140 Day Summary of the Million Dollar Experiment Down Under

140 Days has passed in what have become busy times for the Million Dollar Experiment Down Under. I was writing a list of some of the weekly tasks that I need to do as part of running my sites, and unfortunately for me it is becoming quite a list!

Anyway time to cut to the chase. Now this week, I am going to try something a little different, it is probably a bit tiresome seeing the same old figures about beer testing coming up each week, and I guess because I have been earning a little less on this site, while concentrating more on others that I might as well start including them.

It has also become difficult keeping separate figures for the different sites that I have so yep I am going to combine all of them together (A couple of people have suggested that I do this also). It is going to be from when I started the Exponential Growth Experiment, as I started recording everything at this time, and is going to updated with how we are going for the month to date, earnings broken down into Passive, Active and Overall. Passive is made up of Advertising, e.g Banner adverts on sites, Contextual AdSense etc. Active is when we have had to actively do something for the money, e.g a sponsored Post. Money is counted when it is approved.

At the end of each month I will include a graph like in the Exponential Growth Article. You can view the status at the end of February here.. Exponential Growth - 5 Months down the Track - A Summary

And to date for March here are the numbers

Budget for this Month $US 91.69

Active Income $15.50
Passive Income $6.69

Total month to date $US 22.39
Total Earnings to Date $US 472.75 or $NZ 695.22

So you can see by including all my sites incomes, I have also given my Million Dollar Experiment a good boost. And why not include all the income, I have been working on them all - so might as well!

Let me know what you think if you have an opinion as to whether this is a good or bad idea. And what sort of detail you would like to see.

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Exponential Growth - 5 Months down the Track - A Summary

4 or 5 Months ago I read an article on Problogger about exponential growth of Blog Sites - it was this article Making Your Adsense Earnings Grow - Exponential Blogging and it had me thinking. I started doing some calculations on what I had just earned during the Month of October on my sites and figured that this could be a starting point. The amount that I earned in that initial month was $36-85 US dollars.

The beauty of exponential growth is that it creates realistic targets on a monthly basis and ends up growing into a healthy amount of income, if you can sustain it. What really had me thinking was that if I could sustain this model of growth of 20% a month for 30 Months straight I would be earning over $7000 US dollars a month. I don't know how this stacks up in the country you live in, however in NZ it is a very tidy income that could enable my family and myself to live very comfortably indeed.

November came around and I went flat out doing sponsored posts and making money anyway I could, this meant that I had doubled my income quickly however it was taking a lot of effort that simply wasn't creating ongoing returns. I soon figured out the error in the thought process and began trying to reach the target by passive means alone, this meant trying to increase traffic to my sites and spending my time doing this, rather than taking up time writing sponsored posts -however I still had this as a back stop if I needed a few extra bucks to make the target.

This model has really begun to work for me, I have been concentrating on the sites that are showing the most returns, as well as trying to increase the ones that aren't doing enough. Traffic and income is steadily increasing and it is very exciting plotting the figures every month and seeing the growth occur.

February has just finished, and being a short month I was prepared for a difficult one. The target was $76-41 and I am pleased to say that we have come in comfortably over that figure, a full graph of the last 5 months is below, remember where we took a dip was the time where the focus changed from actively earning the dollars - to trying to spend 95% of our time building passive streams by way of increasing traffic to raise the advertising earnings of the sites.

If you are considering doing an exponential growth plan of your own, I highly recommend it and just advise that you take it one month at a time. If you look at it like this you only need to make 20% on what you have just achieved previously so its not that overwhelming really. Focus is important though - failure cannot be an option if you want to follow it through and achieve the dream.

Good luck - let me know what you think of this Exponential Growth Experiment and whether you are keen on doing one of your own.

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Can't toss in the job yet!

The Z-list has morphed into a directory style list of Blogs called Z-list 2.0, along with descriptions! This is thanks to the Customers Rock! blog, Servant Of Chaos blog and the eSoup blog where it appears they took the time to visit every blog in the z-list and add comments about each one! Thanks heaps for the effort guys what a great idea.

