How Much Time Spent Blogging

How much time do you spend blogging?

I have a bunch of websites and BLOGs. In addition to my BLOGs I write articles, free reports and info products and that doesn't even count all the reading and writing I do offline.

Much of my time is spend reading, thinking and writing. Something I love to do.

I can't nail down how many hours a week I spend reading and writing, but I know it is close to 30 hours if not more.

I'm off to prepare for a speech on Sunday and then watch a little TV.

Michael

Time To Pay The Tax Man

Now that I am back from New Orleans I need to work on my 2007 Taxes.

If you make money online, keep track of all your income and expenses. The best way I found so far is to use a spreadsheet. Include a category column that matches the IRS categories for small business. That way you can create a pivot table to sum it up for you.

If creating a pivot table is not in your skillset, just pick up a 4 column notebook and keep track that way. Or use the spreadsheet and manually choose the rows & columns to add for each of the IRS categories.

This year I am cutting back a little on the networks I promote. There are 3 good ones so I will stick to those 3, plus AdSense.

I'm going to be selling on Ebay this year, so that will add another layer of record keeping.

Trust me, keep your papers in order throughout the year and it will save you time and hassle at tax time.

Michael

Learning From The Right People

Would you rather learn how to make money online from a free forum loaded with people how want you to buy their product? Or would you rather learn from people that are successful and doesn't let "Product Pushers" mess up the forum?

I do read a couple free forums from time to time, but I find my time better spent on the forum over at Wealthy Affiliate. People on Wealthy Affiliate are there to learn and to teach.

No need to buy tools for research, all the tools you need are included. No need for web hosting or a website builder. You can build 3 websites and host them as part of your membership.

There is so much more to Wealthy Affiliate, but you have to try it to believe all the cool stuff you get to build, grow and improve your business.

Michael

Back From New Orleans

I am back from New Orleans. The trip was a safe one. It is good to be home with my family, yet there is much rebuilding to be done.

Now on to internet marketing.

Looks like MyBlogLog is having a problem with adding contacts again. I will test this on my laptop as well, but I think it is a process problem, not a PC problem.

Today is catch-up day then back to work tomorrow. Even though I tried to check in this past week, there is plenty I need to get done.

Looking forward to starting a new site and testing some new advertising.

Take Care,

Michael

Don't Get Stuck In A TrafficJam

John Reese just released one of hs new websites to the public. I have yet to join BlogRush for various reasons. Income may be done some day, still waiting for that one.

I see no reason to jump on the TrafficJam bandwagon. I know the ins and outs of Technorati, so why bother with another blog tracking site.

John is a great marketer and no doubt there is some value with TrafficJam. But for me I will stick with Technorati.

I have a new product that I will be promoting when I get back. I didn't get a chance to review the product or sales letter yet. The membership I belong to gives me master resell on a product they create every month. Works gret for me as it would cost 5 times as much to have the product written.

Things are going well in New Orleans. Today it is rainy, but all of our work will be inside. This might slow down the drying time of the drywall compound though. Hopefully we can get all the walls ready for paint if not completly painted by Friday evening.

So much to do, so little time.

Michael

Do What You Can - Don't Sweat The Details

Hello All,

Our group arrived safely in New Orleans yesterday after a bumpy, but uneventful flight. We took a tour of one of the houses we will be rebuilding and should be set to start work on Monday.

Today is Church then we may spend some time in the French Quarter. Love the music and atmosphere of the French Quarter. But as always many places are better enjoyed every once in a while rather then every day.

Many of the people who read this blog are bloggers. One thing I often struggle with is the details.

There are 2 types of posts for me. Results and Information.

For "Results" posts I write about things I have tried and how they worked for me. Take for example my thoghs on the tools I use at Wealthy Affiliate. I also try verious advertising methods and ways to make money online.

What I do and what I learn from it are written as "Resluts" posts. Many of my readers prefer those posts over the information posts.

I do information posts because not everyone is at the same level. So I try to write about some things that may be known to many, but not to someone who is new at blogging. These posts take much more time to write then the Results posts.

What I am starting to learn is that I don't need to write all the details, just a high level post with links to others that have more detail.

This will benefit my regualr readers who already know the topics I am writing about as well as the visitor who is new.

Take Care,

Michael

Update on Blogging Projects

I am heading to New Orleans to help with the rebuilding efforts for a week. There will be little or no blog posts until I return. Depends if I have time to write in the evenings.

If you are new here there are plenty of archives to read. Probably enough to fill a book or two. My suggestion would be to go back to the beginning and read all of them to here.

When I return the private advertising sales will begin. Post a comment here with your email address if you are interested in purchasing a spot.

