Looking at my gross earnings online, I made $18.12 from Adsense and received payments of $56 and $15 for posting blog entries and links in deals from DigitalPoint.  In total, that comes to $89.12 gross for the week.  I’ve made much more than that in a week by selling links, but that was a recent high for me as I’ve concentrated on developing and building rather than going for immediate profits.

One of my big projects that is nearing completion is a new digital book.  I know most ebooks aren’t highly regarded so you may be rolling your eyes, but I can tell you this book can help a lot of people if they read it.  I may as well tell you what it is – a domain name guide for buying good domains.  Domains are my speciality so I decided to pour as much of my knowledge as I could into an easy to understand book for everyone on how to create good new domains, purchase domains from domainers, understand why certain domains are worth more than others, and a lot more.  I also include an office index chart full of 400+ (haven’t counted them yet but there is a lot) potential add-on words you can use.

I’m very upbeat about the potential this book has.  I think if I can impress some of the top domainers, which I have no reason to doubt it will, then I can generate some authentic, positive reviews and sell some books.  The book is about 75-80% done at 10,870 words.  I’m trying to get it done ASAP, but I sometimes slow down as writing parts of it are very mundane for me but are necessary for an informative book for all.  For example, writing on certain aspects of buying a domain name at registration are boring, but absolutely critical for a beginner who picks up my book hoping to learn everything they need to know about domains.

Anyways, the book will be one of tremendous value.  If you’re reading this and have an established, quality website and would like to get a free copy, I’ll send you one if you reciprocate an honest review.  I’m not looking for charity reviews, just honest ones.

So the book is nearing launch, but I’ve also been tending to some of my other sites.  I’ve got two in the make money online and weight loss niche that are moving respectably up the ranks.  My SEO is working!  One is #39 and the other is #86.  That may not sound impressive but they are very competitive keywords and I’m creeping my way up on a $0 budget – writing articles, linking from the website itself, and linking from other websites I own on different servers.

I’ve tried purchasing a few higher pr links from searching on different sites within the niche, but they either want too much or don’t want to deal for what I’m asking.  I did find one person in the make money niche that allowed me to write two 400+ word articles with a link for his blog for free.  I noticed it had been awhile since he updated his blog (PR2) so I emailed him the proposal and he seemed happy about the idea so I think it really was a win-win.  An added bonus for me is not only is his blog a PR2, but he ranks somewhere in the top 50 for make money online which has given me some incoming traffic as well.

Overall, a positive week, but I certainly hope this is only a tiny stepping stone.  My ebook should be released in about 3 days so hopefully I’ll write to you next time about inital sales.

I did make 2 blog posts this week for someone in the legal niche for $56 total dollars so add that to my income.  I also had a $200 private offer on one of my domains which I registered in February of this year.  It wasn’t a true fresh reg as it dropped and I’m constantly scouring the drops in hopes of picking up gems.  I have picked up quite a few dandies for reg fee.  Anyways, I countered the $200 with $750 and I don’t plan on budging too far as it is a really nice name.

On Adsense, I should pick up big earnings in late July and August as I have some seasonal websites which made a nice turn last year.  Currently, my plan is to keep writing articles to get links to some of my targeted blogs as I add to their search engine rank.  I’ll also start adding Adsense on some of the sites I removed it from in about 2 or 3 weeks.

The big news is I am currently writing a book on domain names.  This is one area of the Internet where I feel I have expertise to match anyone pound for pound.  My goal is to write a quality domain book that teaches anyone how to register a good domain.  In the book I write about buying domains for money, but the emphasis is really on how to find a good available domain in the first place.  Once you have the right domains, the money will follow if you have the patience.

There are so many aspects of domaining that a lot of beginners can’t see when they start – some of the very pitfalls that cost me hundreds – so I plan on talking about that and also not building your website around a bad domain name.  It seems like everyday I see some great websites that could have a much better presence if only they were build around a better domain.  Some – like Grizzly – don’t care, but we can’t all be number 1 for make money online on Google.  Plus, some businesses are out to establish a presence to the public and/or surrounding community via a marketing campaign and while a blogspot extension obviously works fine for SEO, it’s not great for promotion.

