We almost run into Problogger Darren Rowse!

I was reading George Mantys Blog today as I often do and I noticed that I was in distinguished company! Darren Rowse from Problogger must have just visited as well.

You may think and why is Rob writing about this? Well living in little old NZ this is about as close to seeing a celebrity as I ever get!

I made sure I recorded a screenshot of the moment as you can see to the left. Darren's website is one of the best, and I subscribe to and read his articles everyday. As he is an Australian, plus a similar age to myself, it makes it all seem easy to relate to.

I am not sure who NZ's top earning Blogger is but I am sure at the current earnings from this site that its not me! (however given our small population it is conceivable that this site could be in the top 100 )

If you want to read a great story of how Darren became a problogger the story is here. Its certainly interesting and inspirational. After reading this you realize that even for Darren it has not been a get rich quick scheme, and Blogging is as much if not harder work than any job. Unless you are extremely motivated and have a great work ethic the chances are you will never make it.

Although I often have ideas about cutting down on my full time employment and investing more time in online endeavours, due to mortgage and other expense commitments this will remain a fantasy until earnings reach at least $1000 per month.

Look out tomorrow for our 110 day summary, we have been trying a few new things lately with a certain amount of success - remember our change of focus that we took on around a month ago, you can revisit the article here.

Sponsored Post - PayDayCashAdvanceLoans.Biz

Payday loans are a great idea for people in need of money before payday. This can be of particular use in the case of emergencies such as hospital expenses, vehicle repairs, or important one-off payments that you don't have the immediate funds for.

Although Payday Cash Advance Loans are convenient in times of emergency, they should not be used for unnecessary expenses.

Ten Commandments for Bloggers

Often it is hard to know what is the right thing to do, or what not to do in the world of blogging. Here at the Million Dollar Experiment Down Under we have attempted to put together 10 Commandments for Bloggers.

1. Don't lie, trick or try and deceive your readers into clicking or signing up for anything - if it is an affiliate link mark it as so, or at least mention it in your post.

2. Announce a sponsored post as a sponsored post. Unless you would have written about it anyway. If the sponsored post requires that you do not say this, don't do it. (Its like selling your soul)

3. Give back to the community. Remember when you started out how bigger and better sites did you the favour of linking to you, do the same within reason of course. (i.e if they only have a couple of posts its a good incentive to promise them a link if they work on their content)

4. Be open - use your name and your picture. Think of the best bloggers out there, everyone knows their name and what they look like - if you want to play with the big boys, you need to follow their example.

5. Post regularly, at least 2 or 3 times a week. Readers will soon give up on a blog that is irregularly updated. We will however give you a week off at Christmas! Otherwise get in a guest blogger!

6. You shall not steal. If you are intent on borrowing someone else's idea or text, make sure you link back to them and preferably ask their permission first of all. Stealing content from other blogs is the lowest form of low, so don't do it OK!

7. Treat your fellow Bloggers with respect. You will find that if you do this, and take the time out to learn and participate in your fellow bloggers sites, it will return to you tenfold.

8. Learn from your mistakes. If you make a post and get flamed for it you are probably upsetting someone. Change your tact. If somethings not working change it. If it is working enhance it and keep it.

9. Honour your family. Blogging is cool however it is also time consuming. Remember at the end of the day your family is more important so make sure that you spend time with them and remind yourself of that everyday - without the support of your family you are nothing.

10. Be true to yourself. If its not working give it away. There is nothing worse than slaving away for less than minimum wage if its not really performing for you. Don't be afraid to say enough is enough. If you don't enjoy it, stop doing it.

If you found this site to be helpful or inspiring you are welcome to donate to Robs Experiment!

Sponsored Post - RateGenius

RateGenius is a website where you can refinance your car, truck or SUV. The only costs involved in the refinance are a Title Transfer Fee that is paid to your state (varying from $5-$65) depending on the state you are in. (Some lenders may also have a loan processing fee)

RateGenius will find a lower interest rate for you, and can help to assist with finding more flexible payment terms. (e.g skipping a few payments.)

RateGenius can normally save you a lot of money, so visit them first for Car Refinance.

Time for a change

I have come to the conclusion that for this particular site, Google AdSense is not extracting the maximum value out of the space it is taking on my site. One of the reasons is I believe that the audience of this site are to web savvy to think that a Google advert is anything other than a Google Advert. I really need to find products that appeal more to the sites visitors.

