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.

Want to know where we learn to make money online? Head on over to Wealthy Affiliate University for all the latest info.

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!

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.

We’ve mentioned in the past how a turning point for us was when we started adding Amazon affiliate links to our websites but I’d like to expand on that a little so that you can see the true potential of their affiliate program. I’d also like to share exactly how much we make on Amazon – or at least how much we made this month to give you an idea of what you can achieve.

So where did it all begin?

Last year we were struggling as affiliate marketers. We had over 20 blogs but were only making around $500US a month. After we took out expenses and the money we paid for a writer, we were left with pretty much nothing. We really needed to get to the next level if we were going to live the dream of working from home on a full-time basis.

One of the sites we were working on at the time was a website that provided reviews of products. At the end of each of those reviews we would provide links to different online merchants so that our readers could find the best price. But since, at the time, we were thinking of the money first and our readers second we never added Amazon as an option despite the fact that it would have benefited our readers as Amazon have some of the best prices. So why didn’t we add them?…because we saw that Amazon only pay 4% commission and we didn’t think it was worth it. After all we were getting around 8% from other affliate merchants.

Now Amazon do pay more once you start selling more but at the time we didn’t think we could sell that many items to increase our commission. Talk about limiting beliefs, but you have to remember that prior to this we were using merchants from CJ, Shareasale and Linkshare and to see a sale a day was quite exciting – to see 2 sales a day was amazing and 3 or 4 sales a day would have been a major celebration.

Thank goodness we started to focus on our readers because when we did we realised that we needed to add Amazon links in order to provide them with better buying options. So we did just that to about 10 pages of that site.

Two days after adding the links, I checked Amazon stats and was quite surprised when I saw 11 sales. I also realised that we had already jumped to the 6% commission level. I didn’t get too excited though as I really thought it was just a fluke. I even remember telling Wanda that it was probably just one person who went on a shopping spree. I definitely wasn’t expecting to see any further sales.

But then the next day I checked again and we had 9 sales, the next day 3 and the day after that 12…I started thinking that maybe this wasn’t such a fluke after all.

You can see the results here in the table above.

We were pretty amazed since we weren’t used to that many sales in one day, let alone continuous daily sales like that.

The Benefits of Amazon

The main benefit of using Amazon is that they know how to convert. You just have to get your reader there and Amazon will do the rest. Even so, you shouldn’t just rely on Amazon to do all the work for you. We noticed that when we reworked a few pages to provide more indepth reviews for our readers that conversions jumped through the roof. So make sure you provide value too and then let Amazon do the rest.

By far and away the best benefit of Amazon is that although you might send your readers there for one thing, they generally tend to look around and often they will buy the product and other items or they end up buying something completely different.

For instance, if your site is all about dog beds and you provide a link to Amazon recommending what you think is the best type of dog bed, the reader might go to Amazon and decide not to buy the dog bed but because Amazon has so much to offer, something else may get their attention and they end up  buying other unrelated products.

And believe me when I say that this happens more often than you think. If we take our stats for instance, for November, 524 of the products we sold were products that we recommend. The remaining 1768 products that sold were products that we didn’t recommend and in fact in a good majority of cases they were for products that were not related in any way to our blog topic.

How to Use Amazon Effectively

The best way to use Amazon is to use text links within a review of a product. Don’t bother with the widgets or the banner ads – they won’t be anywhere near as effective. Use text links and your click through rate will be much higher.

So How Much Did We Make on Amazon This Month?

This is the bit I am sure you have been waiting for but since a picture tells a thousands words I have added a screen print of our Amazon stats for November 2009. The results are for four of our blogs but most of the money is coming from one site…probably about 90% of the income. We haven’t worked much on those other 3 blogs and until we do they will continue to make a minimal income.

Notice that we have hit the 8.25% commission level. This is because we have sold over 1571 items – the more you sell the more commission you get up to a maximum of 8.5%.

It will be interesting to see how we go in December with the build up to Christmas.

And Finally…

Just remember that with anything you do online, that you shouldn’t put all your eggs in the one basket. We use Amazon quite extensively and highly recommend them but we also use Google Adsense, CJ, LinkShare, Shareasale, Google Affiliate Network, Clickbank and more. So that $14,000 + from Amazon isn’t our only source of income this month.

Well we can’t stop smiling at this months Amazon earnings and here is the link if you would like to add Amazon to your website.

An eBook is a great way of making money on the internet and you don’t need to have a website to do it. Nor do you need to actually sell the eBook to make money from it.  So how do you do it…well in a nutshell, it involves you writing a short ebook preferably about a topic you know about and distributing it for free around the internet.  It doesn’t have to be long – 10-15 pages is enough. In order to make money from it, you add multiple affiliate links to different products within the ebook.

Here’s how it works…

Step 1: Choose a topic that you have an interest in

The best eBooks are written by those who know what they are talking about. It will also make it easier to write if you have an interest in the topic. Having said that however, there is no rule that says that you need to know the subject to write about it but it will take longer because you will need to do the research for it first.