I started testing a few new things and should have a report ready next month. With going away for a week I want to re-test some stuff before I put the stats together.

The traffic to some of my blogs has picked up. Most of them only get one post a week, so when traffic picks up I tend to get a little excited. It looks like natural search results, so if this keeps up for 2 weeks I will have to increase posting frequency on those blogs.

There were no entries for the Valentines Day contest. So no winner there. But I will have another contest sometime in the future. Next time the prize will be much bigger.

If you are interested in checking out the tools I use for research and making money just click --> here.

If you blog for money or you blog for fun, always enjoy what you do. It makes life easier.

Best of luck to everyone, see you in a little over a week.

Michael

More Wealthy Affiliate Updates

Looks like more of the updates are ready at Wealthy Affiliate.

It is great to be a part of an active community and have access to the tools we need to succeed. But even better when the owners of that community keep updating and adding to the membership at no additional charge.

Best of luck on your blogging journey. If you need any help or some tools to make "making money" easier, check out Wealthy Affiliate.

Michael

Make Money From One Penny

Can you make money from one penny?

Yes, in my experience I can.

There are multiple ways to make money when you have little or no money.

The most popular is blogging. Free blogs and social networks make it easy to get started online without investing any money.

On the income side, AdSense is a popular way to make money. You have to make $100 before they pay out, but with a couple blogs and some hard work that can be done every month or every other month.

To mix things up I belong to a bunch of advertising networks. That way I can mix in some interesting offers from time to time.

Promoting affiliate products is also a good way to make money without investing any money.

One thing to keep in mind when not investing money is that you will be investing more of your time.

Take Care,

Michael

Provide Exceptional Value and Live Forever

Ok, you got me. I added the live forever part. I had a conversation about vampires, so I just threw that in.

But in a sense you could be imortalized by providing exceptional value. Write an interesting book and it could be read thousands of years for now.

There are two directions I am thinking for this article.

First, free content. While writing free content is great, if it doesn't provide exceptional value visitors may never return.

This goes for offline as well as online writing.

Second, paid content. If you write an ebook that provides exceptional value and charge below that value you could have a customer for life. But provide marginal value at a fair price and you may have lost future sales from that customer.

Imagine going to the movie theater to watch a movie. The $7-16 to get in ontop of $8-12 for food make for an expensive experience. But what if at the end of the movie, the stars where there to take pictures and sign autographs for free.

People would no longer complain about spending $28 to see a movie because of the exceptional value added by the photos and autographs.

I am a bargan shopper. I buy good stuff, but as cheap as I can.

By providing value beyond what the customer expects they will look up to you. It is a win-win situation. They were happy to give you $20 for an ebook that was worth $47 and you have a customer that is more prone to make a future purchase.

Blog content may be free, but it must be good to keep people comming back. And if what you write (ebook, etc) isn't free, then customers better be asking you why you sell it so cheap.

Michael

Testing All Kinds of Advertising Income

After some thought I decided to open up advertising sales again.

I stopped last year when Google started dropping sites that had the TextLinkAds code on them. That was closely followed by the PayPerPost slap.

To avoid big brother Google from beating me up for something they have no problems doing themselvs I decided to make a change.

Starting in March I am going to open up private advertising again on my network of blogs. There will be paid post options as well as text link and advertising banner options as well.

I am heading to New Orleans a week from today and will be gone for 8 days. When I return I will start accepting advertisers.

If you are interested, just post a comment to this post and include your email. Don't worry the comment won't show on the blog and I will delete it after transfering your email adress to the advertising waiting list.

Prices will be cheap since I am cutting out the middle man (TLA & PPP).

When I start using private advertisers I will cut the AdSense SkyScraper back to a single ad unit. 125x125 I think it is.

Take Care,

Michael

Do You Text or Twitter?

I joined Twitter a while ago. It is a mashup between blogging and texting. You can do it online or with your cell phone.

The benefit to Twitter is that you can reach out to a bunch of people at the same time. Kinda like a blog, but the posts are much shorter and some of the readers may be reading the info on their cell phones.

I see more people using it for marketing and including links in their text messages. Much like I do on MyBlogLog I ignore and delete any message that has a link in it.

Before posting links in messages, get to know the person you are texting. Don't just slam them with marketing messages and links.

I find that Twitter is nice for short messages and group announcements. But I doubt it will take hold without better integration into existing social outlets.

Michael

CPM Advertising for BLOGS

Last month I tested some CPM advertising. Conversion was terrible and it would have been much cheaper at $1 CPC.