I will continue to use AdSense on this site, however are going to cut down on the amount and try out some other forms of advertising - this may include books on Blogging,Blogging software and other things that directly relate to the kind of readers I am likely to get.

Naturally I will be reporting on how successful or unsuccessful these things are. If you have any suggestions of Advertising that has really worked for you, please let me know, I will trial it if it stacks up.

I signed up for PayPerPost approximately 5 days ago, however are yet to hear whether or not my blog has been accepted. I am not sure how long it takes them to review a blog, hopefully it does not take to much longer. I am very keen to do a review of their operation as part of the Million Dollar Experiment Down Under.

If you found this site to be helpful or inspiring you are welcome to donate to Robs Experiment!

MyLot Continues to Surprise with Passive Income Potential

Lately I have not paid much attention to what has been happening with MyLot, however when I took a closer look at my earnings I realised that referral income is starting to tick along quite nicely.

There are 3 active referrals that have signed up via our referral link and one of them particularly is going fairly hard on a daily basis. This means that every day we are getting between 30 and 40 cents for doing absolutely nothing at all. (not even covering our site with advertising.)

Of course being an exponential kind of guy I then start thinking what if I had 10 times the referrals, or 100 times.... I am sure you get the picture. Maybe some people out there could be making serious coin out of MyLot.

There is a little website that I run, that caters to parents of small children, many of them would probably be stay at home parents. Thinking that this could be a win win website to refer to this audience I have posted a review of MyLot along with my referral link onto that site. It will be interesting to see how many (if any) end up signing up. It is good to try and reach a different audience sometimes and I can see MyLot being a great little earner for Stay at Home parents. The fact that it could help with our Million Dollar Experiment Down Under is an added bonus of course!

If you would like to sign up under my referral please visit and register on MyLot here

Meanwhile we are now beginning to settle into life as a PR4 ranked site... In the last day or two traffic has taken a big leap, however whether it is because of the new ranking, or the story about the ranking is yet to be seen!

If you found this site to be helpful or inspiring you are welcome to donate to Robs Experiment!

Google Page Rank has come through!

I'm sure yesterday I didnt have a page rank at all, yet today I appear to have a pagerank of 4 on my main URL. (A couple of my other pages already had page ranks). Well I am pretty happy about that, the blog has only been going for 3 1/2 months. Check your home pages and let me know how you are getting on. You can check all the data centers here.

I checked another couple of blogs out of interest...

Mike's Money Making Mission - Mike comes in with a whopping 5/10 !
My Quest to Make Money from the Internet - Martin a cool 4/10 - nice
Can I Make Big Money Online - George has a 5/10 however he already had a pretty decent rank I think.

That kind of crept up on me, a couple of weeks ago everyone was talking about it happening, yet nothing on this site then whammo, out of the blue there it is. I have done a quick search around the blogosphere and there does not seem much mention about it.

Maybe half the world is still asleep!

If you found this site to be helpful or inspiring you are welcome to donate to Robs Experiment!

Building passive Income - Part II

Before you read this article if you like you can read Part I

Earn Money While You Sleep
I like to think of Passive Income as earning money while you sleep. Whatever hemisphere you live in remember to take advantage of the opposite side of the world. If you live down south like me I have a couple of UK websites... that's right whilst myself and my countrymen are sound asleep my UK websites are earning a few bucks. Make sure every hour of the day and night is performing for you.

Think of Time as an Investment
It takes at least 15 minutes, probably 30 to write and go through the process of a Sponsored Post and you may get between 5 - 10 dollars for this time. That's all you get though. Spend that same half an hour on improving your traffic or some part of your site and you may earn for example an extra 10 cents a day. That adds up to 70 cents a week, $2.80 a month, $33 a year and so on. Yet remember it was the same half an hour, you just need to think a couple of years down the track not next weeks paypal payment.

Multiply the things that Work
If you have a site that works, make another just like it, try and cater to a slightly different market or country but just duplicate what works and chances are that it will work as well. Don't waste a proven formula, they are hard to come by.

Multiple Streams
How many times have you heard the saying don't keep all your eggs in the same basket. Well its true, you need to diversify and spread your income streams over multiple sources. Otherwise one bad turn of events could destroy your whole empire. If you are spread over 6 or 7 different income streams then at the most you will only take a partial hit.

