Well it’s been a while since my last post. It’s not that I’ve been busy…it’s more the fact that I couldn’t be bothered writing for this blog.  Sounds bad doesn’t it? But when it comes down to it, this blog isn’t how we make our money. In fact, it makes us nothing at all except when we write up a review for something (which is few and far between) or when someone pays for advertising space.

For now, this blog really is just a way of expressing my views of this online business I am in and also provide advice to others who are wanting to make a living online.  So I personally don’t want to have to feel forced to write every day for it simply to keep the traffic coming in order to make sales.

But not only that, I find this business model for making money online quite time consuming. It also requires consistent action in order to maintain the momentum and quite a bit of networking in order to build a following.

In contrast, I find that the model we use to make money online is so much easier and once set up requires minimal work.

For instance, to get this particular blog up and running to a level of making a consistent income I would probably need to do the following on a consistent basis:

• leave blog comments on other peoples websites
• leave forum posts
• tweet regularly
• regularly post on Facebook
• write at least one blog post a day
• network, network, network!
• regularly post to my email list
• check RSS feeds on a daily basis (something that I don’t do at all by the way)
• write guest posts
• work on JV’s

That to me is a lot of work.

On the other hand our model requires the following:

• find a product in Amazon
• do a bit of keyword research
• write up a really good review for that product and post to one of our blogs
• get traffic to it

The difference between the two is that the first model requires consistent effort (usually daily) whereas the second model requires a one-off amount of work. The only consistent work involved with this is getting the traffic and even then once a level of traffic is achieved we don’t have to worry too much about it.

So we can take a week off and not do any work without it affecting our business. In fact, we can take a month off because the pages we have set up already get traffic and don’t need constant work to maintain that traffic. Obviously we can’t neglect those pages totally but the work involved with maintaining them doesn’t have to be done on a daily basis nor on a weekly basis once the traffic is there.

When it comes down to it, you only need a handful of good pages to make a full time income online. We have individual pages that consistently make over $500 a week and that is without ongoing effort on our part. So we don’t need to blog consistently or leave blog comments or check RSS feeds or post regularly on forums or Twitter constantly. All we really need to do is get traffic to our top product review pages and that really is just a handful of pages per website.

I’m on a mission at the moment to simplify everything we do. I want the The 4-Hour Workweek lifestyle…who wouldn’t?…but the only way we are going to get that is to consistenly analyze what we do to see what is working and what isn’t and then refine the process.

What me and Wanda do is get out the butchers paper and write down the tasks we do on a regular basis. We then go through each to see whether each task is actually worth the effort. For instance, at this moment in time we don’t see the value in spending hours a day on Twitter. It brings in minimal traffic for the amount of time and work that is involved. So you’ll notice the Twitter account for this blog has been pretty quiet these days as has the rest of our Twitter accounts. That’s not to say that Twitter doesn’t have value but for us it’s too much work for the results we are getting.

So what about you? Have you thought about the effort you put into your online business? If you are new to making money online then obviously you are going to have to do a bit of work before you see results but what about those that have been online for a while. Are you actually making any money for all the work you are putting into it? If not, then you need to step back and look at exactly what tasks you are doing on a daily basis and see if they are getting you the results you desire.

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I remember sometime back listening to a conversation I heard at work between two colleagues who were discussing what they would do if they won the lottery. I listened with interest to this conversation as each told the other about all the great things they would do if they won a large sum of money. And as the conversation progressed, I could see that much of what they wanted to do, they could do right now if they really wanted to. They didn’t really need to win the lottery to achieve it.

So often you hear people discussing what they would do if they won the lottery or had the time to follow their dreams. In fact its something you hear constantly from people around you and it goes a bit like this…”when I win the lottery” or  “someday I’ll do it” or “when the kids are a little older” or when the “kids have left home” or “when I retire”.

You know when it all boils down to it, each of these statements is simply an excuse for not taking action because taking action may require a bit of effort or it might involve taking some risks. So, it’s much easier to just continue on day after day doing the same things over and over until eventually you get stuck in a rut and come to accept that you will never do all the things you really want to. At some stage you may even reach a point where you don’t even dream about doing these things anymore.

