The Million Dollar Experiment Summary To Date

The Background

Back in October 2006 I started upon a journey that I hoped would make me One Million Dollars in cold hard cash. It is now 21 Months later and I have NOT made One million dollars yet, however I have made more than ten thousand dollars online and set myself up with a small monthly income whether I work at it or not.

All was well on target until January/February this year when my life literally fell to pieces and I ended up leaving my marriage, going through a very tough time both emotionally and financially and working on my experiment was to be quite honest the last thing on my mind.

Six months later the world is a different place for me, it has not been an easy time, by any stretch of the imagination, but as the saying goes

"What doesn't kill you makes you stronger"

and I believe I will come out of this whole experience wiser, smarter and happier in the long run, however it's going to take time and I would not wish the last six months on anyone.



Results for January - June 2008 ($NZ)

Jan 200.06
Feb 264.95
Mar 493.58
Apr 487.44
May 764.94
Jun 481.06

That folks is $2692.03 NZ dollars which added to the running total of 8493.68 comes to

$11185.71

Where to from here?

Well one of many things I have learned is that money can be earned online, there have been some high points and low points along the journey and in some ways this is just beginning.

My goals over the next few months are to get right back on track, I have graphs to update and figures to plan so make sure you check back soon for more updates from the Million Dollar Experiment down under...

Happy blogging - and remember if I can make more than ten thousand dollars online so can you, read through my site and follow the journey from the beginning.

Rob StGeorge

How the Million Dollar Experiment Has Changed My Life

Its just over a year since I came across the Million Dollar Experiment by chance on Steve Pavlina's website. I read a few more of his articles and realized that this guy was just making a fortune blogging about how to improve yourself.

Anyway I joined and created this site, wanting to do a similar thing and although I have only made a few thousand dollars the facts are that this has changed my life in so many ways and even given me the freedom to live wherever I want. (as long as there is a broadband connection!)

Here are some of the ways my life has changed since taking on this experiment, the good and the bad...

• I now only work 3 days a week at my full time job


• My career in the real world has come to a standstill, by my choice


• I can now earn enough money online that although I haven't replaced a full time income yet I am well on my way, and have reduced my reliance on working a nine to 5 job.


• I spend much more time with my kids


• I enjoy what I do so much more and have become very highly motivated.


• Somehow I am better of financially now than I ever have been in my life and I only work 3 days a week and my wife is also just doing a little work from home when she feels like it.


• This blog ranks 2nd on Google after Steve Pavlina himself for the words "million dollar experiment"


• Money now seems like monopoly money to me - strange but true. Its like a game and one that I am enjoying.

What did it take to achieve this - simple I just started doing it, and doing it and never giving up. You to can do this if you want.

I have reinvested a lot of the money I have made and now have probably more than 20 websites (including partnerships with a couple of colleagues). I spend my days building and enhancing these sites and working out the best ways to optimize the income from them.

If you are saying to yourself oh no, it's to hard or you don't have the skills or whatever thats BS, you are just making excuses, so if you want to make your life a better one, stop talking about it and feeling sorry for yourself, just get of your butt and start working at it. Maybe you will be writing about how your life has changed in 12 months from now.

Or you can just keep reading about other peoples success's and you can be doing exactly what you are now in 12 months time.

The choice is yours!

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Seven Days - 140 US Dollars - staying focused

For most of you that follow this experiment in exponential growth you will know that if nothing else I am one determined Blogger and when it comes to making money online I have found that often a simple stop at nothing frame of mind can return great results.

For the first seven days of this month I have attempted one way or another to accrue at least $20 US per day and I am pleased to say that at the end of seven days I have managed to do this with an end result of just over $145.24 US dollars.

How have I done this? Well here is exactly how.

1./ Passive Income from Google Adsense and TextLink Ads $36.91

2./ Active Income from being a pay per poster from PayU2Blog $40 , Bloggingads.com $20 , payperpost @28.33 and bloggerwave $20 being a grand total of $108.33

All you need to do is to set yourself a daily target and then do whatever it takes to achieve it. I was lucky and got ahead of myself in the first few days so pretty much cruised to victory on this assignment that I set myself but the fact is I probably had another 20 or 30 dollars in me if I had really needed to.

This is not money physically paid to me but money accrued. I keep two spreadsheets, one with actual money received which is what I count in this million dollar experiment and another with money earned which keeps track of what I have accumulated on a daily basis.