Please share any other good ideas that you may have for creating and securing passive income. There could be a part III if I get some feedback!

If you found this site to be helpful or inspiring you are welcome to donate to Robs Experiment!

100 Days, Over 100 Posts and a Summary of Money Made to Date

It has now been 100 Days since we started this Experiment. Over 100 posts have been written and nearly $230 NZ Dollars have been earned.

Traffic
Traffic has gradually increased over the time this blog has been running. Hopefully this will continue to grow over the months ahead. Most of our traffic comes from Google and referrals from other like minded sites - thanks to all that have linked through to this site. It is appreciated

Passive Income Focus
With more of a focus on passive income over recent weeks income has dropped a little on this site, however it has risen on my other sites so concentrating on building traffic, promoting etc has been worthwhile to date.

AdSense
Google AdSense has been cranking along quite nicely for us this month, it is a long time ago that I first became an AdSense publisher (June 2005) and it took 1 year to earn the first payout! The next payout took 5 months as a couple of new websites were added to the mix. Now we are looking at less than 2 months to clock over the minimum payment - One of our short term goals is to be paid out monthly, however we have a bit to go yet.

Sponsored Posts
It is has certainly been enjoyable NOT doing any sponsored posts this month (apart from a couple right at the beginning.), the benefit of concentrating on building traffic instead should mean that gains are ongoing and will help add to the snowball effect of exponential growth.

Summary
Anyway lets cut to the chase, here is the breakdown to date of the Million Dollar Experiment Down Under!

(NZ $)
Google AdSense Total $23.97
Money4Blogs Total $29.41
Blogsvertise Total $22.06
Blogitive Total $110.29
LoudLaunch Total $7.35
MYLOT Total $11.19
SportsGambling Total -$10.10
Beer tasting Total $30.00
Grand Total US$ 152.44 or NZ$ 224.18

Increase over the last summary (90 Day Summary) in NZ Dollars: $11.31


If you found this site to be helpful or inspiring you are welcome to donate to Robs Experiment!

Google Reader - Another Useful Tool for the Bloggers Toolkit

For many of us we spend a lot of time every day catching up on the latest news from a variety of Blogs and Websites. Google Reader is a great online tool that takes all this and keeps it in one convenient location where you can access it from any PC with your Google log in details.

There are many options that can be configured with the New Google Reader including...

• Import your feeds from another RSS Reader into Google Reader
• Manage subscriptions through one easy to use interface
• A number of well documented Keyboard shortcuts for the power user
• Incorporate into your Google Homepage
  

The Google Reader Application is appealing because it is classic Google style, easy to use with a basic layout but plenty of features if you are prepared to do a little digging around.

In summary a useful tool, so an excellent addition to the Bloggers Toolkit, tommorrow we will be posting our 100 day Summary of Earnings to date in the "Million Dollar Experiment Down Under".






If you found this site to be helpful or inspiring you are welcome to donate to Robs Experiment!

How to Make the Technorati Top 100,000 in 90 Days

This blog made it into the top 100,000 Technorati Blogs within 90 days, by following the simple steps outlined below. There was no linking required to anything other than related and interesting sites to achieve this goal.

1st 30 Days
Write as many quality posts as you can, offer to link to like minded sites and try to comment as much as you can on like minded blogs. Focus more on getting content into your site in this time period rather than linking.

Target: Aim for 10 - 15 Blog Links in this time.

Days 31 - 60
In your posts mention that you are interested in swapping links with like minded or interesting blogs. Take time out to read other blogs and offer to swap links with any that you enjoy or compliment your own. Even just link to them and tell them you have done so - a lot of blogs will return the favour as long as you have reasonable content on your site and update it fairly regularly. Participate in Blog Carnivals as this tends to create additional and valuable links that Technorati counts. Join sites like Blog About Your Blog for additional links.

Target: Aim for 20 - 30 Blog Links in this time.

Days 60 - 90
Things tend to gather a momentum of their own if you have worked hard in the previous weeks, new blogs will start to find you and link to you. Remember where you were a couple of months ago and return the favour. Still offer to link to like minded blogs as you come across them. If you have done your job well things will start to move on their own and you should reach the top 100,000 within this time frame. To gain extra links use key words like Google Adsense in your posts and other blogs will pick up on them and post a link to your articles.

Target: Aim for 40 - 50 Blog Links in this time.

