Cash Money Mom

My Online Income Total for April 2008

admin — Sun, 04 May 2008 18:17:05 +0000

Well, the numbers are in. My April earnings total was significantly higher than the last few months, coming in at $4580.

My next goal is to make it to $5,000 but for now I am really happy and feel extremely lucky to make this much money online. I work when I want to, though I do try to stick with a schedule of sorts. I take days off when I need to, I have no commute and my work wardrobe is sweatpants or jeans with a t-shirt! Best of all, no boss.

I believe you can earn money online, too. If you want to learn from someone who is really doing it, read my site thoroughly and make yourself a list of action steps to get started. And get started!

Earn Money Online: It’s possible, and it’s not even that hard. How I got started…

admin — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 02:58:10 +0000

I started on my quest to earn money online after my son was born. I didn’t want to go back to work & have my son in the care of strangers all day. I took maternity leave from a job where I was earning about $2,000 per month with horrible hours and so-so benefits. I had no intention of going back, and once I ran the numbers it was a done deal: child care would have cost me at least $800 per month.

Was it worth $1200 to go back to work? I didn’t think so. Could I find a way to make the money, somehow, from home? I figured I’d try.

So I started out learning the basics of website design, getting domain names, various ways to “monetize” a website, etc. I was at a point where I was easy prey for marketers selling “make money from home” hype products. Luckily, I didn’t spend money where I shouldn’t have. I did purchase Site Build It early in my online income career, and it’s a purchase that helped me immensely. Site Build It gave me the framework I still use for making niche websites. It helped me get organized and establish a system for putting together a money-making site. I don’t need SBI anymore, but if I were a beginner it would definitely be a good purchase.

Then I learned how to make money buying and selling used books. This wasn’t entirely online income, since I did have to go out to thrift stores and library sales to find the books. Once I had books to sell, I’d list them on Amazon and sometimes eBay. I’d take a daily trip to the post office to ship the books, and Amazon would deposit the money into my bank account. Not bad. This process was made much easier with the help of a tool called ScoutPal that would give you the market price of any book with an ISBN. With the used books business, I got close to replacing the income I lost by not going back to work. And it was fun, I was home with my son. That was the goal.

Still, I wanted a business that didn’t rely on being out scouting around so much of the time. With the book business I could spend an afternoon searching thrift stores for good sellable books and only come home with a few, making it barely worth the time & gas money. Other times you’d hit the jackpot, but it was unpredictable and fairly time consuming for a part time income. I did most of my work with my son in tow or when my husband took over child care. But I needed another idea…

I invested some money in learning copywriting. It could be a good business on its own, or at the very least a very good skill to have. I read about marketing and business. After a while, it hit me. I wrote an e-book on a topic that I knew well. It was a topic that happened to have a “starving crowd” to go with it, so it was an instant hit.

With the e-book, I put together all of the skills I’d spent years piecing together, slowly, whenever I had free time. The e-book made use of my writing ability, but that was just the beginning. It had to have exposure, of course. So I built a website. It needed to be explained to people in a way that they would want to buy it. So I wrote the sales copy on the website. I did my own SEO, my own website design, everything. And this is how a stay-at-home mom with no special skills began earning a significant income online.

From the e-book I branched out into niche websites that earn Adsense and affiliate income. These are actually easier to put together than the e-book (and the e-book sales site) and are what I will focus on when sharing the methods I use to earn money online. I will recommend products on this blog, but only useful & valuable products that will help you earn money online. I don’t recommend products that I think will keep you stuck in that “chasing your tail” mode where you keep thinking you need to buy something else in order to earn money online.

You have to learn and then take action. You have to figure out what works by doing it, not by buying the hot info product of the week.

That being said, the products I have found useful & valuable have been:

Site Build It

Copywriting Course

Build A Niche Site (BANS)

Desperate Buyers Only This is actually an e-book about how to choose a topic and write and e-book! Even if you’re not writing an e-book, the research techniques she explains for finding in-demand topics are brilliant and worth the price!

Day Job Killer Much better than I was expecting. Explains very straightforward and smart techniques for making money with pay per click (PPC) campaigns. This will teach you a ton about selecting products to promote as an affiliate, getting PPC campaigns up and running, setting up squeeze pages, and making people want the product you’re promoting.

The Super Affiliate Handbook A classic and an essential read if you want to learn how to be a good affiliate marketer.