If I continue the way this month has so far gone it is quite possible that I could get near the $500 US mark this month, which is almost twice what I did last month. The only thing stopping me from doing this is myself!

If you are interested in earning money like this for yourself I suggest you stick with us and Subscribe by Email to the Million Dollar Experiment Down Under

Make Money Fast with Google Adsense

Out of all the programs that I have tried there is one program that has consistently earned me a small but steady (and increasing) amount of money and that is Google AdSense. Once you have a site that is earning more than its hosting fees you can simply create another one and another one. Before you know it you have a number of sites earning money and you can then experiment with Ad placement as well as the look and different types of adverts and see what converts the best for you.

Less is sometimes more
If you fill your entire site up with Google AdSense then you are probably going to far. You need to leave some room for content - my largest earning site has one skyscraper on the left and a small link block on the right. The sidebar skyscraper has the best conversion on that site however didn't do well at all on this blog. So different sites have different results- it doesn't really matter what anyone says you need to experiment. I suggest you create channels for the ad units, try a placement for a month and check your results. Then try something else for the next month - if its better great keep it. If not revert back to the previous or try something else again.

Potential Exponential Increase
The great thing about Google AdSense is that by increasing your traffic you can normally increase your earnings in a similar manner. Think about what you earn now and multiply it by 10 - certainly achievable and what about if you multiply that by 10. Before you know it as long as you can continue to increase your traffic you are going to be giving yourself constant pay rises - something no employer is going to do for you!

Passive?
Is Google AdSense really passive? Well probably not as you do need to work away at building and maintaining the traffic to your site however if you have a website that grows by itself (e.g a popular forum or similar) then Google AdSense could potentially grow without any effort from yourself. It can earn you money while you sleep though which is a great start.

Money in the Bank
At today's approximate US interest rates I worked out how much money in the bank it would take to earn as much as a scale of monthly Google AdSense amounts. Please refer to the table below.

Its interesting to see that to make $50 per month with money in the bank would take savings of 12000 dollars if we were looking at a 5% interest rate. To make $80 per month would take a whopping $20000! Its probably a lot easier to make a couple of websites and fill them with good content than it is to save twenty grand, however I will leave that up to you to decide for yourself.

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Top Referrers
1. Kumiko's Cash Quest
2. Mike's Money Making Mission
3. Hot Blog Girls
4. DoshDosh
5. How to earn money online?

April Summary of our Make Money Fast Million Dollar Experiment Down Under

Overview
Month 7 ends for what has been a heck of ride so far as we continue to surpass our Exponential Growth targets. We are still a long way from our end goal of One Million NZ Dollars however things are moving along at an ever increasing rate. The biggest earner for us this month have been a large number of featured posts from PayU2Blog. These guys have been firing opportunities at us as fast as we can type and of course it would have been impolite to turn down this much money - especially when I am trying to find out exactly how much money can be made from a Blog.

The Blog Traffic Challenge
As far as the Blog Traffic Challenge goes this month particularly in the last couple of weeks we have made some excellent headway. This blog had levelled out somewhat as far as traffic goes and Georges invitation to all to join his Blog Traffic Challenge was the catalyst for me getting off my butt and making it happen. Thanks George.

As part of achieving this challenge I have been trying to learn as much about Search Engine Optimization as possible, there are some great sites and podcasts out there, however my favourite to date is Mr-SEO . Joe is fantastic to listen to and lays out simple facts about how best to optimize your site. There are also some great resources on the Mr-SEO site like directory listings to submit your site to, free tools and lots of other relevant information. I can honestly say that by listening to and learning some of this there have been direct results in a significant amount of additional search engine traffic not only on this Blog but my other sites as well.

Here are three articles that I wrote this month that can help you tune your Blog/Site as well as some great tools to Track and Optimize your content.

Blogspot Title Tags how to Remove Blog Name from the Beginning
In this post we look at how to remove the Blog Name from wasting valuable real estate at the beginning of your title tags.

Tracking Keywords - Bloggers Toolkit Series
We use a fantastic tool that allows us to track how our chosen keywords are ranking and we can continue to collect historical data overtime with this tool. A must read if you are into improving your rankings for keywords.