Of course if you have a like minded site to this one, or of course an interesting site, lets swap links, leave me a comment once you have placed a link to my site on yours, and I will of course reciprocate - lets help each other climb that ladder a bit more!


Heres a picture of my Son, he is already learning the way of the Blog!



If you found this site to be helpful or inspiring you are welcome to donate to Robs Experiment!



work from home $100k job

Interesting items to have a look at

Couple of quick notes of interest..

Google have made some changes to the rules with the display of their ads in regards to some of their competitors adverts, you will need to make sure your blog complies. You can read more about this on JenSense

There is a great interview from webmaster radio that has Jeremy "ShoeMoney" interviewing Darren Rowse from Problogger. I love this kind of stuff, you can check it out on Shoemoneys blog

If you found this site to be helpful or inspiring you are welcome to donate to Robs Experiment!

Building your Online Empire - One Day at a Time

As you begin to publish more and more information on your website, plus perhaps increase your online presence via multiple websites and blogs, it can become quite a juggling act to keep everything ticking along. - If you have a few sites on the go then you know where I am coming from!

And not only do we want to tick along, most of us are very motivated to keep the growth graphs heading upwards as fast as possible.

One way to cope with this (if you are working full time as well) is to make sure that you make a minimum of one significant contribution to some part of your Empire every day - If you are working on your sites full time you will obviously have a lot more time to work on your sites.

This contribution can be activities like spending time working on a new or existing site , promoting your site(s), or creating useful and value filled content. As long as you spend an hour or two a day and do something worthwhile you will make great progress. If you stagnate, unfortunately the growth of your Empire will slow and begin to wilt as well.

It is possible to create ongoing growth and improvement, even if you are not a specialized writer or website builder, however it is very hard work maintaining the consistency that eventual success will require. By committing this time and making sure you do it over and over again after a month you will have made 30 valuable contributions to your Empire. After six months you would have made almost 200!

Think of any large achievement or structure, there are not many overnight wonders out there, so most of us need to build gradually one block at a time. You cannot expect to start up a blog and make a living after a couple of months, but by taking small steps and working your plan you can attain visible growth that after a few years could see you making enough to support yourself quite comfortably.

I mention it a lot and that is because so far it is working very well for me and that is Exponential Growth - you can see my initial post on it here. Set your budgets on what you make this month and increase it 20 percent per month thereafter. Then work your butt off to ensure that you succeed - chances are you will blow it away!

Thats all for today - Just a day at a time, make at least one valuable contribution to your empire.

image-www.cgca.org.uk/magazine/spring2003_skytower.php


If you found this site to be helpful or inspiring you are welcome to donate to Robs Experiment!

Google Alerts - Another must for the Bloggers Toolkit

If you want to be at the forefront of breaking news it can help to set up various Google Alerts for the key words that are applicable to the topic of your website or Blog.

Daily, as it happens or weekly you can have the latest information that Google picks up on emailed to you automatically. To set this up you first of all need to be registered with and signed into Google. Then go to..

http://www.google.com/alerts

Google Alerts currently offers 5 variations of alerts - 'News', 'Web', 'Blogs', 'Groups', and 'Comprehensive'. ref: Google FAQs

A 'News' alert is an email aggregate of the latest news articles that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google News search.
A 'Web' alert is an email aggregate of the latest web pages that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top twenty results of your Google Web search.
A 'Blogs' alert is an email aggregate of the latest blog posts that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google Blog search.
A 'Groups' alert is an email aggregate of new posts that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top fifty results of your Google Groups search.
A 'Comprehensive' alert is an aggregate of the latest results from multiple sources into a single email to provide maximum coverage on the topic of your choice.

Enter the search terms that you are interested in, choose a type from the options above, add the frequency and your all good to go! Another useful tool.



If you found this site to be helpful or inspiring you are welcome to donate to Robs Experiment!

90 Day Summary of the Million Dollar Experiment Down Under

We have now clicked over the 90 day mark in our experiment. As always it has been another interesting 10 days since our last update.
A more long term focus has been taken with this experiment, so the income from sponsored posts is going to drop substantially as we try and spend our time, creating passive income rather than earning a quick 5 bucks writing a sponsored post.
Google AdSense has been extremely disappointing over the last 10 days on this site, however has been very good on my other sites, so I guess that I can't complain to much.
We are getting a few page views from an article that was posted on hubpages aff: however have not yet earned any revenue from it. The page impressions are certainly showing up ( it is possible to set up a channel inside Google AdSense to track this). It is only a matter of time before it starts to earn.

