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~