I hope to finish my book within 2 days and have it for sale soon.  I’m determined to win this make money online game – through whichever avenue works.

The reason I discovered I was hacked was because the hacker put a restriction on my ability to login and edit the files within my template.  I thought this was my host’s fault (never been hacked before that I know of).  So I chatted twice with Hostmonster and got lackluster responses both times.  Neither helped at all and tried to put the ball in my court, encouraging me to export the files or reinstall wordpress (which would take out all of my aged content).  I had roughly 65 wordpress sites on Hostmonster so I was not exporting all of these sites (I couldn’t edit any of the blogs on Hostmonster).  I took the next step and submitted a ticket and with great return speed Hostmonster alerted me the root of my problem was the malicious hack.

I read up on similar happenings and discovered that other wordpress users had their site’s search engine traffic (the most valuable kind of traffic) stolen by the hacker.  In effect, the site turned into a redirect to a psuedo parked page.  I almost never click on my websites through searches because I want to keep the Analytics pure so I was completely clueless.  Sure enough the first blog I went to from a search sent me to some on-topic links to click on.  I was enraged.  Whoever this did this was making money online on my dime and my bead of sweat and that thought got under my skin.  To top it off, not only did they steal my money but they also may have hurt me in Google’s eyes.  Google will drop you fast for a page redirect.

I don’t know to what extent this had been happening but I’m thinking this was a 2 week or less thing because that’s about when I first noticed I couldn’t edit one of my side bars.  After about 10 hours or quite possibly more of educating myself on removing the code and then manually doing so from every wordpress database in myphpadmin, I think I’ve finally remedied the problem though I cannot be 100% certain.  Currently my Adsense for the day has 136 impressions and 0 clicks.  Yesterday was 144 impressions with only 1 clicks.  As I’ve mentioned before, I did take Adsense out of a lot of my sites (to avoid smart pricing and bad search engine position) but still this unusually low CTR has me wondering if something is afoot.

I know one reason it is significantly lower is because I removed Adsense from one of my star sites.  I was making about $20 month on a “money” themed sited.  Then all of a sudden the CTR and the CPC plummeted.  I was averaging clicks in the upper $0.50 area and then dropped to 5 and 7 cent clicks.  I don’t know why this happened.  The site is aged since 2007 with plenty of content and I don’t think the code was taking effect here as the impressions were still coming in at 20-40 per day.  You know, maybe I was getting credit for the impression but visitors were being redirected before ever getting to my site.  The clicks I did have may have been social traffic or some other place Google doesn’t like.  Is the Adsense code even my own Adsense code?  That’s it, I’m putting new Adsense on some of my sites – hold on.  Ok there I just updated 5 of my top sites so we’ll see if that changes anything.

It could very well be that I’m just not getting clicks right now but that’s one aspect of being hacked that is extremely frustrating – uncertainty and paranoia.  Still, I’ve got several sites I’ve cleared so let’s see if I can’t improve upon them.  As if it isn’t hard enough to make money online without being hacked – this incident has cost me time, money, and development on my sites.  Another distraction is whether my top “money” site that I mentioned before is being sandboxed as a result of some of this.  I had climbed all the way up to #3, but I’ve now been delisted for the keyword search term unless you enter in the words together with no spaces.  It is a sweet niche because there is so little competition.  I did very little link building and got to where I did through age and on site optimization.  About a month ago I upgraded the theme to the same one you’re seeing here and it got over the 4 marker to #3.  It was still #3 but yo-yoing back and forth between being listed and not being listed when I added an affiliate banner.  A day after I did this, it dropped and hasn’t come back since.  I put a no follow tag in the html code so now I’m not sure what’s going on with that site.  Maybe it was my time to get sandboxed?  I have no idea and right now I can’t experiment with it because when I removed some of the malicious code, I also deleted some needed code.  I installed 2.71 over to replace those files, but I still can’t login.  Now I have to figure out that.