But on the flip side the sites I advertised on got paid and didn't loose any visitors. Instead of earning for a visitor to click and leave they simply had to show an ad to get paid.

Direct sales are the best way to make money with CPM because the rates are lower. Check your current eCPM and cut it in half, then in half again.

But on the plus side, you may loose less visitors from clicking.

There are plenty of networks where you can display CPM ads. Check out my tools section for the ones I use.

Michael

Keyword SEO is Crazy This Week

I often spend part of my time working on SEO and part working on paid advertising.

While I would rather get my traffic for free, this past week has been crazy. Some of my sites dropped 20+ poisions and others are now on page one.

I'm glad to have multiple websites so changes like this don't have as much as an affect on my earnings. It is a little stressing with all the SEO work I have done to see a site drop in position.

On the positive side my paid advertising continues through rain, sleet, snow and hail. It isn't free traffic, but it is predictable. The only thing I have to worry about is conversion.

I use the tools over at Wealthy Affiliate to help me with both my SEO and paid advertising. I joined in September and can't say enough about how great their membership is.

Another nice benefit of a SEO shakeup is some small sites will bubble to the top and I can try and buy them quick before the owner realizes where the extra traffic came from. I believe you can never own too many websites and blogs.

Michael

MyBlogLog Checkmark and an Update

Today I finally got my checkmark on MyBlogLog for my One Penny Project BLOG. You can see it here. While you are there, please consider joining my community.

The process to get the checkmark was the same that Technorati uses to verify that you own a blog. It only took me about 2 minutes.

Now my blog will stand out for a little while until others catch on and start getting their own checkmark.

Michael

Did You Go Online Because of the Super Bowl Commercials?

The price for a 30 second commercial last night on the Super Bowl was about $2.8 Million.

Some of the commercials were funny, and others had me wondering why they didn't just show their logo for 30 seconds. A couple of the commercials didn't reveal the product until the very end.

I digress, this isn't supposed to be about commercial quality.

What I want to know is. During or after the Super Bowl, did you go online because of a commercial?

For example GoDaddy did a great job of directing the viewer to their website where they can actually make a transaction. The commercial was about how they couldn't show the commercial on TV. There is also talk about "Exposure".

Even though I am already a GoDaddy customer and knew of them I will bet they got a bunch of new customers last night.

Overall I think GoDaddy did the best at directing viewers towards a purchase point.

What are your thoughts?

Michael

P.S. Don't forget about the $75 Contest.

January Income Report - Completed

Here it is, the income report for January 2008. Yes, I know I said it would be out later this weekend, but when I saw the totals I couldn't wait.

First, lets start with the expences.



Advertising was $140.80 and that included a little over $50 to test promoting new ebooks. Hosting, including the virtual server and 4 domain registration renewals was $78.78. Next month will be about the same.

As for the membership side of things I belong to Wealthy Affiliate, Aweber and Send Out Cards. I also joined a new site, but more on that later.

To round out expences I purchased an ebook and will be using infrom learned from that in February or March.

Total expences were $343.37 for January.

Now the fun part, Income.



As in past months, AdSense was the lowest source of income. At $89.50 a good portion of this came from one site.

If you are a regular reader of my BLOG this should help you decide to move AWAY from AdSense. Income from products I own rights to was $207.12, more then double AdSense. These rights were either re-sell or PLR.

Yes, I agree, It isn't easy finding rights to a product that isn't junk. But as you can see by my stats the effort is well worth it. Keep in mind these sales I can track, I have their email addresses. You can't say the same for AdSense.

Not far behind products I own rights to are products I created myself. January was a good month, higher then most at $119.96. After seeing the results this month I am going to focus on promoting this product a little more before I start my next project.

Rounding out income was affiliate sales. While I made $111.38 in sales, I also lost that much. I say that because I only earned 50% per sale. Had I owned the rights or created these products I would have made twice as much.

Balance for the month was $184.59 in profit. Some of the expences this month will produce profit in a couple months, so I expect this number to be closer to $1000 by April if not sooner.

It is easy to get started with AdSense, but the real money (at least for me) is in selling products I wrote or have the rights to sell.

The Tools I Use page has info about all the stuff I use to make money online.

Take Care,

Michael

January Income Report

I am gathering the numbers for my January income report.

This time I will use some cool graphics and try to write a monthly conclusion. The report will be a PDF and I should have it done this weekend after my numbers are finalized.

Just looking at the rough numbers I think I spent too much last month. Some of the expences will produce income in the future. Plus I turned down $120 in advertising on one of my sites. We couldn't agree on a price to time ratio.

But more on that in my report later this weekend.

Michael

P.S. Don't forget to check out the Valentines Day Contest.