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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This post was submitted by Richard @ No More Compromise.

It’s easy to see the similarities between blogging and content sites. After all, they are both content heavy, tend to attract plenty of visitors from the search engines and make money from affiliate links and private advertising sales.

The only difference, you could be forgiven for thinking, is that blogs require more frequent updating than content sites.

But this similarity subtly hides a huge chasm of difference between the two models.

And here is the biggest one - succeeding with a content site can be largely a selfish act, while blogging tends to be quite the opposite.

How come?

Content site publishers, attracting the vast majority of their visitors from the search engines, jealously guard their PageRank like their life depends on it. Try asking one of these sites for a link if you don’t believe me - you can be in for quite a ride.

Stipulations may include that you must link back to them, that you must use the exact code they specify, that you must not have more than x links on your page, that you must have a certain PageRank yourself (often equal to or even higher than their own site), that your links page is no more than 1 click from your homepage and on and on.

Content site publishers make it *hard* to get links.

Basically, content site owners (myself included) are loathe to “waste” a link out of their sites that may devalue our own rankings. We expect something in return for a link - such as a link back from an equally good quality site, a fee in the form of paid advertising or the chance of a commission in the form of an
affiliate link.

But you ain’t gettin’ nuttin’ for free.

Nor am I knocking it. That’s the nature of the game. A fact of life. People who give out links left, right and center really *can* suffer - and why risk that?

Blogging, on the other hand, is far more “community based” and “link happy”. The very nature of blogging is being able to share your ideas with a community of likeminded individuals.

Even most blogging platforms like Blogger or Wordpress are free.

Wrote a great post? It’s likely you’ll find a number of other bloggers linking to you - drawing attention to you. Why? Because that’s what blogging is all about - and they know you’ll likely link back to them anyway because that’s what (polite) bloggers do.

This “linkability” factor can make quite a difference to your business results when you think about it. These days it’s easier to generate links from blogs than content sites - and to do so simply create fantastic content and network with bloggers in the same field as you.

Also, you can build PR to your own site - and hence benefit in terms of SEO by starting a separate blog, getting involved with the community and then linking back to your main site.

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Sorry for the delay, it was supposed to go out yesterday but Feedburner decided to be funny.

This competition was a successful one, even though I didn’t win Blogging Idol - I saw an almost 300 subscriber increase over the duration of the competition, and this is with zilch work on my part (apart from writing posts, of course).

Anyways, no time to waffle on a little more, even though I’d like to - I’ll be 17 in around 15 minutes. Winners were drawn through Random.org.

The winner of the Nintendo Wii is:

raziiii @ gmail.com

The winner of the Flip Mino is:

virtual134 @ gmail.com

Winners have 24 hours to claim their prizes, or else winners will be redrawn.

Have a good day all!

EDIT: 17, finally. Happy Birthday to me, eh.

Here’s a ‘gift’ for you guys - most of you will have this, but some won’t That eBook about making money from your blog that I wrote a little while ago, given to you guys with resale rights (some have made a couple hundred selling it) - anyways, here’s a direct link. Enjoy!

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