Read the amazing true story of how one woman, with no previous business experience, earned $436,797+ in 2002 and now earns MUCH MORE than that … just by selling other people’s stuff online!

In her down-to-earth, sincere and often humorous style, Rosalind Gardner guides you through the entire process of building an affiliate marketing business on the ‘Net.

Frequently revised and updated to reflect industry changes, the Super Affiliate Handbook now consists of 236 pages and 124 screenshots that will show you step-by-step how to become a Super Affiliate. You’ll learn how to pick the best affiliate programs, negotiate a commission raise and save time, money and effort on everything from affiliate software to web hosting.

To learn exactly how she does it, Click Here.

I hope this helps.

Earn Money Online: Simple Foolproof Recipe

admin — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 01:58:51 +0000

If you’re looking for an easy & quick way to get set up to earn money online, you can follow this recipe.

1. Browse eBay and pick a niche that is popular & has items that sell at decent prices. eBay pays you half of their fee, which is tied to the final sales price on most items. The exceptions would be eBay Motors items, real estate, businesses for sale, etc. where you’re dealing with tens of thousands of dollars as the sales price. The big ticket items have a different commission structure, and while you can definitely still make good money on them, I want to make sure you understand the 50% commission doesn’t apply in those cases.

That being said, one of the best ways to make money through eBay’s program is with the $25 for new signups that they pay you IF that new signup also BUYS an item.

Make sure it is a tightly focused niche - not just “antiques” but something like “antique quilts” or “early American antique furniture” - make sure it is pretty narrow but also large enough to have several hundred items for sale at a given time.

2. Once you’ve decided on your topic, come up with a domain name and register it. The name will cost you about 10 dollars. Think of a name that is keyword friendly, and using dashes is OK.

For example:

buy-antique-quilts.com

american-antique-furniture.com

2. Get cheap website hosting for your site. This will cost between $5 and $10 per month depending on the hosting company you use and whether you pay yearly or monthly. I like Hostgator. Once you get to Hostgator, select “linux” hosting and go with the “hatchling” plan.

3. Join eBay’s affiliate program.

4. Buy BANS and follow the simple instructions for setting up your site. BANS (Build a Niche Site) is an easy website builder designed to create eBay affiliate websites in literally minutes. You can read a BANS review here.

5. Rinse and repeat. Have fun earning money with eBay’s affiliate program!

My Online Income for March 2008

admin — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 19:52:23 +0000

I’m late posting this - taxes and all - but here is my online income for March 2008.

The total for March including e-book, affiliate, and AdSense income came out to $3624.35! I’m really happy and grateful for this and just want to show you that it is very possible to make a substantial income online. I’ve scaled back my work hours and taken more days off, so my average work time is probably just 3 hours a day.

I want you to be able to do this, too. I enjoy my freedom every day and feel lucky to have this online income. So read my blog to get ideas about how to earn money online.

How to set up a Wordpress blog the easy way so you can earn money online

admin — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 00:55:19 +0000

I have set up about 50 Wordpress blogs on the two hosting companies that I use (Bluehost and Hostgator) so I thought it was time to make a tutorial for you to learn how to set up your own Wordpress blog.

This is, in my opinion, the first step in creating your own profitable niche website. There simply is no better way to run a money-making website than by using Wordpress as your content management system (CMS) - it makes updating easy, it organizes your content for you, and you do have flexibility in your format.

You don’t have to use the blog format with entries arranged on your home page starting with the most recent…etc. You can put all of your content into traditional pages, with any page you want serving as your home page. It becomes more clear as you do it, but the first step is installing Wordpress if you have a domain name and hosting.

If you haven’t gotten a domain name get one now.

If you don’t have web hosting set that up now with Bluehost or Hostgator.

Now go into the Cpanel for the site you just set up hosting for.

Find the Fantastico smiley face and click on it.

That will take you to this page:

On the left side you see a menu - click on Wordpress.

Then you will go to this page:

Click on “New Installation” which will take you to this screen:

You will be installing Wordpress so that it is the home page of your site - meaning you don’t have to go to your home page and then click on “blog” to get to this Wordpress install. So in the “Install in Directory” field you will enter nothing - just leave it blank.

