Last week my wife and I just got back from a vacation in Maui which definitely was a much needed break from the internet hustle. In fact while I was there I did absolutely zero work, which for those that know me is like a week in rehab.

While there much of our time was spent sitting on the beach doing nothing at all other than reading a book or watching the waves roll into the warm sand in front of us. Quite a bit of time I was able to spend time thinking about my business instead of working in it.

So often I get so caught up in working in my business that I don’t take the time out, unplug, and really think deeply about where I am going and what I’m doing to reach my long term goals. If you haven’t taken a few days off away from your computer and cell phone for awhile, I highly suggest you do. It is amazing what I’ve learned and thought of in the week away from my business.

Lessons From a Menu Guy

One night while in Maui we decided to head into Lahaina to shop a bit and grab some dinner. We walked past a guy standing in front of a restaurant holding a menu. Obviously he was working for the restaurant to lure tourists in to eat whatever they had to offer. While walking by I was waiting to get the sales pitch, but instead, he just looked at me, we both smiled, and then we walked past without him saying a word to us.

I thought maybe he didn’t work there or possibly he was the shy type. A few hours later we were walking on the other side of the street and there he still was, standing in front of the restaurant holding the menu out not saying a word as people passed by.

We ended up going to a burger place that was right next door to where he was and the business man inside of me was happy when we were seated at a table on the balcony overlooking the sidewalk where this guy was “working”.

I watched hoping to see him in action. Obviously the guy was getting paid to be there so what was his angle? In the hour or so we were there I watched closely and counted a few hundred people walking by and only 1 person he talked to. From the looks of the conversation and some pointing, that person had just asked for directions.

Every 1-3 minutes he’d reach in his pocket, pull out his phone and look at the time. He probably did that 20 times in an hour. He’d also study and read the menu making it look like he was busy. Between that he’d pace back and forth giving passers by a polite smile as they walked on by.

To someone walking on the sidewalk this guy looked like he was working. He was probably a busy guy.

From my point of view however, he did absolutely nothing to get people into the restaurant. I actually only saw 1 couple walk in and they didn’t even make eye contact with our menu friend.

So here is this guy making money by acting like he was busy, when in reality what he was doing didn’t help the bottom line of the business at all.

Are You The Menu Guy?

I started thinking about this guy and how sometimes I can relate to him. Obviously he wasn’t the most outgoing and probably just took the job for money so he could live in Maui and surf (he looked like he might be a good surfer).

He was doing everything he could to look busy, but no progress was made.

Do you ever find yourself in that position? I know I do. I check stats, keep my email open so I can delete or reply to emails as soon as they come in, check stats again, read another blog post, check stats again, check analytics, take a break, delete emails, chat on Skype, look through Flippa, and then check stats one more time.

It seems like I’m busy, but I’m not at all productive.

Busyness is not productivity. 

Sometimes you need to take a step back from your business and really take a look at how you are spending your time and how it is actually helping you if any. If your time is being wasted, change your plan.

If you’re too busy to stop and analyze your business and what you are doing day to day, you are most likely not as productive as you could be. You’re the menu guy.

How do you make sure you maintain good productivity in your business?

Whether you blog or just run your sites using WordPress, spam comments are a pain in the butt. Hopefully at the very least you are using the Akismet plugin to help keep your comment spam from overwhelming your site.

While Akismet it great I’m sure you still get quite a bit of bot generated comments filling up both your spam box as well as making it to your approval page.

On my craft beer blog, I was getting anywhere from 250-500 comments coming in everyday which was a bit frustrating. While most were caught, not all were so I was left cleaning comments daily.

I’ve been using WordPress for years and had no idea there was a feature to turn off comments after a certain number of days which has been a savior to my spam problems. After making the small change a few months ago, I maybe get 5-10 spam message a week, and those are pretty much all caught by Akismet now.

How To Turn Off Comments After A Set Number Of Days

It’s pretty simple to change. Just login to WordPress and follow these instructions.

