Day 9.1: Setting Standards, Setting Limits

Two things that are especially on my mind this morning are the importance of setting standards and the importance of setting limits. Since I started this blog, I personally set a standard for myself that I have practiced every day since then--write three posts per day, share it on the right websites and search engines, look for ways to improve the system. I've said again and again that it's a lot of work. You could easily make a full-time job out of doing exactly what I've been doing, and if that's something you can't afford, then you'd better look out. The Internet is a vast and growing whirlpool. If you have Facebook you know what I'm talking about. It draws you in, and before you know it, hours have passed and you've hardly done a thing that would help. Hence, the importance of setting limits.

Hopefully you already know the grand rule of bidding. When you're bidding on something from Ebay or Amazon, you need to decide beforehand how much you're willing to pay. If you don't, adding just a few more cents and a few more cents becomes all too easy, and before you know it you've paid $65 for something that should have cost $40. Ouch. You need to set limits, and you need to stay with them. It's the only way to get a genuinely good deal on business sites, and it's also a vital tip for any form of freelance work online.

Let's say you decide to start up a blog, like this one. You'll go for one post a day and get all the publicity you physically can without paying. You travel from site to site, search engine to directory, posting links to your blog article everywhere. You investigate all of the different methods of publicity, join more programs than you can keep track of, and sign up for all the newsletters. You do your homework, and you're not going to leave any stone unturned. You've got patience and you've got grit, and you're going for it! While I have to say it's a brilliant start, and I have to applaud you if you can keep up with that for even so much as a week, let's get realistic. Do you have time for that? What about your actual day job/homework, family, social life? What about giving your mind a break from it all and just playing a dumb game or reading a book for a while? You need to take care of yourself. You can't stop living all for the sake of a program.

Fortunately, there are solutions to this, and they're easy. The first is to plan. Decide what path you'll follow, and stick to it. You'll save a lot of time and energy if you don't even bother with alternatives after a certain point. Does it fit in with your goal? Include it. Is it a bit different? Don't even bother. The second is to set limits. How much time are you willing to put into this daily? An hour or two? Before opening or turning on your computer, look at the clock. Pick a time you'll be free, and work diligently until then. When the time's up, exit your programs and go on to enjoy the day.

You can be an Internet entrepreneur without selling your soul to the Internet. Remember--you shouldn't work for it, but rather make ways for it to work for you. That's how it's supposed to be, and that's the best way to succeed.

Please follow me on Twitter for more follow-up tips and updates, and check out my strategy by visiting Free Internet Money today!

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 8.2: Getting Rich Online

Ok, I think my plan's ready to go live! More than that, I've actually already started putting it into action, and I'm really excited! So what is this plan?

First, let's look at things logically. The other day, I was investigating various cases of people who actually did get rich from PTC sites. I tried to find a pattern in all these stories, and I found it. There are two things (well, three things, actually) that are required to make any serious money online. Nothing else matters--having a large Twitter following, owning your own website.

What are these three things? Let's put them in a list.

1. Patience/Perseverance. All of the cases I looked at were people who have been working at this for years. They didn't start earning $500 paychecks over night. If you want this to succeed, you need to be willing to work consistently with little immediate progress.
2. Referrals. I've already written a post entirely about referrals and how they're practically impossible to get. However, I've been doing careful research lately and I think I have found the key! It will take some setup effort, but it's possible to get your message out to all the right people in a way that will draw them in. I've gone through the whole process now, and I can tell you it is very doable!
3. God's will. Please don't laugh here. I am a very strong Christian, which I really should have shared much earlier in this blog. I pray over my decisions every day, and if there's one thing I've learned it's this: God's will trumps man's logic. You could get everything right, but it'll fail if it's not in God's will. Also note that God is not a magic genie who grants all your wishes. It is a serious matter, and if this plan is not in God's will I will not succeed. I heavily urge any of you Christians out there to pray about this before going any further. Ask God if taking this path is really a wise decision and examine your motives.

All right, now that we have all of the pieces, let's put them together. Over the past couple days I have been researching how to build downlines like crazy, looking for one good option that worked that wouldn't cost me a cent. I found two, and they link together perfectly to generate solid, high traffic that will be loyal to your site. Let's take a look!

