How To Make Money Online January Update

Wow, Janurary has gotten off to a quick start and an extremely busy one! I know most of you have been waiting for an update on the How To Make Money Online January $2500 challenge so here it is. The first 11 days of the Month saw me running around putting out little fires for my Clients. I was extremely busy and had hardly any time to work on the Challenge until a few days ago. But I’m still going to give it a good shot. Sometimes real world matters have to be dealt with before any Online fun can be had!

Anyway, the first weekend of the New Year found me running a few errands into town. I browsed Craigslist that morning before leaving the house. I always check out the ‘Free’ section to see what people are giving away. Saturday morning I found a lady giving away 2 wheels and tires to a Chevy pickup. They were out by her Garage and she wanted them gone. Also near the same place was a Family cleaning out their Garage and they had some Sports equipment set out on the curb. Since I would be going by there, I decided to stop and check it out.

As luck would have it, the 2 tires and wheels came off of a late model compact Chevy pickup so I took those. I think they were factory originals. The tires had some wear, but still had life left in them.

I didn’t make it to the Family with the stuff from the Garage until later, by then most of the stuff was gone but I did score on 4 rods and reels that were left. They were pretty junky except one, which I kept for myself.

One the way home, I stopped by a Tire store and sold both tires and wheels for $45. I figured they were worth more, but I didn’t want to waste time with the guy. Besides, $45 for a few minutes work isn’t bad.

I stopped at a Pawn Shop to offload the rods and reels (except the one I kept for myself). Since they were pretty crappy, I could only manage to get $20 combined for the 3 that were left.

Oh well, I made $65 that morning simply by taking a few minutes out of my day. I had to go in that direction anyway, so stopping by those homes wasn’t a big deal.

Craigslist is an excellent place to find stuff to sell offline or online!

Sunday I logged on to my Project Payday account and filled in some offers. It’s been a while since I’ve used Project Payday, but filling out offers is still as boring as it ever was. I spent about 3 1/4 hours Sunday and made $45. Not bad for sitting at the Dining room table pecking out offers in my shorts and T-shirt!

Sunday evening I start getting calls from Clients and for the next week and a half I was on the road a bit. I did manage to type out 10 articles, in two 5 article sets, on a competitive subjects and sold them on Digital Point. These articles ranged from 600 to 1100 words each. One set I got $30 and the next set I received $35 for.

These were just rewritten PLR articles. They were well researched and written in SEO copy for websites. One gentleman has already emailed me back asking if I had more. I’m not sure if I’ll do that again. I hate having to set down, research and write lengthy articles on subjects I know little about! As you can probably tell, my attention span isn’t very long :)

I also started creating some Squidoo Lenses and HubPages. I’ll probably use some of these to help push offers and I might try and flip a couple of the Squidoo Lenses. I’m not sure yet, but I know there’s a chance that I’ll need them later on.

Now I’ve known how to make Squidoo Lenses for a while. But it wasn’t until I read “Flip That Lens” by Tiffany Dow that I found out how to trick a Lens out that I could flip. While there are some people selling Lenses on DigitalPoint Forums for $30, she gets anywhere from $125 to $250 for her Lenses. One look at them and you’ll know why. She takes building Squidoo Lenses to the next level!
Start Small and Work Your Way Up

As you can tell, these small sales will not get me to $2500 this month alone. But there is an important reason you want to start with these small sales.

1. They give you a little bit of confidence. There was a time long ago that I was ‘between jobs’ and made yard sales, estate sales and grabbed up free stuff off of Cragslist to make some extra money until the next job came along. I either sold this stuff locally or I would put it on eBay. So I knew I could make some quick cash that way. But if you’ve never done this before, these are easy ways to make money while you learn.
2. I know I’m going to need more than $50 in the future to buy stuff for bigger projects. These small sales gives me some operating room to buy what I’ll need later on.

Back To Making Money From Home

Once I was back at home, I started doing some keyword research to see if I could find a niche to make some serious amount of money before the end of the Month. Now that I only had about half the month left, it was going to be a big challenge.

I found a few niches I thought I could make some money off of. So the first thing I did was start visiting some of the Affiliate Networks to see what kind of offers were out there for these niches.
Tips For Choosing An Affiliate Offer

I visited ClickBank, Azoogle, CJ, Copeac and ROI Rocket looking for the best offers. Now, when I say ‘Best Offers’, I don’t necessarily mean the highest paying offer. What I look for first and foremost is what the Customer has to do in order for me to get paid.

For example, for this niche there were several offers that I found. One offer paid $37 per sale. In order for me to get paid, the Customer would have to buy that product. Another offer for the niche paid $22.50 per lead. In order for me to get paid, the Customer has to fill out a contact for and pay $2.95 shipping & handling.

Another offer paid $9 per lead and all the Customer has to do is fill out a contact form with a valid email and address before I get paid.

Now, which one do you think I chose?