Anyway here are the numbers...

(NZ $)
GoogleAdsense Total $15.38
Money4Blogs Total $29.41
Blogsvertise Total $22.06
Blogitive Total $110.29
LoudLaunch $7.35
MYLOT Total $8.47
SportsGambling Total -$10.10
Beer tasting Total $30.00

Grand Total US$ 144.75 or NZ$ 212.87

Increase over the last summary (80 Day Summary) in NZ Dollars: $17.11

If you found this site to be helpful or inspiring you are welcome to donate to Robs Experiment!

Building passive Income - Part I

As mentioned a week or so ago, the new focus for 2007 is to concentrate mainly on building passive streams of income. This is what we have been doing to achieve this...

Adding blogs to existing websites, to help search engine rankings
This is a great way to increase the search engine keyword pickups from your website, search engines love blogs, and adding a blog to your existing site can help you build that search engine recognition. You can also strategically place your AdSense adverts on the new blogs that you create to create additional revenue. Write a few good articles and money will start to be made.

Adding advertisements for various sites through free methods...
There are many sites where you can place free advertisements for your websites. These can help you gain additional traffic to your site. Here are some examples of such sites that can be found for free on the net.

http://www.gumtree.com
http://www.ukclassifieds.co.uk
http://www.smilecity.co.nz
http://www.emailcash.com.au

The last 2 are a bit of a pain because you need to complete surveys etc to earn points which you can then use to buy a classified advert, however the traffic that can be obtained from these sites is quite astounding. You need to live in NZ for the smilecity site, or Australia for the emailcash site.

Gumtree have sites in most countries, so you can easily post a free advert along with a number of images to promote your website.

Affiliate Adverts
An article was published by this site promoting different methods to make money along with affiliate links. This kind of article can be useful for the readers of a site about how to make money, and if anyone signs up under you an ongoing passive income can be earned. The article can be viewed here.

Results to date
So far Month to date our Google AdSense earnings across our sites are higher than ever (over $2 a day consistently) . Traffic is also on the up and up. Things are looking good however it will take more time to accurately determine whether these are the results of our efforts, or just a blip on the graph.

Just a side note, we have finally cracked the top 100,000 technorati blogs woohoo! Thanks to all that have linked to us, and a reminder, if you would like to swap links please post a link to our site and leave a comment saying you have done so. Within 24 hours you will have a link in return.

If you found this site to be helpful or inspiring you are welcome to donate to Robs Experiment!

Google Pagerank Update - Live PR Checker

While searching the blogosphere about the Google PR update that appears to be happening, I came across this tool (found a reference to it on the Monetize Your Blog site )

Its a great tool and one that we will add to our Bloggers Tool Kit. The tool queries the Google Data Centers and shows you all the Page Ranks that your site is displaying as well as calculates the average.

http://livepr.raketforskning.com/

Unfortunately for this site we are still looking at a bunch of 0's however maybe this will change, or maybe we are just to new. ):

Anyway check it out for your own site(s), please let me know if you are seeing any action.

If you found this site to be helpful or inspiring you are welcome to donate to Robs Experiment!

Blog Readers - Unfortunately not your Average Joes!

I have come to realise lately that one of the problems with having a blog like this one is that you are reaching out to people that have many similarities to yourself.... this is not unfortunately going to help you make money.

You may wonder what I am on about, however to try and provide an example of this we need to look at one of my other sites, this site earned more than 3 times the amount of Google Money last month as this Blog. Now the funny thing (or not so funny maybe) is that my blog here had a similar amount of hits, and the adverts on my blog are in more obvious places than my other site.

The other site mentioned also needs minimal maintenance, verifying a few adverts that get entered is all that is required, compared to the writing of over 20 articles for this blog.

I believe this is due to the visitors, most of the people that visit this blog are web savvy and know how to find exactly what they want on the net, compared to most of the visitors to the other site that I mentioned are just your average Joe surfer, and unfortunately for average Joe, he/she is less likely to find what they want.

This makes them more likely to click on a Google advert that may be more topical to what they are trying to find than the site they have just clicked into.

