I spent the best part of today working on ideas and tweaking this blog - including an hour and a half on trying to install Threaded Comments, but I think I screwed up a lil and had to give up. If you’ve got a few minutes to spare and can help me install the plugin so that it’s functional, let me know and I’ll hook you up with a 125 x 125 for a month and a text link in the sidebar for your help. Only trustworthy and experienced people, please!

I put out a post asking for advice yesterday - some of the ideas on there were pretty decent and I’ll be looking at implementing them on here. Some of the things I learned was that the theme was fine, as with the content; although things like categories etc were felt to be needed by some of you.

If you have more ideas, feel free to mention them in a reply to this or the original post. Just so you guys know what’s happening, here’s a break down of changes I’ll be making over the next few days / weeks.

- Install Threaded Comments. The sooner, the better.

- Fix up the categories. At the moment, I don’t really do anything with regards to categories - everything goes into a category called Daily Rambling mainly because I forget while writing posts. With over 300 posts on this blog, that will take some time - however, when it is done I’ll put a widget in the sidebar with links to the categories.

- Weekly guest posts. Without visitors, this blog would not exist, as I’d have shut it down a long, long time ago - anyways, what I’m going to do is allow one guest post a week, for people to show you guys what they’re capable of. If it’s good, people will visit your blog (remember that each post is sent out to more than 900 people); if it’s bad, well… it won’t get published. Top notch stuff only, guys

- Fix Advertise page. The last time the Advertise page was updated was around February. Of course, metrics have changed since then, both positive and negative, so I’ll be rewriting the Advertise page. Will be dropping a few prices, and raising a few others, as well as putting up a post on here - if you’re interested in advertising, let me know via email and we’ll work something out.

- Upgrade Wordpress. No urgency on this one, considering I’m happy with 2.5.1 - but I probably should get around to this. Maybe when the next update comes out.

- Increase Marketing. At the moment, the marketing I do on this blog is entirely passive… that is, I put out posts and people link to or promote those posts because of their content (be it a contest, task post or just normal decent one). Might start looking at doing the whole guest posting thin again - on blogs with 1,000+ subscribers, as well as other types of more… creative marketing.

- Reward Top Commentator. Starting this month, top commentator by the end of the month gets a month long ad slot in the sidebar.

Stuff I’m considering…

Blogger Pitch - basically, the idea is that people send me private emails pimping their blogs… and I choose one blogger every month on here to get a free plug and explain why you guys should visit it. I try to produce good content, but would really love if there were many, many sources on the Internet that people could go to learn things… this could help people promote themselves as well as strive to better their blogs so they could get featured.

Link love - I did this in the past, but in all honesty the reason I stopped was because I couldn’t find 10~ top quality posts that I’d send you guys towards. Most blogs are rehashed rubbish, nothing else - although some are better at it than others, should you really waste your time reading basic content? Maybe have links sent in by readers suggesting what’s good and what’s not.

Blogs I read and blogs I find - I’m constantly on the look for new blogs, but have been busy the last few months so stopped reading many. With me using outsourcing more and more these days, I’ve started to get time again. The blogs I currently seriously read, and would recommend are few and far between - although I do glance at loads of other blogs daily just to see what’s up - mainly because they’re run by friends or active commenters on here.

Bi-Weekly Q&A Sessions - I promised I wouldn’t do another one for a year, but that’s mainly because it took so long (5,000+ words!). What I’m thinking is cut it down, say ten questions maximum and do it more often.

Contest. Had a few problems with contests recently, with sponsors vanishing. Might look at holding a contest, but one similar to the last one - a decently valued tangible item for a month long easy to enter contest. Hmm.

Goals

Hit 1,500 subscribers

Increase traffic to around 15,000 monthly consistently (last month was 16,000 uniques but helped by social spikes)

Release a product for the blog. Probably about website flipping, as for how expensive and in what format…. that will be decided by you guys in a future post. I toyed with a forum, but am also considering an eBook or an autoresponder series.

As always, feel free to share your thoughts.

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This blog is growing by the day, and I’ve always tried to take reader advice into account while making it grow. Of course, I do not listen and follow 100% of the ideas put forward, or else this would descend into chaos, but the good ones I do try and listen to - even if I don’t act upon them immediately, they’ll remain in the back of my mind.

