First Taste of Outsourcing

I had my first taste of outsourcing this week. Overall it was a brilliant experience. I needed some articles rewriting so I advertised the job on Digital point, and within minutes I had about a million PM's in my inbox, (ok that was an exaggeration, but it was a lot lol).

Some people were claiming to do the job for really cheap and saying they were able to have it done in a few hours, some people said they would take longer than a week and wanted an extortionate amount for the job (pfttt). In the end I went with a lady that was charging a reasonable amount, not too cheap and not too expensive and said she would have them with me within 24-48 hours.

I couldn't of picked a better choice. The quality was awesome and I had the articles back right on time. So my overall first experience of outsourcing has been a good one:).

The thing I have found so far with digital point marketplace is that there are way more people there looking to make money than spend money.

Anyway on to some other news :).

So far this month has been a busy one (hence my need for outsourcing). I have managed to get my games website up and running, although it still needs a lot of work doing to it.

If you want to check it out here it is:

http://www.battlestargames.com

I have not started promoting it yet, I want it perfect before I do.

I have been making and selling a few websites, and all has been going well there :).

I have made a start promoting one site that I have made, I want to see if I can get it earning. This one is a bit of a slow process, but I will get there.

Anyway there are still 9 days left till the end of the month and still plenty of time for me to get lots more work done.

My Plans For August 2008

I have a lot of plans for August, my only worry is that I have too many plans :). There are always new ideas whirring around in my head and sometimes I can't keep up with them. So here are my plans in no particular order.

Plan number 1- Site Flipping

I will continue to build a few websites to sell, as this keeps my income topped up for the time being. In fact I am working on a site right now, I bought a domain name last month and have not done anything with it so that's going to be made into a website and sold.

Plan number 2 - Sprucing Up this blog

I really need to buy a domain name for this blog and move it over to a self hosted wordpress blog. I love wordpress they have so much more to offer than blogger.

Plan number 3- Building a site to keep

Well I say building a site to keep, but in fact it's already near enough built. I just need to add a few more articles to it. I will be keeping this site, and seeing if I can get it to the top of the search engines using some simple SEO. This site is an affiliate site, and I really want to see if I can get it earning. I am even considering showing you my site on this blog and kind of doing a case study to see how long it takes me to get decent traffic and making me money. I could show you what I am doing step by step.

Plan number 4 - Writing an Ebook

I plan on starting writing my own ebook this month. I doesn't have to be finished by the end of the month, but I want to at least start it. This ebook will be aimed at complete beginners to buying and selling websites. It won't be another ebook about how I made $xxx.xxx selling sites, but it will be more focused on the practical issues of site flipping. Some of the things I plan on including are, how to set up a site, registering a domain name, and transferring the site etc..

Plan number 5 - Building a games arcade site

This is something I am really excited about. Actually I am so excited about this it deserves it's own blog post.

I know I know this is quite a largish list for just one month, but as long as I can get started on some of them I will be happy. As you can see this month is not about how much money I can make in one month, it's more about starting some of my long term goals.

How Time Flies

I can't believe it's the end of July already, it's nearly been a whole month since I wrote my last blog post!

Just a little update on my 7 websites in 7 weeks challenge, in case anyone was wondering - I failed miserably. I didn't make not even close to as much money as last month this month. In fact I think I actually spent more than I made. Let's have a little breakdown of income and expenses.

Income

selling websites - $155
bum marketing - $0
Adsense - $4.57

Total - $159.57

Outgoings

Hosting - $9.99
Domain names - $34.52
Sitepoint fees - $20
Paypal fees - $6.95

Total - $71.46

Total profit - $88.11

Ok so I did make a profit this month, but not quite as much as last month. That just took me about 30 minutes to calculate just that measly bit of income, I am so unorganized. I had to trawl through emails and my paypal account just to find out my incomings and outgoings. I should really find some kind of software or something that I can use to keep track of all this.

You may be wondering where the adsense income has come from, I have no idea. I have some adsense on this blog, and I also put adsense on the sites that I sell. I should really start setting up some adsense channels and then I would see where the clicks are coming from.

You may also be wondering what the hell happened to my 7 websites in 7 days challenge. If you are wondering what I am talking about you can view the details here. Well my first website sold on sitepoint for $75, I then put up another 2 websites for sale, and they didn't sell. I guess I kind of got discouraged.

Well this month I have a few goals, but they are not money orientated goals. Keep tuned and I will fill you in in a short while.

