How much money can you make online - Income report #2

Welcome to super late income report for Jan 2012. Nothing much happens as the income for Jan has maintained on the same level as Dec although the composition has changed. Let's take a look shall we:

 (in case you are not aware of what kind of earnings I am tracking for this income report, please refer to the explanation here: income report #1)

Adsense Income Report: USD948

Almost made it to 1k last month with adsense. Remember that my 2012 make money goal for adsense was to hit 1k for 2012.  Looks like I can achieve that without doing anything else. This will leave more time for amazon which I am still struggling with.

That being said, I did order a new homepage backlink service for site 1 that you see below. In Feb, this site seems to be coming back from Panda and I want to see if the addition of new powerful links can help to bring this site back to its USD400 per month record.

Yes, I am not always supportive of using backlinks but in a competitive industry such as cosmetic surgery, the competition leaves me with very little choice. I will report back on how effective this homepage backlink service is once it has passed a month.

Click all images to enlarge

Amazon Income Report: USD412

As expected, amazon earnings fell after Christmas. In January, the income dropped from USD630 to USD412. Ouch! The good thing is that the composition of the amazon earnings has changed from being concentrated in a few sites to a larger base of sites due to my 50 amazon niche site challenge. With time, I am confident that this new network of amazon sites will make serious money as I have not seen money coming in so fast with such new sites.  Give them a year and see what happens : )

Click the image to enlarge

Total Income: USD1360

So,  not much happening. This is how it is my friends. There is a delay effect in making money online and my results show this.

During the Oct-Nov period, I basically did nothing due to the panda update affecting my motivation.  As a result, nothing happen in Jan as there was no work done before that. Conversely, all the stuff I am doing now will only reflect in the results in the coming months.

If you are stuck in the same siutation of not seeing results even though you are putting in the hard work, then be patient, The results will come!

Have fun making money online.

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Work hard to make money

I received many visitors who search for this term "can you really make money online'. This is not surprising given that there are lots of scams and rubbish online. However, to those who asked, you can really make a full time online but there is no shortcuts around it.

I have been making money online since 2009 although the money in the early years were tiny. The important thing however is to realise that the making money online model works but it needs a lot of commitment to get there. There is no such things as fast money so stop search for terms such as how to make money online fast.

In this article, I am going to lay out how much work you really need to put in to start seeing results. Don't expect half hearted efforts to result in money pouring in. It wouldn't and the sooner you realise this, the better. You need massive efforts to see massive results.

Ultimately, my model in making money is simple: build sites that can rank well in search engines so that the traffic that comes to my sites either clicks an ad or buys a product from my affiliate link. The more sites or the more content I have, the more money I will make. So, what the hell is 'more'. What does more means in my eyes.

Here is what it is:

For those who have not money but are willing to write

Aim to write 3 articles a day. That will give you 150 articles in a month. 20 articles can be on your side while the others can be used as backlink articles. Just doing 3 article a day with give you a solid site that has 20 pages of content and 130 backlinks. It will be enough to gather traffic and clicks if you know how to pick low competition keywords.

Multiple that with 12 months and you will have 12 strong sites by the end of one year. This is going to make a huge difference to your income. I guarantee it. Compare this to the person who is only making one site and adding a couple of article and backlinks per month, you are going to have a much higher probability of selecting a good income producing niche.

For those who have money but are not willing to write

There will be some of you who just hates to write. It is fine if you can invest a small sum of money into creating websites. 20 articles will cost you around $60. 130 backlink articles will cost you around $130 or less if you manage to find low cost writers. The total cost per site is only $190.

For $190 per month, you are building a potential business that can bring hundreds of dollars each month for many years to come. You cannot get a better rate of return than his. For $190 per month, you have a chance of building something that can get you out a boring job. All for just $190.

For those who have no money but are not willing to write

There is still hope for this bunch of folks. The answer is to starve yourself. Yup. Don't take lunch or dinner and save yourself  $5 per day. At the end of one month, you will save $200. Use that to invest in a way that I have mentioned above. When the site is making money, you can start to eat more : ).

So, there you have it. You either need to put in hard work or money to create income online. No work, no money!

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Adsense niche ideas for you to steal!