The Z-list has been instrumental in giving this blog a rocket up the technorati ladder, we have cracked the top 25000, previously this blog was hanging around the 80,000 mark when the z-list first kicked into gear. Some people may say that this is an unfair ranking however we have tried to spend time visiting a lot of the blogs that have been kind enough to link through to us.

Tomorrow the 130 day summary will be released - due to a lack of recent results with some of the changes that were made advertising wise I have made the decision to remove the friendfinder adverts and amazon advertising from this particular Blog, as to put it bluntly they are performing very poorly.

I have calculated that if I happened to quit my job tomorrow, I should be able to earn an income of approximately 1100 NZ dollars a month online without to much problem. (this only works out at $22 US per day!). However unfortunately I need to earn at least 4 times this much to be able to survive and pay the bills!

At some stage later in the year I may try a one off week long "money making marathon" to see how much it is possible to earn in one week, with the income sources that are now available to me. That would be interesting however obviously very time consuming. A large part of this would have to be sponsored posts, and a lot of unsponsored posts would also need to be written to provide some real content.

It is obvious from the amount of issues raised on the previous post about Content scraping that this is becoming a major problem. One of the things that is concerning about this is that even if the scraper was reported to Google or any other entity that could help, how would they decide who the original publisher of the article or content was?

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The Secret of making Paid Posts less intrusive on your site

When you decide that you need a bit of quick cash, it is often tempting to write a sponsored Post. With half an hour or so of effort and a bit of luck you can earn yourself between 5 and 10 US dollars (or perhaps even more), which depending on where in the world you live may or may not be much at all.

The secret to writing paid posts that have minimal impact on your website is simplistic yet effective - you need to have a really decent article ready to go, and place this right above the paid post that just got published.

There is nothing worse than visiting your favourite blog and being greeted with a sponsored post right at the top!

Remember to always mark your sponsored posts as such, I normally write Sponsored Post - then the name of the article. This means your readers can trust you and know that you are not trying to trick them into reading something that you got paid to write.

Also join as many pay per post sites as you can, so that you have a wide range of topics to choose from. That way you can try and pick a subject that is interesting and actually add content to your site as well. If you would like to use payperpost you are welcome to join them via the affiliate badge on my sidebar under "Blog Earners"

Myself I try not to do to many paid posts these days, preferring to spend my time boosting the passive income side of my sites. (i.e driving more traffic to them) - however I still have them up my sleeve if I need a little boost to reach the ever increasing monthly targets that I set myself.

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

Million NZ Dollar Review of PayPerPost

History of Payperpost
Payperpost according to the first few entries in the PayPerPost Blog, kicked off in late June 2006. Its interesting reading through their early Blog entries as the popularity of the site begins to build.

There appeared to be a lot of confusion back then about the ethics behind disclosing or not disclosing that the posts that bloggers were doing were being sponsored. Some bloggers think its ok to not disclose if it is something they are genuinely interested in, others think that a sponsored post should always be disclosed. What do you think?

Towards the end of 2006 PayPerPost had a significant change to their policy that meant that publishers would need to Disclose somewhere on their site the fact that there was renumeration involved in the PayPerPost Posts. You can read more about this at Tech Crunch.

Recently PayPerPost created the rockstartup reality series, which follows the exploits of the PayPerPost team at their Head Office. I have so far watched a couple of episodes, and found it quite enjoyable, plus it helps to see the very human side of this company.

Registration
Registration involves the usual process, one thing I found a bit strange is that I came in through an affiliate referral. However even so when I registered it asked for the referrals email address. I did not have this and it is a little concerning that if you are going to promote PayPerPost and your signups dont have your email address are you going to get paid? Hopefully we can find out.

Once registered you need to submit your blog and wait on approval, this took about 4 or 5 days for my site, which isn't to bad really I guess. PPP probably have a ton of sites to check every day.

As far as registration requirements go, your blog must be over 90 days old. Once they have accepted you its time to start taking opportunities!