For this niche, I chose the $9 offer because I know it’s easier to get someone to give their email address than it is for them to whip out $37 or even $2.95. If this Challenge were longer, then I would come up with an action plan to make money with the $37 per sale offer.

Even though I’m making less money per lead with the $9 offer, I can get people to sign up quicker than making them pay for something. In essence, I can make money quicker in the short term.

As I said before, I have several other niches that I’ll be looking at and finding offers for those too. I’m not sure if I’ll have time to start working them, I’ll just have to wait and see.
Getting Started Promoting Affiliate Offers

Here’s how I started getting ready to push this offer. Again, this is not how I would do it if I had more time. This short term promotion isn’t the best way to make money with these offers in my opinion, but I have to work in the constraints that I set for myself.

I started off by buying two domains for 8 bucks and change from NameCheap for niches. They’re normally $9.69, but I used the NameCheap Promo Code of ‘Happy2009′ to get a discount of $8.81 per domain. If that NameCheap Promo Code doesn’t work for you, then just Google “NameCheap Promo Code” and you can find one that does.

I also signed up for the Pro Hosting Plan at NameCheap because they will let you pay by the month. It’s not the cheapest plan, but it’s the cheapest plan you can get and still pay by the month. You can also host multiple domains on one account for the $6.95 where you can’t with the cheaper plan.

I then went to Blogger and built two Blogger Blogs for that Niche.

Next, I’ve started writing some articles that I will be promoting my Niche with. I’ll use both EzineArticles and GoArticles since they are both free. I’ve written 10 articles and have submitted them to promote my niche.

I’m nearing the point now that I’ll be setting up the WordPress blogs and designing them the way I want to push the offers. I hope to generate some quick targeted traffic and start making sales!

Finally, I used www.big-boards.com to find forums relating to my niche. So far I’ve found 8 forums where I’ve set up accounts at and have started posting some general information post and answered a few questions to get my post count up.

I’ve also set up accounts at MySpace, Twitter, Yahoo Answers and Facebook to do the same. I’ve started using these accounts and building up friends and post.

The reason behind doing it this way is because I’m going to need a lot of traffic and need it fast. These places have a lot of traffic. Not great converters, but some will take the offers I push. It’s very important that you get started on the Forums and Social Media sites early and build up a reputation. Do not Spam them. You should be actively involved and asking real questions or giving real help. This will pay back huge dividends down the road as you’ll see with the next update.

As you can see, just getting ready to push an offer can take quite a bit of time!

The next update should be at the end of the month and I’ll let you know how well it’s gone. Don’t be surprised if I don’t make it with the unforseen time I spent on the road, I ended up with about half the month to work on this. But I think I’ll still have a pretty good show!
A Word About Making Money Fast On the Internet

These tactics that I’m using to make money quick aren’t the same ones I would normally do. I don’t want anyone to get the idea that making money online is quick or easy. It’s hard work, at least it is for me. I spend a lot of time working on my online businesses.

Whenever I start up a new website, I plan on working on it a year or more before I start seeing any tangible results. Especially if it’s in a competitive niche. For smaller niches with less competition, maybe 6 to 8 months before I start seeing any real rankings and sales.

I like to use organic traffic to drive sales to my websites. I’ll admit, I’m kinda lazy and don’t like spending all my time on one website. I like to build them and forget ‘em as they say. Still, it takes a lot of time building content and backlinks to these sites to get them making money.

The only reason I decided to do this little Challenge is to show you that money could be made rather quickly online. It’s been my experience that these little quick cash cows don’t last long. With more work, you can generally turn them into long term money makers. Sometimes they do well, other times they don’t. That’s just the fact about making money using websites and organic traffic on the Internet.

I’m kicking around the idea of starting a new website after this Challenge is done and doing a 1 year challenge where everyone can follow along with me. I’ll have to wait and see how this idea pans out and whether or not I think I’ll have time to take on another project! I do think it would be ver beneficial to many of you just getting started in Internet Marketing though.
The Janurary Make Money Online Challenge Financials

Okay, I wanted to share a little bit with you about how much I’ve made and spent so far. Here’s the breakdown.

Startup: $50

Craigslist Sales: $65

Article Sales on DP: $65 (two article packs, one sold for $30 the other for $35)

Project Payday: $45

Total not including initial $50: $175

Total money including $50 seed money: $225
Expeditures

Two domain names at NameCheap: $17.62

Web Hosting: $6.95

I’m not counting the Gas I used to get the Craigslist items because both places were in the same area as I was going to run errands. (less than 3 miles away) The cost of gas is minimal for these items.

Total Spent so far: $24.57 (this will start changing here soon)

Subtracting the money made from the money spent leaves me with a Grand Total of $200.43

Only about $2300 to go in about a week and half! WooHoo!

Once I get into really pushing these offers, you’ll probably see the expenditures go up a little.

Be sure to sign up for my RSS feed so you can find out how this all ends at the end of the month. I’ll be sharing with you more details about how I set up the offers, reactions and lessons learned.