Day 16.1: Confessions of An Optimist

In case you haven't already gathered, I'm a serious optimist. I can't help it. No matter how many times I've been disappointed (and it's been a lot), I can't help assuming that next time, it's going to work. That's what got me started on this experiment, and that's hopefully what will drive me to be able to earn at least a $100 a week from home. My innate optimism has been a mixed blessing for me, however, and for this post I decided to write about how much optimism is too much.

First of all, if you're going to be an entrepreneur either you're already an optimist or someone's holding a gun to your head and forcing you. (I doubt that's the case.) It's necessary to be an optimist if you're going to try new things. You have to have the vision to see your endeavors prosper, and you have to see a light at the end of the tunnel if you're going to chase it.

My problem is that I get so caught up in chasing the light that I don't realize that it's actually coming from an oncoming train and not the end of the tunnel at all. I get carried away with things. I obsess over something and then if it doesn't work out, I'm devastated. While being an optimist might be a necessary attribute to an entrepreneur, it's also vital that you be a realist. You can't simply walk around with high hopes and your head in the cloud and expect that good things will show up. You have to see how they will show up and what you can do to make that happen. You have to anticipate your own weaknesses and work out a way to combat them. That's an area where I really struggle. I'm a rotten salesman, period. Something could be cool and awesome and totally free, like Clixsense, but despite my own personal enthusiasm and even the fact that I'm going to get my first paycheck tomorrow, none of you will click on that link. And if you do, I'll be totally shocked and surprised and thrilled and incredibly grateful. Now see, you (almost certainly) didn't click the link. I love it, I'm excited about it and telling you... but I'm not getting any results.

So why is it that all of my plans hinge on referrals? Ok, true, Traffic Exchange Profits does have a way of working around that, but what about everything else? Why do I keep thinking I'll make it work, when it never does? I don't know. I guess I just can't stop.

Please follow me on Twitter for more updates and--please--check out Clixsense if you want to make your own cash online!

Day 8.3: Is Online Marketing for You?

This has been an exciting day for me, because today I was finally able to put my money-making plan into action! Please see my last post for information about that. But my work on that, and on this whole project, is far from over. Today I spent hours figuring out how to optimize my new system, visiting and joining site after site so that I could learn more about what's out there. Things are clicking into place brilliantly, but there are a few things I thought I should make note of in this blog, primarily that my system will not work for everyone.

It's simple, it's logical, and it works. Guaranteed generated income. But it's also time-consuming and repetitive work. You can't passively just sign up for Clixsense and expect others to sign up under you. You have to promote your link. You have to be active in getting others to notice. And while my system provides all the necessary venues to do that, it will still take a good chunk of time out of your day. There's no such thing as easy money, and even in a system this simple you have to earn every penny. But don't get depressed--there are plenty of good things about online marketing too!

If you're thinking about getting involved, but not entirely sure, here are some questions to ask yourself:

1. Am I willing to follow leads? As a marketer, you'll be interacting a lot with other marketers, exchanging services and providing traffic. You'll have to join a lot of sites and stay active to keep your accounts open. If you want only a one-stop-shop, online marketing probably isn't for you.
2. Am I willing to start small? Remember, you probably won't make anything at first. You'll be working long hours while seeing few results, all to invest in a hopeful future. It's an investment.
3. Will I stick with this through thick and thin? Remember, patience is the key! There will be days when you want to quit. It's going to look bleak and hopeless, and you'll feel like you're losing a lot of time for nothing.

Any form of online marketing is serious work, but with patience and determination it can really pay off.

My new system focuses on optimizing the process to generate maximum referrals in the shortest time possible, and as I continue to work on it, things will hopefully keep getting faster and easier.

Do you think you have what it takes? It's surprisingly simple and automated, so don't be afraid to poke around and see what works for you. Check out Free Internet Money and Turbo Income Charger for all the information you need to start generating an income! In the meantime, please follow my Twitter feed for updates and tips and hints for making and saving money online.