1. Step 1. Get a gmail account. If you already have one, get another one. This is a surprisingly important step, and the sooner you take care of it, the better. This is the site you'll use whenever you "subscribe" to things.
2. Step 2. Go to freeinternetmoney.biz. It's a very simple system that not only allows you to consolidate multiple trustworthy PTCs under one URL but also gives you fantastic tools to manage them and organize them. It's a very user-friendly service, and if you just follow the steps offered for setup you'll be well on your way to success. It's a brilliant site and very handy if you want to do anything at all with PTCs.
3. Step 3. Once you're done with freeinternetmoney.biz, go to turboincomecharger.com. This is how you'll get your traffic. It has tons of different venues available, such as forms, safelists, and a company that guarantees you tons of traffic and referrals (I haven't tried that part out yet, but it seems to be good). Remember: this is a tool. You need to have initiative to get it to go. This site just shows you what to do with that initiative so that you won't waste your time.

There you have it. All the tools for generated a solid online income. Of course, the plan is flexible. You don't have to do it at all the way I recommend if you don't want to. I simply tried to find the best way to simplify the referral problem for free (oh yeah, none of these sites cost money). And if you can get good referrals, you've got it made, simple as that. Just keep in mind that you won't make a fortune overnight. You have to work it, and you have to be intentional about it. But now there's no excuse! So get plugged in, make money, and enjoy!

And in case you were wondering, I'm still going to keep up with this blog, and I'm still going to look for ways to make my system even easier and simpler. I hope you enjoy the system and that it works for you as well as it is for me!

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 7.3: Lessons Learned from An Entrepreneur

I meant to get this post up some time ago, but I've been busy seeing if I could find the best way to put my plan into action. I think I've found it now, and I'll let you in on all the juicy little secrets tomorrow. Mind: it will only work if you're determined to work at it yourself. There's no such thing as "easy money" but there is such a thing as making a fortune from home. Whichever route you take will require patience and perseverance, along with the willingness to work for practically nothing at all.

It's now been one week since I first set out on this entrepreneurial mission, and so I figured that tonight would be a good time to review my progress--successes, mistakes, and lessons learned.

Successes: There are some things that have gone way better than I had thought they would. The biggest of these is publicity. In my old blogs, I was lucky to get five or ten views a day. Seriously. And that was after telling everyone about them and posting on Facebook and everything. I've been shocked every day now to check my views and see that it's been over 100 per day almost since I started up! How did I do this? Pinging, article submissions, and key word optimizations were the best things I did that I know of. Stumbleupon continues to be a good source of traffic, and so did Reddit before I left it. Another success so far has been my regularity in writing. My initial goal was to write three posts a day, and so far I've done it! It's kept me busy, but the publicity and everything I've been learning about working online has been well worth it, and I'm far from running out of content.

Failures: There have also been areas where I've completely blown it, unfortunately, or where I've yet to have any success whatsoever. The first of these is in actually generating an income through this blog. Yes, I've been making money online at sites like Clixsense and Protypers.com, but the blog has gotten me nowhere financially. I take that to be a mistake on my part, and something I should work on. You know I'm not a salesman. I've been terrible making sales since I was a kid doing fundraisers, and it's no better now. I check every now and then to see if there's been any progress, any clicks. Nothing. It's disappointing, but I can only hope something happens in the next three weeks.

Lessons Learned: As I said earlier, I've learned that there's no such thing as "easy money." Simple money, sure, and I'll tell you about that tomorrow. But easy? Far from it. I've learned that making money online is a slow and drawn out effort that can take years before you even break even. I've learned to expect the worst from things but also to be open to new ideas. I've also learned that I'm a total rookie in many areas, that my "learning" has really just started. Another thing I learned though is that there is hope, and there is good reason to invest in online marketing, as hard as it may be to keep working for pennies. I've learned that success stories are real and do happen, and that it is possible to be one of those people making serious money online.

I'm excited about this venture, and I hope you are too. I've learned a ton in my first week, and who knows what the future will hold? Please follow me on Twitter for updates and join me on Clixsense, Swagbucks, and Protypers.com (code 611M). You might be making pennies now, but they will be dollars! I'll tell you how to make that happen tomorrow, and I'm stoked to get started on it myself.

Day 7.2: How to Get Rich

Note: I am not writing about how to get rich quick or how to get rich easily. I'm simply focusing on how it is possible to eventually be able to generate a huge income from doing simple tasks online. I was on my usual PTC sites today, Neobux and Clicksense, and I decided to take a look at the forums, which I'd never bothered to look at today. One forum was for people to share their massive daily income from that site alone. What? How is that possible? Is it possible? I felt a bit more assured when I saw that these members had all been working there for years, but still--hundreds of dollars a day? What?!