Knowing what we know, the challenge is to find a way to monetize our blog according to the audience that we have. One of the ways to do this is to encourage visitors to sign up as referrals in some of the different programs that are out there.

Another alternative is to reach out to other audiences, by placing articles on sites like hubpages aff: you can potentially reach a different profile of reader, one that is maybe more likely to click on your ads.

Also of course you could have a blog that appealed to a less tech savvy audience, therefore increasing the conversion rate to your advertising.

If you found this site to be helpful or inspiring you are welcome to donate to Robs Experiment!

The Bloggers Octet- 8 Proven Methods to get your Blog Earning!

This article assumes that you already have a blog set up and a reasonable amount of regularly updated content within your blogsite. If not you need to set yourself up with a blog site from somewhere like here . Then revisit this article in a couple of months.

Method 1 - Money4Blogs
This site is quick and easy money, just go to the site and register your interest, they will check out your blog and if appropriate make you a very reasonable offer to place a small text link on your site.
Payment: They pay promptly via PayPal aff: which you will need to set up first.

Method 2 - GoogleAdSense
If your site gets a reasonable amount of traffic, it is simple to create a relatively passive income from running GoogleAdsense on your site.
Payment: Once your account has reached $100 US they will send you a check or direct credit the amount into your bank account the following month.

Method 3 - Blogitive
Blogitive offer paid blog posts and it is quite possible to get say 5 - 10 of these posts per month. Certainly a lucrative way to earn extra money from your blog.
Payment: They pay weekly via PayPal aff:

Method 4 - LoudLaunch
LoudLaunch is a brand new site that offers paid blog posts, the prices that you get paid tend to vary a bit more than Blogitive, so far I have seen posts offered for 0,3 or 5 dollars. It depends on your blog so if you have a highly ranked blog, you may of course get offered more. I am not sure how many people would offer to do sponsored posts for no money at all. Certainly not me!
Payment: LoudLaunch pay via PayPal aff:

Method 5 - Blogsvertise
Another site that I have used, I actually received the highest pay per post from this site ($10) however the catch is that you need to wait until they email you with an offer, whereas the previous two payperpost methods let you log-in and as long as there are sponsored posts available you can do them.
Payment: They pay a month after your post has been published via PayPal aff:

Method 6 - MyLot aff:
MyLot is an interesting one, basically it is like a forum discussion site, where you create discussions for other people to join and comment on, as well as comment on discussions that other people have created. You can also upload photos and you get paid, both for getting involved in discussions as well as uploading images.
Although the money paid out is small, you need to think outside the box with this one, money can be earned via referrals and you can also refer related discussions back to your own site, so the opportunity to get extra traffic should not be ignored.
Payment: They pay monthly, if your balance has reached at least $10 via PayPal aff:

Method 7 - Amazon aff:
Amazon offer a number of ways to make money from your site, you can set up an Amazon AStore of your own, or display adverts that you can modify through the Amazon site to suit your blog content. Amazon have been around for years so offer a wide variety of methods to monetize your site.
Payment: Amazon pays by check or gift certificates.

Method 8 - HubPages aff:
Hub Pages lets you write articles (Hubs) and then you will receive %60 of the revenue generated from the advertising displayed upon them. You can associate your Google Adsense Adverts with them, as well as Amazon and Ebay Affiliate ids.
Payment: You will be paid by the Advertisers directly (Google, Amazon, Ebay)

Given the 8 methods above as well as a certain amount of time and effort to dedicate to your Blog you should be able to make a reasonable amount of money online. Depending on the quality of the content of your blog, as well as the time that you are prepared to commit to it you will at worst make a little pocket money, at best you could make a very good living!

If you found this site to be helpful or inspiring you are welcome to donate to Robs Experiment!

A New Focus Moving Forwards for our Million Dollar Experiment Down Under

I have been doing a lot of research, thinking and reflecting over the last few holiday weeks and have made a decision which I believe will be crucial to the continuing and long term success of our websites, and our Experiment.

Unfortunately this may involve taking a bit of an income hit for a couple of months, I will explain more...

The Plan

Concentrate 90% of efforts on building traffic, improving our existing websites and increasing passive income. (e.g Google AdSense, affiliate programs, paid advertising etc) - this was previously about 50 %

The effects that this change of focus will have will be noticeable both short and long term. At the moment I spend quite a bit of time and effort on sponsored posts, this has proved quite lucrative in the last month or so however it is time that is not being spent on creating recurring income.