Step 2: Find products to promote in your ebook

There is no point spending hours writing an eBook only to find that there are no products to add to it. So before you start writing, you need to find products that you can ’sell’ in your eBook that relate to your topic. You can choose products from Clickbank, CJ.com, Linkshare.com, ShareaSale.com, Amazon.com or any of the other affiliate networks. These companies are all free to join and offer thousands of different products and services that you can promote. Clickbank is a good one to start with as they don’t care whether you have a website or not.

Once you know that there are plenty of products you can start writing.

Step 3: Start Writing

This is not as scary as it sounds. If you have a flair for writing then you will probably have no problem getting started but if the last thing you wrote was a report in high school then you might find it hard to get going.

The easiest way to write an ebook is to break it up into sections first. For instance, say we decide to write an eBook on dog training. We might break it up into the following sections:

1. Introduction
2. How to train your dog to sit
3. How to train your dog to come when called
4. How to train your dog to shake hands
5. etc, etc

Once you have the main sections you can then provide the content. Always leave the introduction till last as it will be a lot easier to write.

Here is a really good tip. Start out with dot points. Don’t worry about making it read right at this point. Just jot down as many things as you can think of for each of the sections of your ebook.

Once you have the dot points then just expand on each dot point with sub-dot points. Before you know it you will have lots of content.

Now you just need to structure those dot points into coherent sentences.

If you really don’t want to write it yourself then pay a professional. Elance is a great place for this – it is full of writers willing to work on your projects and you would be surprised at how little it costs.

Step 4: Add Affiliate Links

Once you have completed your ebook you will need to add affiliate links. You can add them within the content itself where appropriate or add them at the end as a list of recommended products – or both if you like.

Step 5: Convert to PDF

Before you distribute your eBook you will need to convert it to PDF. There are a number of free versions available on the internet that are simple and easy to use. Ensure that once the document has been converted that you check to ensure that it has formatted the content correctly and that any links within the document work correctly. Some converters work better than others but we recommend one of the following:

• http://www.freepdfconvert.com/default.asp
• http://www.doc2pdf.net/

Step 6: Proofread Your eBook

There is nothing worse than reading a document with multiple spelling errors or bad grammar. Make sure you run a spell checker over it and read it through thoroughly yourself. Better yet, get someone else to do it for you. The more people that look at it the better so get your family or friends to help out.

Step 7: Distribute Your eBook

The next step is to distribute your ebook. Here are some ideas:

- email websites that relate to your ebook topic and tell them they can send out your ebook to their email list if they have one or they can use it as a free giveaway to encourage people to sign up to their newsletter.
– submit your ebook to ebook directories – there are plenty of them…just do a search in Google
– create a Squidoo lens, Hubpage (hubpage.com) and attach your ebook to the page so people can download it.
– submit to forums

And if you found that your ebook turns out better than you expected and you  might just be able to sell it rather than distribute it free them sign up with Clickbank.

Making money online is one of those truly unique methods for making a living. It doesn’t have to involve selling a physical product, it costs practically nothing to start, you can work from home, you can live anywhere in the world (as long as you have a good internet connection) and in a lot of cases you don’t need to work long hours to succeed.

A good majority of the population aspire to working online but never get any further than thinking about it.  And in most cases their thinking involves negative beliefs that keep them rooted to their 9 to 5 job. I’ve heard lots of excuses over the years – I don’t have the time – When my kids are bigger I might start looking into it – I spend all day on a computer at work, I don’t want to have to come home and do the same – I can’t type (hello!?…you only need 1 finger to type on a keyboard).

Every one one of these excuses is simply that – an excuse to keep that person from even trying. For most it is easier to not attempt something than to attempt it and fail. Their fear of failure keeps them stuck doing the same 9 to 5 job day after day. Unfortunately they don’t realise that the most successful people on this planet have failed again and again, but the difference between them and anyone else is that they see these failures as opportunities. They know that they can learn more from their failures than they can from their successes.

I think we’ve all heard by now the story of Thomas Edison who failed over 2000 times before he finally perfected the light bulb. Imagine if he had given up after the first failure? Would we all be sitting in the dark now? Probably not, as someone else who wasn’t afraid of failing would have taken over.

You only have to see a baby attempting to walk to see how this all works. They get up, take a step and fall straight back down again. But do they give up?…no way, they keep getting up and falling down until they take that second step and the third and before you know it they are walking across the room towards you. And the thing is, we expect them to fail again and again before they eventually start to walk properly. We don’t codemn them, or think they’re stupid or tell them to stop trying.  We know that the only way they will walk is if they keep trying.

So if you think about it why aren’t you doimg the same? What’s holding you back from taking the next step to making money online?

Let go of the fear and just do it. If you make a mistake then don’t beat yourself up about it – instead look at that failure and see how you can improve upon it. Just keep at it and you can only succeed.