Day 51: decision

I've decided to stop this. It was originally designed to be both fun and helpful for me and perhaps interesting to readers. With that said, it has become long, tedious and a huge pain in the ass for me and there's no interest from others so it basic amounts to me shouting to myself every day. Not to mention, with so much already going on it makes it hard to put in a lot of time every day and when I do not put in a lot of time and don't get a lot of work done, instead of feeling good about what does get done, I feel really guilty about not having done enough and not being able to post an interesting post.

That does not mean that I will be stopping the whole thing with the goal of the whole challenge, I still am going to do it but rather, I will post slightly less frequently and when I can make sure that I have something interesting to say. This has been, for a while now, pretty boring and it sucks for me and sucks for everyone else.

Day 50: Change once more!

Ahhh, the continuing fun of this ever increasingly boring and lame blog. At first, I felt excited and motivated and it felt like it would really be something fun and exciting and informative. As it has been going, however, it has become increasingly apparent that it is actually getting further and further from that. I am thinking that I might want to return to the original format which at least kept things easy and so I knew exactly what I had to put in every post and kept things rolling well. The ambiguity and lameness of the majority of the posts since has been really quite unfortunate and partly because of the change in format. I think, for the next month I am going to go ahead and stick with the original format and see if that can reinvigorate this blog which I was actually thinking about stopping doing today. So, starting tomorrow, look for something much less lame and much more informative.

Day 49: outsourceness and illness

Well, tonight has been amazing. It has come about that I am now violently ill and have barely been able to sit down at my computer without having to run back to the bathroom to vomit profusely. Between bouts of losing all interest in food and the food I may have had, I did manage to go ahead and find someone to go over and fix my javascript for 75 bucks. In my opinion, it will be worth every penny provided the guy actually does what I am asking him to do. We will see if that is the case.

I also went ahead and started on my new keyword with another page on hubpages but that has been tough to write considering I can't really just sit down and write but it is just about finished.

Day 48: Back to business

So, it's back to business. Ranting ended yesterday and business started again. In addition, I got myself some magical little lovelies that help with motivation and focus (here's looking at you e 401!) So, I decided to finish up with keyword number 1 yesterday and blasted out another round of SENuke in addition to getting my accounts made. SENuke is the magic that makes the world go 'round, or in this case, what helps to build rankings quickly and easily.

Also, I did some more quick cash work and made another 60 bucks because I was really into working last night. Also, I finished two more pages for my hosting website and now the only thing that is really missing with those is the Javascript and I will probably end up paying someone 100 bucks or something to go ahead and make it so my javascript actually works. It is not worth my effort to spend countless hours struggling with it when I can pay someone some cash and just make sure that it gets done.

Getting things done, that is the key to this and everything else and with 48 days behind me, I need to start getting more things done if this is going to end up being big money. I am also starting to see some traffic trickle in from my first keyword phrase and some rankings in the google so that is good news.

Day 47: Frustrated and tired

Sometimes it gets very frustrating and tiring to keep going with things and yesterday and today is one of those days. I did get some stuff done yesterday but really not enough. It is difficult to work so much during the week and I have not been doing as much as I could be. Obviously, theoretically I could work every waking hour of my life but that is a lot easier said than done. It is also hard to focus on some of these things when I want to be doing bigger things.

Intellectually, things are really easy and I have no problem solving problems and building plans but the reality of doing them is much less glamorous than it is when I build it out in my head. The ~100 keywords for this niche website are amazing, and will result in a great deal of traffic if I rank #1 for all of them and that is not something that is unrealistic, but it does require a lot of work on my part.

Once I solve "the problem" a great deal of my motivation just disappears. In fact, I'm not even that motivated over all in my other business ventures and they are not doing nearly as well as they could be if I were to apply the full force of my intellect with a great deal of effort. I do just fine but just fine isn't fine when it could be fucking outstanding if I had more motivation, haha.

The fact that even after 47 days I'm still posting is kind of a miracle and the fact that that is true is a depressing commentary on the state of my motivation. GG

Day 46: Refilling my capital reserves

So, I took on a couple quick-pay projects yesterday which would take most of my time. As you all know - the three of you that read this - I write pretty well and it is the quickest way to get money from other people into my paypal and that is exactly what I did yesterday. I made a quick $150 writing some content which not only covers my SENuke cost but I still have a few hundred "in the bank" as it were for spending on whatever I plan to.

In addition to writing the content, I nuked one of my pages for my new niche website and I put a little bit more time into my other two niche sites. I really need to get my analytics working again on CEG because the fact that it is no longer working is infuriating. I'm probably going to go through and figure out why exactly my analytics is not working. Obviously it has something to do with the new WP theme that I am using since it stopped collecting data when I switched.

Day 45: Javascript is holding me hostage

I don't know how much time I have before javascript returns to continue to torture me. I have tried to get it to do what I want but it continues it fight me tooth and nail all the way through the process. A more sinister creature I have never seen. Everything else for my website is more or less complete but unfortunately, the scripts are pretty important to the operation of the website and they continue to taunt me not doing what I tell them to do. Obviously, this is a problem on my end but still... CURSE YOU JAVASCRIPT!

Now that I have vented about JS a little bit, I can talk about the other progress which is happening. I need to go back and fix my hubpages pages and add some more content to my squidoo pages because I read them and they feel a bit short. That is fine for pages that are in the third tier as those are mostly for backlinks but for pages that I actually want to be ranking well, it is unacceptable. You can never tell what something is going to look like and read like until you go and see how it looks.

I'm getting some traffic which is great, and some clicks which is also great, but as of yet, no sales (for my niche site) For my other nice website on electric guitars, I changed the wordpress theme and now my analytics is no longer working so I'm really pissed about that. I've been trying to figure out what the issue is but so far I have not been able to determine what it is.

Day 44: Bubbl.us is AHHH-mazing

So, I am playing with the bubbl.us website for my flow chart and I have to say that it is pretty awesome. It is really easy to use and keep track of things. I think it might be problematic to have a truly massive flowchart on it but, for now, it is doing the trick which is awesome.

