolute Unique Visitors: 1,994 [down from 3,277 last month]
• Number of Keywords: 1,038 [up from 1,712 last month]

Traffic is down considerably now that the Christmas traffic has all dried up. You can see from the graph that things have definitely leveled off now. There is obviously less searching going on. Even the number of keywords is down by about 700.

Have a look at the traffic sources for February.

I’m pleased with my income for February but I’ve got a lot of work to do in order to bring the numbers up to something respectable. My traffic is back to normal now after the Christmas spike.  Now I need more traffic and more content with the opportunity to generate revenue.  That’s what it will take to bring my site to the next level and these are the things I should be focusing on.

I’ve been posting progress reports for each month dating back to October 2010. That’s when I first started making money with my little hobby niche site. It’s now June 2011 and I’m still playing catch up by writing a new report each week. These reports document the income and the traffic that the site has generated, and how I achieved both.

I’m starting to really enjoy writing these reports because it forces me to step back and look at the big picture again. It makes it easy to see what’s working and what isn’t. From there I can determine what kinds of things I should (or shouldn’t) be doing. I hope these reports are as helpful to you as they have been to me.

What did I do in January?

The month of January was all about a site redesign (theme redesign really). Back in October things started to click for me when I finally started earning money from my website. I knew I needed more traffic in order to make more money but I was scared and embarrassed of my site. So while December was focused on creating core content (see the December report), in January I focused on making the site look pretty and presentable.

Here’s a before and after of the themes I was using. Note: these images are from the theme demos, not my actual site.

Before

This is the theme I started out with. The Sparsely Green theme. This free theme worked fine but it just felt too amateurish to me. I wanted something more professional and less bloggy looking.

After

I ended up with the Product Afiliator V2 theme. I didn’t like the buy button and “price” shown at the bottom of every post though. I was able to get rid of those by setting up the theme to present useful information in the content area instead of featuring products. Other than that the site is pretty similar to what you see below. I have the Featured product slider at the top and the sidebar is pretty similar too.

That’s just about all I did in the month of January. I planned to have the theme updated in 1 week. But that didn’t happen.  I did all the work myself so I had to learn a bunch of stuff.

• How to create a local wordpress site for testing.
• How to make changes to a theme
• How to import and export databases
• How to create my own graphics
• How to design a logo
• Much, much more

This was a very intensive and slow going process. I knew nothing to start with and I didn’t want to spend any money on outsourcing or software. But, I got it done and found some great resources in the process. By the way, as I’m thinking of those resources, I’m jotting them down right now for future blog posts.

I almost forgot to mention the one thing I did to the live site this month. I found an Ebook on my subject that was being sold through E-junkie. I signed up for the affiliate program and slapped a banner on the sidebar. This probably took about a half an hour to do and it generated a sale for me this month!

I’m finding that what I like about the internet marketing industry is its passive nature. I made almost no changes to the site at all this month, but it still generated revenue!

Income Sources

• Physical Product Affiliate Earnings: $51.15 [up from $50.72 last month]
• Ebook Affiliate Earning: $5.98 [New income stream]
• Adsense: Earinings: $4.20 [down from $5.06 last month]
• Total For November 2011: $61.33 [ up from $55.78 last month]

With Christmas season over and next to no work done on the site, somehow my income still managed to increase. I racked my brain trying to figure out how this was possible and I came up with 2 probable cases.

1. People received money for Christmas and used that to purchase equipment that they found through my site.
2. People received equipment for Christmas, found my site and purchased upgrades I recommended.

I may sound silly for getting excited over 61 bucks but its my first experience of making money for nothing (no free chicks yet though). Plus I know that I can expand the website to make more money and then create more sites like it. Very cool.

Adsense earnings did go down a bit. I’m guessing that’s due to advertisers pulling out after the Christmas season and the fact that my traffic is less than last month.

Traffic

Speaking of traffic, lets take a look the details for traffic this month.

• Page Views: 8,964 [down from 10,184 last month]
• Absolute Unique Visitors: 3,277 [down from 3,562 last month]
• Number of Keywords: 1,712 [up from 884 last month]

Traffic is down since the huge spike I had on Christmas day. It dropped dramatically at the end of December and has been slowly leveling out this month at just under 100 visitors per day. Based on the graph above it looks like I’ve finally reached an equilibrium. I’m still getting much more traffic than I was before the Christmas spike which is great. Now I’ll have to keep creating content to keep that traffic growing.

Have a look at the traffic sources for December.

Thanks for checking out the January Progress Report.  This month I learned first hand that passive income is real and I’m stoked about it. Now I just need to add some more

December is the best month for a lot of affiliate marketers because of Christmas. This was definitely the case for me and my hobby niche site. I had a huge surge in traffic this month which resulted in a bunch of sales. I didn’t get rich or anything, but this is a significant gain compared to previous months.

What did I do in December?

I continued to build out solid base content. In November I realized that I needed some substance to the site before I started to drive traffic to it.  So mid way through that month I went to the online forums to find out what people in the niche wanted to know. Most questions on the forums were about which is the best equipment to buy. This question was being asked by beginners, as well as people who had mastered the beginner equipment and so on.  The answers always started with a question… “What is your background in the hobby and what equipment do you have experience with”.

So I defined 5 skill levels, Beginner, Novice, Intermediate, Advanced and Expert. The reason for this is that there are 5 distinctive categories of equipment, each with specific features that require a certain level of experience.

So my December was primarily focused on 2 things.

1. Explaining those skill levels and the equipment features necessary for each.
2. For each skill level I created a comparison of all the equipment that fit into that skill level. Then I gave recommendations for who was best suited for which (based on budget, ambitions etc).

My strategy was to draw visitors into the skill level posts. Each skill level post links to other skill level posts to help ensure that the visitor finds their appropriate skill level.  Those posts then encourage the reader to click through to the comparison posts which are sprinkled with affiliate links throughout.

