That's impossible to answer without knowing what your goals are and how you've been working to achieve those goals.

"Make lots of money" is a vague idea, not a goal.

Sorry. Anxiety got the better of me in my explanation. ^_^;;

As for my site, I've been working on it for a few years now, but it's a personal blog about toy collecting (and my other hobby, cooking) featuring quite a few figure photographs.

It's had a few stops and starts since I started working on it, I thought I finally had it ready to 'launch'. Until it was hacked, and my savings ran out. I thought I could get my site to turn an income to cover the bills in the meanwhile, but it hasn't. It'd get a few visitors on one day, enough to get an earning, and then a slew of days where the earnings show 0.

Now I feel like I'm running around like a chicken with it's head cut off trying to keep from being being evicted, trying to take on freelance jobs and selling things on eBay, and keep the site updated with stuff folks to see.

(I'm not sure if I can post a link to my site in this section...so if someone'll give the OK, I'll edit the URL in.)

Heres what you're doing wrong. Shifting from one method to another randomly.

Making money is not about trying a lot of things bur sticking to one. Focus yourself on just one stream (website will be great) and don't rest until you make something out of it.

Good luck!!

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My first thought is - cooking AND toys / personal blog.

That splits the traffic targeting in two directions - and unless it's very informative or very funny, neither group is going to stay or return. (a lot of personal blogs are interesting to the author but not to anyone else - unless you can give them a reason to trust and / or love you they won't come back.)

Try focusing on ONE of those two and going above and deciding what you are trying to give in value to your website visitors as far as that topic goes. IF you chose toys, would you just be talking about toys you like? or would you be listing pros and cons of toys, making funny videos to show of the toys, maybe asking your readers to submit pictures of their kids playing with certain toys (which makes them like you and want to return, and also hands you fresh content for the blog).

Give them ONE thing, and make it something they want more of - that's half your battle.

The other half of the battle is the painful one - it's TRAFFIC.

What sources have you been using for traffic? SEO? PPC? Adwords, Facebook ads, fan pages, youtube, What? You haven't said.

Traffic is a huge task that causes most sites to fail even with great content.

I'd love to give you feedback on the website itself if you want. You can link here or in PM. As for traffic, let us all know what you've been doing and you will get a ton of advice i'm sure.

You need to pick one and go for it though- website or freelancing- until the one you pick is paying enough that you can start working on the other again. (IE freelance until it works, then get back into building a website. One consistent stream of income before you move into others.)

Remember; bull shit, hype sells.

Reality, stinks. on the Net

Making money online all comes down to traffic and conversions. It is critacle that you track your traffic and see how long people are staying on your site and what they are doing. Hopefully you researched your market and niche and there is a demand for it!

Google is changing so much Id forget about SEO and just spend your time with other traffic sources such as social media with facebook, youtube, forums and countless others. Over time google will index what it wants and that will just be an added bonus. Hopefully you are building an asset or list with your website. Some will say the google does not rank squeeze pages but by landing page ethanstrafficsources.com is sitting in the 2nd position for the term "ethans traffic sources" and I have a youtube video sitting in the first spot. Not that that term gets a lot of traffic but I just want you to be aware thats all.

You'll do it, set your goals and never give up!

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Seems like you really ARE all over the place. You just need to take a step back and decide on what you're planning on focusing on.

In business, you should never rely on just ONE method of making money, for this purpose here. You say you see a variety of traffic one day and then nothing for the next few days. Do you write any articles or blog posts? If so, are they keyword rich?

If not, how would you expect the maximum amount of people to see your site?

My suggestion is just to take a step back, take a deep breath, and then refocus. But on ONE thing. Either your website ... your EBay stuff ... or freelancing. But not all three starting out.

You should immediately note that you made $50 on ebay, but nothing from your own website. The most sensible answer is to focus more on ebay, and do backend marketing. But if you want to be brave and dont want to put up with ebay (or Amazon).... start building an email list. You'll get to predict the amount of sales that you can earn... as your list grows. Try it again, and dont look for riches. Take it one step at a time.

