If You Were In My Shoes, What Would You Do Next?

Given your list of what you do NOT want, you might consider creating your own product for the niches.

If you failed to build a list (email marketing) or sell to the list, however, you may also have problems to sell products. It could be a problem with the targeting, or with the offer.

Ralf

Hey there Ed

Advice is cheap and not always of any use. However, I suggest that you pick one or at the most two specific ways you want to develop your business and concentrate on them and work hard.

It seems to me that maybe you move around too much expecting results too soon.

I think that in this business there is no substitute for hard work, sticking to your plan and believing it will work.

It will take time and lots of effort or otherwise we would be overpopulated with millionaires.

Hope this helps and that your next post will reflect the happy result of hard work and focus.

Dobbs

It looks like from the link in your signature you're at least running wordpress on that site.

I would guess you are on the natural health one too.

If you can boost your traffic up, get a bit of pagerank (only in that it matters to customers) and show a good bit of interaction with your community via comments on your blog, etc (which you could encourage) - you could seek out your own advertisers.

Find people in the natural health related niche who would pay you $x or $xx/month to run a banner or something.

There are also all kinds of get paid to blog services around. Basically you just do a review of their product or website using the anchor text links they specify.

I did that a bit several years ago, and the minimum I would take for a single post was $10 and I could get $10 posts at least every day. This was back when I wasn't really making any other money though so it was a good place to start.

I think some of the things that are factored into your blogs "quality" score for these services are:

1. Pagerank
2. Amount of backlinks
3. Maybe Alexa rank

etc.

For a new blogger - and especially one who's working in such big niches as internet marketing and natural health I think there are all kinds of "paid to post" opportunities around.

You just need to up your game with the stats mentioned above (or whatever else might go into their algo - I'm sure other people have a better idea and can tell you more about that), and then if you're doing maybe 2 or 3 posts a day of regular content, do 1 post per day of paid posts.

You can search google for "get paid to blog" and find lots of these services.

The one I was using several years ago as I mentioned was called sponsored reviews, and like I said - I could usually get $10 paid postings every day almost between them and maybe 1 or two other networks.

The bad thing about doing this is that it might turn your readers off if you're doing paid posts that are completely and obviously off target for your niche, but again - you're working in big ones so I think it shouldn't be a problem.

The good thing is that if you've got your metrics looking good (pr, alexa/traffic, in bound links, etc. ) it's MUCH more dependable than adsense.

Just sign up for as many services as you want, take a look at their advertiser inventory, and once you know that your blog has the metrics to make saleable posts - you can basically figure out how much you want to make each day.

Obviously bigger and more popular blogs can demand much higher payouts for a single post. What's John Chow get for ReviewMe.com? Like a grand a post? Something crazy like that I think.

Anyhow - if you can't do adsense I would suggest focusing on building an obvious and active community (lots of commenters on your posts), possibly setting up a forum (easy to do with wordpress - I've got one on the wordpress install in my signature but haven't really opened it up yet), get as many in bound links as possible from the best possible sources (mainly PR based), and do your best to get a good alexa rank or at least demonstrable traffic via google analytics or whatever.

If people think you HAVE an audience, and your audience likes you and listens to your opinion - you can make quite a bit more either directly selling advertising or doing paid posts.

If you're not going into product creation and you don't feel like you want to risk the time or possible failure on promoting affiliate products, I really think this is the best way to go for a new blogger.

Just remember the 3 magic words that bring in the money: metrics, metrics, metrics.

Hey Ed,

You might look up Rob (ccmusicman) on this forum. He's got a pretty neat training program that grabs you by the throat and 'Makes' you find your way. Pretty neat. And a guy you can trust.

Good Luck

I agree with creating your own product eventually. That is usually the stride for businesses in the first place. Use your time and resources to develop a product or service of some sort. If people like it, they will buy it. Simple as that.

The only way you can build your business is first build your product... You said that you are good in writing articles then with that talent or skill, i know you can make your own product... (what product?) I think because of you're in the natural health niche... why not make an E-BOOK on Alternatives CURE or SUPPLEMENTS for disease...

Hey edmltw

If your looking to monetize I can surely help you their. I've created a report that goes over monetization methods for Internet Marketers. The link to the report is over at http://www.genxor.com - Make sure you check it out, also you talked about getting more hits, I've also gone over various traffic methods in my report that will help you get traffic and then build on top of that and start monetizing.

As for a mentor, I recommend you first do trail and error and a bit of reading (from legit sources ofc) - Try not to get over struck by people who just give out bull****, and try not to read so many Internet Marketers blogs as they lie a lot - Let me know if this helped, I can elaborate more if needed.

Targeting freebie seekers isn't the easiest way to go about earning money.

Affiliate marketing, CPA marketing, Adsense, mailing lists, selling your own products...these are all proven business models. Let me take a different angle on your problem...

For someone who hasn't made any money online you sure have a lot of "rules" about what you DON'T want to do. The method isn't so important as just doing something. Do something and stick with it for a while. Learn all you can about the method you choose.

CPA advertising, affiliate marketing, product reviews, selling your own products, Adsense...all these things work if you stick with them long enough to master them. Darting from one thing to another is a sure way NOT to make money. That's the trouble for most newbies, they chase after everything but master nothing.

You can make money writing articles for people if that's what you like to do. You can make money creating PLR packs of articles on specific themes. If you can write articles you can write ebooks - an ebook is just a really big article with a table of contents - and you can make money at that.

You're looking for someone to hand you the answer. There are many, many answers, but you seem more interested in ruling them out rather than choosing one thing and going with it. There is no easy answer. All involve work and perseverance, the question is...are you willing to do the work?

Take a deep breath...

Will you make mistakes if you jump in and stick with it? Sure, we all do, no shame in that. Mistakes are just learning experiences. The point is, do something and gain experience. Stick with it long enough to know the medium well and you WILL make money.