Already, my two pages (hub and squidoo) are indexed and now I need to build some backlinks to them so that they can start to rank high in google for the terms they target. Luckily, the competition for these terms is terrible and the web 2.0's that are currently ranking for these terms are poorly written, poorly designed, not as SEO'd as my own and have zero backlinks. Basically, getting up in these terms in like shooting fish in a barrel. I have also finished what I consider to be my tier 2 websites for this keyword and now all I need to do is get a domain name and start building the central website that they will then link to. I have links out to products that they are targeted for right now and I will add links going to my main site as soon as it is finished.

I am debating whether or not I want to build something on wordpress or if I want to start from scratch and build the website with my own - albeit mediocre - design skills. I like wp because it is easy but at the same time, it does have limitations. I also started working on the custom graphics for my hosting yesterday. There are quite a few graphics that I need to make for it and it is a very time consuming process (especially for someone like me who is not what I would consider a graphic designer) but so far so good. Many of you, and my many I mean the few of you who actually read this, are probably wondering why I do EVERYTHING myself. The answer is actually pretty simple and it is that I have never had a good experience trusting anyone to do anything for me. It never works out, it costs too much money, and it is always much more trouble than it is worth. Why should I pay a few hundred dollars for something I am going to be extremely disappointed with and will probably have to spend as much time fixing as it would to make it in the first place.

Regardless, my pages for keyword #1 are already generating traffic and clicks which is exactly what I need them to do and they're not even ranking very highly yet. Good news for this project indeed.

Day 43: Nearing the completion of programming, keyword #1 deployed

A few things have been kind of messy over the past few days. 1, adscend media has been having some serious issues as a result of a DDoS attack so my ebook website has been having issues as well. That seems to have been resolved so that is good. Another thing is that I have been finally redoing my hosting website which is going to be a major source of revenue for ebook and is a planned major source of revenue for my business in general and having a user friendly, attractive, and quality site is imperative to that end. As such, I have been applying my programming and web design skills to that task and things have been going...well. Well in the sense that it is progressing quickly (I have 4 pages of the website near completion and I have finished with 2 javscript files) but it has not been enjoyable or without it's fair share of moaning and groaning on my part.

Additionally, I set up a hubpage and a squidoo page last night with unique content on my first keyword phrase for my niche website that I am going to be working with on SENuke. I did not notice the the flow-chart comment on my post until today - thanks Matej - so I will probably work on playing with that today and posting it tomorrow. I am going to add another property to tier 2 today, probably ezine, and then I am going to work on the nuke portion today as well which will be tier 2. How many tiers I will go to I'm not really sure but it will be at least 3 (including my own .com domain at the top) which should provide excellent rankings for these phrases.

Once again, I want to thank the few of you that are still reading and I have to say that I am happy I am still posting these things. They probably seem pretty boring most of the time and I hadn't really realized how much frontloaded work I'd be doing - I could be doing less but I try to get things fairly perfect at the start - so thanks for reading/commenting and sticking with me!

Day 42: I remember again why I didn't go CMU for computer science

That reason is that I really do not enjoy programming. I have fairly extensive experience in C and Java and I can say without any hesitation that programming just is not for me. In theory, I love programming - that is being able to identify a problem and create a solution - but the reality is much less glamorous. Debugging code, small problems in functions and incompatible I/O's between functions are immensely frustrating and make me want to smash my computer to pieces. And, I am actually a fairly good programmer even though I have not done a lot of programming for the past 3 years. What brings this up today is the fact that I have been retooling my entire hosting site and doing a decent amount of work in javascript and it has reminded me of how much I do not like programming. The only saving grace is that it isn't some massive 10k line behemoth like the project that really killed programming for me - a chess game that could run over a network with a decent AI that you could play against.

I also laid out a good plan for my "G" niche and I am going to build a couple of the "good" properties today which are going to have all original and hand tailored content. I plan to have at least levels of hierarchy with the top one being my own domain, the second level being other web 2.0's with original content that can quickly rank, and then the rest of the pages are mostly well-spun content that can be used to give decent linking to the other pages. If anyone knows of a program that can be used to make a flow-chart that would be amazing.

Day 41: SENuke Continuing

So, I have been trying to setup a way to make my SENuke system work continuously and I have finally decided that I am going to do at least 1 article per day and nuke one article a day, every day and rotate which website that I am doing that for. Today is my niche website day and I'm in the middle of writing an article for it. Once I write the article, I will submit it to ezine and then I will nuke the alterations to all of the other websites. I did this yesterday with a CEG article again and the system should work pretty well IMO.

I figure if I can do one long-tail a day over the course of the next few months I will be able to get to rank really well for many different keywords which will give me a very good traffic boost overall. There are so many different ideas that I have kicking around in my head I just have to really hit hard with a couple of them. Thankfully, SENuke will be able to help me with that. I think I might start to visually graph out my plans and post those graphs here. I have never tried to make one of those things so I will have to figure it out as I go along but I will be able to track the growth which will probably be really helpful.

Day 40: Application of SENuke and market research

So, I spent most of the day yesterday working on and playing with SENuke. I made a profile for SENuke, created all of the profile accounts (automatically) and used an article that I spun and then posted it out to get all the backlinks from it. I was pretty happy with the results of it and I was also doing some serious niche research on another project. With SENuke I do not want to bombard one site to the point where I get smacked down by google so it is wise to have a few (3 or 4) projects going at the same time so that you can spread things out across the sites.

I did my keyword research on the niche yesterday and I must say that I am EXTREMELY happy with the possibilities of the niche. I have about 100 different keywords that I should be able to rank very easily for which could, if I get it so I am ranking for all of them as #1, generate more than 6000 visitors a day. Even with a relatively conservative conversion rate of 0.25% would result in about $300 a day which would be excellent. I am probably going to start on this project today and continue to work on the other projects and spread the love around the three of them with SENuke.

Day 39: Where have you been all my life?