1. Click on “Discussion” under Settings.
2. Check the box next to the text “Automatically close comments on articles older than ___ days.”
3. Set the number of days you want the comments to close after. I use 60 so people can still comment for up to 2 months after the post as been written.
4. Use your free time saved by not managing your spam box to start a new hobby.

What other tricks do you use to stop WordPress comment spam?

One topic that I haven’t discussed at all on my blog which I plan to quite a bit in the future is outsourcing. If you’re in the internet marketing space at all you should be using outsourcers as much as you can.

It’s so nice to have people working IN my business so I have the time to work ON my business. While I do outsource a few tasks to outsourcers on places such as oDesk and eLance, I much prefer to hire full time employees in the Philippines.

I pretty much outsource most of my writing (except for my blogs), SEO, link building, and web design tasks now so I can spend my time moving my business forward.

Why The Philippines?

In the past I’ve hired from other countries such as India and Bangladesh, and I quickly realized that I prefer to work with people in the Philippines the best for a few reasons.

1. They speak and write in English very well. Less communication gets lost in translation.
2. Their culture is a lot more similar to Western culture than other countries.
3. They tend to be hard workers and very loyal.
4. I’ve had more success working with Filipinos.

A Good Experience Starts In The Hiring Process

Over the past two years I’ve had some good success and some failures with hiring employees and realized the number 1 cause of a poor experience came down to my hiring process which I’ve since started to perfect.

While I just wanted to touch on it in this post, I’ll be writing another post in the future with my hiring process. However before you start interviewing potential candidates, you need to start getting some applicants.

Where To Find Your Filipino Employees

There are a few main places I’ve used that have worked well for getting qualified candidates.

OnlineJobs.ph

Most of my employees I’ve found through OnlineJobs.ph. It’s a paid service but you will find some great candidates. I’ve posted an ad on there and had over 100 candidates within 2 days.

Easy Outsource

I’m starting to like Easy Outsource more and more. I’ve noticed that a lot of candidates that I see on OnlineJobs.ph also list themselves and apply for jobs at Easy Outsource. The downside is that the system is setup in a way so that most job searchers can apply to multiple jobs with the click of a button, so they don’t tailor there cover letter to your job specifically. However you can find quite a lot of candidates, and best of all it’s FREE to use.

Craigslist

I’ve listed a few ads on Craigslist in the Philippines which got me quite a lot of resumes. I’d suggest posting your ad in Manilla and Davao City (although it might not hurt to try some of the other cities). Keep in mind that Manilla is a huge city so the cost of living is a bit more so you’ll be spending a little more on salaries.

BestJobs.ph

I’ve heard some great things about BestJobs.ph, but I’ve never used the site. I’ve heard that you have to be in the Philippines to use it, but I guess people have ways around it to find good employees.

Forums

A lot of marketing forums have sections for you to hire people for different tasks. Quite often you can find people who are looking for long term work. Check out Digitalpoint, WickedFire, Warrior Forums, Blackhat World, etc… and you can find some good talent.

Word of Mouth

Ask your current outsourcers or other people you know who have outsourcers if they know of any one. Any time I’ve asked my employees if they know of someone good that’s looking for work they always do. You can find some of your best employees just through word of mouth.

Questions

Do you have any questions on hiring? Ask them in the comments below. Look for more posts in the future on the hiring process, communication, and other outsourcing tips.

Are there any places I’m missing that you’d suggest looking?

I was sitting here thinking about what questions people ask me the most when I mention what I do for a living and the topic of blog monetization keeps coming up.

Many friends and random people I run into run blogs on a wide range of topics and they either ask me how to make money from it, or they simply state that blogs are great for receiving free stuff, but you can’t earn a living off of them.

While I would say a big majority of bloggers don’t know how to properly monetize their site, it can be done and it isn’t too difficult to earn $500-$5000 a month with an average blog.