I’m at a little bit of a crossroads now regarding TUK, and one of the things I’ve always talked about is asking your audience to figure out what they want. I wrote a post about that sometime on here but can’t remember the title - anyways, the basic idea is rather than analyse hundreds of facts and figures, just ask the people you’re pitching to what their ideas are.

I get a lot of private feedback - be it by email, comments on here, instant messenger conversations… the amount of feedback is insane. Here’s the chance for some public feedback. I did this before too, but at the time I was pretty busy… now I have time to make the necessary changes. Any comments you make on this post will be looked at, as all comments are on this blog - I’ll seriously consider the best ones.

One of the things I’ve been asked about is a custom theme for this blog - now, I do have licenses to a few premium themes, and currently use John Cow’s Milk It theme (albeit heavily customized) for this blog, however a custom theme with top notch graphics would take this blog to the next level, or so I’ve heard.

Personally, I’m happy with the current one but wouldn’t mind putting some money forward to get a custom one created; what I’ve heard is that posts are difficult to read on here with the current settings. I do not use images much, if it all in posts here - they tend to be just text. The reason for this is that I don’t have the time to spend hours a day putting out pretty looking images that ultimately don’t help you, and would rather concentrate on content (and other ventures…). If it is hard to read posts on here though, a custom theme might be the way forward. Let me know!

Other points that have been raised are a weekly live kind of chat show - be it plain text or otherwise, video, a paid membership course about website flipping, more interaction (a weekly reader highlight for example)… loads of ideas. Feel free to put any more forward, be it ideas for posts you’d like to see, design, website features, questions, blog changes (ex bringing back dofollow or introducing threaded comments) - rather than wasting my time and yours with changes that aren’t needed, let’s discuss what is.

By the way, I means men and women in the title. Just a general term, don’t want to appear sexist

Thanks in advance for all input.

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A few of you might have noticed the RSS count jump from 700 odd to around 980 or so… some questions have been raised through instant messsenger and email.

Although I’d love to claim I’ve discovered some secret hack that gets me hundreds of subscribers within seconds, the truth is far more boring.

When I originally got Aweber, I made one of the mistakes that most people make - targeting the internet marketing niche. Now, the greatest deal of money is in other niches - so I learned as I experimented more and more, and although I have around seven messages setup as an autoresponder series should people join my list (here’s the link)… I haven’t really updated it in ages.

Rather than let the list die - a large portion of it is built through methods like forum marketing and Youtube, so people that don’t know about the blog yet - I decided to combine it with my blog through Aweber’s Blog Broadcast feature, as both talk about the same topics. Ergo the large boost. If you’re on the newsletter, you’ll get a thrice monthly email with all new content from the blog.

This has been done by bloggers such as John Chow, Yaro Starak, Gyutae at Winning The Web, John Cow and dozens of others… so for all accusing me of gaming numbers etc, meh. Personally, I can’t wait till I pass 1,000 subscribers as that is what defines a blog moving from the third tier into the second tier.

Anyways, just wanted to clarify. As for today’s post - I’m dead tired, as I’ve been out the whole of today… so sorry, nothing useful for you guys today. Just wanted to welcome newsletter subscribers to the blog, and one hopes you guys will stick around

Over the next few days, I’ll talk about how I got 200+ subscribers to join within a week or so (through the password protected post that went viral) and maybe another question and answer session if you guys are interested. Let me know, comments section of this post.

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I could write about here on entrepreneurial topics and the like, but most people have told me that they don’t give two shits about the life of an entrepreneur and would like to know more about stuff that’s making me money. Now, as I run this blog for you guys - thought I might as well follow their advice, and I’ll bring you stuff that has made me money - not rehashed crap that has been repeated on thousands of other blogs, but stuff I’ve used successfully (and maybe theories I’ve thought up - with a disclaimer, of course) and stuff that you guys can use too.

By no means is the content on here revolutionary - it’s usually just taking simple ideas and tweaking them or putting them together to make huge profits relative to time put in.