After that was done it was close to the end of the month (and year). I decided it would be a good time to create a “Best of 2010″ post to highlight the best new equipment that had been released that year. I did some keyword research and saw that there was relatively (this is a small niche) significant search volume for  “Best <primary keyword>”. So the last thing I did in December was to write that post optimized for the phrase “Best <primary keyword>”. Of course I sprinkled affiliate links on this post as well.

Income Sources

• Physical Product Affiliate Earnings: $50.72 [up from $29.83 last month]
• Adsense
  • Clicks: 44
  • Earinings: $5.06 [up from $0.97 last month]
• Total For November 2011: $55.78 [ up from $30.80 last month]

Things are starting to pick up. This is the Christmas month so I’m sure that a lot the income received was for gifts. You’ll have to wait and see if the numbers continue to rise or if this was just a Christmas spike. I’m just starting to get content up that has a good chance of creating sales though. It’s something I’ll continue to work on. It all comes down to Traffic and Conversion. Hopefully my Best of 2010 article will pull in some traffic and  be able to convert that traffic into buyers.

Traffic

Speaking of traffic, lets take a look at how the site did in December. I’ll continue on with the metrics we established last month.

• Page Views: 10,184 [up from 4,389 last month]
• Absolute Unique Visitors: 3,562 [up from 1,696 last month]
• Number of Keywords: 884 [up from 527 last month]

Pretty crazy right? Things tick along pretty steadily right up to December 24th. Then on December 25th (Christmas day)  traffic shot way up! Based on this graph and other analytics I can confidently say that the traffic is a result of people receiving a particular product for Christmas. The most viewed page on the site on Christmas day was the manual download post that I put up back in October. People must have received it for Christmas then went online looking for a manual to download.

The second most viewed page on the site was a post I wrote about fixing a particular problem with the same product. This is the post that I think produced most of the sales for the month.

I’m sure the traffic will continue to fall as time elapses from Christmas and those visits die off. Hopefully it will settle out somewhere above what it was before Christmas though.

Have a look at the traffic sources for December.

Thanks for checking out Decembers Progress Report. I hope you learned something. I know I’ve picked up a few things that worked here that I plan to expand on and leverage in the future.  I’m super excited now that I’m making some progress on my site. I can’t wait to see where I can take this in 2011.

November was a good month with significant growth over the previous month. In-fact, the revenue almost quadrupled over last month! I guess that’s easy to do when the numbers are still small, but its still very encouraging to see.

Early in November I did a little keyword research and noticed that people were searching for a manual for a product in my niche. Luckily, I had recently purchased that product which happened to come with a manual. Since the manufacturer didn’t have the manual online, I scanned it in myself. I wrote a keyword optimized post for it and included a download link to the manual using a wordpress plugin called WordPress Download Monitor. This plugin allows me to track the amount of downloads I get. I turned the scanned images into a PDF file, zipped it and put it directly on my site. I figured the traffic was small enough that it wouldn’t cause any bandwidth problems.

At some point in November (can’t remember when exactly) I also added an Adsense banner in the sidebar. Basically just plunked one up there to see what would happen.

In mid November I started to re-focus my attention on creating some solid base content for the site. I realized that the site wasn’t very useful (other than the new downloadable manual). Early posts that I created during the 30 Day Challenge were keyword stuffed junk, and the more recent posts were just random stuff I was thinking about. I wanted to make sure that there was some worthwhile content on the site before I started focusing on bringing in traffic.

I started thinking about who my target audience was and what did they want to know. It’s a hobby site, so I went on the forums to see what questions were most commonly being asked. It turns out that people want advice on what equipment to buy when they are just getting started in the hobby. The also want to know the same thing each time they progressed to the next skill level and outgrew their old equipment.  So I started creating comparisons for the top few products for each skill level. Each comparison was a new post with a title such as “Top 3 Beginner XXX” (XXX is a place holder for the product name, get your mind out of the gutter). I only got a couple of these posts out in the second half of November.

Oh yeah, I guess I should mention that each of the comparison posts included an affiliate link to each of the products. I used the excellent free PrettyLink plugin to drop those links. I’ll save the details on that plugin for another day.

Lets get to the Numbers…

Income Sources

• Physical Product Affiliate Earnings: $29.83 [up from $7.75 last month]
• Adsense
  • Clicks: 8
  • Earinings: $0.97 [up from $0.00 last month]
• Total For November 2011: $30.80 [ up from $7.75 last month]

Not bad! Things are just starting to take off but I’m very pleased with the results so far. My costs so far are $8.33 per month for hosting (I used hostgator baby plan with a coupon) plus $0.75 a month for the domain name. And that’s it for my costs. At a total cost of $9.08/month to run this site, it’s already turning a profit. True I’ve got several months of carrying costs to make up for, but that shouldn’t be difficult. I’ve already earned enough to cover 3 months in November alone!

Traffic

Okay, Lets Look at traffic. There are so many stats that I could post here it’s hard to narrow it down to just a few. I guess I’ll just pick a couple and we can tweak them as we go. Let me know if there’s something else you’d like to see.

• Page Views: 4,389
• Absolute Unique Visitors: 1,696
• Number of Keywords: 527

You can see that the site has had a nice little uptick since the beginning of November. There’s a little dip on the last day in the month but I’m not worried about that. To be honest I was going to change the date range to end on November 29th just to filter out that point, but I want to be completely transparent here. You can see that over the course of the month there were several down days, but the overall trend is positive.

Here’s a view of where the traffic is coming from

That’s it for this Novembers Progress Report. I hope you enjoyed it. I know I liked looking back and seeing the progress that I made during the month and what impact it had to the bottom line. I think writing these reports are going to be an eye opening experience for me. They will force me to look at the project as a whole and what I am doing (or not doing) to improve the site and it’s earnings. I’ll be back with the December report next week.

Welcome to my very first progress report. Well, kind of.  I’m not counting the Monthly Income Updates I did way back in 2009. Before we get into it let me give you a little update about what’s been going on.