So you want to make money with your blog?

The first step is to clean up your blog. While you might make a few bucks here and there filling up every free inch of your sidebars and footers with ads and links to products, all you are doing is distracting your readers and making it more difficult to make some decent cash.

Once you clean your act up, implement some of these 10 strategies and watch your income increase.

1. Make Sure You’re Passionate About Your Subject

Although this isn’t a direct way to make money, it is one of the most important pieces to being a successful blogger. Unless you are a full time marketer and know how to enter pretty much industry, stick with a topic you love. I write my craft beer blog because I absolutely love craft beer and it gets me excited.

If you aren’t excited about your subject, no one is going to want to read what you’re writing and that means no visitors. No visitors means no income.

To make money with your blog, you have to put a lot of time into it so make sure it doesn’t feel like work and stick to a topic you love.

Also make sure the topic isn’t too narrow as that could be tough to monetize. While a blog about chocolate candy could work, a blog about something as narrow as just Almond Joy might be a little too narrow to make money with.

2. Build Your Email List

If you want to build a long term asset, make sure you start building an email list for your blog as soon as possible. Look at your list as a marketing channel. You build it up and pretty soon you have fans of yours that obviously are interested in your content since they gave you their email address.

As your list grows you can monetize it in multiple ways. You can promote your products and services as well as new content to your readers. Maybe you find a great affiliate offer and you send out a quick email to your subscribers about it. As long as you make sure they remember you, you will be putting money in the bank.

A great tip for your email lists is to use them to ask readers what they want and what problems they have that you can solve. From that info you take it and build up more content for your site that solves your users problems (and it doesn’t hurt if you throw some affiliate links in the solution if applicable).

Your followers will love you as you are solving their problems and your visitors and income will increase. Cha ching!

For list management, I use Aweber which I really like, but you could use other services such as Constant Contact or MailChimp.

3. Real, Genuine Product & Service Reviews

Most bloggers at some point review a product or service. Either a company gives them a free sample, or to help their users stay informed.

Reviews are probably one of the single best ways to make money on your blog. You could put an affiliate link to a product in your sidebar, but I guarantee you if you write a review about the product, you will make at least 50 times more money with it.

Just make sure to follow these rules of making money off of reviews.

1. ALWAYS use an affiliate link.
   So many bloggers link to a product on a merchants website and don’t make a dime if someone clicks through and buys the product. Just because a company sends you a free product doesn’t mean you can’t sign up for their affiliate program. Include affiliate links throughout the review.
2. Be GENUINE
   People can sniff out fake reviews. Actually try out the product or service and give your honest opinion. I’ve had reviews that I wrote that weren’t so favorable still make decent money. People are looking for good information. Provide it to them and you’ll be rewarded.
3. Be Thorough
   Don’t just write a paragraph review. Go in depth. The more details you can give about a product, the less places your visitors will have to visit before they click through your affiliate link and buy it.
4. Do Your Keyword Research
   If you’re an internet marketer you should already know how to do this.  Basically you want to make sure your post is optimized best for search engines. Are people search for “Green Widget Review” of “Reviews of Green Widgets” more often in Google? Just head over to Google Keyword Tool and do your research. Check out this post on SEOmoz if you want to learn more on keyword research.

4. Paid Posts or Reviews

Offering paid posts or paid reviews can help generate some income fairly quickly, but make sure you are a bit cautious. Many bloggers generate $100-$500 pretty easily per post which can add up if you find enough interest.

One thing you need to make sure of is to not irritate your readers. While paid posts here are there are great, make sure not to let it make up the bulk of your posts.

Also make sure not to allow just anyone to buy posts. I don’t know how many times I get people trying to promote there gambling sites coming to my beer blog wanting to pay for a post. If it isn’t something your readers are going to be interested in, be cautious. With that said, you can earn some great money selling paid posts.