So all-in-all a bad week for my money making operations.  One positive that did come of this was I cleared out a lot of unnecessary blogs, updated the existing wordpress versions, and became more organized so there is that.  And it also could have been a lot worse – a guy on Warrior Forum had 300 of his sites wiped clean and Hostgator says they don’t have the files backed up.  That hurts especially because it sounds like he had a lot more money on the line than I do.

One thing I was happy about accomplishing was yesterday I downloaded Gimp 2.6, read some tutorials, and made a pretty nice looking minisite out of my custom made banner and a nice, plain premade template.  I’m going to replicate this and try making money online with the affiliate program I talked about last week.  I believe I’ve found a soft, but very profitable niche so I’m going to start attacking that niche as well.

I’m headed off to the gym now, but once I get back, I’ll be focused again, trying to win the make money online game.

“I remember one time Kevin Garnett was mushing him, and shoving him in the face; and Tim Duncan didn’t do anything, he didn’t react. He just kicked Kevin Garnett’s ass, and won the damn championship. You know what I’m sayin‘? That’s gangsta. Everybody can show emotion, dunk on somebody, scream and be real cocky; but Tim Duncan is a … he’s a pimp.”

-Ron Artest

To me Grizzly is the same way.  He’s won the championship.  He is the king of make money online and you need only to search Google to see his million dollar belt.  He has a plain website off blogger with no glitz, no glamour – in fact the primary site hasn’t been updated in over 40 days – and he is dominating the online industry.  Does that not tell you all you need to know?  Hell, I don’t even know what his URL is.  Make money online for beginners dot blogspot?  I never even enter the URL, I just search make money online on Google.

So there’s Grizz and then there is the rest.  I’m not going to name URLS, but I was at some generic info site for the “make money on the internet” niche.  Seemed like overall decent information but very bland and it didn’t absorb like say a Grizzly – nor was it as believable as Grizzly.  While reading the articles and guest articles, there’s a huge difference: Do these guys know what they’re talking about or are they telling me what they think they know what they’re talking about?  Continuing on, there is an ad in the corner for what you need to know to be successful online.  Free ebook so why not right?  I start reading it and the guy starts telling me about life and giving life advice on how to live and how to be.  I scroll down to about p.25 before he starts talking about making money online and it’s just a bunch of generic garbage that everybody rattles off – nothing insightful at all.

I’ll tell you what that guy needs to know.  He needs to know that when you advertise a product as something, you deliver that something.  I don’t need instructions on how to live my life.  I want to read something insightful that helps me make more money.  Like I need advice from some internet marketer on how to cultivate my way of being.  The notion was so stupid I was in disbelief.  It went on for 25 pages.  I only read 2 pages, but what a waste of time.

If you’re going to write a book, title and advertise it appropriately.  If you want to write a book about how to live your life, label it as such.  This guy may very well be a successful IM, but that book was a failure.  I got less than what I paid for it because it stole my precious time, but you know maybe I did get something out of it.  Maybe I got burned for looking for an easy answer.  I can read everything I need to know at Grizz’s blogs.

On Google Adsense, I was smart priced for putting Adsense on my sites too soon.  No official word from Google, but its pretty obvious to me so I’m just going to have to wait before putting it back on my sites.  Hopefully this not only helps my clicks but also improves search engine rank.  I hate the thought of losing potential clicks and money, but this is the rules so long as I play with Adsense and I haven’t been approved with MSN yet so here we are.

I did sign up with Click2Sell today.  I found a great copy for an ebook and decided I would try to supplement my online income with the affiliate link.  I haven’t had success with affiliate marketing before, but I really liked the way the landing page read and how persuasive it was.  It’s so true that you shouldn’t put all your eggs into a basket so this is my way of diversifying my portfolio from Google Adsense and individual advertisers to adding affiliate marketing.  The program I selected ranks in the top 10 at Click2Sell so it does have results.  Another good indication of success is the creator openly encourages advertising offers so if he’s willing to pay for advertising, he’s making money.