I have achieved well over the exponential growth targets that I have created, however it will become very hard work to continue to do this as the targets continue to increase. I need to be achieving the targets via passive income means, and keep improving my systems rather than earning money via one off sponsored posts.

If I need a couple of sponsored posts to ensure I reach my targets I will of course do them, however I am aiming for 90% of the income to be passive and recurring.

New Project - Curry Focus

The project that myself and a colleague have been working for the last couple of months has gone live, we need to spend a lot more time tweaking it as well as adding more and more content to the database. However it is now out there and operating.

The website is called Curry Focus and is all about delicious curry recipes and curry restaurants around the world.

The site will earn income from a small amount of advertising placed on it. It will not be ruined by excessive advertising as primarily it is about creating a site that creates value for the visitors via free recipes and information.

If you have any quality Curry Restaurants in your neighbourhood, please add their details to our database so that this can be shared with the visitors to our site. We accept restaurants from 182 countries around the globe.

This Blog

I will continue to try new things and write about them on this blog, also we will be looking at a lot more SEO and traffic building techniques over the coming months. You will not see to much more about non passive income earners, however we may need to dabble in a few to keep things ticking along.

If you found this site to be helpful or inspiring you are welcome to donate to Robs Experiment!

Shoe me the Money!

When someone at mybloglog adds you as a contact, you receive an email stating that this has happened. This happened to me today (as it does occasionally) and someone called shoemoney had added me as a contact. As per normal I wandered along found shoemoneys blog and had a look.

I found 2 amazing photos that made me want to read more and more about this guy, and some great articles.

Photo of shoemoney holding a cheque from Google for over $132,000 dollars here.

Photo of him with Paris Hilton here.

After seeing these I was beginning to think, who is this dude and I wanted to find out more, so read his Bio, which didn't give away to much, then I found an interview on this blog here, which gives away a little bit more...this is a quote from that blog.

Shoemoney: I own several large community/forum websites that I wish to not name. I just have never been much into self promotion =P. Combined subscriptions alone we have almost 95,000 members paying 19.95 every 6 months or roughly 4.5 million a year. That is the single biggest revenue stream that I have and it is reoccurring.

Anyway I recommend that you check out his site, obviously this guy is a legend, and there are articles on his site, that I need to do a lot more research into (e.g the 10,000 experiment with PPC ), he appears to be a very sharp cookie!

If just a little of what hes got, could rub off on the rest of us, we will all be reaching our goals a lot sooner than expected.

If you found this site to be helpful or inspiring you are welcome to donate to Robs Experiment!

80 Day Summary of the Million Dollar Experiment Down Under

Doesn't 10 days pass quickly? It seems like only yesterday I was crunching numbers and writing the 70 day summary however we are now at the 80 mark.

For me it has been a fantastic month overall (December). As you may know I have a few other websites not directly related to the Million Dollar Experiment, anyway over all my sites this month the AdSense total was 49.70 US. This may not sound like much however it is continually increasing and is pretty much a passive income.

Here is the breakdown of the Million Dollar Experiment specifically

(NZ $)
GoogleAdsense Total $14.82
Money4Blogs Total $29.41
Blogsvertise Total $22.06
Blogitive Total $102.94
MYLOT Total $6.63
SportsGambling Total -$10.10
Beer tasting Total $30.00

Grand Total US$ 133.12 or NZ$ 195.76
Increase over the last summary (70 Day Summary) in NZ Dollars: $40.43

This is starting to get almost lucrative when you consider that this is additional money over any of the other pre existing sources that contribute to the household income. A lot of this is due to sponsored posts, and can not really be considered as passive income, however I am more than happy to take the money for them!

One use for this additional income is to try and finance new projects out of the funds that are starting to be produced in the hope that new income streams can be created. (In other words don't tell the wife!)

If you found this site to be helpful or inspiring you are welcome to donate to Robs Experiment!

Sponsored Post - CarInsurance.com

CarInsurance.com offer an easy and cost effective way to obtain Cheap Auto Insurance online. The site begins with asking you for your zip code. After this you will be asked General questions, then details about the Drivers of your car and Household Residents. Next up are questions regarding any Violations or Incidents you may have had in the past, then the usual Vehicle details, Coverage Selection and Account set up.