5. Banner Advertising

Another way a lot of bloggers monetize their blogs is through selling banners. Looking at blogs you will see a wide range of prices from $25 a month on up to $5000 a month for a spot depending on traffic.

Like paid posts, I suggest you limit the ads on your site. If there is a hundred ads on a site, the content won’t be the focus and your visitors won’t be sticking around long enough. If you don’t have any advertisers to start with, use Google Adsense or Chitika.

I use a WordPress plugin called OIO publisher to manage all of my advertisements. It makes managing everything from payments to setting up new ads pretty simple. I highly recommend it.

6. Promote Your Own Products

If you have your own products or services, whether it be a book or DVD, use your blog as a marketing channel for them. I’m not talking about doing a hard sell or anything like that. Use your blog as a way to connect with potential customers.

For example lets say you have a set of DVDs that teach people how to golf. Why not setup a blog that gives tips, techniques, reviews and videos and start giving away free content and building up your user base. Pretty soon people will be sharing your posts with their friends and you will get a following.

Now make sure people know about your Golf DVD’s with a few mentions in some of the posts, a link in your sidebar, and your about us page (which is usually one of the most popular pages on your blog).

If you don’t have a product to promote, create one. Write an ebook. Make t-shirts. Build some software. Create something that will generate a new income stream for you.

A great example of promoting your own products is Gary Vaynerchuk’s blog. See how he built his personal brand with his blog and promotes his books in the sidebar. People know and respect Gary because of his blog and speaking engagements so they will be more likely to buy his books.

7. Offer a Service or Consulting

Another great way to make some money is use your site as a tool to sell your services. Setup a page on your blog that describes your services and make sure to mention them from time to time in your posts (as well as link to it in your sidebar or header).

An example of this can be found at QAQN, a podcast site founded by Daniel Clark. Daniel knows what he’s doing when it comes to podcasting so he decided to take that knowledge and start a podcasting consulting service. Now instead of just having a podcast, he has created an additional revenue stream by offering his consulting services.

8. Book Speaking Gigs

A blog is a great way for people in your industry to get to know you. Why not start speaking at events if you aren’t already doing so. The more you do it the more you’ll start getting paid if you’re good.

I know many bloggers who make money getting speaking gigs because event organizers found out about them through their blog (take Seth Godin for example).

Make sure to create a speaking page on your blog listing previous speaking engagements and videos so people know you as a public speaker.

9. Sell Your Blog

Ok, this is a little different than the others, but there is some great money to be made selling blogs with traffic and readers. If you’re unsure of how to monetize your blog, just focus on producing great content and building up your traffic. The more quality traffic you have, the higher the price you will be able to get for your site.

If you run out of time to update your site, sell it quickly if you don’t plan on reviving it. People want to buy sites that have good fresh content.

I’d suggest listing your blog on Flippa if you’re looking to sell. Heck, just contact me and I might be interested in buying it.

10. Create Premium Content

If you have a lot of great content, why not create some “premium” content and turn your blog into a membership site. If you have a decent following and people trust your current content, it could become a huge revenue stream.

Just think if you could get 100 people to signup to a $30 a month membership section on your site offering premium content. That’s $3000 a month with only 100 people. Not bad.

It does take lots of work setting up a membership site, but it can definitely pay off.

Conclusion

These are just 10 ways to monetize. There are tons of other options I didn’t cover so I’m opening it up for conversation.

What are your favorite ways to monetize your blog?

Note: This is a guest post by Murray Newlands

In short, content monetization is the process of earning money through written content.

There are many methods to achieve this. You can earn money by either selling the content or by using internet-based writing activities. In the first method, potential buyers of your content can be anyone from news editors to artists to entertainment blogs. In the second method, you can use one of the hundreds of possibilities available through the internet that enables you to make money from something aside from the actual content. Examples of some of these opportunities are the use of AdSense, sales of consultation or advertising for a small business.