It’s been pretty quiet around here since I wrote my I’m back post way back in August 2010. In that post I explained that I was returning from a little internet marketing hiatus. I also layed out the kind of content that I wanted to showcase on this site. Since then I wrote a very detailed post about how I handle information overload and the systems I use to organize incoming information. And that’s the only activity around here since last August.

But I haven’t been out of the picture. I have been focusing on another website. It’s a niche website that I started as  part of the 30 day challenge back in April 2010. I guess that means the site has been up for a year. I’m really trying to build that site up to be profitable and I’m happy to report that it is at this point. I will continue to focus on maximizing the profitability of that site. Once I’m satisfied with its profitability I will move on to another project and so on.

In the mean time, I want to provide monthly progress reports here on this site. I hope this will be of interest to you and it will also force me to be accountable. Since this site isn’t an income earner for me it has been easy to neglect up to this point. I’m going to try not to let that happen anymore by reserving one day per week to work on it. At the very least I will try to post a progress report each month. If possible I’ll try to also post another article about something I’ve learned or implemented that month.

Well lets get on with it shall we?

I’ve got a backlog of progress reports to write but I figured I’d start with October since that’s the first month that the site actually made money!

Income sources

• Physical Product Affiliate Earnings: $7.75

That’s it. Haha, short list I know. But it’s a start right? It took me 7 months to get the site to this point.  Lets look at how I got the income.

In April I followed the 30 day challenge (currently known simply as The Challenge) but at the end of it I wasn’t happy with the results. There were a couple of problems…

1. It had only been a month.
2. I was blindly following the mechanics of the course so I didn’t have a vision of what the site would be or how it would make money

Then I figured I just needed content so I started writing articles that were of interest to me. These articles were good but not focused on keywords that would attract traffic.  And they were not terribly useful to anyone either.  Just interesting.

By June I re-focused and started producing reviews of and comparisons between popular products in the niche.  By August I started dropping affiliate links in my reviews and comparisons. Slowly the traffic started to come up (mostly from very long tail keywords I was ranking for by fluke). Eventually the traffic and the content connected and in October I made two affiliate sales. One for $6 and one for about $150. I earned 5% of each of those. I must say that it was a bit of a fluke though that one of my first sales was for a relatively high dollar amount but it felt good and got me pumped up!

Traffic

Lets take a quick look at traffic too. For October 2010 I received 512 unique visitors. here’s a graph of my traffic from April through October.

As you can see it took a couple months to see any traffic at all. It’s important to be patient at the beginning when you’re just starting out.

Here’s a look at where the traffic came from.

I hope you enjoyed the first progress report. It will give us a basis to monitor progress going forward. There was a lot of background to go over here but the November report should be a little more focused. I’m glad to have you on the journey with me and I’m going to try to get the November report up next week.

Not long ago, I realized that it has been over a year since I started writing on this blog.  And, a year and a half since I purchased the domain.

What the heck had I done in a year and a half?

It’s as if I had just woken up from a coma, only to discover that I’m paralyzed.

When I stumbled into this internet marketing thing, I swore to myself I wouldn’t become one of “them”. You know, those people who refuse to take action, and have nothing to show for themselves after months or even years. But I did. I was just spinning my wheels.  Fortunately I was finally able to wake up, realize my handicap, and do something about it.  Only recently have I started to pick up some traction and see signs of success.

So what happened that caused me to fall victim and join the ranks of “them”? The sad and boring truth is that nothing really “happened”.  I just didn’t know how to organize  myself for success.

3 reasons excuses why I took so long to get going with internet marketing.

1. Lack of Focus/Direction
2. Misinformation and Lack of Knowledge
3. Information Overload

To begin with, I really had no idea what I was doing. I wanted my own little piece of internet property  so I could throw up some ads and get rich. To do this, I wanted to start a blog, so I spent months (yes that’s right, MONTHS) researching into the best blogging platform. In hind sight, this would have been a no brainier if I would have known where to look for the information (everyone who’s anyone in the internet marketing space would tell you that WordPress is the blogging platform of choice). After that I spent way too much time trying to make the blog look the way I wanted. All the while I was reading everything I could about making money online. Unfortunately I was reading a lot of bad information from lousy sources. I was also doing a bunch of forum reading. Forums aren’t a bad thing, but they are dangerous for beginners because anyone(everyone) can say anything on a forum which makes it tough for a beginner to decipher the good information from the bad.

By the time I finally started to actually write on this blog, I had discovered that there were many ways to make money online. But I had no idea what was entailed with the different models let alone which one was right for me. A part of me really believed that if I just wrote something, anything, and did it regularly, that success and money would follow. I was more concerned about losing motivation so I started to take on little projects that I considered to be safe (like online surveys and freebie trading). By doing this I avoided facing my fears of committing to a real project which meant virtually no risk of failure. The cost though, was no possibility of any substantial success. No risk = no reward, as they say.

Internet Marketing Courses are Not the Answer

Eventually I realized the futility of my efforts and scrapped those “safe” projects. Instead, I decided that my path to success was to find myself an action oriented internet marketing course.  Something that would teach me the ropes while telling me the exact steps to take on a regular basis. The idea being, that as long as I followed those steps and took action when told to, I would be rolling in dough by the time I  reached the end of the course. So I did some research and settled on the Shoemoney Xtreme internet marketing course. A 12 week, internet marketing course complete with action oriented assignments at the end of each week. I went thorough the course, followed all of the action plans, and in the end, I still wasn’t making any money.  In fact, I was even more confused because the course led me though a hodgepodge of internet marketing models and techniques that ended with me wondering what to do next. I certainly didn’t have a business.  So, I abandoned the project and tried another course. This one left me without any money and feeling defeated as well.