So, I have been playing with SENuke and I must say that it is very helpful. Much of the busywork that I hate and find a complete waste of time is completely automated now thanks to SENuke. I wrote 2 spinnable articles yesterday and nuked them by using SENuke and got them all bookmarked and pinged and I am still getting used to what I can do with the software but so far so good. There are a lot of nuances with using this program and as I continue to work with it I will become more adept and getting it to do exactly what I want it to do. I don't want to go too crazy on a single site and get myself sandboxed so I am going to go back and forth between working on ebooks and CEG and I might even add a third site into the mix just to get things flowing.

Day 38: Late... but I for good reason

So, I realize that I have let this slip past my agreed upon deadline but I do believe the circumstances allow it. For the past 5 or so hours I have been playing with and learning SENuke. What a tool! I figured that it would be worth it to dedicate some of the money I have made to make my life easier and making this process more efficient and that if it saved me one hour per day in work that it would be more than worth the cost... it seems like it will be. Obviously, this piece of programming is quite a work and it takes some getting familiarized with even for someone like me. I have been so engrossed with it for the past the past number of hours that I have totally lost all track of time until I glanced at the clock a short while ago and realized what has happened.

Regardless, I don't regret getting the software and the fact that I am thoroughly engrossed is a very good sign indeed. As such, I am going to keep this brief since I want to get back to it!

Day 37: I love backlinks

Backlinks really are the greatest. With things finally starting to take hold, serp ranks for the most part are skyrocketing. Up 100 places in a couple of days is great and not that many have even been counted yet so I am looking at a lot more places of movement upward going forward. Only 100 and change have been counted so far and I have built probably around 1000 or so so that means that there is still some strong room for upward movement. I do need to start adding more deep linking to balance it out a little bit. My linking schemes have been heavily weighted toward the home page for both websites and I need to start dumping a lot more links into deeper pages so that it is a more balanced tree of links. Also, I think I need to add some more inlinking on the website. It is very helpful from an SEO standpoint and it is something that I have not spent enough time doing.

I am happy with the serp progress and I have tons of keywords that I am hoping to rank #1 for and can easily rank #1 for all of those keywords with some work. The total traffic value of a #1 ranking for all the keywords is in the neighborhood of a few thousand visitors every day which is a not-too-shabby number.

Day 36: Back to nothing to say in this part

Last night was the first night in a while where I went to sleep happy with the progress that happened over the course of the day. I spent a great deal of yesterday just pumping as much backlinking into these two projects until I was so bored that I wanted to just sleep. I think I probably put together about 300 links altogether yesterday which is actually a great deal of links when they are not total spam. I am also going to write many articles and get ready to post them for the new ezine HAHD challenge which I have participated in in the past and it was actually pretty cool. One of my biggest assets in IM is the fact that I can write extremely well, have a very strong knowledge of SEO, and knowledge on many other facets from coding to web design and almost everything that falls between.

So, progress was strong yesterday with a good deal of work put in and only time will tell how things go but I am looking at moving a little bit away from general SEO on the Ebooks website - I have done a good deal already - and start to move into more instant sources of traffic. I have been saying this for weeks now but I think it is really time to do that and since month #2 was going to be traffic getting month, it fits into the theme quite nicely. Also, I want to say thanks for all the comments. =)

Day 35: Motivation

I have been sidetracked with this for the past week or so in the sense that I have really been focusing on the end date when that is exactly the wrong way to do it. The original plan was not to do it so that I would declare victory on the day that this ends but rather as soon as possible with the stipulation that it must occur before a certain date. September is the deadline, not the goal and that has fallen from the forefront of the idea behind this and that is something that I need to get back to. I should want to be finished next week and then having the challenge making 50,000/day by September. Granted, that is not nearly as realistic but it should be the way that I go about this. As such, I am changing the way I am approaching this back to the way I wanted to approach it from the beginning. It is easy to get side tracked when you are not focusing on the actual goal but instead focusing on the requirements.

As such, I am going to try and focus more on the actual goal and less on the requirements and the goal is to make as much money as possible in the shortest period of time with the baseline requirement being making ~273/day by September 10th. Here's to getting back to pursuing this the right way.

Day 34: The Game Continues

Well, the game is certainly continuing but geeze it is hard to find the time to really get a lot done sometimes. It's a shame that there aren't more hours in the day so that I can get more done but, alas, I have to work with what I've got. I have been continuing to build links and I have started to see noticeable improvements in my serps so that is a good step in the right direction. I am also starting to see a decent traffic increase (getting about 10-15 uniques a day for the ebook) so that is also good. I think I need to go back and work on the facebook page so that can actually be a resource that I can use to drive traffic and make money. I also have another contract out for more work and that netted me another 30 bucks or so yesterday so that was nice. Now that I have a fairly solid coffer of cash I am going to go ahead and get myself the full version of SENuke so that I can work smarter and save time on busy work which will now be automated.

Day 33: Yay linkbuilding!

So the plan for month 2 to really hammer the traffic is what I am going to stick to. I did some serious backlinking yesterday to both ebooks and CEG and I am finally starting to use a good deal of those profiles that I have sitting around waiting for links to be built. I still have hundreds more of the profiles but at least I am using them. In addition to profile links, I have been getting a lot of blog links too. Volume can overcome lack of quality and depending on the difference in quality of the backlinks, I would rather have 50 mediocre links than 2 or 3 good links ( unless they're something super special and amazing which is almost never the case) so I have been taking this approach to these two websites. While they will not drive traffic on their own, they are there to improve my ranking in the serps so that will get me traffic. As my links have been getting digested, my google rank has gone up over 100 places for a major search term which is excellent. My yahoo results are starting to turn around and head back in the right direction as well which is also excellent.

Day 32: hammering the SEO

So, like I said, it's SEO hammer time and that is just what I'm doing. I'm hitting the offsite SEO and backlinking to try and get as much traffic as possible. Yesterday was a day where I built about 200 or so backlinks for a bunch of different keywords for both ebooks and for CEG and so now they need to get picked up/propagated/etc and the plan today is to do much the same thing. I'm hoping to get about the same number today and going forward and just keep hammering.