Site Number 1 Went On Sale Last Night (very late)

OK site number one out of the seven sites went on sale late last night. I was going to write this post yesterday but I was so tired after working all day on the site.

http://marketplace.sitepoint.com/auctions/39578

I'm kind of scared of starting a new one today without knowing if the first one will sell. I am taking a massive risk by pushing out 7 websites in a row each day for 7 days.

How do I know if any of them will sell?

Then I will be $170 out of pocket.

It is scary but I gotta press on, if I don't take risks how will I ever know.

Keeping my fingers crossed.

The 7 websites in 7 days Challenge

I am setting myself a challenge this week. I am going to make 7 websites and sell them on Sitepoint. Timeframe for this challenge is 7 days, so I'm calling this my 7 websites in 7 days challenge.

I am quite scared I have overchallenged myself here, but if I never keep challenging myself and pushing myself further I will not get to where I want to be.

I have worked out this will cost me roughly $170, so it's going to be a big risk to take. Having just worked that out actualy makes me even more scared.

I know I have successfuly sold 2 websites over on Sitepoint last month, but that doesn't mean that all 7 websites will sell.

I have to put my all into this and I have a funny feeling by the end of the week, I will need to be catching up on some housework (and some sleep).

So wish me luck, I think I'm going to need it.

Little Update And Monthly Earnings Report

Yippee I sold my 2nd website over on sitepoint this week for the buy it now price of $299. I think I'm a little more excited about the 2nd site selling than I was about the first.

As it's coming to the end of the month I thought I would do a little earnings report. Now I know that this isn't going to be as big as some other peoples earning reports on their blogs, but it's big for me. I have been studying Internet marketing and making money online for more than a year, but this is the first month I have ever taking any real action, and this month I have made more money than the whole of the year online.

Most other "make money online" blogs only report their incomings but rarely report their outgoings, but I thought I would try something a little different. I am going to show you how much money I have made, where I made it, and exactly what I have spent money on so you can see exactly how much profit I have made. OK here goes:

IM Incomings

Site selling $424
Bum marketing $0

Total $424

IM Outgoings

Sitepoint listing fees $20
paypal fees $16
Hosting (Hostgator) $9.99
PLR articles $25
Domain names (Namecheap) $8.41

Total $79.40

Total profit $344.60

As you can see that's not a bad little profit for my first month of taking action.

Let's see if I can top this next month :).

I feel like I'm wasting time

Well that's how I'm feeling at the moment.

Mind you this month I have made more money online than any other month since I started one year ago. I know I know I have only made $120 dollars (£60), but it's the first month I have really taken any kind of action.

I have another website up for sale on Sitepoint. I listed it for sale two days ago and at the moment the current bid is $145. I spent a lot of time on this website and it will be kind of hard to let it go. But initially I made the site to sell it, so I musn't get too attached. If you would like to check it out here is the URL:

http://marketplace.sitepoint.com/auctions/38919

I am hoping to get a little more for this website, but I will still be happy to let it go for $145. That will take this months earnings up to $265.

So why do I feel like I'm wasting time?

For the last two days I have done nothing but watch the auction. I still realise that making and selling websites is not going to make the the kind of money I want.

But I love the whole process of doing it. I love having the initial idea for a site, then making it. I love the feeling of achievement once the site is completed. I also love putting the site up for sale and seeing it sell.

It is common knowledge that a website will sell for significantly more if you have some traffic and revenue, and if the website is a little older. So maybe that's the road I need to go down next.

It's still all about the instant cash though to keep me motivated. So I think for every brand new turnkey website I make to sell, I Will make one to keep for myself.

I will then get them earning a little money and getting some traffic. Then after a few months I can sell them for more.

What a week!!

First off I apologise for not updating all week, I lost my internet because I didn't pay my bill :-0.
I am so fed up with bills and not being able to afford to pay them. Just yesterday I had to pay out £250 (UK pounds) just on bills alone. I have been thinking about getting a normal job, but there is no way that is possible right now, with one 5 year old who needs taking to school and picking up, and a three year old who is about to start nursery. So I will be back and forth the school all day, when would I get chance to work.

So my only option is to keep plugging away online which by the way I am thoroughly enjoying :).

Anyway I am sorry about the rant,let's get down to business.

Before my internet was cut off I ordered reseller hosting, and had a little play around with it, but I am a non-techie person and couldn't understand it one bit. So I am in the process of canceling that account and just going with a baby croc account. I do realise I need to have some paid reliable hosting if I'm to make any kind of serious money online, so I think for now this account is better for me whilst I get my head around the basics.

