Hey, YOU!
You’re here because you want to make money, right?
Well, stop wishing and start doing something about it!

Read this blog.  In fact, read all that you want.  The truth of the matter is that you’ll never earn a single penny if you don’t do anything about it.

I’ve never spoken at seminars nor have I ever been featured in the paper, but if you want to start making money online in 24-hours, Ewen Chia can help you.  This is what he has to say about his program:

Listen, nobody wants to beat his head against the wall trying to succeed.

Only an idiot would actually enjoy sweating and missing sleep and giving up family time just to sit and wait every day for money to roll in…and never see a penny.

But the sad news is that the vast majority of people who ever try to create an Internet business do exactly that — they work, they wait and absolutely nothing happens.

I don’t want you to have to settle for that. What I’ll show you is

• A simple plan that’s easy to do (it takes about 2-3 hours to set everything up, and I’ll walk you through every step)
• Dirt cheap, and mostly free (you’ll probably need about $25-50 maximum for everything you need to buy, like a domain and hosting)
• A method that pays off fast (yes, you can and probably will see profit in 24 hours or less)

If you want to start making money as soon as tomorrow, get this program.  It comes with a 60-day, 100% money back guarantee!

Go get it now and start making money online.  You’ll be glad you did!

Like any business, the chances that you will succeed at getting paid to blog is very small if you don’t know what you’re doing.  And chances are, you don’t know what you’re doing. Even though blogging is easy enough for anyone to do, it’s not easy to do it right and even more difficult to succeed in a competitive niche such as “making money online” blogs. John Chow, Darren Rowse from Problogger, “Shoemoney” and other super bloggers have worked hard to get where they are in status and success, but when looking at their sites from the outside it’s hard to tell how much hard work they’ve done in building their blog to achieve their current levels of success. This gap between their hard work and our perception of their hard work is what draws the masses to start blogging, but the odds are that you haven’t worked nearly as hard and won’t work that hard in the future either, and that’s why you’ll fail at blogging.

Here’s the good news: You can succeed if you really want to. If you really really want to, you too can be a successful blogger but it won’t be easy. You’ll have to posses certain qualities in order win at this game, and I’m going to show you how to do it.

Build Relationships

If you’re a blogger, chances are you know of other blogs in your niche. You have your favorite blogs and know who your favorite bloggers are. You know what they write about, you know what you like and you know what you don’t like.  If you’re a good blogger and want to be successful, you need to build a relationship with these bloggers.  Send them an email and introduce yourself.  Participate in discussions with them on blogger forums.  Kiss up a little bit.  Swallow your pride if you have to.  These bloggers are people just like you and welcome communication with fans and people from that admire their work.  Get to a point where you feel comfortable with your writing and then ask them to do a guest post.  Keep in touch with them and maybe they’ll share the love with you. A guest post is a great way to build an audience and in the long run, your relationship with the bigger bloggers will only serve to strengthen your blog.

Don’t be Stuck Up

As a newbie blogger, you are already fighting an uphill battle. There are countless other bloggers just like you, likely talking about the very same things. If you come off as a stuck up blogger right from the start, then chances are your readership will flatline in no time and you might as well pack up quit blogging. Nobody wants to read from a newbie blogger who sounds stuck up and has no credibility to back their words. If you are going to be controversial and challenge your readers, you need to first prove yourself by providing real content and value to your readers. They are the ones to whom you need to cater. You need to have a helpful attitude, treat your readers like you really want them to be there, and make sure to cater your posts to your audience based on post comments and feedback they provide you. Keep your ears up and listen to what your audience has to say…without an audience you will be failing fast!

Stick to it!

Finally, the last thing you can do (and in my opinion, probably the most important) is to keep blogging. Even if your blog starts off slow. Even if you haven’t been able to meet a lot of other bloggers. Even if you get criticism from your readers. Keep doing it. This is the reasons why so many blogs just die. The author will get tired of writing and will stop at some point. When they get back to it they’ll notice that their audience has dwindled and their influence has gone down the drain. They’ll then notice that getting back into the swing of things will be more difficult than they expected so they’ll just give up. If you really want to make in blogging, then you’ll never give up. Don’t quit typing. Set a schedule and stick to it. Make yourself goals; be it a number of posts per week or a number of of people to contact. Keep your list of goals visible and handy, and keep yourself accountable.