Make Money Fast - An experiment in Choosing Words
When writing articles we look at using a tool to assist in choosing the most SEO friendly article title by looking at exactly how many searches are being done for certain words or phrases.

Top Referrers
Each Month My top 5 referrers of traffic get a Link back that is probably a bit over the top - however I haven't had any complaints yet and I hope that it helps their traffic as well as their Technorati Ranking. Its all about giving back to those that have helped me and all the sites that I link to are well worth a read.

This is how they stand this month - thanks to them all

1. Kumiko's Cash Quest
2. Mike's Money Making Mission
3. Hot Blog Girls
4. DoshDosh
5. How to earn money online?

The Results to date
The beauty of exponential growth is that it sets realistic targets. If you had said to me after month 1 when I earned $36-85 that I would be earning $266-00 in another six months it would have seemed a little unlikely. However by having the target just creep up by 20 percent a month it certainly makes it achievable. Now just because I more than doubled my target this month does not mean that we need to get greedy and start becoming unrealistic. I will continue to keep to the original plan.

You need to be absolutely unwilling to fail if you want to pull something like this off - and try not to think more than one month ahead. Aim to reach your target early as that way the pressure is off and you can work on creating content and putting your time into site optimizations that will help to form the basis of passive income in what will be challenging months ahead.

Budget for this Month $US 110.03
Active Income $207.50
Passive Income $58.84
Total month to date $US 266.34

Total Earnings to Date $US 846-28 or $NZ 1244.53

May looks to be another great month, we are surging ahead in traffic and income and see no reason why things should slow down at all. Stick with us through the next few weeks as we will be looking at Exponential Growth in depth and will provide a detailed tutorial of how you can set up your own experiment.

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Making Money Fast - How this Blog is Doing it

Firstly some background, 7 or so months ago I started an exponential growth experiment with the end goal of earning 1 Million NZ dollars online. In the first month I earned $36 US dollars and by using an exponential formula realised that by increasing by 20 percent a month after 30 months of doing this I would be pulling in a whopping 7000 US dollars a month and be well on my to achieving my goal.

I work full time and are studying a Degree at University part time, also to top if off I have a young demanding family. Having no time is not an excuse - it is a cop out. This has to date been as much about time management as it has been about making money however I am pleased to say that after 7 months we are not only on track but literally blowing the targets out of the water.

For April the Million Dollar Experiment Down under has really ramped up - we have pulled out all stops in an effort to start proving exactly how much money can be made online. We are trying to Make Money Fast - no more dreaming about how much might be made - the readers of this site want to know whether they can do it to - and there's now enough content on this site to give you a plan to follow. Within the next couple of weeks I am putting together a chain of articles from previous posts that will help you get to where I am - faster as you can learn from my mistakes.

My tally so far this month is already over $250 US and we still have a couple of days to go. last month as a comparison we made $129 US Dollars - its pretty goddamn exciting as the dream starts to materialize.

Here's a glimpse of this months graph, more details will be in the month end summary in a couple of days with a breakdown of active vs passive as well as key realizations that have been made in recent weeks that have really started to help especially in regards to search engine optimization.

Good luck with your own endeavours, if you have any questions about how I am doing it feel free to ask by leaving a comment. You may want to subscribe so that you don't miss some great updates over the next couple of weeks.

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1. Mike's Money Making Mission
2. Kumiko's Cash Quest
3. How to earn money online?
4. Stratz's Blog
5. Hot Blog Girls

April Exponential Growth Target Already Accomplished!

Today I got paid US$45 from payu2blog for some of the posts I have been doing for them. It did 2 things...

1/ Finally tipped me over the $1000 NZ Dollar mark oh yeah!
2/ Meant that for this month we have already achieved our budget of $110 US dollars. (actually we are about 30 cents short, but close enough) - we are not quite halfway through the month so that in itself is fantastic.

I know that you as a reader may have seen an increase in sponsored posts over the last few weeks, and this is mainly because I am cranking through about 7-10 "assignments" that payu2blog.com are sending to me each week. Now this company does not really let you pick and choose assignments they just fire a weekly list at you and from what I can gather you pretty much sink or swim.

Anyway this to me is not a problem really because I want to see how much money I can make from this blog and I am assuming that you as a reader would as well - these posts only take 5 - 10 mins as its really just a key word that you are given that you need to link in an article of minimum 60 words. I see it as a quick advert after a post. My method of doing them is I sit down for an hour or so and churn through them writing up each small post and saving them as drafts. Then when I post an article I slip them out around it. This means whenever a visitor hits my site they are greeted with an article and not a sponsored post.