Another thing I have realised is that even though I enjoy making and selling websites, it's not going to make me rich. I spend about 4-5 days to make one, and it takes roughly another 5 days to sell it. Most turnkey websites sell for no more than $250 (at the most). So if I work constantly on just that I will only be making that much a week, and then the website is not always guaranteed to sell.

Don't get me wrong building and selling websites is a great way to earn a little bit of quick cash, and I will be doing it from time to time, but it's not where I am going to be focusing all my energy.

I need to be thinking about long term residual income that can keep growing month after month. Maybe affiliate (bum) marketing is the right way to go for this.

Oh I don't know, when it comes to different ways to make money online there are just too many choices and it becomes hard to just stick to one. But if you never stick to one and always chase the next thing you will never get nowhere fast.

I think I have a few choices to make. I will let you know of any new developments. I would love to hear from anyone, so if you have any comments, comment away below :).

:) I Sold My First Website :)

I am so unbelievably happy right now. After a long five days of waiting my website finally sold in that last few hours of the auction. I can't quite believe it.

In the last couple of days of the auction I decided to lower the minimum bid price and buy it now price. I am not sure if this is what made a difference or not.

So in the end the site sold for $125 :) :).

How happy am I?

Even though it eventually worked out at £60 in British pounds profit after paypal fees, that's still the most I have made in one transaction online.

All that's left to do is to transfer the site.

Apart from that I have been pretty busy the last few days writing some articles for some people over on digital point forums. Once I have finished with them I can get back to my bum marketing challenge.

I am also thinking about hosting now I have some money to spend. I think I am going to go with hostgator, but I will check around first. I am also thinking about reseller hosting.

Reseller hosting would be great because I can continue to build sites for selling and offer hosting with them aswell. I may be getting ahead of myself here but all kind of ideas are popping into my head right now.

Anyway I am so happy right now, I will keep you posted when I decide what I am going to do next. :) :) :).

My Site Officialy Up For Sale

Omg my site is officialy up for sale. I'm quite nervous actualy.

All I can do is sit here and keep my fingers crossed.

If you want to check out the auction it's listed here

http://marketplace.sitepoint.com/auctions/37080

Good luck me :).

Running Into Difficulties

Well my site isn't up for sale yet :(.

It seems every time I manage to get something going something else gets in the way. My site was all ready to go two days ago, when I decided to pop onto the Warrior Forum for a browse. I came across a post about someone trying to transfer their website to someone else.

So I thought to myself "That's something I'm going to need to know, if I'm planning on selling websites". So I decided to do some research on how to transfer my website to the new owner.

I found plenty of helpful sites but I just can't get my head round what I need to do. The more I read the more confused I got. I even sat at the computer screen at one point trying my hardest not to cry.

I am still sat here now without a clue as to how I properly transfer the website quickly and easily. At first I thought that without knowing this there was no way of me being able to sell it.

But I went to bed last night thinking about it, and now this morning I have made up my mind.
I AM NOT GOING TO GIVE UP!!. I spent days constantly working on the site and I'm not letting it go to waste.

So this morning I am putting my site up for sale on Sitepoint. How am I going to transfer the site?

Well, I am going to clearly state in the auction that the winning bidder must transfer the site themselves. I will have to give them my username and password. If someone is even more clueless than me I can transfer the site for them but I will have to do it the long way, by installing wordpress in their hosting account and transferring it bit by bit.

I will learn how to do this one day, but for now I am not going to sit and dwell on it wasting even more time.

Finaly Finished My Site

Yay I have finally finished my niche site that I plan to sell on Sitepoint. It did take me a while because I wanted everything to be perfect.

I am quite scared actually lol. I don't know why, maybe I am worried that it won't sell or that absolutely no-one will be interested.

Oh well I will never know until I try will I?

A quick update on the bum marketing:

I have not made one single sale yet!
Probably because to be honest I haven't put as much effort into it over the past week. I've been too busy perfecting my site after I lost it last week.

Anyway I am off to do some housework to calm my nerves before listing my website for sale on Sitepoint this afternoon.

I will keep you posted. :)

Half Price Credits At Sitepoint

Yes that's right Sitepoint are offering half price credits up until May 26th. This couldn't of come at a better time for me :).

I've had a migraine the past two days, so havn't really done much, and then I've been beating myself up over not doing much, making my migraine worse. Then this afternoon whilst checking my emails I see one off sitepoint telling me of this offer.

So instead of listing my site for sale for $10 in the turnkey site section I can list it for $5. I have gone right ahead and already bought my credits to list my site, and it's given me the motivation to get it finished as soon as posiible.