If you want to make money online, you have to learn not to complicate things. Now for me - if things are too complicated, I can’t even be bothered to try and understand them, and if things are too difficult or involve too much work, I can’t be bothered to do them. Which is why I keep things simple and for the moment, it’s working.

This idea could be packaged up and sold, and I don’t say this about many posts on this blog. A few, but not many.

Anyways… no more fluff, let’s get started. You can make a full time income with this idea alone.

A lot of the posts on here over the last month or so have been about website flipping… I started website flipping around 2-3 months into my IM ‘career’ and till date it’s been one of my biggest earners. In few other industries can you create something in the morning and sell it in the evening for hundreds (or thousands) of dollars, and with everything being capable of being outsourced, well… when it’s so easy, you just have to try it. I’m in the middle of flipping a medium - large blog live for you guys and will break down what exactly I did.

The problem with doing this is that if you want to make a lot of money, it is far easier to do things in bulk… it’s easier to make ten small websites as opposed to one dominator one. However, to make a decent amount of money (that is a few thousand monthly), I’d say a blog (in any niche) would have to be around the similar size of TUK (500-1000 RSS) or bigger.

Buying multiple - I currently own 11 blogs with more than 500 subscribers - blogs like this would set you back at least $20,000, probably treble or quadruple that (just for comparision, CashQuests sold for $15,000 with around 1,000 subscribers).

However, I paid less than $150 for each blog I run, didn’t set them up myself and get all content on them free. I don’t spend any time updating them, and less than an hour a week maintaining them. They all bring in money too, and have people approaching them to advertise on them and have contests sponsored. This is literally easy money - and today I’m going to talk about how I’ve done it.

This is similar to offline marketing, the concept at least.

A lot of you will have started out on free blogs - that is, blogs using Wordpress.com or Blogspot.com, blogs that didn’t cost a cent to run. Most will have moved on, however at the moment there are still a lot of people on them, most often because they don’t know about doing any more than what they currently are.

First off - a warning - most blogs that you can work this deal with will not be in the internet marketing niche (which includes blogging tips, making money online etc) as they tend to be more web-aware. In other niches though, you can profit.

You’ll have to find the blogs yourself - how you do this is up to you. You can Google them, use search tools like Technorati… entirely up to you. You’re looking for blogs with upwards of 200 subscribers, with a decent amount of traffic and interaction (comments on posts and the like). The best blogs you will find will be on Wordpress.com.

The two disadvantages of Wordpress.com are:

- Looks unprofessional (XYZ.Wordpress.com instead of XYZ.com)

- Can’t be monetized

This is where you come in.

What you’ll be doing is approaching bloggers you find on free hosting - bloggers that currently run a growing blog and with an active following, and push to them the benefits of moving to a ‘regular’ website - that is, their own domain, on your hosting and the ability to make money.

Remember, these are bloggers that have been blogging because they like to. Not for any other reason than that.

You’ll finance the move, of course. Depending on you, this will involve various things - a domain, hosting (you can host all your sites on a Hostgator server pretty easily). I like to throw in a custom Wordpress design as well, based on their specifications. If you want to, you can buy a developer license to something like the Revolution theme and use those for your blogs.

Each website costs me $10 (without the theme) up to $150 with the theme custom created for me. What the blogger then does is post on his current free blog that s/he is moving to a more professional platform, and their readership will follow.

You also offer them a 50% cut of all revenue the website makes. Considering (Wordpress.com bloggers) they were making $0 before, most will be ecstatic to hear about this. You take care of the monetization completely - I like to use Adsense because it works on niche blogs, but I also do banner sales, CPM etc. Most websites have paid for my initial investment by the end of the first month, even with me only taking 50% of the revenue. Everything after that is profit.

To the blogger him/herself, this is like a goldmine - getting paid to do something they were doing anyways, on a more professional look (a proper .COM domain - remember how thrilled you were when you got your first one?) with a design based on their specifications.

For you, you’re getting a blog worth a hell of a lot of money that comes with an active following and existing traffic at a fraction of the price. One where content is created at no charge whatsoever. One where you have to spend around an hour a week tweaking ads, organizing contests etc. When a blog is big enough, people will be climbing over themselves to sponsor contests.