Much appreciated with the advice!
If ya'll want to check out my site, it's located at Taaron.org |.

I've tried Fiverr, and wanted to offer photoshop work (cropping, background erasing, for example) but when it comes to uploading that mandatory gig image, I have no idea what to post, and hit a brick wall there. :/

As for Traffic, most of it's coming from Google / Google Image search, but I have it set up so when I do a new post it'll be tweeted out and sent to Tumblr as well. I've thought about linking it to my Facebook, but I'm so incredibly uncomfortable with Facebook, I'm not sure about it. (I don't go on it much, it's mostly folks from high school and family, who's gone on to do relatively 'great' things. get jobs, made families and the like. and I'm over here all "uh... I have a new toy to put together?" :p )

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taaron
I was in your shoes. I know exactly how you feel. I'll keep it short and sweet for you.
All you need is a little bit of coaching. About three months ago my cousin recommended that I do some research on a guy named Chase Watts. He said his program would help me. Well, it did. I learned more in 30 days then I have in the passed 3 years. No BS. I'm just a normal guy from NJ who saw all the money being made online and wanted in. I had very little success until I got in touch with Chase Watts. Go to this link: The $1,000,000 Blueprint! enter your name and e-mail and get the free information. Look up reviews on Chase Watts if your skeptical. Also, take a look at his guarantee. No matter what your niche is online - base on your post - I promise you this will help.... Enjoy

The $1,000,000 Blueprint!

Focus, focus, focus. It's been said –you are darting around trying to do too many things. If you really want to have a site focused on toys and cooking it is possible. But only if you split up your traffic on your homepage and have it going to a category page for each of those topics. Then on the category page you need to have it well optimised for the keyword term you think you can rank for (do your keyword research) and link to the main pages about that topic.

This way, Google knows what the hell your site is about!

If you want to know about keyword research, by the way, you can check out this free video of mine. this gives a painless method of identifying decent keywords and completely bypasses the usual "keyword research tool" bullshit – who's sales pages are just designed to squeeze poor suckers' money out of them ( OK - I'm cynical. But it's still true).

So, now you've got your site structured right and hopefully some good quality content on your site for those keywords. Now, you spend an hour a day visiting forums in your niches (get one of them going first) and link back to your decent content. Just don't spend the whole hour putting up one post!

Over time you are now to start to get a trickle – ever-increasing – of traffic back to your website.

I hope this gives you food for thought.

Malc

Mike Hill -that's irony for you....i said that's the way most selling on the Net is..check the w.s.o. section to see proof. 99% of people trying to buy short cuts actually love the hype. I'd say almost all info courses, mentoring, coaching is mostly hot air and fraud oh I mean hype...let's call it hype and that's ok)

You do not agree?

The question is why should i have to write articles,reports etc to sell on the Net? Just to please Google? Most of is copied, altered, etc and let's face it most articles/reports are outsourced.

I've found creating my website's around specific niche products and working those site's and videos to the top (through seo marketing) has really helped me to build a nice income and email list of buyers.

Never had much success promoting generic blogs and trying to make money with adsense.

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If you don't know yet, the answer is: You haven't failed enough.

Success is really just learning what doesn't work, and doing what did over and over again.

You've made some money, though "not enough"...add it to your portfolio, scale it up if possible, then fail some more.

You may be suffering from information overload. It's best you try concentrate on one project at a time, or you will become distracted and earn nothing. This happened to me at first, and it was only when I focused and committed myself to one project that I started making money. You could try create your own info product and sell it through a squeeze page?

Sinking money into a website can be valuable but the main goal is traffic/customers. You can have the coolest looking website with awesome products your selling but if no one see's it, your not going to sell anything.

You should focus on putting a budget on helping you get your website noticed. Search Engine Optimization is a great way to do this. Hire someone to rank your keywords on the search engines so you start getting traffic.

