This post is a little bit personal, and probably won’t be of much use to you guys. Just letting you know :)

My time as a relatively inexperienced internet marketer has been not just useful, as I picked up quite a bit of knowledge along the way – it has also been fun. Having met a tonne of new people, most of which were entertaining, knowledgeable or just cool to talk with, I don’t regret a single moment of my internet experience so far. I did however take things perhaps too easy when I shouldn’t have – during the holidays, rather than spending the free time I had building up websites, I lazed around, went out to parties and chatted on instant messenger – had I worked a little, there’s a good chance I would have 3-5 relatively large websites nowadays.

I also devoted a bit too much time to forums, and became unhealthily reliant on Digital Point in particular – never good for any type of business. I conducted nearly every single online activity, including marketing this blog over there, and when I was banned through no fault of my own, I was a fish out of water – apart from this blog, I have no other ‘large’ websites that I’ve devoted time to, and focused on reading rather than doing, something I’ve tried to fix over the last couple of months.

Due to me being utterly, utterly inexperienced at affiliate marketing and unable to use things like Adwords as I don’t have a credit card, I’ve not done too well with that either – a couple hundred dollars which is fairly alright as its my first go, however nowhere near enough to live on as a full internet marketer. The dream is of course to eventually work from home, as 9-5 jobs don’t seem much fun or make the most use of abilities that people have; they also have earning restrictions, something that the WWW doesn’t.

I’ve decided that I will go the blogging route in an attempt to diversify my income – not only relying on TUK and eBooks. TUK brings in some money, about $500 a month give or take a bit, however as I mentioned earlier, I don’t have too many websites that I can promote so it is my main earner. Due to this, I’ll be creating a series of blogs, most of them in the webmaster area, and attempting to get them up to decent levels… we’ll see how it goes.

This is where I’d like to ask my readers for some help; I know I can write fairly well, and I hope you guys do too – if I typed like a third grader on crack, it’s probably safe to say that I wouldn’t have any readers. I do however have a decent amount of readers; nowhere near the big boys, but enough to persuade me to continue blogging. Anyways, here’s the ideas I currently have, some fun, some not. Let’s see what you guys think.

a) Internet Marketing blog – creating reasonable hype, getting sales… something I’ve done fairly well in the past with, and one that would be pretty easy to create content for, as the phrase ‘Internet Marketing’ is fairly broad.

b) Contests blog – most of the posts required for a contest blog don’t need much intelligence to write (as most contests just want you to copy and paste a list of prizes) and it would be interesting to keep track of who was running what. Eventually, if you get big you can charge for contests to be given a featured status. :)

I didn’t really think highly about this, but then I saw the sale of ContestBeat.com on Sitepoint, a website with $100 – $200 a month in earnings and 100 visitors a day (both very achievable). Granted, the website also had 200 RSS subscribers, but I guess I could always run a contest to get the numbers up :razz: . Oh yeah – the blog sold for $3,400, hardly chump change.

c) Satirical blog. I got this idea yesterday, after the comments in the MMO post which inspired a decent chunk of debate – anyways, hear me out.

When Carl Ocab did it, yeah fine; it was pretty cool. Seeing a guy that milked his age to the extreme, and managed to capture spot one on Google for a sweet keyword (make money online) – that was something that inspired people. The problem is, it inspired quite a few people in the same way that John Chow unintentionally causes hundreds of make money online blogs to be started weekly… you had blogs popping up all over that tried to milk their ages, but unlike Carl, whose maturity matched the standard adult, these kids actually blogged and spoke like kids.

You had make money with a 12 year old, make money with a eleven year old, make money with a sixteen year old (*cough*)… way too many youngsters that acted like youngsters. I’ve got no problem with young people, but when I see ‘Yo, Hey, Man, Sup, Chillin” thousands of times in your blog posts, it makes me want to slap someone.

Anyways, my idea is to create a blog with the satirical title – ‘Make Money With A Four Year Old’. What I was going to do, is not just run it as a blog, but also have a sales page in front of it… you know how most sales pages tend to show pictures of flash cars, huge houses, gimmicks costing thousands of dollars in an attempt to get people to buy? I was thinking of doing that, but from a four year old’s point of view. See the example on the left of what a four year old would consider a flash car.

I doubt it would earn much money (although I’d have a donate button under the blog posts with ‘Buy me my milk’ or something like that, but it would be good for a laugh.

d) Life tips blog. Nothing major – as I mentioned on the sales page for the One Dollar Millionaire, if it was major then I’d be charging insane amounts of money for it, but just general, basic life tips. Running it off the above linked to website, as a /blog extension would be interesting, as people could see my standard of writing and it would add value to the website as a whole.

e) Blogging magazine. I really want to run this – at the moment, there’s no competition and I don’t think competing with a startup (unless they’re funded by err… like Microsoft or something) would be too difficult. I have a lot of ideas for this one, but want to make it extremely large and valuable – something like 50 pages in PDF, something I can’t do alone so I will need help for that. At the moment, I’m looking for the right magazine theme to use, and after I find it… it’ll be time to market. :)

I’m thinking of making it free for the first month, and then charging a minimal amount ($5/month subscription) thereafter; also have sponsor opportunities for both the magazine and the website, like a ‘real’ magazine. I’ll be asking Bloggeries members over the next few days if they want to contribute – we’ll see how it goes :)

What does that mean for this month?

Starting a blog is not easy – although I can do the content myself, getting up premium themes, paying for promotion, domains and hosting all costs money. I’ll be investing every single cent I earn this month into creation of these blogs – most of them I’ll run myself, but I will also try a) hiring someone to write on a seperate one and b) partnering with other bloggers to run new blogs. At the end of the month, I’ll compare and see what happens. If this kicks off, you guys will (hopefully) have a tonne of good content to read and I’ll have a few websites that will be doing fairly well.

Your thoughts

I’d be interested in hearing what you guys have to say – what you think about the above blog ideas, and whether you have any of your own you’d like to see me take up. I’ll also be taking advertising from the first month on all of them, so if anyone has a proposition, let me know :)

By the way, don’t worry about TUK – I’ll still be updating here every day and promoting this. Want to get tshirts made too! :)

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