Next is the admin name and password. You can enter whatever you want (I usually enter “admin” as the user name) but you will be entering this every time you get into Wordpress to work on your blog, so pick something that won’t give you any trouble. One of my blogs has a really long user name - it’s a pain. You can always add users later on, too, but this is your primary admin user name/password.

Next…admin nickname. That’s what will appear as your author name so I sometimes use keywords here. You can enter your e-mail address next, then with thesite name and description you can change that later so I always skip it for now.

Next you will enter e-mail info for “blog by e-mail” which I never use, so I just enter a password and leave the default user name and server info. This is also something that you can change later so I don’t pay much attention here, just enter a password and then hit…INSTALL! You can’t see it in my screen shot, but there is a buttin below those fields you just filled out that says “install” so go ahead, install!

Click finish if everything looks ok.

The last screen will show you that it installed ok, and a little lower down on the page it will offer to send the intall details to an e-mail address for you. Good idea, since it will give you the access URL along with your user info. The access URL is going to be http://www.your-domain.com/wp-admin.

That’s it, that’s all you need to do to set up your own Wordpress blog. Now start blogging! You can earn money online with blogs - look around my site for niche topic ideas and more “how to” info.

Online Income for March Screen Shot

admin — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 21:08:25 +0000

I thought I’d post a screen shot showing my income from one of my online income streams. It shows the second half of March and lists sales of an e-book (different prices from different upsells) that I sell in a very profitable niche. You can see one refund was given, which is actually not typical, but oh well.

I also have CJ, Clickbank, Adsense, and other affiliate networks making good money each month but I thought I’d start with showing you PayPal. I will be posting my March total online income soon.

Great Profitable Niche Website or Blog Idea…

admin — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 21:11:59 +0000

Thought I’d share on of my all-time favorite profitable niche ideas for making serious money online. I love this niche for three reasons.

1. It’s a service that people “need” - it’s not just a “want” so eventually they WILL buy, there’s no way around it.

2. When they’re researching this they are ready to buy (or very close to it).

3. They payout is awesome.

Ready?

Keep reading… (more…)

Ways to make money blogging: start a profitable niche blog today

admin — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 01:50:51 +0000

Some bloggers make hundreds of thousands of dollars per year from their blogs. Want to get started blogging? Here are some ways to earn money online by blogging.

First there is Adsense. With Adsense, you make money each time someone clicks on the Google ads running on your site. It’s easy to add the Adsense code to your blog and it can add up to some real income. One of my blogs currently makes $10-15 per day in Adsense income, which is pretty good considering the fact that I only spend about 10 or 15 minutes per day on it. You need traffic to make decent money with Adsense, but it won’t take long before the blog at least breaks even, and then it’ll start paying a bill or two, then it’ll maybe pay the car payment, and so on. Just keep blogging.

The next, and possible much more lucrative, way to make money with your blog is with affiliate links. Some affiliate programs pay extremely well (hint:web hosting!) while others pay a small percentage of sales. So if you sell a book through an affiliate link you may end up with enough to buy a newspaper. If you have tons of traffic this may be worth your while, but I like to find programs that pay $20 and up for sales. They key is to make sure you have relevant affiliate products on the blog, otherwise you’re just junking up your blog with stuff your readers aren’t interested in. That’s not going to make you any money.

I’ll write more soon on making your blog profitable!

Good Online Money Making Niches

admin — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 06:32:55 +0000

Need some money making niche ideas for your next website?

Here are some tried and true niche classics:

dog training
weight loss (crowded niche but lots of money to be made from high paying affiliate programs for diet pills, meal delivery programs, etc)
insomnia cures
making money
free business ideas
favorite TV show (pick a show that’s getting renewed for next season)
American Idol (people get obsessed and will read everything about their favorite contestant)
natural pet food
recipes (pick a specialty)
frugal living
getting out of debt

There are good profitable niches everywhere you look. I’ve even heard of a profitable web site about (this is gross) popping zits. Like I said, I heard about it - I didn’t check it out, so I have no idea what made it so profitable, but it just goes to show you how you can find unlikely money-makers if you just keep your eyes open.

Day in the life of a successful “making money online” entrepreneur

admin — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 06:12:43 +0000

It takes work to make money online, and although the benefits are numerous (setting your own hours, no boss, no commute, I could go on…) you have to treat it like a job. Here’s an interesting post by Yaro Starak who I’ve learned a ton from already, describing what a typical day consists of for him.