I have also changed the front page of this site to only show 2 posts on the front page. I will try and add some of the more popular category links to the sidebars in the near future.

As you may know if you are a regular reader each month our target is boosted by 20% each month and in 30 months we will be earning $7000 US dollars a month. Currently we are in Month 7 - so next month we are going to have to find $132-04 - from what I have seen to date I can't really see it being to much of a drama until we hit the 300 - 400 US mark, then its going to start getting a lot harder.

However even in saying that the first month I only earned about US$36 so US$110 would have seemed like a huge target. That in itself is the beauty of exponential growth - it kinda creeps up on you and if you have already achieved one amount its not to hard to crank it up another 20 percent.

Anyway heres the skinny for this month to date...

Budget for this Month $US 110.03

Active Income $87.50
Passive Income $22.14

Total month to date $US 109.64

Total Earnings to Date $US 689.58 or $NZ 1014.09

I hope sharing this with you helps you realize that you to can earn $100 US in a couple of weeks part time. The more popular your site gets the more opportunities appear to show themselves... or as someone famous who I can't quite remember at the moment says...

The harder you work the luckier you get...

No weekend links this week unfortunately, I would like to have a good excuse except I just plain forgot!

I will however leave you with a great tutorial on Blog Link Building from Entrepreneurs-Journey.com

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1. Mike's Money Making Mission
2. Kumiko's Cash Quest
3. How to earn money online?
4. Stratz's Blog
5. Hot Blog Girls

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Make Money Fast - An experiment in Choosing Words

Previously we have looked at tools that show the popularity of certain keywords. What you can do is ideally try and find a set of key words that are popular yet don't have every man and his dog trying to optimize their sites for it - then start to build them into the content of your site, plus hopefully get people to link to your site with the keywords as the anchor text.

I have decided to try a little experiment that will hopefully make money fast for me at the same time - firstly lets go and check out our new phrase on the Overture Keyword selector tool to determine how popular it is - have you guessed what three words I am using yet?

And remember these keyword results are just from yahoo, so we can probably multiply it by 3 to get a more relevant picture of how many people are searching for these words.

Now we need to do a search on Google and see how many results one gets for carrying out a search such as this. Quite a few 47,200,000 actually.

However what I liked about this is that the first page of sites didn't really look that intimidating, and by that I mean there is for example an ezine article, a wikipedia article and a couple of lame looking sites. Not really a site dedicated to the art of Making Money Fast which is probably all it would take to get up there.

So just to recap we have found some reasonably popular words , and we have done a search on Google and theres millions of page results which makes the task a challenging one.

Now the next thing we need to do is track our progress. We need to know where our site currently ranks for this term. Then we are going to keep checking back and rate our progress.

For this head to Google Rankings (note you will need to get your Google API key first ) and lets see where currently the Million Dollar Experiment Down Under ranks for the key words "Make Money Fast" ....

As you can see currently we are not ranking for these terms at all, so this will be an interesting task to see how long it takes.

Of course if you would like to assist and link to this article it would certainly be appreciated.

Good luck, let me know how you get on and where you rank for your chosen terms, please think of your own terms however - we don't want to be fighting over the same words!

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1. Mike's Money Making Mission
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3. How to earn money online?
4. Stratz's Blog
5. Hot Blog Girls

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Exponential Growth - 6 Months down the Track - A Summary

Exponential Growth of the Million Dollar Experiment Down Under

Its been a strange Month, I started out with a huge boost from a number of Sponsored Posts and then pretty much cruised on from there. I had achieved the Monthly Target quite early on so from there endeavoured to concentrate on increasing Passive Income.

AdSense has been a little disappointing for me the last couple of months, I would have hoped to have been a lot further ahead with this than what I am currently however at least I suppose it gives me something to focus on this month as I try and turn that around.

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.

Budget for this Month $US 91.69

Active Income $62.52
Passive Income $67.06

Total month to date $US 129.58
Total Earnings to Date $US 579.94 or $NZ 852.85

The Famous Five

Last month we started a link program that is second to none, the top 5 referrers of traffic to this blog from the previous month get a link after every post for the next month. Its all about sharing the love!