We are creatures of habit. This is both a good and a bad thing. Good because it means that a lot of those regular tasks we do can be done without even thinking about them. It’s like when you get in the car – you don’t think about how you are going to drive the car, it’s an automatic process because you have had years of practice. Unfortunately though, the bad is that your life can settle quite comfortably into a rut.  You know how it goes –  you wake up, get the kids ready for school, go to work, come home, make dinner, get the kids to bed, watch a bit of tv and go to bed.

Even the weekends become  a routine, you take the kids to soccer practice, go grocery shopping and if you are lucky maybe do something different like go to a movie or to dinner. Then on Monday you wake up and get the kids ready for school, go to work, come home, make dinner…and so it goes, on and on, day after day until the day you retire. And at that stage, your life has settled into its daily routine and as you are older you are not ready to take risks, so your retirement isn’t happy because you have lost the enthusiasm or the will to try new things and perhaps follow those long lost dreams.

Would you call this an extraordinary life? I wouldn’t. And don’t be blaming your kids here either, you can have a mundane life with or without kids.

If you want to have an extraordinary life then you need to start taking risks. The most successful people in life are the risk takers. This doesn’t mean taking stupid risks. Obviously you still need to do your research before taking on any risk but don’t go too crazy either….you can get bogged down with too much analysis and then you will start to focus on the negatives and that becomes scary, so eventually you decide its safer to stay at home and you never go anywhere or try anything new.

Now I am by no means an expert at this but I do have a tendency to take risks…  I’ve thrown in my job before I was making a decent income in order to work from home, I moved to a new city where I had no family or friends, I’ve gone overseas when I barely had enough to feed myself while I was away, I bought that ebook when I knew nothing about making money on the internet and it cost a staggering $197 and it could have all been just a scam.

Even as business partners, Wanda and I take a hell of a lot of risks – we have been overseas countless times, even though there have been times when we really weren’t making a huge amount of money from this business and funds were tight. We didn’t dwell on where the money was going to come from – we just booked our fares and off we went.  This is something we still do and now we only book our return airfare and book all other travel as we go when we are overseas. We  both have a can do attitude and truly believed  that we were going to succeed and so we live life accordingly. We could have said “someday we’ll go to Affiliate Summit” or “someday we’ll see the Colesseum” but instead we just did it.

Wanda has a quote from “The 4  Hour Work week” by Timothy Ferriss, on the wall in her office that sums it up nicely:

SOMEDAY

Is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you.

If it’s important to you and you want to do it ‘eventually’

JUST DO IT

and correct course along the way.

Taking action and taking risks go hand in hand with being successful and having that extraordinary life. This doesn’t mean that you won’t fail. Failure is a part of life but the difference between those that succeed and those that fail is that those who succeed see failure as just being part of the road to success.

Don’t settle for less in life. We decided early on that we each wanted an extraordinary life, we don’t want our lives to be mundane and boring. We don’t want the 9 to 5 grind that most people take for granted and ultimately why we know that working online is the ultimate lifestyle…at least for us.

Don’t wait to win the lottery in order to do all the things you want to do. Take action now to live an extraordinary life – it’s fun, its risky, its exhilarating but most of all its fulfilling.

My internet business gives me an extraordinary life and I am more than happy to take whatever action is required to keep it this way.

Have you ever noticed how some people have a thumbnail image of themselves next to their blog comments? It looks good doesn’t it?…but that’s not it’s only advantage. It’s also a great way of branding yourself. If you leave enough comments on different blogs, then what happens is that you begin to start being recognized by other bloggers. Suddenly your face starts appearing everywhere and other bloggers begin wondering who you are and what you do.

That image is called an avatar – and yes, if you have seen the movie Avatar (which I highly recommend) you should already have an idea of what an avatar is. Unfortunately, in the world of blogging an avatar is not as exciting. Wikipedia defines an avatar as “a computer user’s representation of himself/herself or alter ego…”

Leaving blog comments is a great way of getting traffic to your site so make the most of it and take the time to add a photo – it doesn’t take long and is worth the effort. You only have to add your image once and then everytime you leave a comment on a gravatar enabled blog your image will appear next to it.

You will often see people using pictures of animals, flowers, movie stars, a company logo or anything but their own photo. If you really want to make a name for yourself amongst your blogging peers then you should really stick to your own photo wherever possible.

So how do you add your image?

 Step 1: Head over to www.gravatar.com and create an account. It’s free to do so.

