Are you hungry but don’t really know how to cook? Do you want to make a good breakfast for your significant other but are intimidated around the kitchen?

Have no fear, Nick is here! I love to cook (especially breakfast), but I think this video can be helpful to some of you who don’t necessarily like the kitchen. Add to this a bit of chopped up ham, cheese, and tomatoes. When it’s done, top it with a bit of salt and oregano and you’ll be enjoying a fine breakfast. Pair it with toast and coffee or juice and this breakfast is sure to please.

Good luck!

Way back in 1963, J. S. Adams established the “equity theory of management”. I find his theory a bit obvious and extremely applicable to entrepreneurs and all sorts of business minded individuals, but I want to discuss this theory with you today.

In short, the theory “attempts to explain relational satisfaction in terms of perceptions of fair/unfair distributions of resources within interpersonal relationships” (1). Very simply put, this theory says that there is a tie between what you feel you are worth in a certain setting and how you feel about your worth or compensation.  In a business setting, this means that an employee may feel like they’re being treated unfairly if they’re paid too little (or too much? Yeah, right.) for their work.  The relationship between the pay for the job and the fairness of the pay based on the amount of work (“equity”) that you put in can lead to either an increase or a decrease in work satisfaction.  Click on the image below to get a bigger version – it’ll help you visualize this theory better.

So what does this have to do with blogging?  Well, it’s pretty straightforward, I think.  How hard to you work on your blog?  What kind of time and commitment are you giving your blog?  How thorough are you when you make posts?  Do you research your topic?  Do you spell check?  Do you make posts that make sense?  Are you active in your blog’s community?  Do you answer the emails that you get?   If you’ve answered “yes” to these questions, then you are definitely working hard and deserve to receive recognition or payment for your work.  If you’ve answered “no” to some or all of these questions and yet you believe that you should be getting paid to blog, then you need to wake up and smell the roses.  There’s a definite tie between the amount of work that you put in and the amount of money that you get paid for your work.

I recently received an email question from a newbie blogger asking for my honest feedback on his blog.  I know it probably was a shot in the dark to send me an email, but I appreciated the note and felt as though this person cared about my opinions.  So I took the time to research his blog, figure out what I thought about it, and compose a nice email detailing my views.  It took about 35 minutes out of my already busy day but I did it as a favor for this guy.  I never received acknowledgment of receipt nor did I receive a simple “thanks” or anything else.  I don’t mean that I felt like I was owed anything, but I what I got out of this transaction was that the blogger didn’t really care to hear about anyone else’s opinions, even though he asked for it.  I don’t think his blog will be around very much longer if he keeps up this attitude.

If you’re involved in your blog’s community and are actively putting in sweat equity into your blog, Adams suggests that somewhere down the road you will feel like you need to be compensated for your work.  And I agree.  How you can be compensated varies, but if you have any kind of audience it is your duty as a blogger to work hard to monetize your site.  Private ad sales, paid reviews, or otherwise,  you need to figure out what kind of payment you want to receive from your blog.  Don’t give up and keep writing!  The money will follow…eventually.

1 – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equity_theory

So Davey Z and I found out today that we were unintentionally violating the terms of service to one of our big search engine marketing campaign programs. This campaign apparently didn’t like us using our domain name to promote them. That’s why our link stopped working roughly a week ago. During this time, I had been working with my affiliate manager to figure out what the problem was but we didn’t figure it out until today.

Up until today I was really happy with my affiliate manager at Azoogle, but the fact that it took him 3 days to tell me why the link stopped working is really unacceptable. I know, I know, I’m still a small fish. I brought in less than $1000 last month so why should he care about my problems, right? Regardless of size, I think he should have been more responsive.

So, lesson learned. Read and understand the terms of service fully before spending money on a campaign. I don’t think we’ll lose any money other than the money we paid for clicks for a few days, but other than that we’ll be in good shape.

What did we get out of this lesson?