And the quest continues to make money online.

How smart pricing works
We are constantly analyzing data across our network, and if our data shows that a click is less likely to turn into business results (e.g. online sale, registration, phone call, newsletter sign-up), we may reduce the price you pay for that click. You may notice a reduction in the cost of clicks from content sites.

We take into account many factors such as what keywords or concepts triggered the ad, as well as the type of site on which the ad was served. For example, a click on an ad for digital cameras on a web page about photography tips may be worth less than a click on the same ad appearing next to a review of digital cameras.

Google saves you time and hassle by estimating the value of clicks and adjusting prices on an ongoing basis. With improved smart pricing, you should automatically get greater value for clicks from ad impressions across our network, all with no change in how you bid.

So basically if Google decides your clicks aren’t making the difference for advertisers, they can decide to pay you less.  This decision wreaks of an outfit that has way too much power.  There are so many things wrong with this type of Orwellian  decision that I’m going to list them.

1.  Google never discloses how they decide when clicks aren’t converting and really how would they know besides getting full disclosure data from a large sample of advertisers?  The cloak here is Google decides you have a spammy site and tosses you a few pennies just because they deem your site unworthy.

2. Even if Google got all the market research in the world from every single Adwords user, who is to say whether they are going to be completely accurate in their surveys.  In other words, why would advertisers trumpet oh everything is converting at 85% thank you so much Google when they could say yeah we did pretty good but we need a little more of that smart pricing, our conversions weren’t as hot as we’d thought they’d be?  It just doesn’t add up.

3.  A lot of advertisers can’t convert their landing page anyways.  Even if we assume Google knows everything in the world and can magically know what is converting and what is not converting, it’s fundamentally unfair to put the onus on publishers.  Just because Bobby Joe wants to play with the big boys and bids $3.00 a click for his new “make money online” program that nobody would ever buy, how is it fair that I bear the burden of Bobby Joe’s sucky website?

4.  Google says they discount the clicks but because they’re so secretive, how does anybody really know how much they keep and how much they give back.  Sure they can give back some, but they could also make a tidy profit in the whole transaction – it’s up to them.  The advertiser has already set their bid so any money back is a bonus.  The publisher doesn’t know how much Google pays because they never say.  Google makes all the decisions and has all the money.  Whose to say that when Google decides I’m giving off a spammy click and smart prices me that they don’t get a windfall?  This is a huge problem and unlike some people, I don’t have blind trust in Google.  Folks, whenever a situation comes up where one party holds all the money and has all the discretion to say how much you receive for your services, then there is a mega problem.  This is the very same as if you went to work at McDonald’s and at the end of your 40 hour week, McDonald’s decided how much they would pay you in the name of customer satisfaction and calculated your pay based on their top secret “smart compensation” formula that only they could know about.  Would you take $15 for 40 hours of work just because that’s what McDonald’s said you should make?  Hell no, you’d quit and sue them.

5. If you have one website that is being “smart priced” (read: ravaged by Google), then your entire Google Adsense account is penalized and it’s up to you to figure out what went wrong.  Basically you have to play a guessing game and decide where the “smart priced” website is at and take it off Adsense.  WHY IN THE WORLD WOULD GOOGLE DO THIS? Think about it, if Google is so damn smart and concerned with efficiency, why can’t they just put a little asterick next to the website that has been flagged or just send you an auto notice in your Adsense account so you can go remedy the problem right away?  Instead they let you play a guessing game amongst all of your websites to see if you can guess and check your way back into their good graces.

Obviously, I’m none to happy about this.  I hadn’t heard about smart pricing until I read Grizzly’s blog but I knew I had been shafted before on Adsense in some way or another.  At first, I was naive and just I was receiving really low clicks and didn’t put much stock in it because I wasn’t aggressively pursuing Adsense, but because my efforts have turned solely to monetizing with Adsense as of late, I started digging deeper and realized my rediculously cheap clicks were a result of Google’s efforts to play the role of a deity and decide what shall be right and what shall be wrong.  This has gone too far… too far.

