Another Blog About Making Money Online - First Post/Introduction

Hello and Welcome,

This first post will act as an introduction, some background information on me, what you can expect to get from this blog, what I do, what I have done and what I expect to do with regards to making money online.

The title of this blog has been chosen as there are an umpteen number of blogs and website around which focus on the subject of making money online.  Most of them provide very little information on making money online, they are simply there, not to provide useful information, but to try and sell you some guide or ebook on how to make a fortune online.  Most of them in my opinion are rubbish.  Why would someone who is supposedly making thousand of dollars a day/week/month online go to the effort of writing a book about it and sell it for just $47 or $97?  Usually they say they want to help others to be as successful as they are, I would love to believe it, but I don't.

I expect the only money they make online is from selling ebooks on how to make money online.

So your probably thinking I'm just doing the same.  I'm going to be honest with you, I am.  Wait!  I'm not going to try and sell you an ebook, but I do hope to earn some revenue from this blog, probably from banner advertising, affiliate links, the Amazon Associates program, CPA/CPL offers and other methods.

I am mentioning this because I want you to understand that honesty will be the central theme to this blog.  I'm going to create posts with you, the fellow Internet marketer in mind, marketer to marketer, not seller to buyer. 

But the difference is I'm going to cut through the BS, I'm not claiming I make thousands of dollars a month online, I'm not going to post screenshots of accounts with thousands of dollars in them.  I'm not claiming to be an expert or guru.  I'm not going to post pictures of piles of cash or me leaning on a Ferrari or give you some rags to riches story.  I'm going to share my experiences, successes and failures.  I will probably post affiliate links to things which I have used or think are good, but I will always mention that it is an affiliate link.
(An affiliate link is a link to something which will earn me some money, it will not cost you anymore than if you went to the website directly, it's just that I will earn a commission for 'recommending' it, I will explain in detail about affiliate links/marketing).

I plan on providing a basic beginners guide to Internet marketing (IM), the various ways to make money online and ways to get web traffic, you cannot make anything online without traffic.

Then I plan on sharing various methods I have tried and the results.  I will also mention good methods I see, like using free sites like Craigslist and Yahoo Answers to make money online.

So a little about me, I'm from the south coast of England, I started writing articles/guides online about 5 years ago on a site call Squidoo (which has now just closed down), just for fun, earning a few dollars a month from it, then about two years ago I wrote one single article (800 words maybe) which started making me about $100 a month.  I had heard about making money online but never looked into it further than eBay, but after I started making money from that one article I started to look at how I could make more.  Most of the money I make now is still from articles I have written.  The money comes from adverts placed on the page and eBay/Amazon affiliate programs (I will make a post about this).  But I have started trying other methods recently and will post results of those.

So I'll show you my progress so far

The articles I have written have been read over 250,000 times
Two websites with 75,000 visitors a month together
Youtube video with 100,000 views
Facebook Pages with total 6000 Likes/Fans

Amazon Associates sales $10,000 (5%-10% Commission earned on sales)
Online Article Earnings $1000
Content Locking/App Installs $1200
Google Adsense Earnings - Sorry it is against Adsense TOS to disclose earnings!
(But Adsense is NOT my main source of income online)
Clickbank Sales $75

So you can see I have started to build up some traffic/views and have tried various methods to make money from them.  I will create separate posts about making money from each of them and other methods I am using/testing.

****Update 21/5/2016****

Wow!  So it has been over a year since I started this blog and I must admit it hasn't developed as much as I had expected, I got no one else to blame, I have just been busy with college, work, life, volunteering and I have been a bit lazy; this is probably one of the biggest problems with being self employed/working from home/working online.

There is no boss telling you what to do, there are no deadlines, you don't have to get up everyday and be in work by 9:00 am, quite often I will wake up at 11:00 am, have something to eat and binge watch a few episodes of Breaking Bad!

Another problem with Internet Marketing is that if you do loads of work and make no money you lose motivation to keep working, conversely if you make lots of money you lose the motivation to do more work as you already have money coming in.  Luckily I'm in the latter category, ok I'm not making LOADS of money but I do have a steady online income but I'm at the mercy of Google, if they decide to deindex my site tomorrow I'm basically screwed!  So I'm going to try and put more effort in to this blog and try and create a secondary decent online income.

I'll give you a little update on my earnings since I first wrote this post.

My online article writing income is steady, about $1 a day but I haven't written anything in over a year.
My Adsense earnings are steady too, again I can't disclose how much I earn but it's not enough to retire on!
Amazon Associates is about the same with the odd sale here and there.

The real big changes are with my websites, one got deindexed! :(

But the other one is growing day by day, probably because I have been adding new content regularly and aggressively tracking down content thieves and getting those sites and blogs removed by filling DMCA complaints.  I am now getting about 5000 visitors a day which is really good!

The majority of my earnings now come from my big website and content locking, in the past 12 months I have made over $10,000 which is enough to support me living in a Mediterranean country where the cost of living is much lower than my home country of the United Kingdom.