Taking Opportunities - Using PayPerPost
Now that your blog has been accepted by PayPerPosts administrative team you can start taking advantage of the opportunities that they have on offer. The first thing that will probably take you by surprise is the sheer amount of opportunities on the go at any one time. Whenever I have logged in there have been between 60 and 70 sponsored opportunities up for grabs.

Not only are there blog posts there are quite a few video posts and other things like puzzles that can be solved and written about. The prices that are paid to Bloggers vary alot, however appear to be quite a bit more than what I have seen on other PayPerPost sites.

Affiliate Program
There is an Affiliate program with PayPerPost and although the details are a little sketchy it appears to work like this. If anyone that you refer to PayPerPost is accepted by them and writes a Post that is both approved and remains online for 30 Days, you are then payed $15-00 US. There is no obvious affiliate link on the site that I can find at the moment, however I managed to get to an affiliate page by typing in www.payperpost.com/affiliates ! - I found this on a forum somewhere. Unfortunately they don't appear to have a simple text link, so if you would like to join PayPerPost please use the affiliate banner on my sidebar under the heading "Blog Earners"

Summary
Alot of people seem to have it in for PPP and I have approached this entire review with what I hope is an open mind and a unbiased view. Theres a couple of things that annoy me about the site, for example no obvious link for affiliate code, time take to approve posts appears to be a while for example I did one 6 days ago and it still has status pending, and one 4 days ago with the same issue. I will however update this post when these are approved (or declined) along with anymore information that comes to light.

Update 02/03/2007 - I thought I should add that since writing this post I have had every post approved after normally 5- 10 days, also they pay from the date you post the article, not when they approve it. I have recieved payment on time as well, no issues to date with payperpost.

I havent personally been paid yet by them, or even had a posting approved - so I can't comment on that side of things, however this post has been hanging around for so long that I just had to get it out there - I promised it over a week ago.

PPP have all the makings of a success story, and have attracted a lot of attention both good and bad. They seem to have struck a sour note with some Bloggers out there, and yet many appear to be more than happy. Its hard to really get a feel for the culture of PPP after the short amount of time that I have dealt with them, however one gets the feeling that they have a lot going on and must be struggling at times to keep up with everything.

If you have had any experience with PPP good or bad, please share it and hopefully this will help other bloggers when they are trying to decide whether or not to give PPP a shot.

110 Day Summary of the Million Dollar Experiment Down Under

Another 10 days comes to a close, and a month comes to an end. As you may know from previous posts recently we had a large change of focus and began spending 90 percent of our time trying to build passive type income, the other 10 percent of our time can be used for things like Sponsored posts or other "quick fix" income earners. The results have been better than expected and here's why..

Passive Income
Unfortunately this site does not earn a lot in the way of AdSense, however other sites that I own do quite a lot better. All up my AdSense income has increased by 28% over the last month! This can be attributed to a reasonable growth in traffic which has been brought about by constant promotion and advertising. We are very keen to continue following this model of growth.

Traffic
The growth in traffic has been pretty damn good, see below the graph from my sitemeter, it would be hard to get the climb much steeper than this. I put the growth down to regular posting which is creating a lot of content that is being well picked up by Google. I also have a network of great referrals from fellow bloggers with like minded sites. Please take the time to visit them from the links to the right.

PayPerPosts
A couple of these were done at the beginning of the month, also I have just joined payperpost and reviewme. I will be looking at doing a full review of payperpost in the next week or so, so you might see a couple more sponsored posts, which coincidentally pay quite reasonably. Full details will be in the upcoming review.

Summary

(NZ $)

Google AdSense Total $31.01
Money4Blogs Total $29.41
Blogsvertise Total $22.06
Blogitive Total $110.29
LoudLaunch Total $7.35
MYLOT Total $14.24
SportsGambling Total -$10.10
Beer tasting Total $30.00

Grand Total US$ 159.30 or NZ$ 234.27

Increase over the last summary (100 Day Summary) in NZ Dollars: $10.09

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

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.

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!

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!