The main problem was that I had complete tunnel vision while I was taking those courses. All of my efforts were spent following the courses to the letter in the hopes that sticking to a formula would guarantee success.  It didn’t. Eventually I realized that in order to make this work, I needed to take a step back. So I analyzed my niche (the one I had settled on during the second course) against my personal interests and capabilities, and stacked those up against the business models and techniques that I felt capable of. From there, I came up with a plan to draw traffic into my website and provide that traffic with an offer that would convert to sales. This is the approach that is paying off now. My website is ranking on page one of Google for a few of my targeted keywords, I’m driving traffic to some affiliate offers and I’m starting to see a couple of affiliate sales. Who would have thought that knowledge, planning and execution would lead to success

The Secret to Success

I really believe that to have the best chance of succeeding with internet marketing, you need to have a solid understanding of the basic concepts and principals before you jump in. Of course, you want to get there as quickly and efficiently as possible. Unfortunately, I can’t give you all that background in a single blog post. What I can do, is show you how I was able to get organized and learn what I needed in order to finally move forward with internet marketing.   So, for the rest of this post I’d like to share with you some techniques and sources of information that I’ve learned the hard way over the last year or so.  You’re going to learn the best models and techniques from the most respectable internet marketing mentors on the net (in my opinion). Not only that but you’ll avoid getting derailed by misinformation and unnecessary hype from gurus and unqualified teachers.  And finally, you’ll learn how to prevent all of this information from getting in the way of doing the work when the time comes.

Ready? Okay, let’s get started…

How to Stay Focused and Overcome Information Overload

The first thing we need to do is to set up a system for receiving new content. Good content comes in a number of different forms. I find that even from a single source, you will see different content across various channels. It’s  important to be able to receive Email, RSS and Social Media updates while staying efficient. To do this, I’m going to show you how to sett up some new accounts to use exclusively for internet marketing education. I recommend that if you don’t already have one, you come up with a user name to share across all of your internet marketing accounts. This way you will have a consistent name across the internet so that people in the internet marketing world can recognize you. Go to namechk.com and type in some user names until you find something that will be available across the different sites listed.

We are going to be talking about RSS and Twitter. Before we move on, I want to make sure you understand what those services are all about. Read on if you know what they are. Otherwise, check out How RSS Works and Twitter in Plain English to get a quick overview.

Create Your New Accounts

1. Sign up for a new google account at  gmail.com using the user name you found on Namechk. This account will give you access to email but will also be used to access RSS via google Reader. There are many other services available with your new gmail account, but for today, we’ll focus on just those two.
2. Sign up for a twitter account at twitter.com. Again, using the same user name from earlier.

Configure Twitter

For the purposes of what we’re doing here, you don’t need to do much to configure your twitter account. All we’re going to do is “opt-out” of some email subscriptions that are automatically enabled by default. This is just to try and reduce the amount of email you receive in your Gmail inbox. Of course, you can keep these enabled if you like, but if you do,  I suggest you create a rule in Gmail to automatically label and archive them (more on that later).

• Click on “settings” (use the drop down menu from your user name )
• Click on “Notices” and un-check all three boxes. (If you’d prefer to receive emails from twitter, that’s okay too, just leave the check boxes checked)

Configure Google Reader

Once again there isn’t very much to configure for Google Reader.  It works beautifully right out of the box but there is one thing that I suggest you change right away. Google reader displays the full post of every article. This is bad because it makes it nearly impossible to scan through the list and pick out important articles to read. here’s how to hide the content and show only the title and a brief excerpt.

• Click “All Items” on the left side bar
• Click “List”

Subscribe to your Twitter RSS feed

Okay, now that we’ve got Twitter and Reader setup, let me show you how to get your twitter stream into your reader account. It turns out that this is a little bit tricky. Twitter provides an RSS feed that you can subscribe to, but it requires some kind of crazy authentication that Google Reader can’t handle. Don’t worry though, there’s an easy way around it thanks to a free service called GTweet.

• Go to GTweet.appspot.com
• Enter your Twitter User name and Password or, just click “Sign in with Twitter” if given the option.
• Twitter will ask if you would like to allow Gtweet to access and update your data on twitter. Click . Don’t worry, it’s safe. And you can always revoke access later if you choose to.
• Click the “Add to Google” button next to timeline
• Click Add to Reader

You should now see your twitter feed displayed in your Reader window. How cool is that! This has been a great time saver for me while still allowing me to keep my finger on the pulse of what’s happening on twitter.  And if you want to respond to the tweets, no problem, Tweet and Retweet  buttons are inside of every tweet entry.

One more thing about Reader before we move on. I categorize my content into folders. For example, I have a couple of twitter feeds (from different twitter accounts) in a Twitter folder on Reader. Here’s what you need to do to set that up

• Hover over the feed and click on the down arrow that appears
• A menu will show up with “New Folder…” Towards the bottom. Click on that
• Name the folder (I suggest Twitter) and click OK

Your Twitter feed should now be inside a Twitter folder.

Enough about Reader and Twitter for now, lets talk about Gmail.

In case you’ve been living under a rock or something, Gmail is an online email client. I love Gmail. My favorite Gmail feature just happens to be the one turnoff for people who don’t like Gmail. Labels. Most people are accustomed to a hierarchy of folders and are reluctant to switch over to Googles labels (I was one of those people). Labels are basically just tags. I’m not going to get into a comparison here, but if your a doubter, just trust me and give Gmail a try. Once you get used to it, you’ll love it too, and then there’s no going back.

The first thing we want to do is to create some Labels. As I said above, labels are basically tags. They are descriptive words that you can associate with any given email message. You can actually associate more than one label with a given email so keep that in mind when you create your labels. The key is to be strategic about the labels you create so they can help you find and retrieve content later.

• On the left sidebar click “Create new label”
• Enter your new label and click OK
• Repeat the above steps to produce as many labels as desired

You can create a label for any category you like. Here are a few suggestions to get you started

• Traffic
• SEO
• Adsense
• Affiliate Marketing
• WordPress
• Gurus
• Mentors
• Friends

Remember, you can always add, delete or change labels later by selecting Manage Labels.