Day 31: A look back at the first month

Well, I thought I would do a little something different for the view of the first month and a look toward month number 2. Month one started out well with the fleshing out of ideas that I have had but haven't really pushed before (ebooks for free) and ideas that I had started on but let fall by the wayside in my other ventures (cheap electric guitars). I got ebooks up and running and got a good amount of content up on the website with some monetization.

The site is making some money, it made about 52 dollars over the first month of the challenge which has covered it's expenses which is nice. Additionally, it is in a position to start getting some serious traffic and I have been continually building a decent SEO presence for the website and it is starting to rank for some long tail things.

CEG has benefited the most from the link building since it was already relatively established. With that said, the dance has taken me from #1 in yahoo down to #8 although this could also be because I changed the layout of the site to make it a little more visitor friendly. Regardless, sometimes you need to take small steps back while progress is going forward.

Recently, I have been redoing the front-end of my hosting site as it needed a good deal of work especially since I have been planning on sending a good deal more traffic that way and it is going to be one of the primary income sources - hopefully - from my ebooks website so I want that converting as much as possible. I also made some decent cash from doing some writing so that this game has some money in the coffers when the need to spend arises.

Going forward I want to get really big pushes going on these two projects so that they can be easier to carry on. They are one big push away from getting strong momentum and at that point they will be less work intensive and more lucrative which is a win/win. I think month 2 I am going to call my big push month where I push these websites out there and start the large scale traffic and money efforts with them.

Day 30: Illness FTL

So, not much can really be said about yesterday in terms of doing work. By the time I got home and was ready to get some work done on the project, I was so sick I could barely see through the glassiness that had begun to plague my eyes. I am not so bad today but I am still not feeling 100% but I should at least be able to get something done without a chicken soup IV drip.

Day 29: om nom nom

So we're almost at the 1 month mark here in this project and I have to say that I really want to do more with it and get more effort into the whole thing. I do consider it a success that I have managed to continue posting these and doing work almost every day even though I have a lot of other things on my plate at the moment. Ebooksforfree is making about $1/day give or take with the minimal traffic it is getting and so once I finally step the traffic up, it should be doing even better. I have also decided that getting senuke is worth it since I cannot stand doing busy work and it will be beneficial not only for this side project but for my primary IM income sources as well which will be great. Overall, I have to admit I have been having some fun with the incentive based advertising and I think it can really make some bank when I put a decent effort into it.

I also spent more time last night on redoing my hosting company's website because this is actually a business that I would like to seriously get into and grow. Obviously this is not part of the six month challenge but it is an extremely viable business model and I see many weaknesses in the sector as a whole. That is not to say that I will be bigger than hostgator starting tomorrow but I could definitely see the company following a similar trajectory.

Day 28: I love puppies...

I never really realized how much actually went into designing a website like the one hostgator has. It is actually a lot more difficult than I had thought. I did a decent amount of work on the design last night and I should probably be finished with that and hopefully able to launch it over the next few days. My biggest concern is that I do not have a staging area to test and see if everything is working before I throw it up on my server so maybe I should give it a go in a subfolder before I replace what I currently have with what I plan on using. On a side note, I made another 28 dollars on a content sale - I got an offer to buy more content this morning in an e-mail which I will probably do as well, and I have been getting some traffic and money from ebooks and I got another lead for another $0.80 just yesterday which is sweet. I need to take a step back though and not worry like I always do about things being absolutely perfect and just working and improving as I go. As a total perfectionist, I have great difficulty releasing things to the world when they are not quite finished. Regardless, things are going pretty well so I'm fairly happy with where things are. With that said, month one was slower and less productive than I hoped it would be - even though it isn't over - so month two I hope to remedy this.

Day 27: A question worth answering

So, I came to the conclusion - more like finally accepted the fact - that the web design for my hosting company is total shit. Not really a surprise considering I am not really a graphic designer but it is something that bothers me greatly. So, I have decided to go ahead and change it. I am not too familiar with working with dreamweaver and the rest of the adobe web building suite of tools but if I am going to be sending tons of people to the site to sign up for hosting - and I want to - I am going to need a design that I am satisfied with and don't want to facepalm every time that I see the site.

As a major source of revenue for a lot of my potential ventures, I think it should really be brought up to speed and fleshed out to what it should be. Especially considering it will probably be the greatest source of income from ebookforfree.info . I make between 10-20/mo in perpetuity from people using my hosting which is almost certainly going to be greater than the revenue that I generate from downloads.

Another thing that I started doing last night is something that I neglected to do when first setting up ebooks and that was choosing where I want to direct my visitors and lead them where I want them to go. I always forget how stupid people are and how they need to have their hands held and told exactly where to go. Instead of encouraging independent thought, I'm going to hold little johnny's hand and help him cross the street.

I forgot to mention that my hosting website is www.taikunhosting.com As you can see, it's absolutely hideous and I have to say I'm shocked I have as many clients as I do. With the redesign I'm doing now, hopefully it will be a little more respectable going forward.

Day 26: I'm out of things to say here

Not here on the blog but here in the title portion of the post. Maybe that is not entirely true but I couldn't think up anything for yesterday so I'm going with it.

The overall plan yesterday was pretty simple and it was to try and improve the ranking of my ebook site. Also, I did a good deal of looking into whether or not I want to get SENuke or not. It is probably something that is definitely worth the money, especially if I want to cut out a lot of the busy work that I hate without having to spend a fortune doing it through outsourcing. It will make my job easier and less boring because no amount of weed in the world will make doing the painfully tedious busy work fun. With that said, I do not expect it to completely remove the tedium but it should make it significantly less. I did outsource a ton of dofollow forum profiles a while ago - I know I mentioned it here before - and since I haven't used them for anything yet I decided to start using it for this project. Some of them were inactive or not working which isn't really a surprise considering it has been at least 2 months since I bought them. With that said, I worked through about 50 of them yesterday. They actually take more time than I thought that they would to link them together, get all the anchor text for each, etc. It was surprisingly slow and painful work. Now I just need to get the pages crawled but that is the easy part. I'll probably give the full version of SENuke a try here for the 7 days and see how I like it. It just seems like it is designed for me since it lets me use my mind run free which is actually what it needs to do.