I am only responding to the portion about you putting money into a website because I don't know what other internet marketing skills you have. There are plenty of ways to make money online but it seems you want to sell things from a site.

These warriors have given tons of advice, but I will approach the freelancing aspect!

I brought in roughly $6,000 of work in the first 45 days on Elance.

The only way your proposals will be shut down on elance is if you are putting your contact info within the proposal. So, here's a few tips:

1. Complete your profile.
2. Personalize each proposal. (no copy and paste)
3. Know your value. (It doesn't matter if you're the most expensive or cheapest. Know your worth and you will win. For example, I bid $4,000 on a $1,000-$5,000 job and was the highest bidder, but still got the job.)

Here's a great article that will also help you get awarded nearly every proposal.. I have a 75% conversion rate with these tactics!

Helpful Article: Hacking Elance: The Step-by-Step Guide to How I made $23,700 in 4 weeks

This is just my opinion, but....

No offense intended at all, but it reads like a personal website, not a website designed to make sales.

For starters...You could easily separate the topics into several different niches. Selling electronics. Cooking recipes. Etc.

Then (and again, this is no offense intended)....get more memorable domain names for each niche. BadAssCooking.com. HawkingMyElectronics.com. Whatever. (Those may be taken, but are just 2 examples to illustrate my point.)

People are going to misspell "www.taaron.org". It's not memorable enough, unless you give the site to people who know you by name, and even then, could easily be misspelled.

Again, all just my 2 cents here.

I mentioned this in another post.

Although you won't make that much money from Fiverr, you can still make enough to support your other internet marketing projects and cover costs like web hosting and outsourcing some work. Try to make sure the service doesn't take too long to complete in case it gets in the way of your other projects.

Don't give up mate.

I think you are just worrying too much, calm down.

I think your main problem is lack of focus, you are doing too many things at once.

Here is how human brain works:
one, two, too many.

My suggestion is target just one method and give it your all.

You need to look at your strengths and work on it. Do not just from one thing to another. Email me on info @ gen next tech . com, let us discuss

Appreciate the input everyone. I spent the weekend, taking it all in.

As for saying it seems like a personal site, I'm not offended at all.

When I started this project, I went into it thinking of it as a personal site that talked about personal interests, projects (and so on), that just happens to sell stuff as well.

I had planned on getting affiliation from the sites I most actively shop at, and did (for some of them), along with Adsense, eBay and Amazon... however Adsense was the only one I ever figured out how incorporate into my site. The rest I'm not sure how.

Granted, there's not many posts on the site, but that's mostly due to finding out I like photography much more than writing. (not to say I don't like writing. If I can get a good start going, I'm good to keep going. Then get stuck on a closing. Whee.)

I've also thought about incorporating YouTube into the mix, doing model kit demonstrations, toy reviews, but between 'stage fright' and the fact there's quite a few folks already doing decently at it, it kind of makes it hard to jump in with both feet.

Don't think of your money and time as wasted, but as INVESTED!
If you can turn around your way of thinking, you will start to benefit. I struggled a lot in the past, but never gave up and here I am today doing affiliate marketing, having plenty of free time and money.
Let me know if you have any questions!

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Sounds to me your making the mistake like many new comers do, and you are not building your email list.

It is VERY VERY hard to sell to first time visitors, Also it is hard to sell to people on blogs directly. There are too many distractions to focus your visitor to what you want them to see and click.

This is why personally I love squeeze pages. There is only one option a visitor can do when they arrive -- they can either sign up to my list, or not. THAT'S IT!

The great thing about a list is you connect with your subscribers on a personal level where they get to know, like, and trust you -- which therefore makes it 100 times easier to sell products and creating buying customers for you in the future.

So If I were you I would start adding opt in pages all over your blog -- or just set up a simple squeeze page.

Hope this helps

Building a list should be a priority because you would have long term subscribers. I suggest you keep working hard and do the right methods.

