Wham or Scam

Well, things aren’t going as well as they should be. If you look at the ticker above you will see that the target has just become that little bit further to reach. I had a surprise charge for hosting and domain renewal which totalled nearly £200. I really need to sort out the hosting I don’t need as I have a hosting package with another provider that only costs £6 per month for unlimited websites. It is just too expensive otherwise.

Which brings me to my next point. I have three or four sites that are just sitting there doing nothing for me at the moment, hemorrhaging money that I really do not want to lose. I need to re-focus some time into these sites and claw back some cash. The idea is to have all my sites working for me. They won’t be monetised for affiliate revenue as I have not got the time to promote them properly, but maybe to have unique content filtered to them by submitting the sites to Free Traffic System. The idea is to have these sites primarily focused on AdSense revenue, while still have the door open for affiliate revenue as well. This has additional benefits. If the site generate enough traffic and ad revenue the value of these assets will increase, and the door is left open to eventually sell these sites if I so wish.

It is not what I had hoped for. I am assuming that I just let things run away without stopping to think about the financial costs involved. These things happen though, and I am not afraid to take a step back; look hard at and issue and work to resolve them; even if it means starting from the bottom and working my way up.

Nobody said this was going to be easy…..

OK, just a couple of hours into my outsourcing project and it has turned into an epic fail. Those freelancers are a tough crowd to please, one even reported my post, without giving me a change to amend the errors. Gees, nothing like giving someone a second chance eh?

In all fairness I can see their point. 8 articles for $6, not much money for the work, but then i’m not the only employer to offer crappy compensation. It was only to test the waters and I made an honest mistake (the minimum fixed price bid is apparently $50), but again, i have seen projects that fall far short of that sum. If they didn’t want the job then just move on…

Anyhow, back to post another job. It cost me $10 to post that job, so this time i’ll try and do it right. If I am going to pay $50 for some articles they are going to bloody work for it, especially if I don’t know them and the quality of their work. It works both ways, prove to me that you can do what I want you to do, and i’ll pay you more for the next project.

I have been meaning to outsoruce some of my work for a while now. I have the means to do it (the money), but I got worried about how to go about it. Would it work? How easy would it be to set up a posting? Will the work be good enought quality?

I finally posted a job on a freelance website today. It is early days, but hopefully this will allay some of my fears. Article writing is not one of my strong points. I did it because it was necessary to get where I am today, and this would never have happened if I had outsourced my work from the start. You cannot tell someone how to write articles and get them to rank in the search engines if you don’t know the mechanics and techniques behind it. You only get that experience by doing it yourself; starting from the ground up!

Now my priority is to make the best use of my time. I am forever getting distracted (another of my not-so-strong points) and I procrastinate far too long about what makes a good article, when in reality the articles I wrote without thinking about it is pulling in far greater traffic that the ones that took be 2 hours. Now, with the resources behind me I can let somebody else take the burden and let me concentrate on the things I do well.

The bad points…

I have not come across any bad points to outsourcing yet, but the loss of control is a little unsettling. Still, if it really doesn’t work then I can always go back to writing my own articles.

It will also mean that that ticker at the top will be decreasing a little (until I start seeing more commissions that is). Not a bad thing, this is an investment in time and money.

Just one more thing…

I mentioned in my last post that the monthly price for Wealthy Affiliate will increase on June 7. The new monthly price, being introduced on 7th june 2010, is $97 per month, a BIG hike from the $37 per monthly currently charges. Whilst this is an incredible financial commitment, the resources available at Wealthy Affiliate University justifies the price.

If you want to grab the $37 per month price tag then you need to sign up BEFORE June 7th. It may well be the best $37 per month you ever spend

CLICK HERE to join Wealthy Affiliate University.

OK, I am almost there in paying off my LPC debt, something which Project 2011 was aiming towards – replacing the £127 per month repayments with income from Internet Marketing. There is no longer a need for this expenditure to be replaced.

My goal now is to save up for a deposit for a house. Yep, I don’t do things by halves.

So this is the situation. Before all the trouble with the  sub-prime loan market and the near collapse of the economy, banks were lending up to 100% (and in some case more) of the value of the property. Those days are over, and unlikely to return. To be able to get a mortgage in this day and age you need at lease a 10% deposit. To get an affordable deal on your mortgage repayments you need a 25% deposit on the property.

So, here’s for the calculations:

Lets say for example that I earn £16,000 per year before tax, I have no partner and I have £250 per month loan repayment commitments as a safety blanket (in case I need to buy a car etc). I could only borrow a maximum of £46,800, which at an interest rate of 7.5% (just as an example) on a repayment term of 30 years would be around £330 per month. Great, cheaper than renting. BUT, for that money I would only get a shed to live in. Which means that the only way I am ever going to afford a house would be to buy shared ownership. The problem with this is that you have to pay rent on the share of the property you do not own (specified rent), which can make the monthly outgoings as much as £600 per month, depending on the specified rent payable.There is also additional expenditures such as Service Charges which also add up.

