Day 14.2: Sweet Success

I've made a couple discoveries this evening that have given me reason to celebrate! First, I've been discussing lately the success I've been having with Clixsense. After looking up my stats tonight, I realized that tomorrow I can easily take out my first payment! Not even ten bucks, but it should be enough to reinvest in something that will help out my traffic even more. Or I might just decide to leave it in until I can upgrade my account.

The second discovery is equally exciting: mailing lists work. I've heard it time and again in my research, but never wanted to get too involved with it. It sounded too much like spam, and I didn't need to be working on putting together a "list" on top of everything else. I'm busy enough as it is! But I did join a few safe-lists a while ago just to experiment with it. I get hundreds of e-mails to that address every day now, and so can only read a few of them in a sitting. Each one gives me "credits" for reading the email and clicking on the link, and each credit is one more person that I can send my own e-mails to. For the past week or so, I've been sitting around reading e-mails whenever I have some odd spare time and collecting credits. Yesterday I finally decided to try it out for myself. I sent out emails to two different lists and promptly forgot about them when I didn't get any immediate referrals. I was honestly puzzled this afternoon when I was checking up on my sites and saw that one of them had gotten nine views in the past day! I tried to think up what I was doing differently when I remembered the e-mails.

To put this into perspective, I've been using traffic exchanges right and left, milling through hundreds of sites every day on seven different exchanges. It's gotten me two views and one referral (with nine referrals under her). I didn't get any referrals with the letters I sent out, but I got nine views in one day for copying, pasting, and clicking--about five minutes total of work.

What does this mean? It means I'm going to be reading a lot more e-mails and storing up credits. It wasn't as responsive as the traffic exchanges, but hopefully it won't take many more e-mails to do that! If this e-mail thing works as well as I think it will, my Free Internet Money plan will have another step to it: join a safe-list. Any safe-list, and preferably two or three. Read e-mails for a week or so before sending your own, and you will get results. Period.

So those are my two bits of excitement today, and now I'm super encouraged to keep at it! For more information on the Free Internet Money plan I'm following, please click here. To join Clixsense and start generating your own online income, click here. And please come back tomorrow for more!

Day 11.1: What Kind of Online Worker Are You?

Eleven active referrals now for Clixsense. I decided to take money out of my Amazon Turk account to invest in an upgraded membership, because at this point I feel as if I'm practically losing money in not doing so. I didn't expect it to pick up so fast!

Anyway, this morning I've been thinking about all of the different approaches I've now tried to earn a profit online. As the list is getting rather long, I decided to jot it all down here along with my progress for each. Note that my own progress is affected very much by my personality, level of commitment and abilities. Feel free to try out any and every method here--people have been able to earn a substantial income from each of these.

1. Amazon Turk. A very dependable and controllable income, though it is hard to make more than a few cents at a time. You can do whatever kind of work you want, though, and new options are constantly turning up.
2. Writing freelance articles. Sites like Squidoo and Hubpages allow you to write articles without the responsibility of running a website. You can write about whatever you want whenever you want. However, your income depends on ads and selling products, so it's hard to earn a serious income from it.
3. Blogging. It's a lot of work to maintain a decent blog. I write three articles a day and then optimize them like crazy, and I've yet to make a cent. But the work is very independent, and you can focus on whatever area you want and specialize it. This blog has been as profitable as a college class in terms of education--as I maintain it and record my progress, I've learned a ton about online work.
4. PTCs. They felt like an amusing waste of time at first, but right now Clixsense is taking off like crazy, and a lot of the money is generated--meaning I'm literally making money in my sleep. It's nothing without referrals, but get even one person to sign up and it's very much worth it.
5. Online Marketing. I still feel like a little fish in a big sea here--so many people are clamoring for their ads to be noticed that it's easy to get overwhelmed when you're trying to market something yourself. I've had better success than most in this area--largely it just takes insane determination and long hours of work.
6. Joining an organized program. Free Internet Money and Traffic Exchange Profits are both programs that you can join on the side, promoting any business you want. This is my favorite form of monetization so far. You use plans made by others that have already proven to be successful. Wash, rinse, repeat. It's hard to find free plans, though, but it's a great learning opportunity as well.

I think that's it. I've had different levels of success with each one, and have actually had results very different than I was expecting. I honestly thought my writing would be the big moneymaker here, but it hasn't gotten me anything, whereas the silly paid-to-click sites are actually seriously paying. It's going to be interesting to see where I wind up by the end of the month!

Please follow me on Twitter for more tips and updates, and to see more of my personal strategy visit the Free Internet Money site. It's well worth your time!

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.