For those that don't know Sitepoint is probably the biggest and best marketplace online for buying and selling websites. In fact it's not only about websites, you can also list domain names for sale, and offer your services wether it be article writing or web design.

Every Cloud Has A Silver Lining!

Just as I was putting the finishing touches to my niche site that I plan on selling yesterday, something really strange happened. I'm not sure what it was exactly but it wiped out my entire site. I was so mad and annoyed I couldn't bear to look at the computer screen for at least an hour.

When I had finaly calmed down I reinstalled wordpress, only to find out that I could only install the older version of wordpress, and that I needed to upgrade it.

I was sat there for well over two hours trying to figure out how to update to the new version of wordpress. The longer I was sat there the more frustrated I was getting. I really couldn't imagine what the hell I had done wrong for this to happen to me.

To cut a long story short, in the end I finaly managed to reinstall wordpress, and upgrade it to the latest version. Of course all my hard work was lost, BUT....WOW the latest version of wordpress is just awesome.

So even though I lost all of my hard work, if this hadn't of happened I would never of upgraded my wordpress installation, and this may have caused me problems when it comes to selling the site.

So really the moral of the story is if sometimes things don't seem to be going your way, don't give up hope, sometimes these things happen for a reason. I think you need to have this attitude especialy in this business, because if you give up everytime something bad happens you will never get anywhere in life.

P.S. The other moral of the story is to always always back up your work, if you are using wordpress like me then here is a handy plugin to back up all your files. I will definately be using this from now on :).

http://www.ilfilosofo.com/blog/wp-db-backup/

My First Ezine Article Accepted

Yay I had my first ezine article accepted yesterday, and boy did they make me wait :). I submitted the article near enough a week ago, and I was beginning to get a little bored from waiting too long.

Whilst I have been waiting I have been working on my first website that I'm going to flip. It's nearly finished now, just have to do a bit of cleaning up on there. Once I have finished the website I am going to go back to some more article writing for my bum marketing challenge.

The idea is to get at least 30 articles out there for my first niche. Once I have my 30 articles published I can begin to test and track what works best, for more click throughs and more product sales.

I don't want to just stick with ezine articles. So I'm going to write my original article, submit it to ezine articles, then I will rewrite it and submit it to a couple more article directories.
Here are a list of my top 10 article directories I that I will be using, I hope you find it useful :).

Ezine Articles
Go Articles
Buzzle
Article Base
Article alley
Article City
Article Dashboard
Articles Factory
Articles-Hub
Article Biz
Article World

Money and Goals

I know I know money doesn't make you happy, but in my honest opinion I think it can definitely help. I have two beautiful children, a wonderful boyfriend, a pain in the butt dog called Jess :), one cat called chips and two cute kittens, so you could be wondering that I have pretty good life. Don't get me wrong I DO, but I am sick and tired of worrying about money.

These days it's money this and money that, everything costs money. The bills are mounting and I am always in a panic because we can't always afford to pay them. The reason I want to earn more money is to provide a better life for my children, they don't get an awful lot and it would be nice to treat them once in a while.

Well that's enough of my ranting :) (for now anyway :p).I kind of have a short term goal of £5000 (about $10,000). That would be enough to pay off my debts and take my children to Butlins.

So how do I plan on making £5000?

Well I am still continuing with bum marketing, as you can see in my last post I have my first squidoo lens up and running. I have wrote a few articles for ezine articles to promote the lens, but I'm still waiting for them to be approved. While I am waiting I am working on my first website flip. I will also be writing some articles to sell.

As of today I have made zero amount of money from the time I first started this blog, but it all takes time. I will keep working towards my goal, and see where I end up.

Until next time :)

My First Bum Marketing Lens :)

OK so it's not my very first lens, but it's my first one dedicated to bum marketing. You will find my lens here:

http://www.squidoo.com/kingdomofpets-sitstayfetch

I was going to do a squidoo lens and a blogger blog promoting the same product, but yes I've changed my mind again. I think it would be pretty pointless at this moment in time. I would just have twice as much promoting to do, and I am eager to just start promoting this lens.

To be honest I am not overly pleased with my lens, but I am happy I made a start, and it can always be improved upon as time goes on. I would love any feedback on it :).

My next step is to use all my keywords I looked up on my keyword dig tool and write some articles to send to article directories.

I have a couple of other things in the pipeline too :). I really really wanted to buy a domain for this blog and move it over to a self hosted wordpress site. But I didn't want to spend my last few pounds in my paypal account on this in case I could think of a better use for it.

