Edit – some people are telling me over MSN that TLA have scrapped the affiliate program, some people are telling me that it is still there. Anyone know what’s up? If it has been scrapped, ignore the below post as it is worthless.

One of the first things entrepreneurs look at when entering into new projects is how fast they will see a ROI (return on investment), which in layman’s terms means how quickly they will make what they spent back. In some cases, for some projects this isn’t important – for example, I haven’t made back what I’ve spent (a couple thousand or so) on Blog Premiere yet, and I don’t think I will be too soon as I’m not actively looking to monetize it… however, for most projects that involve making money, you will want to make back your investment as soon as possible.

If you could double your investment within a month, how many times would you invest?

No no, I’m not talking about some scheme / scam

I was thinking yesterday, and I had an idea… now bear with me and let me know how plausible this idea is.

What I thought about was using a) the Text Link Ad network and b) aged domains.

Disclaimer: I’m not recommending you use TLA on your own blog (if you have one) as it can kill your Google PR as well as turn your blog into a link farm (you will get a few requests for links to rubbish websites). However using TLA on worthless domains – that’s perfectly alright with me.

You can get aged domains at $5 + registration fee through somewhere like Freshdrop – they also have a nice tool that lets you sort by pagerank, year etc. If you use the coupon code gdbb776, you will get $3 off, meaning that each .COM domain will cost you around $12.xx

Now, TLA auto-accept any blog that is PR3+ into their system… so here’s what you have to do.

1) Buy a domain that is PR3+ from Freshdrop (at the time of writing this, there are five available… including hypocrite.tv which is fairly decent I think.

2) Setup Wordpress on the domain. If you have hosting like Hostgator (use the coupon code wordpress to get the first month at $0.01) you can do this through Fantastico. Install a basic theme, it doesn’t have to be flashy – just don’t use the base one. Don’t worry about plugins etc however it would be easier if your theme was widgetized.

3) Apply to TLA through your own affiliate link.

4) Put up their ad code in your sidebar (and install their plugin). If you need a basic guide to installing TLA, you can find one here.

5) The ad code needs to be up for seven days to get paid, at which point you can dump it. Sometimes you may even sell links, as the advertisers over at TLA tend to be a little more loose with their money (see Jim’s post about them as an example).

6) Wait till the end of the month, net $25.00 through Paypal. Rinse, and repeat.

How many times can you do this? Well, that depends on the number of domains you have. Freshdrop tends to get a few PR3 domains, so you should be able to do 20 – 50+ domains a month (each time doubling your investment.

Remember that you may also make money off link sales – if you have 5+ websites, there’s a good chance you’ll sell a few links. Further increasing your profits. Once you do this the first time, you can rinse and repeat fairly easily – keep the files for your Wordpress blogs in a folder on your desktop, and auto-upload them to your FTP for new domains.

Expanding this

There is another program I think is a load of crap that you can use to make money with this – remember, we don’t care about keeping your new blogs standing in Google, and even if you get slapped… so what.

I’m talking about Pay Per Post. They pay (or used to, haven’t checked recently) $20 for a review of their website, as long as your website a) doesn’t look like a splog and b) has been updated at least ten times and is at least a month old.

Use private label rights articles for the blog posts – you can get them at around $1/100,000 (no, I’m not joking) and at the end of the month do a PPP review (your first and last one). You can use the same PPP review for all of your blogs; they do not care.

So, let’s look at potential review…

Fifty domains would cost you around $625 (assuming you buy all .COMs). Note that I’m not recommending you buy them all at once, and you can also buy .INFOs which are naturally cheaper.

For each domain, you net $25.00 for signing up for TLA.

50 x $25 = $1250.00

After that, for each blog you do a Pay Per Post review on, you net $20.00

50 x $20 = $1000.00

I’ll say this again though – I’d recommend you not use the above services for any websites that you like, as there is a good chance of you getting slapped.

So, your earnings will be around $2250.00 for your investment. This is not including the potential link sales you may get from TLA – you could probably add another $5 – $10 per domain.

Expanding this even further

At the end of the second month, you can sell the blogs (if you’re lucky enough to keep your Pagerank), although if you stay under the radar you won’t have too much of a problem.

The average blog tends to go for 10x a month’s revenue – yours will fetch less, but there is no reason you will not make at least $50 per blog, which is not bad for a blog that will take you a couple hours the first time to setup (once you have done the first, you will find the others a whole lot quicker to do).

50 x $50 (average) = $2500.00

Total earned for the two months would be $2500.00 + $2250.00 + EST $250 (for link sales) = $5,000.00

Now – this is just something I threw together in ten minutes while I was daydreaming a bit yesterday – I have not done this, and I will not be doing so as it is a lot more work than what I am usually accustomed to. However, I did say I would try and bring you guys ways to potentially make money that did not require a lot of startup capital, and I do not see why this is not feasible if you have the time.

If you do the above and make the above estimated figures, you will multiply your investment by eight times within a month. If you outsource the work (something I will be looking at doing) you will not have to do anything to make that money – I do not thing it would cost you more than $100 – $200 to get them all setup and blog posts done on them (plr ones, remember) – especially if you use certain workers that charge $0.3/hour.

What do you think of the idea – is there anything huge that I’ve missed out on that makes it unworkable? Will you be trying this?

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!