In my recent exploration of the finance niche, I came cross the some interesting ideas for niches that I have never thought of. Rather than just giving you the site url, I will also try to generalise these ideas so that you know how to come out with these adsense niche ideas.

Most of the time, what we know by niche ideas are things such as 'oval coffee table' or 'student loan for mums' or 'cheap ipad case' etc. How to make these niche ideas into useful sites is a challenge. With these niche ideas that I am about to show you, they can allow you to create really useful sites, which hopefully can help us to avoid the much dreaded and hated Panda updates.

(By the way, panda 3.2 just ran on 18 Jan, 2012 but my sites were not affected so I didn't noticed)

First adsense niche idea: http://www.pennytest.com/

This is a one page site answering a single question. The key here is not to say that there is little search volume for this niche but to realise that you can build a site with one expert tip that you might have already known. You might have one nice CSS trick, or one wordpress hack or one knitting tip or one gardening advice. This can be the basis of your one page site. If you build such a site, there will be nothing spammy about the site because the tip will be something that is useful and relevant.

Second adsense niche idea: http://freetickettojapan.com/

This niche idea is about turning your goals into a niche site. The author of this site wanted to hunt for a free air ticket to Japan and so she blogged about her attempts at doing so. I think this is a great idea! Why not think about all the goals that you want to achieve such as buying a second house, getting a sports cars, live in a beach home etc and create a niche blog about it. I am sure the content will be interesting and you should be able to promote it more easily as well.

Third adsense niche idea: http://whatisdividend.com/

I like this niche idea because it shows how you can enter a competitive market such as finance if you use a classic market segmentation strategy to identify poor served markets. In this case, the author have segment the market by investment instruments and then by types of audience. This site is not about investing. It is not about dividend investing. It is about dividend investing for beginners.

Once you have segment such a market out, it is easier to create useful content like what the site has done. It is a niche site but is a site that I find useful when I was searching info about dividend investing.

Most of the time, we don't think of niches in this way. We just use a keyword tool to come out with the idea for the site. However, you should combine the keyword approach and the market segment approach to craft a unique selling proposition for your niche site. It will make it easier for you to create the content and to structure your onsite navigation.

If you think such a post is useful, I can turn it into a regular feature here on aaronchua.com.

Thanks for reading my rants on how to make money online!

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50 amazon sites challenge progress report #6 Why I am not making money with Amazon

Here comes the 6th progress report on my 50 amazon niche sites challenge. If you want to see the breakdown in the number, please visit this Amazon earnings page. I will only post the summary here.

Number of amazon sites created: 2 more new sites have been created since update #5. This makes a total of 20 amazon sites created so far. I will stop making new sites in Feb and focus on getting some of the current sites to rank better and hopefully to start making more money.

How much money was made in Amazon
Nov 2011: Revenue =  USD29, Cost = USD227
Dec 2011: Revenue = USD149, Cost = USD412
Jan 2012 : Revenue = USD86, Cost = USD40

Net Profit: -USD416

This month netted only USD86. The drop was expected given that the buying season is over. January has almost been a slow month and let's see if Feb will be better.

Highlights in January

• 3 sites started making money. Good sign : ) 

• Site 3 (the wine site) got a good bump in its ranking. It was already ranking #1 for a three word term and now, the 2 term keyword has appeared on page 1, #8. This had lead to a nice increase in daily traffic.

• Site 4 continues to have consistent income despite not bringing the highest traffic. I will be focusing more on this site and bringing my SEO strategy to play. If you have noticed, each of this site was built with minimal resources and effort. When I see a promising site like this, it will be time to bring out my big guns. This means full onsite seo, deeper keyword research and leveraging on my network of high PR sites to boast this baby up. I do have a arsenal of SEO weapons at my disposal. Believe me when I say that when I can rank in the ultra competitive cosmetic surgery niche, I have built up quite a bit of seo resources. 

•  I came up with a good content strategy for several of these niche sites. I do hope these mini site can last and that only happen if your site has interesting and relevant content. I will created a separate post on how to build quality niche sites after Panda so watch out for it if you are interested in this topic.