Then it hit me. Like a ton of bricks it hit me. The key I think I've been looking for all this time, and it's so simple! Only two basic tricks, and if you master those, you'll make a fortune. I'm not sharing those now, as I want to keep it a secret until I know for sure that it really works like I think it will, but maybe by reading my past few posts you can guess what the two steps are. Seriously, I'm really tempted to tell. Two steps. Simple, though not necessarily easy or fast. I considered writing it all down in an e-book and selling that, but then realized that it was a dumb idea--I didn't want to make people pay for a system I wasn't sure would work, and if it does work, why would I bother charging? (That's the problem I have with a lot of paid "systems" out there on how to get rich.) But if it does work, if I can just figure out how to optimize one little part of it, you bet I'll tell. See? There is a reason to keep up with reading this blog. You could get rich from it!

As I've decided to keep what works,  I've also decided to make a careful list of what doesn't work, as noted by my own experience on this blog:

1. Don't stilt yourself. Don't try to act like your someone your not. My best viewed posts are actually the ones where I felt like I was drifting a bit from the topic just so I could write about something I love (self publishing). Be an honest, real-life person, and people will like you a lot more.
2. Exploring is good, but don't walk into things blindly. This relates a lot with getting good deals online--make sure you know what you're signing into before you agree to do it.
3. Don't put all your eggs in one basket. Depend on many different outlets for both income and publicity. When I left Reddit, I was panicked because that was what I had been counting on the most for publicity. I've been grateful for all the views I've gotten since then, but I realize that I should not have been depending on that one site so completely.
4. Don't be afraid to try something new. I'm not contradicting point number 2. By trying something new I mean working out your own formula for success. My formula for this blog has changed dramatically since I started it a week ago, and I think most of it was for the better. Be flexible. 
5. Don't assume you'll be successful. Don't assume anything, in fact. Wait it out and keep notes of your activity--what works and what doesn't. Those notes WILL help you in the long run!

Ok, as I finish this post I will give you some hints. Again, I don't know if my system will work or not, but if it does I'll tell you right off the bat I would like if you could sign up for Clixsense or Protypers.com (code 116M). I would really like it. If you join Clixsense under my referral I'll even send you a personal note of thanks. I would really, really appreciate it, and I think you will too, if you can stay with the program and keep "earning pennies," though you'll probably earn much more than that if my plan works. Also, feel free to follow me on Twitter for more notes and updates!

Day 7.1: An Entrepreneur's Work Is Never Done

Hello, and welcome to day seven of my 30-day project: making money online. Today I'm going to reflect on some of the bigger lessons I've learned this past week, staring with this: an entrepreneur's work is never done. A week ago, I thought I'd write this blog, submit it to so many sites, and then leave it at that. Wash, rinse, repeat. But there's a ton more work to it than that. What is that? Well...

1. Ads/monetization. I intended to monetize this site from the start. When Google Adsense wasn't working out, I looked for alternatives. I found one that looked good, but then to my dismay I was bombarded by the worst scam sites and popups out there clamoring for space on my blog. I shut that program down, and since then have only carried ads for sites that I know and trust. However, I'm not entirely content with what I have, and I find myself continually looking for better ways to monetize my blog.
2. Optimization. If I make any money from this site, it's going to take a while. In the meantime I have to find out if there's anything I can do to optimize business. Are there any more/better sites or networks that I can submit to? Are there any keywords I've been missing? What are my most popular posts, and why are they so popular? Where is most of my traffic coming from? These are  things that I have to review every day, often several times a day. Every post I write shifts the emphasis of the site a little and also the stats.
3. Alternatives? I also have to take into account the dread possibility that this site won't work. I don't want to be spending a month of effort for nothing, and so I'm constantly looking for other ways to earn money online. This means tracing scams and earning pennies. It means running google search after google search for something that might work. It means a mass of disappointment with only an occasional perk.

I haven't had more than a few hours' stretch where I felt like I could take a good break from this project,  which can be especially stressful as I also have wedding plans going on and a life of my own to return to. Making money online's easy, if you have patience and determination. Making a living online? It's not going to happen unless you're ready to put in long hours and hard work. I'm still up for it. But then, I'm a pretty big optimist and opportunist. I definitely encourage pursuit of this line of work, if you think you can keep up with it. Just know it won't be easy.

Keep up with your research, because the Internet's constantly changing! In the meantime, if you'd like to get started slowly with just a few pennies at a time (which adds up, trust me!), why don't you join me on Clixsense, Swagbucks, or Protypers.com (code 611m)? You can also follow me on Twitter for quick tips and updates on the blog itself!