I have previously bought a domain that I'm doing nothing with so I plan on building a website with that domain and selling it on sitepoint. It costs around $10 to list a site for sale in the turnkey section on sitepoint. So I figured if I use the money for this, and my site sells, I will have money for a domain name for this blog and maybe make some money back.

So fingers crossed and be sure you check back to see how I'm getting on with my article marketing campaign.

p.s I've just realised us Brits have to work twice as hard to make money online ;).

Keyword and Niche Research- Is it essential for a bum?

I havn't managed to get any squidoo lenses or blogger blogs up and running yet as I have had a busy couple of days looking after (omg) seven kids. No they're not all mine :), five of them were my sisters.

What I have managed to do is a little niche and keyword research. Is this essential ? Well yes I would say it is. I will explain a little more about this in a moment.

First I should tell you I have decided that I am not going to do three niches in one go, instead I am going to do one niche a week for the forseeable future. However I am still going to do one blogger blog and one squidoo lens for each niche, to test which one converts better.

Anyway back to keyword and niche research. For the first part of my research I went to clickbank to check out their marketplace. I had a thorough dig around all the products and chose one that I would like to promote.

I chose a product in the dog training niche. I know dog training is a popular niche and it may well be over saturated, but as I have a dog myself, and I know how hard it can be to train them I wanted to give this niche a go.

To do my keyword research for the dog training niche a downloaded a free tool called keyword dig. It is a completely free download and if you want you can download it from here.

I open keyword dig and type in my main keyword which is "dog training". Then I click on "gather keywords". Keyword dig then brings up a load of keywords that are related to dog training. Next to the keywords it also shows how many times that each particular keyword was searched for on the search engines.





I don't know how much you can make out from that picture, but you get the general idea right?

Next I click on "Gather Data" and then this tool will show you how many competing websites there are for this particular keyword.

To make good use of my keywords I want to find ones that have a high number of people serching for them, and a low number of competing sites. Keyword dig shows daily figures. So I am going to take note of all the keywords that have no less than 33 daily searches and no more than 50,000 comptitors. For some people these figures can vary they may want keywords with less competitors for example. But this is what I am going to stick with.

I will use these keywords to write articles to promote my my lens and blog.

So that's niche and keyword research summed up for you. My next step is to build my squidoo lens and my blogger blog promoting the dog training product. I will post a link to both when I am finished so you can see exactly how I have set them up.

This has been a rather long post so I'm gonna leave it there, but if you have any questions or have anything to add to this please feel free to comment.

My Big Bum Marketing Challenge

I am going to start off today by giving myself a new challenge. Bum Marketing.

If I could explain bum marketing in one paragraph I would say that it is marketing or promoting someone else's products, and getting paid a commission if you make any sales. So if you like you are kind of an online sales person.

Now the word "bum"plays a big part in this, because like "bums" I will be doing this with no money. Of course if this experiment proves to be successful I may invest some money, but only if I make that money first.

The first thing I will be doing today is picking three niches. The reason I am going to pick three niches is because I want to test different niches, but if you are doing the same as me you could just start with one.

When I have picked my niches I am going to go to clickbank and commission junction and pick one product to promote for each niche.

Then I am going to build one squidoo lens for each niche, and one blogger blog for each niche. Both squidoo and blogger are free to use so I won't be spending any money there. So basically I will have six kind of mini websites that are not costing me a penny.

The reason I am making two sites for each niche is because again I want to track and test which one either blogger or squidoo will become more profitable.

I will be integrating my affiliate links into my blogs and lens.

Anyway I think that is enough to get me started for one day. If you have any questions feel free to ask.

Introductions

Hiya my name is Clare Hayes and I am a stay at home mum of two young children. I have been trying to make money online for about the last year. I have learnt so much in the last year ( in the beginning I didn't even know what a blog was) and I know I have so much more to learn.

As of right now I have £8.72 in my paypal account. I know your probably wondering that's not a lot of money for a years worth of work. So why haven't I earned more? In fact I have earned slightly more than that but most of it has gone on ebooks and three domain names I have purchased.

The reason why I haven't earned an awful lot is because I am a massive procasinator. I start projects and don't finish them. I get distracted by msn, facebook, online poker, and forums. Maybe I've been scared of failure, but now I realise if I never stick to anything and put my all into it I will always fail.

Now it's time to change, to really make a go of making money from the comfort of my own home, because if I don't stop reading and learning and don't start taking action I never will.

So I hope you will stick around and find out whether I really can succeed. I will be sharing with all the information I already know and what I learn along the way.