The stuff that is making me sad :( in Janaury

The dreaded Google Dance is happening to some of my sites. Either the fresh content bonus has disappeared or I did something that did not impress the algorithm. Anyway, the end result was that some sites have disappeared from the SERPs. In particular, sites 5, 7 and 11 have lost the ranking for their main keywords : (

Other than that, I had a happy Jan : )

One particular happy event was that aaronchua.com dropped below the 200k mark in alexa. I know, I know. This means nothing but I still feel a sense of false achievement : ).

Why I am not making money from Amazon

Back to serious stuff. I am going through my stats to see why some of my sites are not making money despite getting the traffic. I hope that listing these reasons out can let you know why sometimes traffic does not equal sales.

• The source of traffic is not from US. Sometimes, your site will get ranked in .ca or .uk even though you might target these countries. In such cases, your conversion will be low because non US folks are not buying as much as stuff online as the Americans. 

• You need more traffic. There is a saying in the making money online world that if traffic comes too easily, you are not likely to make money from it. This stems from the fact that the market in search is quite efficient. People will drift to the keywords that make money, thus making them harder to compete in. Conversely, this means that keywords which do get traffic easily are those that might not convert very well. This does not mean zero sales but you do need a much larger volume of traffic than other sites to see conversions. I think my site 10 (the bedding site) suffers from this problem. 

• Not targeting buying terms. I have been stressing that you need to rank for buying keywords but I seems to be making this mistake for my amazon niche sites. Rather than trying to rank for keywords such  as item X for sale or cheap item X or item X under 100 dollars, I have been ranking these sites for their main keywords which might be too general. So, for the next batch of new domains, I will be buying domains that have stronger buying intentions.  

Niche site revealed

After thinking though this, I decided finally to reveal my sites for 2 reasons.

• I find that when I read the blogs from other make money folks, I enjoyed those that revealed the niche. It just sounds more exciting and cool to be able to look at the real site and relate that to what the author is talking about. 

• It makes it easier for me to demo my money making techniques if there are sites that I can show you. 

So, for this progressive, the niche I am revealing is site #13. The niche is mini cupcake maker. I chose this niche because it fulfills my criteria of having very little competitiors. (See my post on my unqiue take on how to check keyword competitiveness). The price is not very ideal though as these mini cupcake makers cost than USD50. In the coming weeks, I will be updating this site to show you how I can make this site earn some passive income for me!

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How to get an adsense account without waiting for 6 months

This is a short post on how to create an adsense account fast or to get multiple adsense accounts.

How to create an adsense account fast

Typically, a new blog needs some time to age before it can be used to apply for a brand new adsense account. It needs to have content being added constantly and it must look good enough to pass a visual inspection. This will probably take you around 6 months. If you don't have the patience, here are some shortcuts that you can take:

• Borrow an aged blog from a friend who has no adsense. Use that to submit for adsense application. If it is the average personal diary type of blogs, it should get approved prtty fast. 

• Write a few good quality articles on hubpages or infobarrels.  Make these long and genuine. Use your hubpage or infobarrel ID as the application website. This has a higher chance than a new blog.

• Google for the term "get adsense approved". There is a service provider there who can help to get new adsense accounts within 2-3 days. I have tired it and it works. I don't know how the guy did it but he always delivers the accounts without problem. 

How to get multiple adsense accounts

The above works for multiple adsense accounts as well. However, you do need a real person to receive the cheques for these additional adsense accounts.

Again, there are a couple of ways to do this:

•  Use your family's name but try not to use the same address. You can use your office address as the mailing address for your family members accounts. 

• You can set up a company. The best form is the limited partnership. This protects your personal  assets from any legal liability that the company might incur. At the same time, it doesn't have all the huge paperwork that a limited company has. 

Hope this helps for people 

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How to make money fast with adsense

In this article, you will learn short cuts to making money fast with adsense by using the authority of either your current site or web 2.0 sites such as hubpages or infobarrels. This is my response to an email request by a reader (Yes! I am 7 readers now!) about how to make fast money with adsense. I have done this before so I am going to share my experience. 

Specifically, this is what was asked:

"(what is) the easiest way to start earning some income with adsense in the quickest time possible and therefore I would like to choose keywords that will rank almost immediately in the search engines?  To do this, should I write articles on Web 2.0 platforms such as Hubpages and Infobarrel to earn an income with adsense (and possibly affiliate products) so they get ranked quicker and higher OR should I create subdomains or subdirectories on a generic domain that I already own OR should I start a brand new site and purchase .info domains? "

There are actually a couple of questions mixed in the above statements. Let me separate them out so that you can see the more targeted answers to each:

• How to choose low competition keywords that can ranked immediately or within a short time frame?