Subscribe to content

Now that we’ve got our accounts set up, it’s time to subscribe to some content. This is the part where you have to be really careful. There is a lot of crap information out there and you want to minimize how much of that makes it in front of your eyeballs. It took me a long time to weed out what was good and what was bad. To do that, I categorized 4 different types of internet marketing sources. In my opinion, if the source of internet marketing content doesn’t fall into one of these categories, they’re just noise and not worth my time. Even so, I’d focus exclusively on number 4 to begin with.

1. Discussion forums. Avoid forums when you’re getting started. Don’t get me wrong, forums are great, but their greatest strength is also their greatest weakness. I said it earlier, but it bares repeating, anyone can say anything (good or bad, right or wrong) in a forum. As a beginner it’s really hard to distinguish between good advice and bad advice. So, for beginners, I say just play it safe and avoid the forums to start with. There’s plenty of other places to get your info from in the beginning.
2. Internet Marketing Gurus. There are some brilliant marketers in this group that we can all learn a lot from. The problem is that the primary objective for vast majority of these guys, is to pry the money out of our wallets and get it into their paypal account. I find that most of their blogs are full of junk and not worth subscribing to. If you get on to their email lists, several of these guys only send out emails when their buddies are launching a new product. This can be a huge time (and potentially money) suck for beginners. I tend to stay away from the gurus blogs, but I do stay subscribed to their email lists for a couple of reasons. Firstly, every once in a while, I’ll get access to a high quality, free ebook or something. This is always part of a big product launch designed to get me to buy something, but I’ll take the free downloads anyway. Secondly, there is a lot of money, research and effort that goes into some of these 7 and 8 figure product launches. If you can read between the lines, these product launches can be a goldmine for informed observers. Just be careful to not give in to products you don’t need and/or can’t afford.
3. Mega Blogs. Most of the Megga blogs were smaller and higher quality at some point. I subscribe to several of these mega blogs,  but I do have a couple gripes with them. One, they’ve been around long enough that most topics have been covered already. To keep the new stuff unique, they often put wierd spins on the content by relating it to a movie, putting a cutesy title on it, and other such shenanigans. I personally find it exhausting to read this type of post. Two, they have large readerships and feel obligated to post one or more times per day. This often leads to mediocre content that I have to filter out. Three, to keep up with posting schedules, and to help out other bloggers, they take on guest posts far too often. This causes the quality, tone and style of the posts to loose consistency which makes it hard for me to stay interested. On the plus side, once in a while you will find some truly superb content from these sites. Also, if you dig into the archives you can find some great content (the stuff from earlier on that got them noticed in the first place). So these blogs can be a great source of information if you are willing to be patient and filter through the rest of the garbage for it.
4. Genuine Bloggers provide the best content. That’s a pretty strange category name but I’m struggling to come up with a label for this group. Let me break down the attributes of the genuine bloggers  so you can understand what I’m talking about.
   • They genuinely want to help people. It’s hard to explain it, but when you find what I’m talking about, you just know. They really want to deliver good quality content that will help you.  These people are a breath of fresh air because, especially in the “make money online” niche, most people don’t seem to open their mouth unless they can make a buck. And to do this,  most of the content they deliver is just a teaser for some expensive premium content.
   • They offer quality over quantity.  The really great blogs don’t post every day. They can actually keep their mouth shut until they have something valuable to say. You won’t have to filter through crappy filler posts every day, in fact, you might only see a couple of posts a week or even a month. But when you do get those posts you know they will be good.
   • They are willing to share the knowledge. This kind of relates to the first point. They want to help people so they are willing to spill the beans on real tips and strategies. And not just high level theory that you can’t implement unless you buy something from them.
   • They practice what they preach. This one is really important. There are tons of people out there trying to teach people how to make money online. But here’s the thing. How many of them actually use those methods to make their own money? Most just feed you information about how to create niche sites (for example), while they are busy getting rich by selling  make money online courses. On the other hand, someone who builds niche sites as their primary income, and runs a blog on the side  because they are genuinely interested in helping people, are going to provide a lot more value. Not only that but the tips they are providing are going to be more current and relevant because they are using and refining them on a daily basis.

Hopefully you can see why I recommend focusing on the Genuine Bloggers when you are getting started. Even if you’ve been around for a while, I still recommend selecting some Genuine Bloggers to be your core content providers. The only problem is finding those truly Genuine Bloggers, like I said, it took me a long time to find a few amongst all the noise. I want to make it easier for you than it was for me, so, to get you going, I’ve created an RSS bundle made up of the most Genuine blogs from my own personal Google Reader account. These are my favorite blogs. The cremme de la cremme of internet marketing teachers. All of them exemplify each of the Genuine Blogger characteristics outlined above, and every single post from each of these people is consistently of high value.  I strongly recommend that you add these feeds to your reader. With the bundle I created, you can easily do this by clicking the “Subscribe” button in the bundle below. You’ll have to click “Subscribe” again on the page that comes up. This will create a new folder in your reader titled “Genuine Bloggers” with each of the blog feeds inside. You can rename the folder or move the feeds to a different folder if you like. I truly hope that you find the information from these resources as useful as I have. I just wish it hadn’t taken me so long to find them.

Add more Content to Reader

As you find additional resources (through Google searches, Twitter, recommendations etc), you might want to add their RSS feeds to your Reader account.  Here’s how you do it…

Find the RSS icon that should be located somewhere on the page. There are a lot of varations on the icon, but it should look something like this . If you are using firefox, and if an RSS feed exists, an icon will be displayed on the right hand side of your address bar. You can click on the RSS icon which is sometimes easier than hunting for the icon on the actual page. Sometimes a site will have more than one RSS feed (a comments feed in addition to the regular content feed for example), if that is the case you will be presented with the different feed options, just choose the one you want to subscribe to.  There will then be an option to “Add to Google Reader”, click that. Then select “add to Google Reader. Depending on how you have things set up, you might see something a little different than what I’ve described, but the basic idea will be the same. You should now have the new feed in the root of your subscriptions area in reader. To move it to a particular folder, just drag and drop. If you want to create a new folder for it, hover over the blog title and click on the arrow that appears to the right, then click New Folder, give it a name and click OK. Your new feed should now be in the new folder.