Day 25: Good and bad

So, we'll start with the bad news. The bad news is that I tested to see how easy it was to actually complete an offer to unlock the content and it was a lot more difficult than I had thought initially. I was under the impression that is was a one-and-done sort of thing and it most definitely is not. That does make me quite sad.

On the other hand, the website is starting to rank for some phrases that I want to rank for. Not very well mind you, but it is a start and it means that there is much more work to be done. I think I am going to spend most of today trying to get as many solid anchor-texted backlinks as I possibly can. I am ranking #1 for "mso marketing scam" whatever that is, haha. It's not a big traffic generator but it's entertaining nonetheless.

I am also trying to decide if I want to put all of my hand-tailored content onto this site or if I want to make a dedicated site for my stuff and turn it into a sort of membership thing. After all, my content is significantly better than the random PLR garbage that is here and I could probably do a decent job of selling it as part of a membership thing (have a free membership and a premium membership) which will get good content in front of an audience who is probably more likely to buy (the paid members especially). I am not really too sure but it is something I will definitely ponder today.

Day 24: back to business

Well, I think the redesign of my website has cost me some spots in the serps. It is more user friendly but if I want to bring it back where it was I'll have to do more link building. Unless, of course, the work that I did over the past week will be able to sink in and bring it back up. Anyway, things are moving back to my ebook site. As everyone knows, absense makes the heart grow fonder.

In fact, I got distracted in the middle of writing this post and have been working on the website, haha. I guess that is my cue to finish the post - not very long I know - and get back to work.

Day 23: Why work when I can get laid

I'd love to say that there was some thought of going home and doing work when the offer of getting laid was sitting 6 blocks away, but there wasn't. The formula is pretty clear - Get money, fuck bitches - and I got the second half so skipping the first was totally acceptable. Back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Day 22: Promotion of CEG finished...maybe for now

Well, after putting in a pretty decent amount of time on this side project, or rather, on my project that I shelved for a while, I think it is time to get back to the task(s) at hand, namely ebookforfree. I have given my cheap electric guitar website a decent amount of love the past week or so and build about 8x the number of backlinks that the website already has. Whether all those links will get counted, that's impossible but a good increase in backlinks should help to improve the rank on my website. I am actually debating what to do with the money that I have made from this little project and I am leaning towards going and getting SENuke. It basically does exactly what I need from marketing software and I'm not sure why I haven't gotten it in the past. I have spent money on outsourced human labor to do a lot of what SENuke can do for me quickly and easily.

If anyone is still reading this, and I hope you are, any input on SENuke would be great. Is it worth it? Should I go all out and do the 127/mo for the top program or is the 67/mo good enough? I have gotten a few more downloads of my noobie pack on ebooks for free so that is good. I think I may need to refresh the thread on BHW too since a lot of people who read there are not reading here =).

Day 21: promotion, promotion, PRO-motion

I have decided to start calling promotion PRO-motion. Professional motion. AKA taking high quality action to get the message out there. Perhaps it is a little bit lame but I like it. The simple fact of the matter is that writing quality content and getting it set up in a way that is user friendly is the hard part and I have forgotten that. Promotion is easy and pretty painless to be honest so I have been focusing on getting promotion going for my pet project and it has been going well. At the moment there are about 6 different keyword phrases that, when I rank #1 in google for them, will generate close to 500 hits/day based on conservative traffic data assumptions. That isn't too shabby and assuming a 1% conversion rate (these are good buyer keywords) the site should be generating a minimum of $25/day which would be from organic only and only those phrases. Obviously, ranking for some phrases you also get a bunch of other KW phrases that you rank for in addition to the base phrases so ranking for these keywords could result in an even more traffic and money. This is also not including all of the other phrases that I have done research on but have not built content for so there is a lot of potential on this niche website. There is also immense room to grow and the website could actually move into an e-commerce site going forward if it gets a lot of traffic. So I'm still planning on doing promotion for this website today but I am also planning on going back to my ebook website because that is now generating about $0.75/day with very little promotion and traffic so I think that could be some big money going forward.

Day 20: promotion ahoy!

I have forgotten how much more enjoyable promotion can be than actually building a website. The hard work is getting things set up and ready to be promoted, the easy and fun part is doing the promotion. I spent a good deal of day 20 doing promotion for my old website that I haven't played with in a while. It is now ranked #1 in yahoo for it's main keyword phrase which sees 7k searches a month (over all search engines) I got ~150 backlinks yesterday, when and how many of them will end up being credited is debatable but they cover a bunch of different excellent keyword phrases that I have for the website. I also did some more tweaking to the website to make it more user friendly and make it more likely that people will make a purchase on the website. I actually got a message yesterday from an irate website visitor that said he was angry there wasn't a phone number he could order from on the website because he hates doing commerce on the internet. Doesn't really make sense to me but at shows that there are buyers visiting my website which is a very good thing.

Day 19: An itch scratched

As I said earlier, I had an itch to work on a project that I have basically left completely alone for months. I revisited it briefly the other day because I took a look at it and it was getting decent SEO traffic and the website was lacking a lot to really bring it up to where it should be. It has, so far, only made like 10 dollars over a bunch of months but it was extremely lacking in the visual department and also required a bit of navigation to get to what the primary keyword were looking to find. I've changed it up a bit and used a nicer wordpress style plus I'm fine tuning the SEO on the site. While throwing another site into the rotation was exactly what I didn't want to do, I don't think a few days or even of a week of tweaking this a little bit is a bad thing.

Day 18

So, while not the full-force gale that I expected to create - damn you march madness! - I did manage to get a decent amount of stuff finished yesterday and all signs point to today being equally as productive. Yesterday I was working on trying to get ways to drive traffic to my website and that is one of the things I worked on. I am a big fan of SEO and organic search rankings so I worked on building good backlinks with anchor text and there are a great number of methods for that. From writing articles and submitting to directories (excellent choice and these can rank for keywords too!) to posting blog comments. I'd say I get a lot of people asking me how to get comments with good anchor text without looking like spam but no one asks me much of anything. There are many ways to do it but commenting on blogs with KeywordLuv is a good first step. Simply google search "Enter YourName@YourKeywords" and that will bring up blogs and posts that you can comment on and benefit.

