My Intro & Feedback Request
Hey guys
I've been doing a lot of life evaluation recently and long story short, the conclusion is that for me to live the life I want, the only answer I can see is making money from behind a computer.
At the moment, I'm an engineer who sits behind a desk 40 hours a week with an extra 6.5 or so spent commuting. As much as I wanted to be an engineer in high school, things have changed.
I thought I'd sign up and share my first month in the IM world, mainly for feedback from the pros and secondly it might help out another newbie somewhere (I plan to write a more detailed and technical version on my blog eventually). With my background, I have a bunch of coding experience, with a bit of video and photo editing.
This first month has been a royal pain in the ass. Not because of unsuccesful ventures, but I have been plagued with technology problems and failures of all kinds. That, and balancing my already limited time between the gf, heading to the clubs with the boys (prevents me from going insane), working out AND internet marketing.
So what kicked it all off was a read of the Four Hour Workweek, and my mate asking me to write for one of his websites. Said mate was involved in the development of some pretty serious blogging software and makes a killing without sitting in an office all day, hence my motivation
I signed up at Hostgator and started playing around with cPanel, filezilla and wordpress until I had what I thought was most of the features down..... and that was it for a few months as I changed jobs and travelled Europe.
On returning, with some free tickets I sourced through a mate, I went to The Grants workshop, where they taught methods for making money through blogging, clickbank, product creation and also covered mindsets, outsourcing and all that juicy stuff. This is where I'd say I actually 'started'.
A bloke on the only forum I usually read launched a website aimed at getting newbies started, so away I went. After reading and reading, I've learned about PPC and adwords, adsense, clickbank, analytics, split testing, etc etc - probably as much as I can learn without actually DOING it.
So I identified a couple of niche products in clickbank, found keywords, checked competition, and built their websites. On the sites I installed wordpress, edited to have it display as a single page with only cloaked affiliate links leading out, removed dates, made a logo and wrote the landing page. I also ensured page titles, headings and meta data reflected my targetted key phrases.
I purchased Bookmarking Demon which I ran both sites through, and started writing articles to be published on Ezine, go articles and several other article sites. I've also looked into automated article submission software which I may get in the future.
About the same time I found this forum which has proved to be another invaluable resource. Reading marketninja's $36000 keyword research system verified most of what I had learned already minus the software that does the competition analysis for you (that's next on my list of stuff to buy). I also plan to read up on Steve's blog challenge where he tries to make $100/day in 3 months, but shit there is a lot of reading there.
I'm not really sure where to go from here as for promoting both websites. At this stage, none of my backlinks are actually showing up with the yahoo links search.
-----
Those were the main events of my first month. Somewhere in there I also discovered the black hat forum which I thought was a bit shit.
My goals in this whole thing:
1. Replace my rent and bills
2. Replace my job
3. Up and beyond
Ideally, something like $1.5k / week would satisfy everything I want out of this with only 2 or 3 main sources. Building hundreds upon hundreds of websites is not something I really want to do, but who knows, I may have to.
I also read a pdf from Yaro Starak which made me realise that I really should have something I am actually passionate about, not just all these niche products that I have no interest in. With that, I have an idea of a site which I'd like to build as a background product over maybe the next year or so. On top of that, with all the ideas that have been flying around my head I've come up with an ebook product that has minimal competition and a found a couple of niches to follow. Having limited time to actually do these sucks.
So thats my intro, looking forward to spending a lot of time on these forums in future.
Cheers
J~
I've been doing a lot of life evaluation recently and long story short, the conclusion is that for me to live the life I want, the only answer I can see is making money from behind a computer.
At the moment, I'm an engineer who sits behind a desk 40 hours a week with an extra 6.5 or so spent commuting. As much as I wanted to be an engineer in high school, things have changed.
I thought I'd sign up and share my first month in the IM world, mainly for feedback from the pros and secondly it might help out another newbie somewhere (I plan to write a more detailed and technical version on my blog eventually). With my background, I have a bunch of coding experience, with a bit of video and photo editing.
This first month has been a royal pain in the ass. Not because of unsuccesful ventures, but I have been plagued with technology problems and failures of all kinds. That, and balancing my already limited time between the gf, heading to the clubs with the boys (prevents me from going insane), working out AND internet marketing.
So what kicked it all off was a read of the Four Hour Workweek, and my mate asking me to write for one of his websites. Said mate was involved in the development of some pretty serious blogging software and makes a killing without sitting in an office all day, hence my motivation
I signed up at Hostgator and started playing around with cPanel, filezilla and wordpress until I had what I thought was most of the features down..... and that was it for a few months as I changed jobs and travelled Europe.
On returning, with some free tickets I sourced through a mate, I went to The Grants workshop, where they taught methods for making money through blogging, clickbank, product creation and also covered mindsets, outsourcing and all that juicy stuff. This is where I'd say I actually 'started'.
A bloke on the only forum I usually read launched a website aimed at getting newbies started, so away I went. After reading and reading, I've learned about PPC and adwords, adsense, clickbank, analytics, split testing, etc etc - probably as much as I can learn without actually DOING it.
So I identified a couple of niche products in clickbank, found keywords, checked competition, and built their websites. On the sites I installed wordpress, edited to have it display as a single page with only cloaked affiliate links leading out, removed dates, made a logo and wrote the landing page. I also ensured page titles, headings and meta data reflected my targetted key phrases.
I purchased Bookmarking Demon which I ran both sites through, and started writing articles to be published on Ezine, go articles and several other article sites. I've also looked into automated article submission software which I may get in the future.
About the same time I found this forum which has proved to be another invaluable resource. Reading marketninja's $36000 keyword research system verified most of what I had learned already minus the software that does the competition analysis for you (that's next on my list of stuff to buy). I also plan to read up on Steve's blog challenge where he tries to make $100/day in 3 months, but shit there is a lot of reading there.
I'm not really sure where to go from here as for promoting both websites. At this stage, none of my backlinks are actually showing up with the yahoo links search.
-----
Those were the main events of my first month. Somewhere in there I also discovered the black hat forum which I thought was a bit shit.
My goals in this whole thing:
1. Replace my rent and bills
2. Replace my job
3. Up and beyond
Ideally, something like $1.5k / week would satisfy everything I want out of this with only 2 or 3 main sources. Building hundreds upon hundreds of websites is not something I really want to do, but who knows, I may have to.
I also read a pdf from Yaro Starak which made me realise that I really should have something I am actually passionate about, not just all these niche products that I have no interest in. With that, I have an idea of a site which I'd like to build as a background product over maybe the next year or so. On top of that, with all the ideas that have been flying around my head I've come up with an ebook product that has minimal competition and a found a couple of niches to follow. Having limited time to actually do these sucks.
So thats my intro, looking forward to spending a lot of time on these forums in future.
Cheers
J~