That mortgage amount will also be subject to a minimum 10% deposit from me. So, 10% of £46800 is £5,200. To get a better rate I would need a 25% deposit which is £13,000.  So, I’m going to aim the bar high and say £15,000 over two years, which is £7,500 per year. This money will be saved mostly through Internet Marketing.

You can track my progress with the new ticker at the top of the post.

Refocus

I have come to the conclusi0n that in order to make a consistent income I need to focus some attention on my old sites. There needs to be much more work in terms of backlinking and article submission for all of the sites. There also needs to be a little tweaking for one of my campaigns which is showing some promise, but has no website yet.

Stage 1:

• Continue to write, submit and backlink for my site http://www.ewroughtironlighting.com.
• Continue to backlink for my site http://www.holidaysuncapeverde.co.uk. This site is making me money, I just need to get it higher in the google rankings.
• Forward a domain in my Solar Power niche for some articles that have insane conversion rates. This is peasy, I just need to set up a forwarder and hopefully ka-ching!

Stage 2.

• Write, backlink and submit on my site http://www.holidaysunkenya.co.uk.
• Write, backlink and submit on my site http://www.holidaysafarikenya.co.uk

Stage 3:

• Set up websites for Holidays to Turkey and Mexico.

This should hopefully give me plenty to do and earn me some money. There is nothing like aiming for a goal to keep you motivated. Until all the above is done, there will be no more niche websites set up. I cannot spread myself too thin, it doesn’t do any of the sites any justice.

Note: all the reference to mortgages and repayments are an example only. I am NOT a mortgage expert or a financial advisor. Don’t take any of my information about mortgages in this post seriously.

Well, the transfer to another host didn’t go too well. The files were all uploaded but the site won’t load, so I had to point the servers back to my old host. I guess I’ll be sticking with them for another year. You win some you lose some.

I have some catching up to do. I have to get all my accounts in order so I can get some of my expenses back . It is boring work though. I also have to draw up some kind of spreadsheet about where I am submitting all my articles too. I just get so lost about how many articles are out there. The problem is that this weekend there is not much time to do it, so busy with other things .

Shameless plug alert!!!

OK, sorry about this but for anybody who was thinking about joining Wealthy Affiliate you might want to think about joining sooner rather than later. The monthly price is set to increase dramatically on 7 June. No word as of yet by how much but for anybody who joins before 7 June you will only pay the $39 per month fee, even when the price goes up.

More news as it comes in…

My yearly hosting subscription is ready to be renewed in 4 days, unfortunately for the hosting company I am going to part company with them and move the hosting for this site to my Hostgator account. It’s nothing personal, but hostgator sites are so easy to manage and are so much cheaper it is just not worth renewing the current hosting.

What this means for you.

All the files for this site are uploaded onto my current hosting package. I need to set up a site at Hostgator and point the DNS (Domain Name System) settings to the new servers on the hostgator account. I then have to save and transfer all the files from the old host, and upload them to the hostgator account so I keep all the current settings. It sounds simple and it should be simple; however, it inevitably means that this site will not be accessible when the DNS settings have been changed as it takes a little while for the new servers to be found. Once they have been found, and if I am able upload the old files to the new account, everything should be all dandy.

If something does go wrong and this site is not up and running in 2 days or more visit http://www.crushthecreditcrunch.com. It is a website-in-development but I can post any urgent updates if things go wrong.

I’ll see you on the other side…..

I pulled the experiment. I got too nervous as the adsense was running on a website that was pulling in some nice commissions and I just can’t help thinking that I was diverting the potential sales away.

On the other hand I did learn something. It is a LOT easier to convert someone with AdSense. All they have to do is click, and ching, the money is yours. No trying to convince them the product is worth buying. AdSense has come a LONG way since I first started Internet Marketing, the ads are a lot more targeted to the specific visitors to your site; and depending on where you place the ads you are likely to get clicks.

Having said that, the principles of SEO apply. Get your website to the top of google and you will get more visitors. The more visitors, the more likely your ads will get clicked, the more money you may make.

The earnings from the clicks I did generate were a little surprising. I mentioned in my previous post that I was aiming for around £0.25 per day. Without going into specifics (because it’s against the AdSense TOS) the average £ per day was higher than that, so the potential for some not-so-insignificant income really is there.

My future plans include building some websites especially for AdSense. I don’t want to abandon the idea altogether. AdSense, once the SEO on the sites has kicked in, will generate (hopefully) a steady income, while my affiliate sites will give my IM a monetary boost. I also plan to draw up a step-by-step guide on how to set up and promote both affiliate and AdSense sites. However, this is for the future so stay tuned.

Well, this is probably going to be the last post until mid-May as I am on holiday(vacation) from the 3rd. I love my internet marketing, but it is great to ‘switch off’ sometimes

http://www.whamorscam.com

P.S. If you are wondering why I am putting my web address in this post (and every post from now on) it is because I have found clones of my site in different languages all over the net. I am not entirely sure whether this is a good thing, it seems to be as the backlink checks that I have carried out on this site shows the scraper sites are Do Follow. Plus, all my affiliate links seem to be intact, as far as I know anyway. So, if anybody picks this post up, plops it in their site – a free backlink for me and my site. BONUS!