I won’t beat around the bush and get to the meat of the post. What did I do today?

• did some keyword and affiliate research and built three blogs on Blogger, all in different niches

• wrote five short blog posts for each blog, published three today, will publish the other two in the next two days

• added AdSense to each blog

• submitted each of those three blogs to 10 blog directories

• updated my four previously made blogs with posts for the next three days (WordPress FTW!)

• started using unconventional traffic sources to promote my blogs

“Unconventional” traffic? Yeah, that’s just my way of saying “siphoning traffic from sites where many people congregate.” This means sites like Google Groups, Yahoo! Groups, MSN Groups, Craigslist, etc. I hate marketing via these sites. Especially ____ Groups. Why? Because these are so commonly used these days. Marketing via Google Groups, Yahoo! Groups, MSN Groups, etc. is futile unless you target smaller, restricted groups and take the time to register and make yourself trusted. Every single group that anyone can easily join, hell even ones that you have to apply for are full of spammers. Google, Yahoo!, and MSN Groups are just three big circle jerks of internet marketers. In fact, I have a sneaking suspicion that many of these groups were made by internet marketers to attract a targeted audience. Regardless, I’m promoting my blogs through this method and I hope to find some legit, unpoisoned groups to work with. When I tried this last time, in a group of thousands of members with high activity, I’d get maybe 10-15 hits to a blog.

I’d really like to tap into the Digg/MySpace/Facebook/Reddit/Del.icio.us/Netscape/etc. type traffic. Unfortunately for this to work well, you need to write about something in the news, something controversial, something funny, something exciting. This is an internet marketer’s blog, so I won’t lie to you or beat around the bush. I have a few ideas of articles for this blog that might strike some discussion, or at least get me some hits. I’m not going to write them up now because I just started this thing and I don’t really know how I could properly monetize this blog (except with PPC ads).

That’s another thing you need for this to work well: content. To properly take advantage of a sudden influx of free traffic you need to have more than just that one article. Have a good archive of stuff that people might want to peruse through if they like your blog or your writing style. If it’s a full-blown website, have extra, quality stuff that might interest the stray visitor. Good content will keep your visitors on your site longer (therefore giving more opportunities to click an ad or buy something), and may even make them want to bookmark or subscribe to your feed. This is what webmasters and internet marketers call “stickiness.” What’s the point of flooding your site with visitors if they’ll leave after a minute? The more I work building gimmicky blogs and sites, the more I start to think that this isn’t the best way of making long-term money in this business.

Maybe I should bullshit my way through writing an e-book about how to bullshit one’s way through writing an e-book and sell it for $10. But don’t get me started on that…

Oh shit, I forgot to mention that I got a single click on AdSense today. No, it wasn’t one cent. Now I’m off to see if I can get my head around how to promote CJ products.

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I don’t know.

I, like most other new internet marketers and entrepreneurs, am overwhelmed by the sheer number of ways you can make money on the internet. I think you could lump them into three different, very general streams of online income. I like the numbered list from yesterday so I’ll use it here:

1. Selling your own product.
2. Promoting someone else’s product.
3. Advertising.

I don’t have a product, and I really, really, really don’t want to get into wholesale and drop shipping on eBay or my own store. If you think internet marketing sounds like a field of cutthroats and scammers, you haven’t heard about “wholesalers” who will rip you off faster than clothes during a conjugal visit. I don’t feel like paying $50 to merely get a list of “wholesalers” and “drop shippers” who are actually middle men (guys who buy from real wholesalers, jack up the price a bit, and pretend to be wholesalers or drop shippers) or just outright scammers. Also, a lot of the wholesalers have minimum unit purchases of 50, 100, 200 or more. I don’t have that cash right now.

So at this point, I’m doing #2 and #3. And by #3 I mean AdSense. As I said before, I have over a dozen blogs, most of which are now abandoned. Each one had AdSense ads on it. I also did a little ClickBank affiliate marketing, including doing review sites. I’ve made a few sales, not enough and none with a MasterCard so my money is still locked in there. If you’re not into affiliate or internet marketing, you might just be getting the feeling that this isn’t as easy as all those “MAKE MONEY IN YOUR SLEEP” e-book sellers make it out to be. E-book peddlers are so common now that I throw up a little in my mouth every time I see highlighted text online and in real life.

What are my income strategies now? I’m going to rebuild several blogs in different niches and restart my AdSense campaign. I’m staying away from AdWords for now as I look at how to promote affiliate products online. In terms of affiliate marketing, it’s been blogs and review sites. I got lucky with a few sales in the beginning but I just ended up burning a hole in my pocket to fund my AdWords campaign. I have several domains, unfortunately none are general enough that I can build several webpages in different niches on one.

My plan is to go niche this time, and I don’t mean the overplayed “making money at home” or “lose weight now” niches. They’re too competitive for an inexperienced small fry like myself. I also want to start promoting more conventional products like those at Commission Junction. I guess now is as good a time as any to start learning.

But for now I think I should get to sleep. My goal for tomorrow (er, today) is to start three blogs in completely different niches. I’m going to check out available niche affiliate programs and then do a little keyword research to see how tight of niches they really are. After that, I’m going to update my four still-active blogs, and then I’m going to see how the hell you promote CJ products. If anything exciting happens I’ll update later today or Monday.

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