Start Following People on Twitter

Once you’ve got some content in your feed reader, you might also want to start following some people on Twitter. What I do is find people I respect (generally the same people I follow in reader) and follow them. Their tweets automatically funnel into google reader (thanks to Gtweet) where you can watch what people are saying, learn how they use twitter, and even interact with them if you like. All from within Reader. This may seem like an odd approach to Twitter, but it’s working for me right now. Most blogs these days have a “twitter” or “Follow Me” button of some sort. Click that button to start following them on Twitter.

Start Subscribing to Newsletters

You can then go one step further and subscribe to the email newsletters of the people you follow.  This way you will have a well rounded exposure to your chosen mentors. Even better, I find that one of the best ways to learn is to watch what people do, rather than just listening to what they say. You can now see how people utilize different platforms (Blog, twitter, email) and begin to formulate your own ideas. If you want to subscribe to someone’s newsletter, it won’t be hard. Most blogs will ask you to enter your email in the sidebar or on a pop-up. A word of Caution: You need to be very careful that your email inbox doesn’t get overrun with unwanted messages. Keep your subscriptions to a minimum and try to only subscribe to people who send you useful information. That said, sometimes it is useful to subscribe to the news letters run by the spamming/money grubbing Gurus. I do this myself to keep up on the latest internet marketing techniques, products and trends. You MUST however, keep in mind that virtually every email from most of these guys is designed to convince you to pull money from your wallet and hand it over to them.  These guys are good at what they do, and we can learn a lot from them. Just resist the urge to partake in their Kool-Aid before you’re ready for it (most newbies could probably do without the $2K+ products). Aside from money, you could wind up wasting a lot of time too if your not careful.  In the next section I’ll show you how I make sure that guru content doesn’t consume my time and cash.

How I use Reader

So we’ve got Twitter, Reader and Gmail accounts all set up and configured. Since we’ve set up Twitter to send all of our messages to Reader, we don’t need to go to the Twitter website to access any content. That leaves just Reader and Gmail to deal with. Lets start with Reader. Actually, I usually do gmail first in the morning because it’s quicker to tackle, but for the sake of clarity, I’m going to explain Reader first.

I log into reader every single day to keep my brain stimulated and up to date in the internet marketing world. The first thing I do when I log in is scan the folders in the subscriptions pane on the left hand sidebar . I’m looking for anything bolded because that means there are unread items in there. In particular, I’m looking for the bolded folder that will potentially have the most useful information in it. If you subscribed to my “Genuine Bloggers” bundle, the “Genuine Bloggers” folder might be the one with the most useful information. Once I determine which folder I want to view,  I click on it to display all of the articles within. White headlines are new and shaded headlines have been read (click on the image above to enlarge an example from one of my folders). Next, I skim through the articles to find anything that looks interesting or valuable. . I then click on and read that article. If I really like the article, I star it  so that I can find it later if I ever want to. If the article is exceptionally useful and teaches me something that I will want to read again or implement at a later date, I click the email button at the bottom of the entry and send it to my gmail address. If it applies to a category for which I have a label defined in gmail, I add a little tag by placing an asterisk (*) followed by the label name into the subject line. For example, if the article is about SEO, I might put *SEO in the  subject. I’ll explain why later. If on the other hand, I get sidetracked and have to change a dirty diaper, or can’t finish the article for some other reason, I click on the “keep unread” check box and close the article by clicking on the summary at the top.  I continue this process through all articles in the folder. When I get to the bottom, I click “mark all items as read” to flag the items I chose not to read as read. Now the folder is no longer bold because all items have been flagged as read, so I can move on to the next important folder. If by the end of the day there are still unread items, that I haven’t looked at yet, I mark them all as read. I do this because I find that as the unread articles start to accumulate, I get intimidated. I see a (200) beside a single folder and I never want to click on it again because the prospect of reading 200 articles just seems too daunting. I think that rather than get to this point, it’s far better to just start fresh the next day. You’re not going to die if you miss one days worth of content anyway, right?

How I use Gmail

The objective with Gmail is to keep your inbox empty. That does not mean deleting everything. Instead, you should be archiving everything. To start with, remember those spammy guru emails I mentioned earlier? Well here’s how I deal with those. I create filters that automatically take those spammy guru emails, attach a “Guru” label to them, and move them to the archives. It’s easy to do, and its effectively the equivalent of moving it into a Guru folder. Here’s how it’s done.

• Click settings in the top right corner of your Gmail window
• Click  “Filters”
• Click “Create a new filter”
• Now you specify what Gmail should look for in your incoming email messages. In our Guru example, we might be looking for all emails from guru@guruemail.com. In this case, type guru@guruemail.com in the From: field. You can also set criteria based on the text in the To: field, or subject field. You can even just look for the presence (or absence for that matter) of specific text in the body of your message.
• You can click the “Test Search” button to see what emails your new filter criteria will catch. If the results are not what you were after, just adjust the filter criteria and try again. Follow this process as much as you need until the filter is working the way you want.
• Once your filter criteria is setup the way you want, click “Next Step”
• This is where you tell Gmail what to do with the emails it finds. In our example we would check “Skip the inbox (Archive it)” and “Apply the label”. Finally we would select the label “Guru” from the drop down list box. Note: you are also able to create a new label at this stage. Other actions that you can assign to a filter include “Mark it as read”, “Star it”, “Forward it”,  “Delete it”,  and finally, “Never send it to Spam”
• Click “Create Filter”. From now on, your filter will be executed every time a new message matching your specific criteria reaches your inbox. You are also given the option to perform the selected actions on any existing email messages that were found in the test search mentioned above.

Now, when you log into your email, you’ll never be distracted by another Guru email again. But, if you decide you want to see those archived emails, they’re just a click away in your Guru folder, listed in the left sidebar.