1. Pay attention to the fine print. The campaign’s terms and conditions clearly told us not to use a domain name that contained their name. We ignored that and did it anyway. Our mistake. I don’t think it was worthy of an immediate ban but I guess that’s just how they work. No sweat. We won’t lose any sleep over this. There are plenty of other campaigns out there….it’s their loss, ultimately.
2. Check your campaign links every day. We could have saved a few click dollars if we had checked up on our links every day. It tooks us 4 days to realize that our link wasn’t working, and therefore we lost out on PPC dollars. This money, ironically, was our first attempt at scaling this campaign so we were bummed when we found out our link was dead. We didn’t lose all of it, so we’ll find another campaign for sure.
3. Stay on your feet. What happens when you get tossed a curveball? Do you let them throw you a strike or do you swing for the fences? Stay on your feet, keep your eyes open for new campaigns, and have a backup plan in case of emergency. Davey Z and I have talked things over and we’ll meet tonight to hammer out our new plan just in time for the weekend.
4. Learn to move on. Don’t let little setbacks like this keep you down. Sure, we were only running 2 campaigns. This one was our “big” one…it generated most of our income last month. Oh well. Big whoop. We’ll find something else and kick our strategies up a notch.

I learned a few lessons this past week about affiliate marketing. I hope you can learn from my mistakes so that you don’t face the same problems that I did. Remember to stay on your feet, pay attention to your campaigns, and most importantly, don’t ever give up!

Wow, this is a crazy video. Check it out as the wing scrapes the ground as it tries to land in very strong crosswind. The pilot then manages to takeoff again; thankfully nothing bad happened.

March is here and February is already over. Even with leap day and February being a “long” month this time around, I just feel as though time flew by. These few weeks have been exciting and fast-paced. They’ve included seeing the start of new ventures as well as seeing other ventures continue to work.

Online business is never boring and one of the key benefits to making money online is that you can see results and gather data very quickly. In less than 1 month, Davey Z and I have learned a lot about search engine marketing and gathered enough data to be able to anticipate and predict certain patters in our trial campaign. We hope to be able to take what we’ve learned in the last few weeks and scale our projects to make us more money this month, so that we can reinvest it and keep growing.

This is what this month looked like:

In January, my eBay sites had started off nicely, earning me roughly $3.50 per day. February showed a little bit of a slowdown for these sites, although I believe this has to do with my lack of effort in updating those sites. For the month of February, those eBay sites made roughly $2.87 per day, or about $83. Although this is a low number and I’d like to see much better results from those sites, it’s important to remember that I did absolutely no work on those sites this month nor did I invest 1 penny into buying new products/plugins or any advertising. This is $83 that go right into my technology savings fund.

In addition to the made for Ebay sites that are making me some money online, I also kept up this blog and started on a search engine marketing campaign with Davey Z. The blog’s performance was similar to last month’s, although advertising sales are still sluggish. Do you want to see your ad on my site? Contact me by 5pm on Wednesday, March 5th and I’ll give you a special rate! Thanks to Claire from Sharp Wit Designs and a few paid reviews, this site earned $40.50.

The part about this income report that I’m most excited about is the SEM report. Starting in the last few days of January, Davey Z and I launched and managed 4 different campaigns. Two of them turned out to do well and two of them turned out to be dogs. We ditched the dogs and kept the ones that worked. That being said, our total income from our SEM campaign topped out at $721.25. Not bad for our first month, eh? Our total cost for running these campaigs was $367.79, but given that we used some promo coupons to get us started, our adjusted costs came to be only $84.87, for a grant profit of $636.38. This is a great first month! We are going to reinvest these earnings and go all out in March. Hopefully to see these numbers keep growing!

2008 is off to a great start. Breaking records and learning new things, I’ve been able to add to my arsenal of webtrepreneurship. I hope that March is a better month than February; given that Davey Z and I already have a bit of experience with SEM and have data to helps us know what to expect, we hope to keep trucking along and pushing the envelope of our SEM skills.