However a new month has rolled around so it is time to pull out the red carpet for the top 5 referrers of traffic to this Blog from the month of March. Congratulations Mike on taking the Top position and we welcome a new Site to the top 5 Hot Blog Girls!

1. Mike's Money Making Mission
2. Kumiko's Cash Quest
3. How to earn money online?
4. Stratz's Blog
5. Hot Blog Girls

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Tracking Keywords - Bloggers Toolkit Series

You may wonder why all the focus on key words lately however it is all about money really. To achieve my goal of earning one million nz dollars I need lots and lots of traffic to my sites - thousands of visitors a day.

Of course one great way to get traffic is optimizing your website or blog for popular keywords which bring us to the second part of this keyword series. You may want to read the first article before taking on this one. Keyword Selector Tool - Bloggers Toolkit Series

There is a tool that I have found to be very useful and well worthwhile for the tracking of where your site ranks over time related to certain keywords. This is good stuff for Bloggers and site owners trying to get more traffic because it means you can measure the success of changes that you make when trying to optimize your site for certain keywords.

The tool is called the Search Engine Key Word Tracker - however before you go and register for it, let me give you the lowdown.

Why would you want to use this tool?
If you are interested in optimizing your website or Blog for certain keywords and would like to track and measure how you are going a tool like this will give you the necessary visibility of where you are at on an ongoing basis.

How do you use it?
Its pretty simple to use which is good to know! Basically you wander along to Search Engine Key Word Tracker register which just takes a couple of secs and then you can log in to the control panel. From here you simply add the keywords along with the sites that you are interested in and it will display where they are currently ranked in Google.

Once you have set these up it is just a matter of working on your site to promote the words that you are interested in and you can check back whenever you like to see how its going. One thing to keep in mind is that when you log in to view this tool you need to click on the Check All link to update the information.

There are many ways of improving the ranking of your site for certain keywords and the 3 methods that I use most often are...

1/ Using the key term in anchor text of a link - if you don't know what this means it is the words shown for a link - not the actual link itself. For example great site would be the way to go if you wanted to promote these keywords for the site www.shoemoney.com which is the link behind it.

2/ Using the words in the title of the html page

3/ Including them in the text of your site, particularly as headings and/or bold text as the searchbots treat these as more important than general text.

Goodluck with your keyword optimization and let me know of any other worthwhile suggestions that you have, I am also always on the look out for good tools to include in the Bloggers Toolkit Series.

March results coming soon....the month is drawing to a close.

Top Five Referrers For February - Great sites that are worth a visit!
1. Kumiko's Cash Quest
2. Mike's Money Making Mission
3. Stratz's Blog
4. If Ya Want to Make Money
5. How to earn money online?


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PayU2Blog, Technorati and our 5 top Blog Referrals

A couple of weeks ago I submitted my Blog to one of the new Pay per post players on the scene and today I received an email from them.

Thanks for your blog submission, your blog qualifies and currently we pay $ 5 per completed assignment. We pay out every other Friday via PayPal. I wanted to say Hello and make sure that you are ready to get started working with us on our projects. You can also get more information
off of our blog at:http://blog.payu2blog.com/5/bloggers-get-paid-to-blog/

Great I have fired them off another email with some more information that was requested and with a bit of luck will be able to give them a shot very soon. Of course I will be sharing the experience.

As far as Pay per post sites go these are the ones that so far have been successfully used by this experiment. We did a full review on pay per post a month or so back.

Blogitive
Blogsvertise
Loudlaunch
PayPerPost

It has become obvious to me in recent times that given enough websites you could probably almost eke out some sort of a living by writing paid posts, however it wouldn't be the most satisfying way to earn a crust.

Technorati - we have just moved into the top 17000 Blogs woohoo, would be very happy to get into the top 10,000 so if you have a like minded blog with 3 months or more of content lets swap links and help each other out.

Who are going to be the top 5 blog sites for March that earn a months worth of links from my posts in April? Well let me tell you at this stage it looks like there will be a couple of new sites that have moved up the MillionNZDollar Referral ladder, all will be revealed in a few days once March is done and dusted.

Coming soon we look at an excellent tool for tracking the ranking performance of key words that you are interested in optimizing your site for.