I mentioned earlier that I sometimes put a little tag (such as *SEO) in the subject line of emails I send from Reader. I do this so that I can easily create additional filters. In the SEO example, my filter would watch for “*SEO” in the Subject: field. Then it would apply the label “SEO”, and it would be set to “Skip the inbox”.  Since I would have already read the article in Reader, this allows me to label and archive the email for future reference without ever having to log into my Gmail account. Suppose I didn’t finish reading the article and wanted to finish it before it gets archived. In this case I would not type *SEO in the subject line, so that the filter would not catch it. Later on I would be able to find the article in my inbox, finish reading it, and then label and archive it manually .

It would be possible to filter out every email that reaches my inbox, but I wouldn’t want to. Once a day I log into Gmail and read everything there that’s of interest. As with Reader, if I read something that is particularly interesting or useful, I will apply a star so that I can easily find it later. I then apply an appropriate label by selecting the “labels” drop down from directly above the email message. Alternatively, you could just pick the “Move to” drop down to apply a label and archive it, all in one step.

Going Mobile

In a nut shell, that’s basically how I consume my content. This strategy has saved me a massive amount of time. But, all the information can be distracting when I sit down at my computer to do some real work, and take action on all of the tips and techniques that I am learning. To solve this problem, I’ve gone mobile. And I suggest you do the same. Going mobile (using a hand held internet connected device) instead of a full size computer, has allowed me to separate content consumption time from content production time. Translation: I have less distractions and get more work done when at the computer.

Most people these days have smart phones so they can access the internet from anywhere. I don’t. I’m way to cheap for that. Recurring monthly data plans? No thanks! If your stingy like me, you can pick up an ipod touch for about $200 (one time investment, no recurring fees). I bought mine nearly two years ago and it has been amazing! It has a web browser and attaches to the internet via WIFI. This is perfect for me because I’m usually at home or at work, or somewhere in-between. Both at home and at work I have full access to WIFI. The Reader and Gmail mobile apps from Google are superb. In-fact, I would even say that I prefer them over the regular versions. I still use my PC for configuring things such as Gmail filters though. Apart from that, all of my content consumption happens on my iPod. I keep it with me and dig in when ever I have a minute of down time. This could be while I’m eating breakfast, after giving the kids a bath while they play in the tub, or waiting for a meeting at work.  This allows me to be super efficient and also to focus on creating my own content when I sit down at my computer. I still get distracted sometimes and can’t help but to open up Firefox and google the latest SEO techniques or WordPress themes, but I’m working on that. At least I’m leveraging my down time keep myself educated on internet marketing.

Bonus Tip: Podcasts

I spend up to 30 minutes in my car traveling back and forth from work every single day. That’s 2 and a half  hours a week. Down time that I realized I should be using to my advantage. Obviously, I can’t be logged into Reader or Gmail on my daily commute, but there is another way to continue my online education during that time. Podcasts. A podcast is just a fancy word for describing content that gets syndicated via an XML feed. This allows publishers to push their content to you so that it’s ready and available when you want to access it. The type of podcasts I’m referring to here are audio shows. You can subscribe to podcasts in iTunes so that they are available on your iPod when you need them. Well, that’s how I do it, but there are ways to do the same with other platforms, even the most basic MP3 players. I purchased a device for my iPod that plugs into the cigarette lighter in my car to power my iPod and transmit the audio to my cars radio.

Podcasts are great, not only because they make it possible to do something productive during my daily commute, but there is something to be said for listening to someone talk about internet marketing rather than just reading it all the time. I also find it very inspiring and motivational to hear other people talk about their online success stories. Especially people who have already experienced the kind of things that I am striving for. It reminds me that it is possible and keeps me motivated to press on.

Here is a list of a few of my favorite podcasts that I listen to during my daily commute.

1. Internet Business Mastery Podcast with Sterling and Jay
2. Entrepreneurs-Journey Podcast with Yaro Starak
3. Smart Passive Income Podcast with Pat Flynn
4. Internet Marketing This Week with Ed Dale, Paul Colligan, Michelle McPherson and Lynn Terry
5. Escaping the 9 to 5 with Maren Kate
6. Blogcast FM with Srinivas Rao

I could continue on about these podcasts and tell you what I like about each of them, but I think I’ll save that for another day. Just trust me when I say that they’re all useful.

Well, there you have it. A little insight into how I was finally able to take back control of my time. I spent well over a year drowning in a cesspool of information without even realizing it. I’m starting to build up a nice repository of high quality, actionable  content in my Gmail archives that I can refer to if/when I need it. For example, if I’m focusing on SEO this week, I just search Gmail for the  SEO label to access all of those archives. And all of the best stuff has a star on it. These days, I feel like I have a better picture of what internet marketing is all about and how the pieces fit together to create a complete business. As a result, I am much better at scoping out what needs to be done on my internet marketing projects.

The last post I wrote for this site was back in November of 2009. Yes, I’m still here and no, I haven’t given up on the site. The purpose of today’s post is to provide an update about what I’ve been doing this year and what my plans are for this blog going forward.

My Basement is finished!
Last fall, when I was publishing to this blog regularly, I was struggling to keep up with my posting schedule because I was busy working on developing my basement. It was critical that I get this project finished because I was having a hard time being productive. You see, at the time I was working on the blog from the bedroom in the evenings with the lights off while my wife slept. Very difficult! I decided at that time to cool it with the blog so I could focus on higher priority tasks such as finishing the basement.

Anyway, now the basement is more or less finished and I even have an office down here with a proper desk and lighting to work from.

We had a Baby!
Back in April we had our third child. A girl! This has been exciting, but it has also made it even more difficult to focus on building passive income. Now more than ever I need to prioritize my work to make sure I get the best use of what little time I have.

I’m sinking my teeth into Internet Marketing
Back in April (around the time my daughter was born) I started to get back into building passive income. This time though, I decided to dig in and do it rather than spending a bunch of time blogging about it. The model I’ve chosen to use this time around is internet marketing. There are just so many options in this arena, plus I can build websites about things I’m really interested in.

So for the last couple of months I’ve been busy plugging away at setting up sites, creating content, and various activities around bringing traffic to those sites.