It’s important to know these different techniques if you want to enhance your writing and reach your readers’ expectations. In order to grab the attention of your readers, you need to deliver the content while keeping your specific audience’s specific interests in mind. You need to convey to your readers the main reason you are writing the piece.

There are many ways that you are able to monetize your content. When writing for a newspaper, for examples, you need to write articles in a manner that can attract the reader’s attention. You earn money though writing a compelling piece that editors of the specific paper want to pay you for one time. You also need to make it an interesting, engaging article for those who want to advertise in the paper, so that the paper can earn from business relations, readers, advertisers, etc.

If you are acting as an advertiser, you need to design the content according to the market—you need to make potential customers of your product or services know the qualities of your product. Your goal is to convince them to purchase your product or services.

If you want to sell your business ideas, you need to focus the content of the ideas. This enables your customers to see your ideas over and over and to get accustomed to them. And If you own a website, you can significantly raise your website’s income by advertising with the help of marketing tools such as Google’s AdSense, paid posts and link insertion.

But perhaps you are a blogger that doesn’t make much money from your website. Who says you shouldn’t earn money from your labor? What’s wrong with making money while working on your hobby? If you want to boost your blogging income, you can use link insertion as a simple tool for content monetization of your blog. All you have to do is to insert some java script code in your site and this can monetize your site automatically. The software will use words and phrases from blogs and use them to link it to relevant advertisers.

An excellent tool for advertising is INTENTclick, which provides an alternative basis for your content monetization. This tool is especially useful for content, which are for advertisement of products or services in origin. You can find more details about these helpful internet advertisement techniques in the book “Content Monetization.”

So all said and done, content monetization really does matter, as it can be a great source of revenue for your website. Using the correct tools can help you reach optimization and make the most amount of money without upsetting your readers.

Disclosure: I am working for the company INTENTclick.

I’ve been spending a ton of time lately working on SEO. It seems like I’ve spent countless hours going over ever piece of my sites, building tons of backlinks, and constantly thinking of how I can improve my search results.

One thing I’ve learned since all my sites are built on WordPress, is that having a good framework is essential to ranking your sites quickly.

Over the years I’ve bought just about every paid theme available, with some claiming to be the best SEO WordPress theme around. While I’ve had success with multiple themes, the one that I use on pretty much all my sites (including my blog) is Thesis.

Why I Love The Thesis Theme

Out of the box it is a solid framework for SEO. I don’t have to worry about H1 tags and adding SEO plugins, it does all that for me.

For awhile I was running the All In One SEO plugin along with it until I realized it really isn’t needed. Thesis has it built in. The only plugin I really use is Google XML Sitemap.

The main reason I like it though is that it has increased my rankings time and again on multiple sites I own.

Case Study – Why I Think Thesis Is The Best SEO Theme For WordPress

Ok, so let me show you a recent example of the importance your theme is to your SEO.

Earlier this week I was browsing through my domains and came across a site that I put up about a year ago that was collecting dust. I didn’t build many links into the site so it was just sitting around in lala land using the Socrates theme.

Looking at my rankings tracker, the main keyword for the site was hovering around a rank of 40-50 in Google. Not great.

So I decided to try an experiment and the only thing I changed on the site was the theme. All the content and images were left exactly in place and all I did was change the theme to Thesis and changed a few colors.

I made the change on September 1st (which took just a couple of minutes) and moved on. I actually forgot I changed it up until yesterday.

I pulled up my rank tracker and now the site which was ranking between 40-50 for the past year was up to 14 5 (with no new backlinks, just a new theme).

You can take a look at the graph below to see how the rankings increased. Pretty incredible if you ask me.

I use Rank Tracker on all my sites to track my search rankings. I highly recommend it.

Obviously this isn’t the most competitive keyword in the world, but still, your theme for WordPress has quite a bit to do with your search ranking, especially if it’s producing crappy code.

Now my next step will be building in some back links to the site and adding a bit more content.