Day 8.1: Knowing Your Market

First the good news: the brilliant plan I've been working on is just about ready to go, and for sure I'll tell you guys in the next post or two how you can actually make serious money on the internet. Again, it's not "easy money," and if you go for it you can expect to be pretty busy, at least for a while until things pick up. But it is simple--foolproof, even, if I can just get the last few kinks ironed out (and there aren't many).

And now onto my topic for this post: knowing your market. One thing that pretty much any book on writing tells you is to know the readers, to have the audience in mind as you write. What age group is the story for? What do they care about, and what draws them in? It's good advice in the writing world and at least as good in the business world.

Yesterday, as I was researching ways to put my plan into action, I came across a very interesting e-book, The Fastest Way to Build A Large MLM Downline by Tracy Biller
. It wasn't on exactly what I was looking for, but it was related to MLM (multi-level-marketing) and sales. What it said was that personal referrals are nothing. I know from experience that you can talk until you're blue to friends and family, and even if they do sign up for something there's no way they'll be active. They just want you to shut up. It's a waste of their time--and it's a waste of yours. Another tip that the book said was not to waste your time recruiting rookies. That was new to me. What's wrong with recruiting rookies? I consider myself a rookie. Why shouldn't a wise marketer recruit me?

The truth is that if you don't know what you're getting into, and you don't walk into something with a plan in mind, blindly expecting money to flow into your bank account, you're going to fail. You're going to fail big. And when most people set out to make money online, they immediately see that it isn't as glamorous as all the ads paint it to be, and they give up. That's the problem with rookies.

So now you have a problem. If you try to market your service to friends and family, they'll do the minimum just to get you to shut up. If you market the same service to the general public, they might sign up, but they'll soon get discouraged and give up before their presence makes any difference. So what can you do? You need to be able to find a target audience. Look through forums and chat-rooms to find people who are seriously looking for a solution and willing to work it out. Look for people who want your business as badly as you want theirs. Those are the people who will make a difference. Those are the people you want on your side. Know your market. You want veterans, not rookies!

For more detailed information, here's the link to the e-book that told me all this: http://www.documentspratiques.com/downloads/FastMLM.pdf. It's a pretty short read, and I think definitely worth the read, whatever your online business is.

Please check back later to hear about my brilliant idea: a shockingly simple way to make actual money online. And right now I'm ironing it out to make sure it's also as easy as possible without any guesswork or frustration involved.

In the meantime, you can follow me on Twitter for the latest updates and tips on how to work and save online. You can also join me on Clixsense, Protypers (code 611M) and Swagbucks for easy ways to earn pennies! And for your information, I've already earned over a dollar on Protypers for only a couple days' work, and they pay you after you reach three dollars. Not bad for an online gig!

Day 5.3: Amazon Turk and Fiverr

If you're interested in making a few bucks for a bit of honest work, you're in luck! For this entry I'm going to take a look at Fiverr and Amazon Mechanical Turk, two different options to sell your services to people who want them around the world. Whatever you do--writing, singing, messing around with Photoshop--there's a market for it. Let's take a look at how these two popular systems work and what to expect from them.

Fiverr

Fiverr is very straightforward. Basically, you can offer to do anything you want for five dollars, and people pay you to do it. It's not guaranteed income. You have to be creative in coming up with your offers, and you have to offer things that people will like enough to pay five dollars for. However, there are some people who do make a lot of money doing very simple tasks repeatedly. If you have a special talent that will help someone out, you should definitely check it out.

Amazon Mechanical Turk

I'm a big fan of Amazon Turk. It takes a while to get fully registered and approved, but from there it's easy to generate a small income. There is a large and constantly changing list of hits to do that include everything from clicking links to transcribing messages and taking surveys. When you start out, you're confined to very low paying tasks, but depending on your skills, you can easily get approved to work on the ones that make it all worth it--up to $150 per task. I've put about two months of work on Amazon Turk myself and now have $70 earned from it. Not much of an income, I'll admit, but some people make a full-time job out of it, and you're working under a very well-known name.

Both of these sites are worth checking out if you have random skills that you feel you could make money on, and if you're wanting nothing more than some good pay for an honest day's work, this is one of the best ways to do it.