Take it easy

Rob

Top Five Referrers For February - Great sites that are worth a visit!
1. Kumiko's Cash Quest
2. Mike's Money Making Mission
3. Stratz's Blog
4. If Ya Want to Make Money
5. How to earn money online?


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March Summary To Date - Budget Nearly Achieved Already!

We are now just over halfway through March, I tried to add another Blog to PayPerPost the other week, but noticed that you needed 10 Approved Posts before you could do this. Hence I churned through a few to get things moving along which gave us a great start to the month. Now we are looking to be well over target so can just concentrate on building traffic and "real" posts.

And to date for March here are the numbers

Budget for this Month $US 91.69

Active Income $46.52
Passive Income $43.92

Total month to date $US 90.44

Total Earnings to Date $US 540.80 or $NZ 795.29

If you missed the last summary all of our sites are now being counted instead of just this one -hence the figures are moving along a bit quicker than normal!

I now have 13 referrals on MyLot aff, the income it is bringing in is quite small, maybe 10 to 20 cents a day. However this is passive income that does not involving covering your blog with adverts!

This month the active income is made of PayPerPost, the passive is MyLot referral income and Advertising e.g AdSense, Banners on sites etc. Passive is what we will be concentrating on for the rest of the month.

Top Five Referrers For February - Great sites that are worth a visit!
1. Kumiko's Cash Quest
2. Mike's Money Making Mission
3. Stratz's Blog
4. If Ya Want to Make Money
5. How to earn money online?


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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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MillionNZDollar Weekend Links

Taking a leaf out of Mikes Money Making Mission, I have decided to post a weekly set of links to the favourite articles from the Blogs that I have read during the previous week. The articles are well worth a read.

Make Money By Keeping Visitors On Your Blog This article by Mike Perry goes through some of the ways that he manages to keep visitors on his blog.

Promoting vs Income Greg Stratz talks about 7 things he has come to realize in his short (but busy!) blogging career to date.

What on Earth is a Blog Carnival - And... How Does it Help you Earn Money? Nice article from Shirlene Moore about how Blog Carnivals can help you bring you more traffic, which should in turn relate to more income!

A Review of Kontera - Monetize your website with Contextual In Text Advertising Maki looks at Kontera which seems to co-exist quite nicely with Google AdSense and looks like a great way to add additional monetization to your blog... hmmmm might have to look further into this one!

That's it for this weeks links, if you have written an article that you believe should make it into my weekly links, please let me know and I will check it out. All articles must be original content of course!

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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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130 Day Summary of the Million Dollar Experiment Down Under

I can't believe that it is now 130 days since we embarked upon our mission. The mission being to simply intend one million dollars into our life, this of course being the record of the journey.

It has become some sort of an addiction now which I am not sure if this is a good or a bad thing, however its certainly taking up a lot of time!

I am still struggling finding something that earns from advertising on this site. Friendfinder has so far given me zero return, Amazon also zero return - I have removed them and will just stick with the only thing that has worked so far advertising wise - Google AdSense.

Its quite possible that I am not positioning them right, or not promoting them enough, however the facts are that this site is now getting a reasonable amount of traffic, and I need to see some results to justify any further effort on those money earning systems. Zero is not going to cut taking up that much space on the Blog!

Received a referral fee from Blogitive the other day of 5 dollars, thanks for whoever signed up and mentioned that I referred them!

Now the Summary - 130 Days (NZ Currency)
Beer tasting $30.00
Blogitive $117.65
Blogsvertise $22.06
GoogleAdsense $39.56
LoudLaunch $7.35
Money4Blogs $29.41
MYLOT $16.59
SportsGambling -$10.10
PayPerPost $33.10

Grand Total US$ 194.22 or NZ$ 285.62 Increase over the last summary (120 Day Summary) in NZ Dollars: $35.16

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Google AdSense Link Units - hopefully adding to exponential growth!

After a suggestion from one of my fellow "like minded" bloggers LFC Fan I have decided to add some Google AdSense Link Units to this site, Link units are a bit different to the normal AdSense adverts in the way that they display a list of topics that are relevant to your page.

It is important that in staying in line with Googles TOS you only place one link unit per content page.

February is a short month, it was going to be hard to meet my required targets this month on passive income alone, hence the additional paid posts that you may have recently seen.

You may remember back in October we began our exponential growth experiment, the article was Exponential growth with your Website Profits and February is month 5 of this (Octobers online earnings were the beginning for us).