If you’re looking for great WordPress theme framework, go check out the Thesis Theme. I’m not saying it’s the only theme to use, but it’s the only one I use now.

Just make sure your theme is helping your rankings and not hurting them.

What theme do you think is the best SEO WordPress theme?

UPDATE: A few days after writing this post this site moved into the 5th position on Google (still haven’t built any links into it).

This past week I got back from New York where I attended Affiliate Summit East 2011, which proved to be one of the best conferences I’ve attended. Every year Affiliate Summit gets better and better and this one was definitely worth it for my business.

Instead of bore you with every little detail of what I did, I figure I’d give you a few highlights and things I learned.

• The first day at 11am I was on a panel along with Ian Fernando and Jason Rubacky that was moderated by Greg Hoffman about the differences between CPA (cost per action) and CPS (cost per sale) marketing. Overall I think it went fairly well. It was only the second time I’ve spoken at a conference, so it was a good learning experience at least.
• Next I went to the session of Chris Pearson (Thesis Theme dude) on designing your pages in a way to get people to take the action you want them to. Overall a really good session, Chris is pretty bright guy.
• My bacon s’mores recipe made it into a real cookbook.
• The Sunday keynote was probably my least favorite Affiliate Summit keynote I’ve heard.
• Ray’s Pizza was disappointing.
• ShareASale knows how to throw amazing parties that is welcoming of all. Where else can you hear a guy on a fiddle, a harmonica, a saxophone, and a DJ mixing some beats in New York.
• Monday I went to some great sessions. Derek Halpern of Social Triggers gave an amazing presentation where I took a ton of notes (which I don’t usually do) that I’m sure will pay for my entire trip cost.
• Wil Reynolds gave an awesome keynote with some very practical ideas.
• Had some great meetings with some perspective companies to work with.
• Went and had drinks at an event put on by Morgan Thomas and met a great contact there that I’m excited about.
• Went to a dinner put on by Lead Cola at Mortons steak house. Food was alright but met some cool people.
• Went to the club were Plexico Burress shot himself in the leg with a gun and watched Doug E Fresh at the Affiliate Ball. I went to the Affiliate Ball in Vegas earlier this year with Three 6 Mafia, and Doug E. Fresh put on a 100 times better show than they did. I had a great time hanging with some affiliates there.
• Tuesday had some great sessions as well and a decent keynote.
• Ate at Lombardi’s pizza with Joe Sousa and it put Ray’s to shame.
• Went to the Yankees game in a suite with some of the other speakers from the conference. Had a great time plus the Yankees lost which always make me happy (although I tried not to show it to much).
• Wednesday I did the whole New York tourist thing and saw everything from Central Park to the Empire State Building. Was a lot of fun.
• Despite what Eric Nagel says, I found my first Tim Horton’s experience to be a bit disappointing. The donut was decent but the coffee didn’t taste much different than McDonalds. You east coast folks may have your Buffalo wings right, but you don’t know much about coffee.

Overall it was a great trip and definitely worth the money I spent to go. Thanks to Shawn Collins and Missy Ward for putting on such a great show. Every Summit gets better and better. My only suggestion would be if the location for the east could change up to different cities once in awhile like it used to.

If you didn’t make it, be sure to go to Affiliate Summit West in Vegas next January.

Affiliate Summit East 2011 starts in just a little over a week from today in New York City and I’m starting to get excited.  Out of all of the conferences I go to every year, Affiliate Summit is usually my favorite. If you haven’t made plans to go yet, you’re probably a little late as it’s sold out (but you can check eBay I’ve heard).

Are you going?

Merchants

If you’re a datafeed merchant and are going to be there, let me know if you want to schedule a meeting. I’m currently looking for good solid merchants that have decent datafeeds and would love to discuss your program with you.

Networks

CPA and CPS networks alike, I always enjoy hearing about your network and what sets you apart.  Make sure to go to my contact page and email me so we can schedule a meetup to let me know about your network.