Today I am having the itch to revisit a great project that has not gotten the love it deserves but is ranking well (2 on yahoo) for an extremely good keyword that get's about 7000 searches a month and I could probably rank #1 in google for with a good amount of hard work. It was an earlier attempt at SEO and I never got back to it but looking at it now it's not very appealing and the traffic being sent is mostly being wasted because the site is not as good as it could be. As long as I am working towards something, that's the point.

day 17: the calm before the storm

So, the calm before the storm is the fact that I decided to take friday night off and instead have a good time. Why did I do this you might ask? Well, the answer is fairly simple, I hope to put in 20 hours this weekend and I needed a little bit of time to prep myself and my stuff for this bombardment of activity. I'm calling this weekend traffic weekend because it is going to revolve around me doing everything possible to find and generate traffic to my ebook project. Backlink building, article posting, web2.0 creating, social page building, video making, sexual favor offering (any hot ladies interested? =P) and everything else I can to drive this thing.

Day 16: The continuation of a good thing

So, day 16 was actually a pretty good day. I'd say I got in a good 2 and a half hours last solid work last night after I was finished with everything else I had to do for the day. I finally decided to go ahead and get myself a domain for my niche sales website. I have already written some good SEO content for the website and now I got myself a good keyworded domain name. The niche is pretty small and pretty specific but it is an excellent niche. I added another 20 really solid keyword phrases to the list of phrases that I will use to generate traffic for the website and those will (hopefully) pull in a good deal of traffic once the website is up and ranking for these terms. I have content for a good amount of the keywords now, all I need is to get the site up and running. The two different projects is kind of distracting me from the making money with focusing on one but I have limited myself to two projects at a time so it will not get any worse than it is already.

I am starting to see some better traffic coming to my ebookforfree website and I'm getting clicks but not too many downloads but really not enough traffic yet to determine whether or not I want to change the way things are set up. My goal for this weekend is to start trying to push some more serious traffic to the site to see how it performs when it is getting real amounts of traffic thrown at it.

Day 15: Almost missed the post

So, I did some work last night but I almost missed the chance to post due to the fact that I went to sleep without posting and got up extremely late. With that said, I managed to make another 100 bucks last night. This is good news and brings my total money made to 240ish give or take a few bucks. I also finished lesson 2 for the project for the step-by-step e-mail campaign which talks about product research and how to find a good product in the niche that you've chosen, what makes a good product, products that have good profitability for you as an affiliate, and things that you can actually sell. This will also go well because I think I might use the niche website that I'm doing right now as a real-time example for the e-mail campaign as well.

Day 14: the slog continues

I really have been neglecting this the past 5 days or so of the challenge but I am having trouble finding too much time to work on it. I've been working on a major SEO project for a relatively large business here in NY and after 8-9 hours of working on that, I didn't want to do any more SEO. As such, I decided to make some content since it felt much more enjoyable to me at the time... so I did. I am writing a step-by-step course that I can use as part of an e-mail marketing campaign. Sure, videos are great but sometimes it's nice to be able to read something.

Anyway, lesson 1 is basically an introduction to the world of internet marketing and I talk about what IMers do, how they do it, and all the many different ways to make money. In lesson 2, I talk about how to find a niche and doing research in that regard. So far, I'm pretty happy with everything. Anyway, I don't know if people are still reading this since it has lost a little of it's excitement and flair but I plan to bring that back ASAP =)

Day 13

Day 13 was a wash... Why was day 13 a wash? Easy, I had a TON of work for my standard work AND i was in the middle of doing what I all a schedule flip (yes, I managed to get it) so by the time it was time to do something else last night I was about ready to pass out, which is exactly what I did. No worries though, I should be back in schedule starting today.

Captain's Log: Day 12

Today was productive but not immensely so. Nevertheless, I am happy because every day that something gets done is progress. In addition to adding 20 pages to my website, I also did some more backlink building today which was nice. I also managed to make two web 2.0's today with the "free internet marketing ebook" keyword phrase which isn't too shabby. Additionally, I wrote some content for 3 different keywords of my other niche. I would love to go into detail about the niche because it is great and not very SEO'd by others because it is a very unknown ( but excellent) niche. It is a definite need niche and I'd say it has users who are as needy as people looking to lose weight.

I'm not really sure what exactly I want to do later today but I figure I will probably wing it today.

Captain's Log: Day 11

Well, I said I'd post everyday and I will but today I decided to mostly take a day off for me. The nicest day of the year so far (73 degrees) and I decided to make the most of it =P. I did manage to build the backlinks but after that, the urge to go out and enjoy summer in march... It was too great. Short, brief, to the point, time for sleep I will give a better update tomorrow =P.

Captain's Log: Day 10

I did pretty well on the goals for today and, while not perfect, was a pretty good day overall. I added all those pages of content and some of it has actually been indexed (quick site indexing means I'm getting solid crawling which is good)so I am happy with that.

I also managed to go and try and build 50 backlinks (whether or not they all go through is another question entirely) which was pretty solid. I also have a ton of dofollow forum accounts that I haven't done anything with so I may go and fire those up for backlinking purposes. I was going to use them on a different project but I had lost interest so they have been sitting around for a while (300 accounts iirc) so it is time to put them to good use.

I think adding 20 pages of content is pretty good as it gives the site a good growth schedule and I can cut it down as I go and have less and less stuff that I can just throw up easily. I definitely want to start focusing more on the nice selection of keywords that I want to start ranking for. I did get nice anchor text so that should help.

Anyway, I think it was pretty good but it gives me with a good setup to go at tomorrow.