And you know what, the choice is mine.  This is an open market and it is time for me to engage in smart selecting.  Google has slapped me around a ton and it’s time to say enough is enough.  I’ll tell you one more thing, I don’t care what they say, when my sites get more clicks the price per click goes down.

With the aforementioned in head, I’ve hit up the Yahoo Publisher Network (”YPN”) and the Microsoft PubCenter both today looking for another, more fundamentally fair way to publish PPC ads.  My application is pending with Microsoft.  I could never fill out a form with Yahoo because it couldn’t load the application.  I do have an account with Chitika but wasn’t impressed with my payouts or click through rate (”CTR”) so I dropped them, but may have to consider a return.

Google Adsense remains on most of my websites for now, but if I can find a more steady, reliable alternative I’ll dump Google in a second.  From the reviews I’ve read, both MSN and Yahoo pay much better than Google but neither convert as well.  That’s ok as long as when someone makes a $4 click I don’t get a 7 cent deposit.  Google has done a lot of great stuff, but I simply can’t afford to have all of my sites docked because they arbitrarily decide clicks on one of my sites aren’t worthy.

I have mostly informative sites with good information (typically 1,000+ words) on blog platforms with 1 adsense block apiece.  If I deliver the click, I expect to get a fair shake, not a nickle in a niche that has an average CPC of $2.88.  If Google is going to insult me with penny clicks, I’m going to have to find another way to make money online.

PS If you read the entry below this one, you may wonder what I’m complaining about but most of my success has been generated from one site (and even at that I’m getting $2.50 for a supposedly $14.00 average CPC judging by Adwords Keywords) and over the last several days, I’ve had several clicks at embarrassingly low payouts for lucrative keywords.

I didn’t do too much as far as upgrading my sites during this period because I was in the midst of final exams so I can’t take the credit for the higher value clicks, but I am glad to see that the money is headed in the right direction. Since finals have ended, I have been on an absolute rampage, buying multiple domains, putting up in excess of 10 new websites, and writing 3 or 4 articles on GoArticles and EzineArticles. Currently I’m in the process of adding more content to each of the 10 websites (they’re on wordpress so you can consider them blogs). I’ve also revamped over 10 of my previous existing sites to be better optimized for receiving clicks.

Currently, I have one website carrying a big portion of the load. It’s a payday loan type of site that I have converted from a “make money online” site because I realized the keywords of the domain were very lucrative and that is what visitors who visited the blog actually wanted. It gets traffic from stuck keyword type-ins from Google. What I mean by this is if, for example, people type in makemoneyonline, they come up with my site first because it is the only keyword of all the primary extensions taken (.com, .net, .org, .info, and .us) that actually has resolves to a real website. This is where domainers are so lackluster – and I am a domainer by the way – but if domainers would just haphazardly develop their sites, they would probably make a lot more money and the domains would become even more valuable. As it is, somebody takes in makingmoneyontheinternet.com into the search box and my makingmoneyontheinternet.biz domain shows up. (Just in case you weren’t sure, these are all hypotheticals.)

Continuing on, this site has been good for $2 to $3.25 clicks ever since I converted it to better targeted and much higher paying keywords so it is definitely banking for me. The reason why I reached my highest one day total ever was because I had 4 clicks for $10.25. This just goes to show the power one site can I have. The domain is nice and aged from 2007 (it was one of my first 20 or so regs) but the targeted content posts are brand new. Previous posts were dealing with making money online and I’ve kept them just because they’re aged and have a chance of snagging more visitors. I also figure I can continue posting better targeted content and eventually push them off the homepage.

So this is where I’m at. I continue to focus on the making money online niche as this is my passion, but from the success I’ve had with my payday loan site, I’ve also bought up several of those types of domains that have good or fair exact type-in searches on Google. You can see the “exacts” by going to Google Adwords keywords and typing your keywords in the box and adjusting the right hand view to exact searches. The other stat I always look at is the average CPC. The average CPC is huge in telling you whether to pursue a particular set of keywords. If you have a Google approved website and aren’t smart priced – see Grizzly’s make money online blog – then you can expect 25 – 35% of the Adsense earnings, at least that’s what my experience tells me.

