New Year Goals

It’s been a long time since I last wrote anything on this blog. It is not because I have lost interest in trying to make money online but more because my off line work has limited my plans. Just now and for the past 6 months I have been working overseas Monday to Friday. That in itself is not a huge problem but with a company firewall that is a complete bitch to view anything through the opportunity to research and attempt things has been severely restricted.

Despite that I have found some great resources and have tried a few things I have read about with some success, so I plan to share those with you in the coming weeks. Continue reading

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The Dark Side of Domaining

As part of my efforts to make a living from the web I have been researching a number of options.  One of these is around domaining which at its simplest involves buying natural type in domain names and parking these at compaies like Sedo. 

I plan to be pretty broadminded about where I will draw the line in chasing the dollar, but for some people there doesn’t seem to be any sort of limit.  The dissapearance of Madeleine McCann is a case in point.  The official site is www.findmadeleine.com

However at least a couple of domainers are trying to profit from Madelaine’s dissapaearance and have registered similar domains as follows:

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Bloggers Earnings

While I struggle in the background to add Google Adsense to my blog (I am failing miserably so far!).  I thought I would mention an interesting article I can across while looking for ideas about making money online.  Its by Paula Neal Mooney and is a list of the top bloggers’ earnings.  The list ranges from the number 1 spot at $3.6m pa to $480 for the number 60 spot. 

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100,000 page views and $100 income?

To kick my quest off I googled how to make money writing a blog. One of the pages that came up was an interesting article by Kyle Pott which claims that a beginner blog writer can make $100 in the first month if they follow the following rules:

  • Select a blogging platform (wordpress in my instance)
  • Select a hosting service
  • Choose a memorable domain name
  • Get advertisements immediately
  • Get Google Analytics immediately
  • Write 50 posts
  • Submit every article to Digg

On the face of it this seems to be a fairly straightforward list and has quite a few things that seem intuitively correct, so I have decided to try it. The only problem is that as newbie to making money online a lot of this stuff seems to take forever to do.

As I have previously mentioned selecting wordpress and hosting it took me 4 hours significantly longer than a reasonably techie person I am sure (probably 3hrs 59min longer!). To add to my problems working out how to upload Google Analytics to this page has taken me the best part of today (6 hours to be precise).

The reason is that WordPress has a Analytics plugin which has the following installation advice ‘Drop the google_analyticator folder into /wp-content/plugins/, and activate the plugin.’ The only problem with this is that I had no idea how to do the ‘drop’! 6hrs later I have now worked out that I need to download a ftp management system (told you I was a newbie!) to manage moving the file from my computer to my hosted server. For anyone interested I used SmartFTP which was pretty easy to use once I finally figured things out.

So my running totals now are hours spent 10hrs, money spent $84, money earned $0 and google tell me that it will be 2 days before adsense can be approved – that road seems to be getting longer by the minute.

But in the spirit of Can It Be Done I will give it a shot.

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My first mistakes?

I am exploring all potential opportunities to make money on the internet but figured as I was writing a blog that making money from a blog would be a good place to start.  But on reading the Dummies guide to building a webpage (yes my knowledge really is that basic), it says that blogging is a very time consuming way to earn money off the web.  As I only want to do this part time is this my first mistake?

My second mistake, well due to me inexperience I am not even sure if it is a mistake.  Having googled how to make money from blogs (my way of learning about anything new) I read that you should have your own domain rather than be part of a blog site. 

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Starting Up

I plan on sharing the highs and lows of my attempts to make a living from the web as well as share any knowledge I pick up. But I am nervous, the learning curve for me is going to be really steep. I like to think I am reasonably smart but all of this is really is double dutch to me.

Case in point to set up and launch this blog has now taken me 4 hours and even then I am still none the wiser about half the stuff I have done – oh how easy it just to blindly follow instructions!

I plan to keep a very Bridget Jones type reporting record for my efforts, so here we go

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Every journey starts with the first step

Clueless about the internet pretty much sums me up.  Don’t get me wrong, I can email and surf with the best of them, and I even have my own myspace page, but ask me how to set up a web page or what an rss feed is and I will just look at you blankly.  How come so many people seem to know about all this stuff?

But I want to be financially independent and I have a sense that the internet is the place to do that.  So I have set myself a challenge - can I earn more from the web than I can from the physical world?  Ultimately I want to pay off the mortgage and have an income stream that lets me live the life I want, with no boss and no office politics around me.  But is any of this possible for a complete novice……

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