1. 20 more pages of content

2. 3 2.0's from yesterday

3. 30 backlinks

4. Redo video #1

Captain's Log: Day 9

A very sad day indeed. I really got my ass swamped with nonsense today between having a bunch of stuff to do with other IM based activities - web hosting - and the fact that Paypal has decided it's time to give me another go with limiting my account,I didn't really get much of anything done on this project and for that I am disappointed. With that said, however, I am currently doing a schedule flip (I've been sleeping too late so in order to remedy that, I stay up through and don't sleep until the next night) so I intend to get a good 7 or 8 hours in through tonight and into tomorrow... or into the rest of the day.

I did give another listen to the video and I must say that I will never volunteer to be a voice actor because my voice is pretty weak. I fear these posts have begun to ebb in terms of how interesting or detail-oriented they are and I'm going to try and change that to set a goals-for-the-day-to-come sort of theme and then go over what was and wasn't accomplished, how I feel about it, and why. It will take this off of the "hobby" track it seems to have drifted toward and back to the "serious side project" it was intended to be.

I am also going to abandon the current progress model as it isn't really indicative of progress and what was accomplished and continuing goals is a lot more indicative of progress especially during early stages.

Goals for the morrow:

20 pages of content for the current main site.

Three web 2.0 optimized web pages.

50 decent backlinks.


Let's see how this goes =)

Captain's Log: Day 8

I feel like the new title is a bit more fun so I have switched it up. Don't hate.

Well, I decided to go ahead and take a swing at making video 1 today. The video content is really going to be the bread and butter I think and a big contributor to my overall traffic. I've got a decent first run-through covering some of the basics like niche research, product research, and some other things that you need to do during the setup phase.

I haven't done any editing, I will probably do some of that work tomorrow. I think I might want to give it another go though as I can definitely improve on the first attempt and my first attempt at actually doing something video related (I don't count making WoW raid videos).

On another project, I have completed the product and keyword research and I will be in a position to start building that moving forward. I know it is bad to do too many things at once and that is why I am only limiting myself to 2 projects for this. Aside from the fact that I do not have enough time for more - I'm doing another other things beside the challenge - but if I was running too many projects the early stage process for each would take longer which is time I do not really have. I figure 2 projects at a time is something that I can do easily and will be happy to manage. After all, working on 1 project and only one project at a time is painfully boring for me (yeah, yeah, I have trouble keeping my attention on one thing).

I've got my nice springtime jitters out and celebrated my ancestral holiday - thanks, Saint Patrick - and can happily focus a bit more time to this venture. Onward and upward!

Time spent today: 2.5 hours
Time spent total: 19 hours
Money made today: $0.00
Money made total: $140.80
Expenses today: $0
Expenses total: $0

Day 7

Day 7 ended up being a very lazy day. With that said, I do not feel too bad about it since it was a great day and some things came together which is all good. I don't know whether the download came from one of you - a reader - or from someone actually going ahead and downloading but I have gotten 1 download of a book so a completion of an offer at $0.80. Regardless, every little success is a motivation to continue so I am happy about that.

Also, traffic is starting to trickle into the site with very little promotion so I hope to be able to expand on that going forward. I have finished the layout for 3 of the videos that I'm going to make to promote the website, now I just need a program that I can use for the filming so suggestions would be welcome. If no one has any great suggestions I'll probably just use fraps.

I'll be back tomorrow with more hard work =).

Time spent today: 1 hours
Time spent total: 16.5 hours
Money made today: $0.80
Money made total: $140.80
Expenses today: $0
Expenses total: $0

Day 6

Pretty good day today. Got some money for content so I am now up to $140 in terms of startup capital which means if I want I can get more domains/whatever else. I could also do some PPC but that doesn't really fit in with this project (next project it probably will) so that is something else to think about.

Speaking of the secondary project, I've done most of the keyword research for my secondary project and it's as epic as I thought it was beforehand. Excited about this as well. Overall, progress is going pretty well so far and it will probably pick up a little bit more here now that it's the week and I'm starting to really get into the projects a little bit.

I appreciate those who are reading and for those of you thinking that it's going a little slowly, there's a very long way to go from here =P. Up and up!

Time spent today: 2 hours
Time spent total: 15.5 hours
Money made today: $100
Money made total: $140
Expenses today: $0
Expenses total: $0

Day 5

Today was a great day and the first real money that's been pulled in by this little venture. I am promoting - among other things - my web hosting company. I managed to get a nice sale through the website today which I won't count for the full value of the client but 40 bucks which seems like a pretty standard affiliate payout for hosting referrals.

In addition to that, I had to do a little cleaning up of the website. I had forgotten to put in metadata for a lot of the pages so I had to go back and add this to a large number of pages. I am also thinking about doing another project so that I have two different things going on at the same time and I do not have to rely on just one.

I figure that this six month challenge can be used to work on a lot of the projects that I have sidelined over the years because I never felt like doing them. Most of them have been pretty good ideas that I never got off the ground and now I have a good reason to see what they're worth.

A short post today but sweet nonetheless.

Time spent today: 2 hours
Time spent total: 13.5 hours
Money made today: $40
Money made total: $40
Expenses today: $0
Expenses total: $0

Day 4

A late start to the day but a fairly solid day nonetheless. I am extremely happy with the direction that this project is headed in and with a decent amount of work, I think this may end up being quite the little money maker. It really just needs a little bit of love which is what I intend to give to it.

I started the day off this afternoon with continuing my keyword research and finding some more goodies in that spectrum that I can work with to attempt to drive traffic to the site. After about an hour or so of doing that (you'd be surprised how hard it is to find good keywords that can easily be exploited in the IM sector) it was time for other things. I did not get home until late this evening but that did not stop me from doing some work on said keywords.

I took a bunch of the keywords and I started to do a little bum marketing. I can hear the groans but it really is a great free source of traffic and free is exactly what we're working with here at the start. I churned out 6 articles for Ezine which are really solid - I am a fairly good writer if I say so myself - and I plan to do a little magic on them tomorrow and go ship them off elsewhere. I also did a little writing for a client that I've acquired for writing - like I said, good writer - and should net me the first real cash out of this game.