What’s next for this blog?
I’m not planning on getting back to the old posting schedule here anytime soon. In fact, the posting will probably be slow and sporadic because my other sites (the moneymakers) will need to be the priority. However, what I will commit to, is creating very high quality content only. As I learn more and more from the various things I do on my other sites, I’ll come back here and post really useful information about what I’ve learned. Information that you’ll be able to duplicate for yourself. Personally I prefer following blogs that post great content infrequently over blogs that post daily (sometimes multiple times per day) but the quality isn’t as good. I’m short on time and don’t want to waste it reading mediocre content.

I have some very specific objectives for what I want this site to be…

1. HOW-TO oriented: I want this site to not only show you what I learn, but also how to implement those lessons. Expect tutorial type posts.
2. Low Cost Methods: Internet marketing can be very expensive. There are services to pay for, tools, books, courses etc. The truth is, I think that there is very little you should be paying for when you first get started. You need to make sure that you are only buying things that you need when you need them. I hope to help in this regard by sharing free or low cost products and services and how to use them (see 1 above)
3. Information Filter: Internet marketing is a huge space with enough content available to make your head explode. I’m going to strive to give you the cliff notes version here. I’m also going to point you at other internet marketers that are offering great fluff free content. And finally I’m going to try and do some analysis/commentary on the big product launches to keep things in perspective.

This is where I’m headed. If you have any comments on this, please post them in the comment section, I’d love to hear from you. The next time you hear from me it’s going to be some really high value content. Watch for it.

Wow! I can’t believe October is over already. Halloween really snuck up on me, but I had a blast taking my 3 year old son out trick-or-treating. This year my son was a dragon, and my daughter (1 year old) was a skunk. They are so much fun at this age!

Anyway, since my second full month since starting this blog has come to an end, it’s time to share my income for the month. As I did last month, I’ll tell you what I’ve done this month, followed by how much I earned, and I’ll wrap it all up with the plan for the next month.

What have I done this past month?

This past month, I have mostly been working on the Xtreme Internet Marketing Program from Shoemoney.There were two other things that I planned to do this month that I never actually got around to.

1. Freebie Trading
2. Surveys

This month It has really become apparent that I don’t have a lot of time to work at building alternative income streams. Because of this I made a conscious decision to pick a single project to focus on. That project was the Xtreme marketing program mentioned above. As a result I made the decision to reduce the posting frequency on the blog. I’ve also put off getting involved with Freebie trading and surveys in favour of spending time on the xtreme marketing Course.

So How much did I make???

$0.00.

Sorry to disappoint you (and me) but I didn’t earn a single penny this month. Although it is disappointing to not see any cash, I’m investing my time to learn strategies that will hopefully pay off in the future. One of the things that drew me to this course (besides the fact it was free), is that each lesson ends with a list of action items to force you to do something with the information that you learn each week. I’ll keep you posted with my progress and thoughts on the course.

What’s up for next month?

In November I’ll continue to work on the Xtreme course. I’m currently about to start week 6 of the 12 week course, but I’m going to try to complete it this month by spending less than a week on each section. Even though I’ll be focusing on this course, I still hope to make some money in November when the completed tasks from the course action plans start to pay off.

Is marketing in forums a viable method of generating an alternative income? While working on my Shoemoney Xtreme course this week, one of the actions was to sign up on various forums and add an affiliate link in several posts on each forum.

I ended up spending several evenings on this task. I found many forums related to the niche I was looking at but each had rules to prevent posting of any links, especially when you stand to profit.

In the end, I finally realized that this is one task that I would be better off skipping over. I’m not sure if it was just the niche I was working with, but it seems to me that it would be very difficult to make any money by marketing in forms.

The weekly Action Plans in the Shoemoney Xtreme course are great motivation for taking consistent action, but this particular task made me realize that sometimes, it’s best to realize when you’re in a hole and move on before too much time is wasted.

If you have any experience with marketing in forums, let us know how it worked out for you?

The third and final cheque from my online survey experiment came in today! $25.50. So Opinion Outpost definitely seems legit since I’ve now received three payments from three different survey panels.

This cheque from Opinion Outpost arrived yesterday (Oct 20/09). I had submitted the request for the cheque back on Sept 22/09. At the time when I requested the cheque, Opinion Outpost had indicated that it would take 4-8 weeks to arrive. It took exactly 4 weeks for the cheque to arrive. This is at the low end of the specified wait time which is good, although I should mention that it did take longer than either of the other two survey panels.

The cheque from Opinion Outpost was written in US dollars which is unique among the three survey panels I tested (the other two paid in Canadian dollars). This is good for me as a Canadian, because the US greenback is typically worth more than the Canadian Looney. Unfortunately, at the moment, the two currencies are almost on par so I won’t see much of a boost, if any, based on the currency exchange rate. In fact, the foreign exchange fees, will likely make it a wash.

As with Survey  Lion, I was a little disappointed that I had to wait for a paper cheque. The good news is… Opinion outpost has recently announced a new payment delivery method… Amazon gift cards. The problem is, as a Canadian, I can’t purchase things from Amazon.com. There is an Amazon.ca (Canadian version) but …

1) I don’t think the Amazon.com cards can be redeemed at Amazon.ca

2) Assuming I could redeem the card at Amazon.ca, they don’t have nearly as much merchandise as Amazon.com (mainly just books).

3) I just don’t like the idea of being restricted on how I can spend my earnings.

While the Amazon.com gift card is a good idea and will remove some overhead in the payment process, I’m just not a big fan (even if I could use it in Canada). If I’m going to spend my time completing surveys, I expect to receive a cash equivalent payment. Gift cards are too restrictive. Opinion Outpost is planning on eliminating paper checks which would kill any incentive I had to participate. Hopefully they will come up with an additional form of payment (perhaps Paypal) before they say goodbye to checks?

To see the reviews of the other two survey panels, check out the the GreenfieldOnline review and the SurveyLion review. If you’d like to sign up With Opinion Outpost to start earning money now, you can signup here.