Last week, I sold one of these blogs for $5,000. They go for more than a regular blog would because the blogger will stay on, as long as you continue the agreement. If you want to, you can give the blogger a cut of the sale - you don’t have to though.

Hope you guys use this idea, as it’s a great one and I haven’t seen it discussed anywhere else. Approach bloggers on free platforms and you can make a lot of money - just don’t be selfish, and try and let them benefit as much as you are - remember, its their content, their following. Good luck!

I love website flipping - this month is heading towards being my biggest ever income wise, and the best thing is that none of it had to do with things I don’t really like. Very little was from affiliate marketing, as I’ve cut down on that almost completely - why make others money when I can make myself money? I’m on course for over 20k, and there are still a few days left. Small money for some, but for others like me…

As always, if you have any questions let me know via the comments. Hope this post was worth waiting for, as I did take a break from here- I’m also going to talk about another variation of website flipping soon that I came across a few days ago and mentioned in an earlier post. How does 3k for an hour of work sound?

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I’m back.

First off - thanks to all the guest posters, they were of pretty high quality I thought and I enjoyed reading them (more than my own posts, even ). Also, thanks for the birthday wishes - unfortunately, my email inbox has been jammed with emails (more than 1,000 legitimate ones over the last week - mainly because of the ’secret’ method release and various other things) so if you’ve sent me an important email and I haven’t replied - it’s because I haven’t seen it or have seen it and forgotten about it.

Although the break was good, it’s great to be back; it’s also great to see that TUK finally broke the 700 subscribers mark. Next up will be trying to aim towards 1,000 - that may be difficult, but we’ll see. Of course, the easiest way to reach the 1,000 mark is if you guys help out; so please send people over here if you like the stuff you read.

Today what I wanted to do is ask you guys about a question that is pretty important in blogging, especially the internet marketing niche where proof is everything. If you’re running a blog teaching people to do stuff, and you cannot do that stuff yourself - you’re not going to last long.

On most blogs you read - even this one - you rarely see failures. People will talk about their successes, most notably their big ones; however, when was the last time you saw a blogger admit he had royally screwed up?

I had a huge failure recently - considering that things have been going pretty good of late, with metrics constantly increasing - it was the launch of a new project which you will not hear about after this post.

I had an idea, as I have a lot of them - when I get ideas, I tend to believe that they are amazing and that all of them will be successes - now, of course that’s not true. Anyways, I had an idea involving social marketing and a specific CPA offer - one that I thought would make me loads of money without having to spend it.

This was a week or so ago - I worked for the best part of a day (10 hours or so) setting things up, tweaking the landing page, testing things to make sure there wouldn’t be any problems… at the time, I honestly thought I could have an early retirement just off this project.

The project grossed $1912.67 in its first 24 hours.

Isn’t that super? That’s almost $60,000 per month, right?

However…

The money I spent on the project was $1905.35

So… ten hours of setting things up, a day of promoting it… and I get a net profit of $7. You work out the hourly rate for that one and you’ll get the same reaction I did… ouch!

I’ll probably work on it a little more over the next few weeks, but for now I’m just taking a break with it… to me, that was a huge waste of time and I don’t like wasting time

However, the one thing I have learned over the last month and a half is that social networks are easy as hell to make money off. Try playing around with them, and you’ll be surprised (I’m not just talking about this projet, but others I’ve done with social networks over the last 1.5 months). You have to be creative and unique - some half assed copied rubbish won’t do well, but if you hit it right you will make money. How creative and unique you are, of course determines the amount of profit you make.

What I learned was that if I had tested things a little more, and waited for some time, I would probably have made more money - I was so sure that this was going to do well that I set it up just before I went to sleep, and by morning it was too far gone to change much.

Despite being on a break though, I did have a pretty decent success this week - making almost $3,000 for about one hour of work (related to website flipping). I will put up a post this week talking about what I did to make that money, something pretty simple that any of you guys can replicate. Stay tuned

Above, I’ve talked about one of my biggest cock ups in my internet marketing career - how about you? I asked this question a few months ago, but it’s always interesting to see what readers are up to - what is one of your recent failures, and how did you take it?

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