I’m not 100% sure this is full proof yet, but the way to jack up your click money on “Google Adsense” is to change your title tags. In my experience, title tags have everything to do with which ads are displayed on your website and therefore how much money you get per click. With that in mind, what I’ve been doing is shading my similar niches over to higher paying keywords. Granted, you’re page is no longer as optimized for the keyword you had been, but if you send enough links under the old keyword as well as including it in your content, you should have the best of both worlds.

For example, let’s say I had the title tags for this page as “make money being online”. This keyword string has an average CPC of $2.42. Not bad, but if I decide to shade over and optimize for “internet make money online”, the average CPC becomes $3.94 which is quite a bit more. You can see how this could be applied to generate a lot more income for your websites. Sometimes one subtle variation can jump a nearly identical keyword from $2 to $10. What you have to decide is if the (possible) loss in search engine traffic is worth the gain in money from Adsense clicks.

Anyways, that’s what I’ve been dabbling with for the last few days when optimizing my websites. I’ll let you know what my results are. Outside of title tag experimentation, I’ve been trying to get as many of my domains online and gathering search engine dust. There is one thing I know for sure and that is that Google takes website age into account. Notice I didn’t say domain age, I said website age. Aged domains probably do matter, but I’m willing to bet websites that have old content matter even more.

The process does get old quickly, especially because I’m including the Google Adsense privacy policy, an about page, an image, new title tags, Adsense itself, and of course an initial blog content post for every blog. No doubt this is tedious, but I’m hoping it pays off down the road. Domain names of the exact keywords searched have a way of rising to the top without nearly as much optimization as non exact keyword domains. This is not to say all my domains are exact keyword matches of what I’m looking for, but a lot of them are.

Ok, that’s the report and how-to’s for this edition. I will place my goal for next week’s earnings at $35.00.

I am a 28 year old “webmaster” with over 2 years of experience being online and trying to make money.  At first I started this game because I just thought it would be cool to have a website.  Then one website led to another and another – and every idea expounded upon itself into a different way to cash in from the Internet until today I have hundreds of domains and websites.  I have tried my hand in domaining, ebooks, Google Adsense, affiliate programs, SEO, content writing, selling links, and just about everything in between.  I haven’t necessarily stopped doing any of these, but now my focus is geared primarily on one thing – making money online with Google Adsense.

I read a very good free ebook the other day and I’m sorry to say I can’t remember the name of it.  I’ll have to dig it up for a future post.  Anyways, the ebook was one of those “How to make money with Google” type of things.  I usually just disreguard these types of offers, but since it was “free”, I wanted to see how they would attempt to convert me into cash.  At the very least, I thought I might be able to get some Adsense tips to help me out.  To my surprise, the ebook was short, sweet, and solid – a very rare happening.

In the Google book, the authors showed how they were pulling in thousands a month with Google Adsense with screen shots.   (I know SS can be doctored but didn’t get the feel these were.)  The driving force behind making thousands of dollars was these guys had Adsense on hundreds of domains and would optimize each of their domains and then rake in the money from there.  They also pointed out a great tidbit on why people make so little per click.  I was one of those people.  I actually had given up on Google Adsense because I was getting 1 cent clicks, 4 cent clicks and it was just depressing to see 10 clicks for $0.24.  I would think to myself, yeah I wonder how Google is staying in business.  They have someone paying them 20 cents a click and they drop me 15 cents.

So the clicks weren’t working and I went the affiliate route to make money online.  I hate affiliate programs.  Do you know why I hate affiliate marketing?  Because they never convert for me.  I know, I know, some people are making thousands with them, but for me I only generated 1 sale through clickbank and that sell is being rotted away with clickbank fees so I’m giving up on them.  Then the Amazon affiliate program only pays 4% for starters!  Are you kidding me?  A 4% sale?  I’m sorry but that’s not working for me.  I tried them for their new shopping network at 15% and their Kindles at 10% – but at $30 per sale because the Kindle is $300 but I never sold a thing from the Amazon program.

