Crazy for On-line Money - The $5 Deal

Contributing to this blog has come a lot easier now that I have realized that everyone is possibly struggling with the same s@#t that I am, trying to make money online. When you read all the reports everything is the same, over and over. It makes everything sound as easy as 1, 2, 3. If it was that easy, then everyone who set up a blog would be rich. It's tough work; that’s why Shoemoney can charge $497 for his program. At first I thought the ad said a $497 value. I was expecting to see a price of $19.99. NO! That s#$t is $497, homie!

Lesson number one of any program should tell you that in order to be successful at this online money game, you kinda, sorta, have to like doing this. Even if your goal is only to make money, you still have to like doing this, and being a little crazy helps. Why? Because for some period of time you will be blogging for 16 hits a week and 5 of those will be from you getting your post of the week format just right. Your Google Adsense totals for the month will be like $.08. Nowhere does anyone ever tell you it’s going to be this hard, but if you like it, then you don’t really care. If that $.08 was $.04 last month, then you have just doubled your money. So there are a lot of things that I’m learning and rather then share the successes I will just share everything.

One thing that I wouldn’t call a success but I would call an obsess. No, not an obsession but just something that is cool and has been helpful. www.fiverr.com It’s a site that you can use to get things done for $5.00. There are literally thousands of things that people will do for you for $5.00. When you are looking through all of the things you are amazed. "How can someone create a logo for my company for only $5.00!!!" "A banner for my blog for $5.00!!!" Then you realize that some of these people are all over the world. So $5.00 in NYC is not the same as $5.00 in India. If you are trying to get your promotion on then I advise seeing what fiverr has to offer. Skip your Starbucks (I know everyone uses that reference, but it’s sooo true).
For just $5.00 I got this Youtube video done for one of my CPA Lead Sites. This video, script read, exactly how I wanted delivered in a wmv file for only $5.00. Check it out.

Here is all the stuff I’ve ordered so far. I skipped a lot of coffees!!

Tips for ordering from Fiverr.com
1. For any order there is no reason to choose someone who doesn’t have a positive feedback rating. There are enough people doing the same things, to find one that is highly rated.

2. If the task is something that an example can be provided for, then an example should be there. It only makes since.

3. Paying for someone to tweet you message is not that effective – work on getting your own Tweeps (Twitter talk for Peeps).

4. Getting 8,500 people to your facebook page – is worth it.

Good luck, I would love to hear about your personal experiences.

-An FTB Blogger
An FTB Blogger Blog

A CRAZY INCREASE IN BLOG TRAFFIC!!

Our team has just become obsessed with blog traffic. We have lived, slept and ate traffic! We went driving during rush hour just so we can sit in traffic! During our obsession we stopped all ebay work, and affiliate marketing because we felt if we increased traffic our sucess with MLM (Traffic Wave and TEProfits) will also increase.

After reading through posts and posts on John Chow.com, TechCrunch.com, Mashable.com and of course Problogger.com we found a bunch of things that begin to work for us.
As a result, we have been able to successfully increase our traffic 4 fold in a month and the month ain't over! Look at May vs April Stats!

Here's exactly what we did, step by step.....Transparency is the key to this blog so we will share. These tactics might appear sleazy, and we are not saying we will continue this practice but here is what we've done. I would suggest cherry picking these activities to taylor what works best for you.  Each of these things were done by all three of us so multiply everything by 3!

NAME DROPPING

We looked at Perez Hiltons blog and others like it who mention famous people, that are relevant in the news today and integrated these same names in a post writen about a super popular Tiger Woods story. See post here. We also mention other popular webpages in our posts, sort of.....like this one. In the beginning of the post we mention four huge blog
 sites and also reference Perez Hilton (twice now).

Then we go on blog catalog and hit the discussion boards with daily witty commentary. We have been extremely active on our facebook page as well as Blog Catalog and Bloggers.com posting questions and shootin' the shzit about any topic that fit our blogs.  Readers of those topics would be interested in our blogs. 

COMMENTS COMMENTS and more COMMENTS
For three hours a day we search really good, well structured blogs that get a lot of comments and added our comments and our Urls. Sort of like dropping calling cards for visitors. The key here is relevant sites and well written real commentary. If we read a post and had nothing to add, then we added nothing, but if we could add info, be creative and funny then we left a comment.  These comments are searchable and readable so if you are acting like a jackass then no one is going to visit your blog; but if you commentary is complimentary and insightful, people will want to see what you ahve to say.
After that, more comments. We went on the top 25 blogs and commented on those as well.

Phew!

LASTLY - LINK REFERRAL

We are also now ranked #1 on Link Referral for one of our sites and top 20 on the other two.