You should create something of value to others and try selling that

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I am just like you tarron. a very confused newbie just trying to make money on line and truly ending up nowhere, very frustrated surely.

You need to decide on one business model that you want to pursue and stick with it until you see some success. If you want to get into ghostwriting, you might want to check out Ghostwriting Cash by Tiffany Lambert (formally Tiffany Dow).

Good luck,
Joey

That is a very general question you need to really be more specific on what you have done, and are doing. The most I got from it is selling stuff on ebay and odesk which odesk is an outsourcing resource so you're not going to make much money there and with ebay unless you have an "online consignment shop" or a lot of high ticket items ebay is just an expensive craigslist.
If you have a website you should have a digital product to sell, a sales funnel, something that turns visitors into buyers.

Focus on one thing. If you find it hard to do so, then get an accountability partner, join mastermind groups or simply a group of people working towards the same goal like a specific challenge or something. At east you can keep yourself motivated being around others who are also going doing the same thing as you.

Persistence is key. Keep on trying and learning and success will come.

So if i say "drugs sell well....I am a drug dealer or condone it? it couldn't be an observation?

Silly mindset.

But what i quoted is 100% true and i stand behind it.....Read the w.s.o. section and see the biggest sellers. It's hyped up crap. The good business educational ones (reality) often tank. People want big, easy money so "marketers" provide it. I.M 101 - Hype,spam.scam. You disagree?

"demand - supply"

"but, but that's simply good business!"

Selling crack is ok then?

So. just because i point out an observation....i too must be doing it?

Bull Sh**

It's how you interpreted it!

If your selling your own stuff on Ebay your not making any money because your net worth didnt change.

As for oDesk. I can speak very well on that subject. 8 applications is nothing. I have been a freelance programmer for about 5 years. I was top rated on RAC/V-Worker before they sold out (in the 99.8th percentile). I am top rated on Elance (over 115 projects with a perfect 5 star rating) and Im ranked well with oDesk (I dont use oDesk much). Despite the fact that I have fantastic reviews and ratings I still only land about 35% of the projects I bid on. As a new worker you will probably land around 8-10% at best. Which means that with 8 proposals you would expect to get 0 jobs.

Some tips to get started freelancing.

1) Post low bids to entice users to give you a try.

2) Post detailed bids. Reference stuff in the bid to show you read it. But keep it concise dont waste the buyers time.

3) Remember that to start your not working to make money, your working to build a reputation. When I first started on Elance for example I was bidding on jobs with a rate of $8 per hour in mind. People gave me a shot because I was so cheep. As my reputation went up I increased my prices. Currently I charge an average of $75 per hour on Elance (I do less for repeat workers) and guess what. I get it, because my ratings are so good. There are always people who will pay for quality. You just need to prove to them (via your work history) that YOU are quality.

4) Always follow through with what you promise clients and treat them like gold. I have several customers who only give me there projects now just because I have always treated them so good.

Finding and getting a job in Odesk is the toughest part. You have to make a profile then applying for job and waiting for clients to calls you for an interview but it ends with disappointment. It might be sometime frustrating waiting for your first job or getting an indication on the best way to begin. One of the reasons why clients do not hire new people is because of their no work record or projects to showcase. Think hard, put a couple of work samples on your portfolio, pass a couple of additional important tests, upload profile picture and make your profile more visible with more details. Have some patience, it will work.

When I started to read your post I was messed because you just told us what you have done for your website and how much you have spent money for it. But still we were not clear about your target. I mean I could not understand what your goal was actually. But after saw your clarification I can understand that what is the exact problem.
Well now you should take a time and think about what would be good for you. I would suggest you go for freelancing and start with a local market. First you need to choose a comfortable zone. Start from that field where you are active and after practicing you can go in other fields. In first time may be you cannot earn much money as you want but still I would say start with small because so many times we started with huge project but we messed up all things. So start with that project which is your forte.