This article was meant to give you a scare and a jolt. I wanted to write an article that would make you to realize that blogging is getting to be big business. There are millions of ad dollars to be made every year and you should realize right now, that blogging is a business. You have to have a certain entrepreneurial spirit, competitive drive, and “stick-to-it-iveness” in order to grab a piece of the advertising dollar pie. Do you have what it takes? Will your blog be around in a year? If you build it, they will come. But if you build it right, so will the advertisers.

I’ve been feeling more and more entrepreneurial lately, and with that feeling of excitement and exploration normally comes some sort of opportunity. Reading the local newspaper last week my wife saw that our city was holding a “startup weekend” and encouraged me to join. So, without skipping a beat I ran upstairs and signed up for the Startup event.

“What is Startup Weekend you ask? Startup Weekend is a intense 54 hour event bringing together brilliant tech minds (developers, designers, marketers, ect.) together to create a company from concept to launch!”

So, this weekend will be VERY exciting and very busy. There’s an online community that is abuzz with ideas and chatter about what we will be founding and building this weekend. Anything is possible; there will be 99 others with me with skill sets ranging from programmers to legal aid, cooks to user experience, we will all be working hard to create a stellar idea and launch it by Sunday night.

I’m in one of the bigger groups, the user experience group. Together with about 20 others, we will come up with a solid design concept, user interaction components, usability innovations and anything else that we can imagine to make our idea pop.

Past Startup Weekends have started the following companies:

• Skribit: “Skribit is a user-generated content suggestion application for blogs. Effortlessly assemble what your readers really want to hear.”
• VoSnap.com: “It’s group voting…in a snap! Ask questions and get answers fast using text messages and emails. With vosnap, it’s decided.”
• Favoreats.com: “Favoreats is a great way to share local food recommendations with your friends. Simply put, it helps you find the best dish in town.”
• TipDish.com: “TipDish is a social media directory and wire service that is designed to connect influencers. With this service, leaders in social media including bloggers, podcasters and videocasters (Dishers) receive the latest news, information, products and info from companies, organizations, PR and Marketing Professionals (Tippers).”
• ScrollTalk: “Scrolltalk is a new take on chat. We like to think of it as Interest Messaging. It cuts through the noise of regular chat rooms and allows you to engage in relevant conversations. Your conversations are ever evolving, and move in a direction that suits you.”

And more! I’m excited to be part of this event and am looking forward to starting something up from scratch. I hope that the 99 others will be at their most creative this weekend! I’ll tell you all more about it…on Monday!

Have a great weekend, I know I will!

January has been a great month for me online, all things considered. I’m glad to see that this blog is on an upward trajectory but I would like for February to be an even better month. January was basically the launching point for this blog; not many people visited the site before this month and in January I made 3 guest posts for Tyler Cruz, two for JohnCow.com, and one for Israel at FatManUnleashed.com. Guest posting put me in touch with a very wide audience and it gave me a chance to sound off some of my ideas on more successful bloggers. January put me on the map, so to speak; RSS readership tripled and visitors were coming in regularly.

Before I tell you how much I made this month, let me first give you a bit of background. Last year I managed to earn approximately $400 total online by promoting a health-related affiliate product. That website is still ranking reasonably well on Google, has great potential to rank in the top 10, but has not been converting any sales in the last 3 months as I have not had any time to work on it. Reworking that site will be priority number one for me in February as that site brings in commissions ranging from $20 to over $100 when sales are made. I believe that this product is capable of helping make even more money this year and I’m looking forward to working with a friend and talented writer to help turn that site from a dud to a stud.

This website is continuing to grow; comparatively speaking this site is still very small. Averaging only 50 or so visits per day and 34 RSS readers, I would like to double or triple those numbers in February and I’m cooking up some strategies and more guest posts to help me achieve that goal.