• What is the best platform to do do this?

Let me answer the second question first.

What is the best web 2.0 sites to make money

Riding on the authority of existing sites is the best way to rank quickly for low competition keywords. As long as the platform has authority, it doesn't matter if they are yours or they are public article directories suchas hubpages or infobarrels.

My preference is in the following order:

• Your own authority site: You have 100% share of the revenue as well as control over how the ads are displayed. However, do make sure you really have an authority site with age and value passing backlinks. If all you have is a generic domain that has little content or age or backlinks, I suggest you skip to the next option.

• Write articles on web 2.0 properties: Bear in mind that these properties do come and go in terms of authority. Now, the best web 2.0 is squidoo. During my amazon keyword search phase, I came across so many squidoo lenses that ranked well for 3-4 word keyword phases. They used to have some form of penalty but that seem to be lifted now. So, squidoo is my preferred choice in terms of using web 2.0 properties to make money, followed by infobarrel and a new platform called Wizzley.
  

• Brand new site and sub domain: A sub domain is treated the same way as a new site so no difference to the two in terms of authority being passed. I will not choose this option if I want to make money fast.
  

How to make money fast with low competition keywords

This is going to be the juicy bits about how to select long tail and low competition keywords to make money fast. If you are a beginner, you might want to make some notes here as I go along.

Ride on the keyword authority that the platform already has: An existing platform will have existing rankings for certain keywords. Your job is to find out what keywords is, say infobarrel, ranking for and create  related keyword sets around them. This way, you are hijacking the authority of the platform and passing them to your keywords.

Here is how you can mine the keywords of existing paltform:

• If it is your own site, use google analytics. Go to traffic>keywords and sorted them according to the number of visits. This will give you a nice set of keywords as the base to develop more related keyword sets.

• If it is a web 2.0 site, use SEM rush. Just go to Semrush.com and key in the url of the web 2.0 site that you want to write articles on. This is what you will see.

 

Click to enlarge 

• The Free version only allows you to see 10 keywords but you can use this coupon "89MW-YR43-HFNJ-K94M" to get a free trial for 2 weeks. Download all the keywords in an excel sheet during the free trial period so that you don't have to spend money to continue the subscription. I don't know this coupon code still works as I used it during the Nov period.
  

• If the promo code does not work, you can still use another service called alexa.com. Again, go to the site and key in the url of whatever web 2.0 property that you want to write on. Click on the 'get details' button and once you are on the new screen, click on the 'search analytics' tab. This is what you will see. 

Click to enlarge

Attack multiple lower volume keywords in one article: Don't expect to rank for any specific high traffic keywords. What we want to do is to group a bunch of related long tail keywords in one article. You should include as many long tails as you can in the article as long as they answer the same search query.

For example, if you are writing an article on how to win a free air  ticket to japan, there will be lots of related words such as winning free air ticket to japan, free air ticket to toyko, i want free air ticket to japan etc. All these are long tail related keywords that will come naturally if you focus on a (i) uncompetitive article title and (ii) hijacking the authority of the platform as mention above.

Choose keywords with urgent need: Choose topics that have a urgent for people. These topics attract people who will click on an adsense ad if it offers the solution they want. A topic such as 'winning a free ticket to japan' can attract more clicks than 'decorating ideas for a nursery room'.

A even better group of keywords are what I called desperate niches They are the people whose lives will be affected if they don't find a solution soon. People who are will sick, people who need money now, people who are unemployed, people who house have been foreclosed, people who have lost their beloved ones etc. These are examples where people are desperate for solutions and they will click ads with abandon if you can attract them.

Link your articles together: Finally, do write a couple of articles together in the same niche and link them up. This will help a bit in helping them to get long tails. The linking can be in a straight arrow format like this:

Article A > Article B > Article C > Article D

Article D will hopefully get the most juice and draw in the most traffic.