Digging through one of my many IM folders on my computer today I dredged up a nice little diagram that I downloaded from BHW that has a great weighted path for networking sites so I will probably work with that tomorrow. I really do enjoy watching a network start to take shape and things starting to happen. I think I might have a lot of fun with this project.

Time spent today: 3.5 hours
Time spent total: 11.5 hours
Money made today: $0
Money made total: $0
Expenses today: $0
Expenses total: $0

Day 3

I am disappointed with my progress today. Mostly disappointed in myself that I did not do more but today was just a weak day. The weather is terrible, I spent too much time reading tech crunch (which has made me feel shitty myself since I want to own a large multi-million dollar company ) and I spent too much time playing poker. I did win some decent money at the table but that doesn't count towards my IM. I wrote a bit more content that I'm trying to sell but still no luck in that department for startup cash. DP sucks for many reasons; people don't want to pay for quality content, you can't bump your threads, and the majority of the people are developmentally challenged.

I did do some decent research today, though. I did some keyword research for www.ebookforfree.info for content that I plan to write and I wrote up layouts for the first two promotional videos that I am going to post on Youtube. I also signed up for a couple web2.0 for the specific purpose of promoting this website. This is always the worst part of a project; however, because I have done all the setup, have the research done, and all that needs to be done moving forward is driving traffic and making money. This is the point where all the doom and gloom scenarios start blooming in my mind and it makes me not want to push through and continue with the project. I have been successful on a few projects but there are many others that I have dropped because I didn't feel confident that it was going to work.

It is ironic because it is actually impossible for things to not work in IM. It doesn't matter how terrible your site is, how awful your copy is, how useless what you're trying to sell is, if you drive enough traffic you can and will make money. I should probably modify that statement and say it is impossible to not generate revenue because you can lose money if you have poorly optimized advertising.

Every day can't be a banner day but I could have should have done more today. The good news is is that tomorrow is another day and I can make up for what I didn't do today. Additionally, this is not a sprint but a 6 month marathon so one lackluster day will not make or break it in the end. With that said, I cannot make a habit out of not doing a lot.

I appreciate all the support from those of you reading both here on my blog and at BHW and your encouragement is appreciated.

Time spent today: 2 hours
Time spent total: 8 hours
Money made today: $0
Money made total: $0
Expenses today: $0
Expenses total: $0

Day 2

So, today has been a pretty good day. I wrote a few more articles to try and get the ball rolling and get some income into this little game and they are worth ~$30 bucks. I have not sold anything from yesterday or today so I will have to wait a little longer on that. I did, however, get my website up and running that targets novice internet marketers and people who are just starting to look into getting involved in internet marketing. The website is www.ebookforfree.info which is a pretty simple site based around Joomla and I have monetized it with a nice content blocker (who doesn't want great IM books for free?) as well as some advertising on the side.

There is some more stuff that I want to keep adding to the site but, for now, it is full enough to get some marketing going into it. I haven't done any marketing with the website yet today but I plan on doing some serious marketing with it over the days and weeks to come. I plan to put up some original and quality videos onto youtube to promote the website, start a facebook page for it, maybe get some CL ads up, and obviously some serious article and web 2.0 marketing.

I didn't get to do any keyword research today or really any marketing but the website is in a position where I am happy to start working on driving traffic to the website. There is a lot of places that I can drive traffic from and I have some opportunities for other money through affiliate sales like hosting and other things that are required to get into the IM field.

Plans for tomorrow (later today) include doing some keyword research, posting at least 10 good articles to ezine or more article directories, and plan how I am going to set up the videos for youtube. I will probably also build the facebook fan page. I do not think it is too unreasonable that with a good amount of traffic this website could be making $100/day. Only time and traffic will tell, though.

Time spent today: 3 hours
Time spent total: 6 hours
Money made today: $0
Money made total: $0
Expenses today: $0
Expenses total: $0

Day 1

In order for this to be successful, it needs to get off on sound footing. For this reason, building up some startup capital is vital. There are many things that can be bought to make the money making process easier and having some money to start with is a great way to expedite the process. As such, I decided to run the most tried and true way to make quick money on the internet. Writing. I spent today doing a bit of writing and have them listed for sale for about $56.

Not a lot of cash but for 2 hours of work, it's not too shabby and it gives a decent base to start building. Additionally, I did some work on a marketing property. It targets people that are not involved in internet marketing and provides a free resource for them to learn the ropes. Obviously, it's free for them but there are many ways to make money off of giving away things for free. =) I would say the website is about 60% finished and once it is 100% finished, I can begin promotion of the site.

Plans for tomorrow include finishing the free marketing property, starting some marketing, and getting that up and rolling. I will do some keyword research and get some free marketing out there because nothing is better when you're starting with no money than free PR.

Time spent today: 3 hours
Time spent total: 3 hours
Money made today: $0
Money made total: $0

The Six Month Six Figure Challenge

As a challenge to myself and - to a lesser extent - the world, I have created the six month six figure challenge. The goal is simple; to be making $273.98 every single day six months from this date. In order for this challenge to be successful, there need to be some ground rules in place before the start. So without further ado, I am going to layout the ground rules of the challenge.

The Rules:

1. All $273.98 must be gross profit and not revenue.

2. In order for the win to count, I must maintain $273.98/day averaged over the course of seven consecutive days.

3. The money must be made at the computer through Internet Marketing.

4. The only things that I can start with are hosting, any domains I may currently have, and tools available on my computer or that I can download for free.

5. No money on the challenge except money made from the challenge.

6. A new post must be made every day by 12:00PM the day after or the challenge is null barring extreme extenuating circumstances.

7. All profit and expenses must be documented.

8. Exact details such as keywords, niches, and specific strategies do not have to be shared but some details can and must be provided.

9. The start date of the challenge is 3/10/10 with an ending date of 9/10/10.

10. Enjoy the ride.


With all the rules of the game laid out and the details of victory in place, I commit to winning the game and encourage any and all readers to comment and participate if they so desire. Best of luck to those who participate and I hope everyone who reads enjoys it.

~Collin~