Step 2: Follow the instructions to add your image. Ensure you use the same email address that you will be using when you leave comments. It is the email address that will trigger your photo.

Just remember that the blog you leave a comment on needs to be gravatar enabled otherwise your photo won’t appear.

That’s it. It’s pretty simple really. Now leave a comment below and watch your image appear.

Yesterday I was having a think back to when we were really struggling to make a living online….and actually it wasn’t that long ago. And as I was thinking about it, I wondered why it took us so long to start making a decent income.

We had been working really hard on our websites on a daily basis for over two years but were nowhere near to making a living from it. In fact the only thing that kept us going was knowing in our minds and hearts that this would eventually work if we put in the hard yards.

As I thought about it, I realized that it wasn’t just one thing that finally did it for us – instead it was a series of actions that got us to where we are today. They are what I call ‘massive action’ tasks (you’ll know that phrase if you read or listen to Tony Robbins).

In other words, as we reached a stage where we could see that the amount of input wasn’t reaping the rewards, we changed our tactics and instead of continuing to do the same tasks everyday, we took massive action to take us to the next level. Now we are by no means experts at it, and really at the time we didn’t even equate what we did to taking massive action….we just arrived at the conclusion that we needed to do something extraordinary if we were going to make this work.

I love the saying – “If you continue to do what you’ve always done, you’ll continue to get what you’ve always got.” This happens a lot with people trying to make money online. They continue to do the same things day after day and wonder why they aren’t getting the traffic levels they want or the income they are trying to achieve. If you really want to leap ahead of the rest, then you need to take massive action.

Here are just some of the things we have done in the past that have taken us to the next level in our internet business:

1. Added massive amounts of content – At the time, we had read about two guys online who were adding something like 20 posts a day. We knew 20 posts were just a little beyond our capacity so we decided on 8 posts a day for one of our product blogs. That meant we had to each write 4 blog posts each a day. I did all of mine over the weekend. I think Wanda staggered hers over the week. It gave us a lot of articles to write but we did it.

The effort paid off and the result was that it made a big difference in the amount of traffic to the blog and a huge difference in the amount of  our affiliate sales.

We didn’t end up doing it forever – from memory I think it was a couple of months and then we started to reduce the number of articles steadily over a period of time. The funny thing was that the traffic didn’t decrease – it stayed at a steady level and continues to increase as we add content at a more manageable pace.

2. Changed the Quality of Our Content – We have a lot of blogs and a lot of content, but I can say with all honesty that a good proportion of our blogs have a lot of rather inferior quality content. This is because at the time we weren’t really thinking about our readers but more about making a dollar. When we changed our focus to providing more value to our readers, we noticed a huge difference in our income levels….and I mean huge. This was a major turning point for us. You can read a little about how we write our product reviews here.

3. Concentrated on Less – What do I mean by this?  Well we focused on only one or two websites instead of 20. This made a big big big difference….I know that’s a lot of ‘bigs’ but I need to emphasise the importance of this one. When we were working on all our blogs, we were really spreading ourselves too thin. It just wasn’t effective for us. The trick is to focus on one thing until it starts making you money, then and only then do you move onto the next thing.

4. A Change in Thinking – I think this one was a key ingredient for us. We needed to change our attitude to things particularly in relation to making money online. I remember us having a discussion about why we weren’t making the income we wanted and we came to the conclusion that the only people who make money online are those that tell other people how to make money online.

Well we know that’s not the case now but that was our thinking back then. After all we were working ourselves to a frazzle and getting nowhere, so that must be the reason. We all know this is a fallacy and product sites work extremely well, thank you very much.

5. More Time for Ourselves – It was at this point that we also started to work on ourselves a bit more rather than just the business. This meant that we started to take time out to exercise and to spend part of our day listening to self improvement cds like that provided by Tony Robbins. Funnily enough, the more time we took for ourselves, the more productive we were in our internet business.

Don’t let anyone tell you that making money online is quick and easy. For the majority of us it’s a hard slog. But there is plenty of opportunity for everyone and that is why we want to share our story with you in the hope it will encourage you when it seems that things won’t ever improve, just hang in there it will get better.

Just remember to:

• provide quality information for your readers
• look after yourself, physically and mentally

…and really believe that you can do – because you know what – You Can!