Affiliates

I’d love to meet you and talk shop. If you’re a niche marketer and interested in meeting up for a casual dinner Sunday evening let me know.

Everyone

Make sure to come by the session that I’ll be speaking on with Greg Hoffman, Ian Fernando, and Jason Rubacky titled “Industry Clash: Balancing CPS & CPA Marketing.” It should be pretty interesting.

Will you be there?

It’s been awhile since I’ve posted on my blog and it’s time for me to wipe the dust off and get writing again. I’ve had a few people ask me to write an update to the Niche Website Challenge that Chris Guthrie, Joe Sousa, James Seligman, and I started back in February and so I figured I’d give you an update.

If you don’t remember that post, check it out here to see what our competition was.

Thinking over the past few months it would be easy to consider the challenge a failure, but it has been far from it as it has taught me a lot of things.

First off, did I hit the $1000 a month mark using only SEO on my new sites yet? Nope. Have any of the other guys? I don’t think so but you’d have to ask them.

There are a few main reasons why I haven’t hit the goal yet all, of which have taught me a few things.

1. I lacked focus – One of the rules we had was we had to make at least 10 separate sites. I ended up making about 17 sites. It is much easier to focus on 1 really good site than 15 mediocre new sites.
2. I don’t like new domains – New domains take longer to rank for decent search terms than already established sites.  One of our other rules was all domains had to be brand new. It’s hard to compete on some search terms when the competition has sites that have been established for years.  While I know a lot of people who love to buy new domains, I’m done.  From now on I will just buy established sites and domains unless it is just for a landing page.
3. I lost a great employee – I had a full time employee who was working for me for awhile.  Once the competition started my plan was to get him working on content for my sites. A week or two into the challenge, he started writing less and less content, and pretty soon I had to let him go.  That set me back some.
4. I neglected my previous sites & campaigns – My attention was so focused the first few weeks on building new sites that I wasn’t updating and taking care of my sites and campaigns that make me money.  I had to basically just stop building the new sites and focus on my established sites after a few weeks.  It wasn’t worth the time it was taking me building the new sites.
5. I hate link building – One thing I realized with SEO is that link building just flat out sucks. Most of my link building from now on will be outsourced.

So Where Do I Stand?

For now, I plan on slowly building up about 8 of these sites while trying not to detract from the time I spend on building new paid traffic campaigns (since that makes me money a lot faster than SEO and is what I know) and flipping sites (since that makes great money and is a lot more fun than building sites from scratch).

My plan is to sell off most of these sites in a few months where I will easily be able to get a few grand for them since they are already making a few hundred dollars a month as it is.

So while the $1000 a month might still be a few more months away, I definitely have learned quite a bit.

In 2 weeks (May 25th-27th) I’ll be headed to Chicago for the ShareASale ThinkTank 2011 Remix conference.  All I have to say is if you’re in affiliate marketing and aren’t going than your nuts.  I’ve been to the past ThinkTanks in 2009 and 2010 and believe me, it’s not an event that you want to miss.

Unlike other conferences, ThinkTank is a pretty small event (usually a few hundred people), which means it’s great to relax and talk shop. Most of the time after big conferences I feel wiped out at the end, but haven’t felt that way at the end of previous ThinkTanks.

For $50 you get entrance into the event and sessions, food, plus entrance to a Chicago Cubs game with all you can eat food and drinks. Usually the conferences are at some pretty sweet places.  Two years ago Jason Rubacky, Ian Fernando and I got mistaken for valets.  I guess we didn’t have the look of the hotels typical patrons (needless to say it was a nice resort).

This year they are changing it up and the event will be taking place in Chicago, fairly close to their headquarters.  If you live near Chicago and don’t go then you’re crazy as this is an event you won’t want to miss.

If you don’t live near Chicago, find a way to make it happen, you won’t regret it.

Sign up here and lets talk in Chicago.

For those of you that are going, I’ll see you there!