The best affiliate program appears to be Commission Junction.  They’ve got a wide array of products and most will pay you a respectable commission for a sale.  Godaddy pays out 20% which is really awesome on their already low prices.  I’ve only had 1 Godaddy conversion, but still it’s something and I’m relatively new to Commission Junction with only a few hundred page views to mostly webmasters.

One thing I’ve been forcing myself to realize is not everyone on the Internet knows what I know.  I read so many webmaster forums like WarriorForum, NamePros, and DigitalPoint that I’ve become skewed in how I think about ads, prices, sells, and sales pitches.  I’m usually modeling my blogs and websites around webmasters rather than a regular person that isn’t concentrated in Internet marketing and Internet money.  My jaded view is something I constantly have to battle.

But back to the focus at hand: making money with Google Adsense.  This is my new mission.  I’ve got the domains and I’m going to make the time (I’m a grad student) so I’m ready to go all out in this Internet money making operation.  Making money online is such the ultimate game for me because it’s an open playing field for everyone and the results are very real: either you’re winning, getting by, or failing.  So yes, to me it’s like a video game that plays with real money and now I’ll be blogging about my progress in the game as I move forward.  My hope is that other bloggers become excited about making money from reading my blog and get in on it with their own blogs as we compete with one another.

Obviously the more resources you have at your disposal, the more of an advantage you have, but advantages can be negated.  For example, if you pick a lower CPC niche, you may dominate it by throwing a lot of money in outsourcing SEO and content writing but I its possible that I can be more efficient than you and end up making more money by picking a better niche, reducing overhead, and putting in leaner hours.  By leaner hours I mean whereas we’re both on the computer for 4 hours a day, you’re watching tv and iming people while I’m working straight throughout with no distractions.

While I know my way around Internet marketing, I’m by no means on the level of a Grizzly.  This guy is probably the best and he straight up proved it by going out and dominating some of the hardest search keywords on the Internet such as “how to make money online” and “make money blogging”.  I’m probably near the level of apprentice.  As I eluded to earlier, I make money online through the combo method.  I sell domains, I collect Adsense checks, I sell advertising, etc.  I made the most money this fall when I had 3 websites in a sports niche turn PR5, PR3, and PR3.  Looking back, I undercharged the guy I sold to and I still made a ton of money.  The PR5 of course fell.  The reason it became a PR5 was because I got a link from a major online newspaper’s sports section which was a PR7.  That link put me in elite status and I road that wave as long as I possibly could.

As you might have guessed, the PR5 site was significantly devalued by Google because of all the links.  I knew that would happen, but the money presented itself and there was no way I was going to make more money off that site other than doling out blogroll links so I did it.  Definitely should have charged more though.  The guy that was buying from me was obviously an SEO guy, but my problem was I was thinking on Digitalpoint prices.  This SEO guy obviously liked to keep costs down, but I was charging too much of rock bottom prices to really start making money online.  Like I said earlier, the webmaster mentality can hurt you sometimes.  It’s ok though because later he kept buying at a slightly inflated price even when the PR5 dropped to PR3.

My make money online plan now centers around Adsense and developing blogs and domains simply to produce great CTR results.  In 3 months, I want to have 120 sites with Adsense optimized templates ready to go.  I already have this, but the themes aren’t choice and the pages need to be better optimized (lighter theme, better Adsense colors, more content, more links, etc.).  I’ll be posting my Adsense results every week in the upper right hand corner so you can see how my progress is going.  Hopefully you are already getting the motivation you need to start your make money online campaign.

My niche sites are mostly of the “make money on the Internet” variety, but I’ve also got a few in other niches.  I probably won’t be posting many site names, but I’ll give you a good feel for what I’m concentrating on.  I’ll probably also be money blogging about 2 or 3 times a week so stay tuned.  In the meantime, good luck with your money making ideas!  I hope you get wealthy and stay rich off your blog.