Well, I'm now five days into my blogging experiment and have over 500 views--amazing compared to anything else I have written. I've learned a ton about publicity in these past few days, and also about the work required to go anywhere with my writing (hint: it's much more than I would have guessed!). Money-wise, well, I haven't earned a cent. I'm still waiting on that, but from what I understand, only about one out of a thousand viewers actually goes so far as to click the link... and even fewer than that actually go through. I guess I'll find out! In the meantime, please follow me on Twitter or join forces with me on Clixsense or Swagbucks! It would be incredibly encouraging and won't do anything except  benefit you!

Day 3.1: Five Reasons to Consider Self-Publishing

As I mentioned near the beginning of this blog, I'm a writer who would like to remain a writer. I want to be able to work on a good novel all day long every day and not have work get in the way. I also want to have some means of getting an income. Hence, this blog. I am out to explore the possibilities!

Today's topic is self-publishing. As a former English major, I know that self-publishing is largely still frowned upon in serious writing communities. There aren't any quality requirements for publishing your writing yourself, it's expensive and a lot of hard work for little acclaim. However, I've noticed that much of the same could be said of published books. I've seen horribly written published books, books that looked bad on the inside and out. Getting a book published professionally doesn't seem to depend so much on being a good writer as it does on being in the right place at the right time and having the right editor getting his hands on your manuscript. It's a hard world out there, and even if you do get successfully published, you must cater to the publisher's every whim and forfeit the rights of your own book. If it's a small publishing company, it will probably give a higher priority to your book, but most bookstores will likely not bother carrying it. If it's a huge and well respected publishing company, your book will probably be a the bottom of their priorities. It's time for a different strategy.

When I first decided to self publish a book, I was a skeptic. Actually, the only reason I decided to go for it was because of the code I got after completing NaNoWriMo that year. That was how I discovered Amazon's Createspace, a stunningly high quality self publisher and distributer. I would have taken it for a scam if one of my friends hadn't already used it, and I couldn't resist. When I got my copy of the book in the mail, I was shocked to see that not only did it look nice, but it looked better than several published books I had seen.

I'll save the details of Createspace for a later post, but for now, let's just focus on why you should give serious consideration to self-publishing if you want to be a serious writer:

1.  There are a ton of options. What do you want to make? Do you want a solid, physical book? A blog? An e-book? Something to sell on Kindle, or something that will invade all sorts of media? You got it.
2. You save time and anxiety. Traditional publishing includes a lot of waiting and a lot of rejection. Writers often spend years going from agent to agent and publisher to publisher without any success, and often it takes months until you learn that you were rejected in the first place. If you hate rejection, you're not going to like this.
3. A testing ground of inspiration. If you have a manuscript that you'd like to be published, but you're not sure will make the cut, self-publishing is a great way to see for yourself what it would be like. With Createspace, you can order a test copy of your book to review before officially "publishing" it, and trust me--it's fun to see your own book in print.
4. You're in charge. You can do your own publicity and make sure that the book is going where you want it to go. Yeah, it's work, but it's better than no publicity at all!
5. It's fun. Seriously, I love going through the different templates available on Createspace and working out something that really fits the book. Whether you want to do everything yourself or just slide around pre-made options is entirely up to you.

I have self-published several books now, some more casual and some more serious. My biggest problem has been the fact that even though I've been at it for several years, I've never made more than about $20 income from it. I'm terrible at publicity, and again that leads me to why I started this blog in the first place.

Self-publishing is an awesome way to make an income from home, and it's easy to go about. First of all, however, you need to be able to sell your book! Get the word out there. And speaking of which, here are some links to the ones I've written, if you want to take a look.

The Chrononaut was my first. Not the best story or cover, but considering how new I was to the whole thing, I was very pleased with the results.

Temporation is the sequel to The Chrononaut, though also readable on its own. My designing is still below par, but the writing is much better.

The Star Chronicles is the first book in a set of six, though I have not yet decided whether to publish the other five.

Anyway, those are some of my other projects, and I encourage you to take a look if you're considering self-publishing. It's a fun and easy process, I can assure you!