"When you request a quote from CarInsurance.com, after answering a few
simple questions you can instantly get a quote from multiple companies."

There are many different ways to get an auto insurance quote, this is one of the best.

Googles Webmaster Tools - Knowledge is Power

Googles Webmaster Tools are not widely advertised by Google, however offer some useful information for Webmasters/Blogowners.

Going back through the archives it appears the webmaster tools were launched around October 2006.

To connect the Webmaster Tools to your site, you need to copy a small line of code into the html of your websites index page. To do this go to www.google.com/webmasters and follow the instructions. This ensures that you are indeed the owner of the site. Once this is done you are then able to access a number of reports and features that can assist you with learning more about the way Google indexes your site, and the searches that people are running, along with your rankings at the time they searched.

Logging into the tools console, you will come to a screen like the below. There are three main tabs. Diagnostics, Statistics and Sitemaps.

The Diagnostics section shows you any errors that Google has found while crawling your site, the crawl rate (how often the Googlebot visits and checks your site), robots.txt analysis as well as enhanced image search if you want it. (This is where Google somehow labels all your images to make them easier to index).

Moving onto the Statistics tools, these include crawl stats , query stats, page analysis and index stats. The query stats show very useful information on the commonly used search terms that are finding your site, the image below shows the top searches for this blog. This is info that I have not been able to get at this kind of detail before.

The final section of the webmaster tools is the sitemaps section, I have not used this yet but it appears that you can upload a sitemap and google will use this in addition to its normal indexing techniques. If you need more info on this here is an article from Google explaining in more depth.

What is a Sitemap file and why should I have one?

I recommend that you check these tools out, knowledge is power when it comes to building your sites, so it is important to try and get all the information that you can. Googles Webmaster Tools will help with this, so we are adding them to our Web bloggers toolkit .

Tommorrow I will be posting my 80 Day Summary, so be sure to check back!

If you found this site to be helpful or inspiring you are welcome to donate to Robs Experiment!

3,2,1 Lift Off - LoudLaunch launches into the Blogosphere

There is a new payperpost site on the scene. The site is LoudLaunch and for Bloggers that are interested in earning money from their posts they offer a way to do this.

For advertisers they offer campaigns starting from $50. (The advertiser may want to spend more than this however to achieve greater reach for their campaign.)

The way the site works is first of all you submit your blog for approval. Once it has been approved you log in to the console, and you can view any campaigns that are up for offer. The prices appear to vary from campaign to campaign.

Update 15 - May - 2007 Everything has been ok with the opportunities that we have done from this site, the only problem is that they are quite low priced and some of the opportunities require quite a bit of effort for the 5 dollars that they offer. They mention that the price is determinate on the quality of your blog however the maximum offer I have seen is 5 dollars to date.

LoudLaunch - Compensating bloggers for their unbiased opinions, reviews, and analysis. View the LoudLaunch campaign release this post was based on.

Only 15 percent of Bloggers are Motivated by Money!

Some facts about those that Blog

According to this Washington Post article the typical Blogger is

Under 30 years of age
Only 15 percent of bloggers are motivated by Money
11 percent focus on politics
Less likely to be white than the general Internet-using population

Hmmmm... and how do I stack up.

33 years of age
Motivated by money
Not focused on Politics
European

Sounds like I am a bit of an oddity in the Blogosphere. How do you compare to the "typical" Blogger?

How many new blogs a day? how many in total?

According to this article on the BBC there are 100,000 new blogs created everyday. Technorati track approximately 57 Million Blogs of which they belive 55% are active and updated at least once every 3 months. The article also mentions that there are 200 Million Blogs that are no longer updated!

What is the weirdest Blog? the most popular?

One of the strangest blogs I have come across is this one Wandering Scribe its about a lady who lives alone in her car, she has even (almost) written a book, which you can view on Amazon even though it hasn't quite been published yet.
The most popular Blog at this point in time (according to Technorati) appears to be Engadget which is part of Weblogs, Inc

The future of Blogs...

Blogging is apparently expected to peak sometime in the next few years, this is because by then everyone that has an inclination to blog should be doing it, a lot that have given it a go however are not going to stick at it and will have moved onto other things. Blogging has the power to change the way information is beamed around the world and we are starting to see that it can be a powerful advertising tool.

If you found this site to be helpful or inspiring you are welcome to donate to Robs Experiment!