In this exponential growth experiment money from all of my online sources is being calculated and I am pleased to say that this month we are on target to more than double what was achieved in October. The majority of the income growth is also passive which is very pleasing and makes for very exciting times ahead.

I will post a full report of the figures of this at the end of February with a month by month breakdown of targets, achievements plus a look ahead at the next 5 months. Remember it is not to hard to increase your earnings by a mere 20% on what you did the previous month. Keep this up and you will soon be making very good money indeed. It actually creeps up on a you a bit and it is only when you look back that you see what great improvements have actually been made.

The attitude that I have about this is simply failure is not an option. I will do whatever it takes to make an extra 20 percent a month - if that means some months staying awake all night and writing sponsored posts to make up the difference then that is what has to be done. If it means creating more sites than what I already have then that's what I will do. I would prefer however to continue maximising the income from the sites that I already have - as time does become an issue. (especially with a young family, and a full time job!)

I am experimenting with Google AdWords on one of my sites at the moment and have found some interesting results happening with this - more details to come in a future post.

120 Day Summary of the Million Dollar Experiment Down Under

The Story so far
120 Days ago we set out on a Money Making Experiment based on Steve Pavlinas Million Dollar Experiment. It has been a blast so far and although we are a long way from our goal I think good progress has been made.

Key Achievements of the Experiment to date
Earning the first Dollar
Making the top 100,000 on the Technorati Ladder
Achieving a Google Page Rank of 4 on the homepage after only 3 months
100 Posts within 100 Days
Making the top 50,000 on the Technorati Ladder

Other News
A couple of confirmations that companies do pay up - which is always nice to know. MyLot aff: came through - I have finally earned my first ten dollars after a few months. With MyLot half of that money was earned by myself actively participating in discussions, the other half was from referral income. LoudLaunch have also paid up - great.

A recent sign up with PayPerPost has resulted in a few higher priced sponsored posts, the first one has been approved so now this income will also start to show in the regular summaries on this site.

The Z-List has boosted us up the Technorati ladder, this has been a great example of viral marketing and shows what a bunch of unsung bloggers can achieve in a short amount of time. Just about every time I log in to Technorati now there are more links to my site showing up - thanks to all that have participated.

Now the Summary - 120 Days (NZ Currency)
Beer tasting $30.00
Blogitive $110.29
Blogsvertise $22.06
GoogleAdsense $36.40
LoudLaunch $7.35
Money4Blogs $29.41
MYLOT $16.21
SportsGambling -$10.10
PayPerPost $8.84

Grand Total US$ 170.31 or NZ$ 250.46

Increase over the last summary (110 Day Summary) in NZ Dollars: $16.19

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

FriendFinder, and Amazon yet to deliver results in the Million Dollar Experiment Down Under

You may have noticed a change in scenery around the outskirts of this Blog, specifically I placed a FriendFinders aff: advert on the site, plus have been experimenting with a couple of Amazon Adverts. The results have been quite disappointing.

Neither FriendFinder nor Amazon have returned a cent, this is a bummer really because I am trying to not be so reliant on AdSense, however it is becoming the Bread and Butter of most of my sites and nothing I have found seems to be able to better it to date. I would be very interested in your story about some product you have found and monetized on your site that has outperformed Google AdSense (and does not require active participation!)

PayPerPost have still not reviewed my Pending Posts 9 and 7 days after I submitted them, I wonder if they wait 30 days before accepting them? And will I then have to wait another 30 days to be paid? I am wanting to add the totals to my figures, however I never add anything until it has been approved.

Loudlaunch paid me today for the one post I did while checking out their site a while back, I have logged back in a few times, however all their offers are $5 or $3 which is not really enough I dont think. It is important to put some kind of value on what your time is worth when you are working on stuff that is nothing more than an exchange of time for money. I might as well log in to PayPerPost and do a similar sized Post and get paid twice as much, or even better spend the time writing an article that might be useful to someone!

The Z-List has been working well, and has boosted us up the Technorati Rankings. It will be interesting to see how far it goes.

Funny side effect of Blogging... I have noticed that now when I do a spell check there are hardly any spelling mistakes, however when I started 6 or 7 months ago - there were spelling mistakes aplenty. Has Blogging made you a better speller?

Look out for the 12o Day Summary - Coming soon.

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

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!