If you do the above right, you should make adsense money fast. There is no need for backlinks if you pick the right keywords that have low competition and are riding on the platform's authority for certain keywords. If you don't know what is low competition keywords and how to find low competition keyword,click on those articles to read them first.

Hope this article helps you to make money fast with adsense.

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50 amazon sites challenge progress report #5

Welcome to the 5th progressive report on my 50 amazon niche sites challenge.

Quite a bit of update for this progress report so get ready for a long read and lots of ramblings.

Number of amazon niche sites created: I created 7 new sites and revised 1 aged site for the challenge. Quite proud of myself actually for doing so much work.

Getting traffic early: If you worked through the stats below, you will noticed how fast some of them are getting traffic. This is what I have mentioned in my previous post on how well your site should indexed if you get the right keywords. Low competition keywords plus an exact domain number will get you ranked and some long tail traffic even if your site is just 1-2 weeks old.

Site 13 is especially impressive. 139 unique visitors for a 2 week old site is quite good and shows that I have found a uncompetitive niche. Problem is there is no sales. If I have had adsense on this site, it would have generated a few clicks already.

Money earned with amazon sites: This month has seen a slow down as expected. Currently, these sites generated about USD50. Not a big amount but I am happy to see more new sites earning.

I mentioned in my previous progress report that I am disappointed with Site 8 because it did not generate any sales with the amount of traffic it is getting. Well, it finally got a sale so I am a happy man : ). Site 4 continues to earn while site 11 surprised me. It was a new site created in January and already had a sale.

If you want details, take a look at the table below.

Site	Niche	Created	Total Cost	Monthly Earnings	Monthly Visitors	Type
1	Toy	Jun 2011	155	NA	184	Purchased
2	Appliance	Nov 2011	25	NA	5	New
3	Wine	Nov 2011	67	26	269	Aged
4	Appliance	Nov 2011	30	4	157	New
5	Bicycle	Dec  2011	30	NA	44	New
6	Storage	Dec 2011	20	NA	78	New
7	Appliance	Dec 2011	30	NA	118	New
8	Bedding	Dec 2011	34	11	593	New
9	Wine	Dec 2011	25	NA	66	New
10	Gardening	Dec 2011	25	NA	6	New
11	Storage	Jan 2012	35	13	14	New
12	Window	Jan 2012	9	NA	2	Aged
13	Appliance	Jan 2012	25	NA	139	New
14	Strange	Jan 2012	9	NA	NA	New
15	Gardening	Jan 2012	19	NA	12	New
16	Appliance	Jan 2012	29	NA	15	New
17	Storage	Jan 2012	24	NA	30	New
18	Bedding	Jan 2012	14	NA	25	New

Now, some learnings that I have accumulated for the challenge so far:

• You need to be patient with the sales. Affiliate sales do not work like adsense. You can make lots of sales in one day and then go dry for a few weeks. This is how affiliate sales work and you need to be prepared for that mentally. New sites take a while to get revenue so if you are not seeing any money, be patient and continue to work on it. Track the two metrics that I have mentioned in my previous post to make sure you are on the right track. 

• You need to try lots of niches to find the right ones: If I have stopped at 4-5 sites, I would not get the sales from site 8 and 11. You really need to keep going until you hit upon something that makes money. You can set up lots of sites like what I have done or you can use article directories such as Squidoo to experiment with new niches. 

• You need to set up a process if you want to scale up fast. I can do 7 sites within 2 weeks because I have set up a process that I just go through each day. If you want to create more niche sites, getting that process up is cruical. It can be in the form of an outsourced process or through software. It doesn't matter how you do it but you need to build a process that can scale. 

• There are some really good service providers in Fiverr that produces good quality articles or effective backlinks. I try a dozen and finally found a couple that I now work with regularly. They are cheap and their quality is good. 

• I try to use different themes for each site. This became a headache because I had to hack and slash my way through the codes to get the look that I want for each site. Being a non technical person, it became a very time consuming process for me. I don't mind my sites looking ugly but they need to at least look like a store with some kind of catelogue on the homepage so that visitors will click on them. Presenting a blog format to your product searchers is not a good idea.  

Overall, creating so many sites without any software and virtual assistants have been quite challenging although it has its rewards in terms of lessons learned. I looked forward to hear your amazon niche site building experiences. 

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