If you’re a regular to this site, you’ve probably realized by now that we don’t promote too many products. If we do, it is either a product that we have used or it’s a product from someone who we know can provide the goods. This is the case with Andrew from WeBuildYourBlog.com.

Andrew has been a regular visitor to my blog and ALWAYS has something worthwhile to say. Just recently he launched an Income Blogging Guide membership course which really is the first of it’s type….yes, I know there are other blogging courses out there but this one is different in that it includes every single step with screen shots and video.

The Income Blogging Course includes choosing a niche, choosing a domain name and goes right through to how to make money from your blog.

The information below lists some of the content that’s included in the Income Blogging Guide membership course so take a good look to see if it will suit you.

If you want to discover:

• The 2-step process you need to choose a proven money-making niche…get it wrong and you’ll never make any money
• The 3 golden rules of keyword analysis…get one rule wrong and ALL your future efforts are wasted.
• The exact step-by-step methods to find the best domain name for your blog …99% of bloggers miss this crucial “Search Engine Optimization” step
• How to install WordPress in under 1 minute (as long as you choose the right hosting company)
• Step-by-step guides and images of each ‘must-have’ plugin you must install on your blog (plus all the tweaks necessary – it is not just a matter of installing)
• The 2 steps you need to take to get Google to index your blog…and don’t believe all the hype…they take no more than 10 minutes to complete
• Don’t be one of those blog owners whose blog is ‘hacked…follow these 6 tasks that keep 99% of hackers at bay
• How to add pages, posts and images the right way, to pick up Google “link-juice” and without being penalised for duplicate content
• To launch your blog, what’s the optimum number of blog posts you should have? The answer may surprise you.
• How to write blogs posts so that your visitors think “I like this person, they know what they are talking about. I wonder what else they have to say” …and return time and time again
• How to write a good title for a blog post and why “Here are the top 20 tips for XXXX” is a no-no.
• The 5 quickest and easiest ways to start making a blog income…including the step-by-step approach
• How to split your working day into the 3 crucial elements of making money via blogging
• The 3 traits of a successful blogger…do you have them?

For more info you might like to get the free guide by clicking here.

Since revealing our Amazon income to both our family and friends (and to the world), we have noticed a change in the attitude of those around us.  And although the change is a positive one it revealed to both Wanda and I just what our family and friends thought about our online business.  We have since found that at least some of them didn’t believe we would achieve what we set out to do and others were even rather cynical about the whole thing.

Don’t get me wrong, they were supportive but in the back of their minds they really thought that we were just playing around and that we would never make a full-time income from it.

This is a common problem for people who work online. It’s understandable really as the majority of the population use their computer for communicating with friends and family on Facebook, playing games, watching videos on Youtube, doing a bit of research every now and then, and maybe buying a few things on eBay or Amazon, whereas for serious bloggers the world of the Internet is a whole different story. For us, the Internet is our life and we have no problem with sitting in front of that computer from dawn till dusk if we must to achieve our goals, and get our blogs generating the income we want.

And this is where the problems can start. Your family and friends may not see your time online as being part of what you need to do to build up your business.  It can be difficult making them see that although you work from home the same criteria applies as if you were going to the office. They may constantly interrupt you during the day and your friends may pop in unannounced and expect you to give them your full attention or  ring you and talk for hours. You really have to be strong and keep the visits and calls short.  Make it a policy that you will set aside time during the week when you will go to lunch, or have people around for coffee and a chat. That way you will establish a work schedule that gives you free time to spend with your loved ones that keeps interruptions to a minimum. And as much as we all love to spend time with family and friends you need to set guidelines for your working hours. If this sounds harsh remember what your goal is.

The fact is, until people see the results of your online business they really aren’t going to take it seriously. And it’s not their fault really – there are thousands of scams on the net and it seems as though the most common thinking is that you really can’t make money online.

So  don’t be discouraged if you find that your family and friends do not support you in the way you would like. Remember it may just be  a case of ’show me the money’ before you are taken seriously.

Let’s face it, regardless of what some of the so-called guru’s like to tell us, it’s hard work building up an online business and there are times when it seems it would be just easier to give up, especially  when you don’t see the monetary results. So having the support of family and friends  makes a huge difference to keeping you on track.  Mind you, not having support can also be beneficial. After all, if you are constantly being told that you won’t ever be able to make a living online you may just find the drive to succeed to ultimately prove to everyone that it can be done.