Link referral has been good to us over the years.  The site is pretty nice and it's a good way to get feedback on your blogs, not to mention a couple of hundred unique visitors per month, if you are ranked high enough. 
Now we can't say which method is most effective, becasue we did all these things at once, but what we can say is that our ad clickthru rate sucks big hairy gorilla booty!! We got 8000 hits and 5 people clicked on ads.  So either the ads are in the wrong place, or the topics aren't that appealing to my audience. 

We hope now we have found the secret sauce, if we improve click thrru, we can make some real money and be stomping with the big dogs. Frequent, authentic clever posts should keep the crowds coming back for more.
We are closer then ever! AAhhhhhh....I can smell the money!

Blogging for Money - A Narrative

Blogging

Today we are talking about blogging and how extremely difficult it is to make money from blogging. We have had over 10,000 hits on all of our blogs combined and it's only earned us $16.00. See Photo from our Google Adsense Account (Every single claim on this site will be supported). Our other source of income is from Amazon.com of which we have earned a total of zero dollars. No need to show a photo of the $0.00 total.

Sot the questions that need to be answered are:

1. How do we drive more traffic to our blogs

2. How do we get people to click on adsense and Amazon ads

3. How do we get the cool little nifty icons for twitter, facebook etc at the end of our posts.

To answer these questions we turned to the internet (of course). The first thing that pops up is http://www.seomoz.org/blog/21-tactics-to-increase-blog-traffic.

Since it's first in Google we figure this guy must know what he's talking about right? He gives 21 tips for increasing blog traffic. Great. 3 Freakin' blogs times 21 things means we have 63 tasks!

Ok nothing to it, but to do it. We will do all 21 of these things for all three sites and see if that increases our traffic. One thing that has already worked already is using Link Referral.

This is a site where you visit and review sites and in return people review and visit your site. A little better then a traffic exchange because the reviews actaully encourage people to stop and visit. We have been working hard to get our sites ranked higher and higher every day. Here s what our screen shots look like for the three blogs we are running:

p>Here is the link to join Link Referral. It's totatlly free:


OK, now the first 3 of the 21 are super easy and consider them done. Here they are:

1. Choose the Right Blog Software (or Custom Build)
2. Host Your Blog Directly on Your Domain
3. Write Title Tags with Two Audiences in Mind


So steps 1 and 2 are easy because we are blogger blogers and that's not going to change. We looked at Wordpress and we are not creating a blog from scratch. So that's 2 steps down, and one to go (for this post at least). Step 3 - Will do. I've changed this title to a short stragiht to the point title, and will create titles for the other two sites with these tips in mind.

Ok, that's enough for today, we have real jobs to finish.


-The FTB Blog Team

Starting from Zero!!!

19JAN2010 Cash Total = $0.00

Today is the first day that we are re-trying this experiment. When I say "we" I'm referring to a few guys who are just plain tired of working in cubes (well one of us has an office) all day.


We want two things:
1. To be our own boss

2. To be Rich!!!


Who doesn't want these two things Right. The difference is that we are three of the most focused, driven guys that I have ever meant. We have diverse backgrounds and Obama could take lessons from us on how to manage stress. The plan is to use this blog to keep a journal of all the ways we are able to make money online. Daily and Weekly Tallies of our results will be posted to keep our fans updated on our progress.

We are not new to this online money stuff, but we know now what works and what doesn't work.

WHAT WORKS:

ebay- we have an online gift store. We are bronze powersellers. We will talk about how we get merchandise, what are margins are and how much effort it takes to bring in an eBay prfit.

Affiliate Programs - we will attempt to build a following with affiliate programs. We have invested in a few and so far we have learned a lot, meant a lot of nice people and now this is where the rubber hits the road.

Blogging - we have a total of 3 blogs. This one http://www.paypaltoprofits.blogspot.com/, http://www.richornothing.blogspot.com/ and http://www.takeourballsback.blogspot.com/. We will attempt to amass blog followings for all three blogs and earn revenue, if possible for our blog sites.


We will be talking about these 3 ways to make money online. We are our own boss' and we are starting today at $0.00. However - we do have a few things already in place. We are already involved in a few Affiliate programs and we have a substantial amount of Ebay inventory which to sell from. There will be proof of everything that is stated on this blog with no embellishing what so ever.

So that's our introduction.

Visit our blogs, click our advertisements and visit this page often. Prepare to ask questions if you have any, becuase we would like this site to be as interactive as possible. As we get bigger, we want our audience to expand as well. This site will be a narrative, a chronicle of our journey to $1,000,000.00 It's been done before, and we plan to do it again.


Welcome to the True Ups & Downs of On Line Money.