This is how things turned out in January:

In January, I earned $212 online. This is a combined income consisting of a paid review and private ad sales on this website and my recently built “made for eBay” sites. The eBay websites can be optimized further by applying a few more SEO techniques and I think that the numbers in February will be even better. In addition, I am planning another 3 or 4 “made for eBay” sites in February so that alone should help bump up my monthly income.

As you can see, I also had some expenses. The advertisement expenses were to promote the site in addition to my search engine marketing scheme that I’m working on. The search marketing campaign is still on going and I’m tweaking it with my friend and business partner so that we can figure out what works and what doesn’t really work. So far we’re down a few bucks but we’re on the rebound. In addition, I purchased the phpBay Pro API that lets me get eBay auctions on hand-made sites, not just Wordpress sites. The API is pretty good, but after working with both I prefer the flexibility and options of the Wordpress plugin. It’s definitely worth my while and as you can see I’ve already made my money back on that investment.

So, this is where we stand. January has been a decent month with $212 revenue. I expect that February will be an even stronger month and look forward to reporting what happens in the month to come!

Let’s face it. Change is a part of life. You do things differently today than you did months ago. Chances are that you made some new year’s resolution that required some change on your part. Unfortunately, change is not always easy. I’ll go as far as to say that change is hard! Nobody likes to change…we have so much momentum going in our current direction that in order for us to stop, analyze or realize that something needs correction and then to apply the necessary change takes a whole lot of time and effort from us.The thing that even trumps effort is the fact that change is hard. Creating new habits, inventing new processes, embracing our creativity and all the other things that comes with change is not easy for most people. Below I outline the top 5 things that make change difficult. Learn these things and be aware of them so that next time change is necessitated on your part, you’ll recognize these items and be better prepared to make a successful transition!

1. Change is difficult. Any kind of change is difficult because you have to start doing things differently. It means letting go of your old way of doing things; a new way of life, so to speak. If change is to be successful, you must persevere and agree to do things differently for a certain time period. Commitment to change is key to success.
2. You may be happy with the way things are. The “status-quo” is a comfortable place. You know how things work, you know why things exist and you know how to get things done. The thing is that if you wish to make things better, easier, more efficient, and more streamlined then you need to let go of the way things “used to be”. One of the hardest aspects of change for me is learning (or figuring out) how to do things better. This usually means doing things differently and this process is normally confusing and uncomfortable.
3. You many not be ready for change. Some people or websites are too quick on the trigger and make changes before the blog or business site is ready for change. I’ve made that mistake in the past. That is, shortly after creating a website that was on its way to making me a little money I decided to completely redesign the site. After the redesign, visitors were not clicking through nor making purchases and my online income suffered. The site wasn’t ready for change and by me forcing a new design, things turned sour.
4. You may not understand what needs to be changed. Everything has a learning curve, even blogging. To be successful, I believe that you should use the “review and revise” method so that you’re always looking back and changing the bad for good. This can be a web design or a process that you do on a daily basis. The hard part is recognizing what is bad and what is good. Understanding the difference is hard and adds a degree of difficulty to change.
5. You may be threatened by change. When people give you suggestions or critiques, or when you realize that some kind of change is necessary, one of your first reactions will be to either be defensive or to be intimidated by change. This is because you may not have been aware that such a change was necessary or because you may not even have known that anything was wrong in the first place. Don’t be threatened by comments or critiques, but rather, look at them as a chance to make your site just that much better!

Aside from the fact that change is hard, change is a powerful and positive force in everything we do. When we do things differently, we realize that there are different options in the things we do and therefore figure out a way to make our lives easier or better. I encourage you, in your blog, business or personal life, to find something to change and just do it. Do you normally wake up at 8 in the morning to get to work by 8:30? Then change and start waking up at 7. See what kind of a difference an extra hour can make in your day. Do you spell check your blog posts? Start checking them to see what kind of a difference that makes to your readers. Do you want to do better in your business life? Then go to the book store and take a look at the new books out there and buy one or find a friend so that you bounce ideas off of each other. Like the old “Nike” ad said, “just do it!” You’ll be better for it!