“We Sally Forth at 9am Eastern Time…” The 30 Day Challenge is merely hours away. I won’t be sleeping tonight, so I will have to wait out every single minute. Will I be the only one refreshing the 30DC site every 10 seconds when the clock strikes nine?

In the last few days I’ve been on the forum and reading the blog. I’ve been looking for clues as to what this year’s challenge will entail, because they will not outright say what we’re going to do until the challenge starts. In fact, from what I saw from last year’s challenge (wasn’t a participant, I learned about the 30DC a couple months after it ended) they literally take it one step at a time, posting what you ought to do each day.

From what I’ve seen, it’s all about “Web 2.0.” I’m no stranger to the internet or Web 2.0, but let me tell you that in the past 36 hours I’ve been introduced to a whole slew of social bookmarking and other Web 2.0-type sites. My knowledge of getting Web 2.0 is limited. I basically follow the write article –> submit story to digg/reddit/etc. –> wait for traffic model. In one blog video, Ed took one link in a facebook message and spread it across several social bookmarking and networking websites. I’m not sure how effective this will be in driving traffic, but I’m putting my trust in Ed and the crew.

One such Web 2.0 site that Ed hinted would be important is Twitter. I swear, I had never even heard of it, and when it was mentioned I kind of ignored it. If you’ve read first blog post, you know that I’m the kind of guy that never really gets involved in social networking. I have a personal MySpace and Facebook profile that I never touch, and this is my first personal blog. Nearly every social networking site I’ve signed up for and every blog I’ve authored was under a “fake” or anonymous alias for internet marketing purposes only. I’m just not into social networking.

So, I bit the bullet and made a Twitter profile. Check it out to see when I eat, sleep, and masturbate.

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For those who don’t know, the 30 Day Challenge (30DC) is an annual internet-wide challenge to earn your first dollar on the internet. This year, however, the challenge is to earn your first $10 on the internet. It’s open to anyone and everyone, free of charge. I recommend all three* of my blog readers to sign up for the 30 Day Challenge, as it’s going to take place in the month of August. If you’ve never made a dollar on the internet in your life, you will be shown, step-by-step, how to start earning money on the internet. If you’re a veteran internet marketer, Ed Dale (who is spearheading the 30DC) says there are things they are going to cover that will “blow you away.”

This year is different, not only because they’ve upped the challenge from $1 to $10 (of course, you can set whatever goal you wish!) but also because you will not have to spend a cent to get started. In previous challenges, you would pay for things like PPC advertising to get traffic. This year, everything will be completely free. This year is going to be “completely different,” they say. I’m thinking most likely that it will focus on using Web 2.0-oriented techniques to drive traffic and get sales, but I don’t really know much about it as they’re still setting it up for Day 1.

Seriously, you have absolutely nothing to lose except some time. And the 30DC is going to lay it out step-by-step for you. Those running it and the participants are also a very supportive group and just a great group of people. I can easily hit that $10 mark, so I’m aiming for $100 by the end of August. I’ll keep you updated!

30 Day Challenge

*Nobody reads this blog.

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My favourite browser which I highly recommend if you don’t already have it, is Firefox. And one of the reasons It’s so great is because of how easy it is to customize.

Although I primarily use Firefox for browsing, as an internet marketer I use Firefox and Internet Explorer to make sure my blogs and sites look the same in both browsers. As of June 2007, 93.39% of users are using either Firefox or Internet Explorer - 14.55% and 78.84%, respectively [source] - so it’s wise to make sure whatever you do will work in both IE and FF.

Anyway, I love FF because of all the useful extensions that make my life easier. Because FF is cross-platform, available on Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux, these extensions are cross-platform, so anybody can use them. So here is a list of the relevant extensions I have installed.

Last update: September 1, 2007

Google PageRank Status - Want to know the PR of the websites you visit but don’t want to install Google Toolbar? This nifty little extension shows the PR of the current opened website on the bottom right of your FF window.

FireFTP - A lightweight FTP client.

Sage - A lightweight RSS and Atom feed reader. Great for blogs, social bookmarks, news sites, and more! Has a single Sage button which opens a side panel listing your feeds (which can be organized into folders). Clicking on a feed shows recent feed items listed below and loads a page showing more details about the items.

Adblock - An internet marketer’s worst nightmare. I still think it’s a great extension if you want to clean up an ad-filled website. You can manually block ads and use wildcards to block images or iframes from an entire domain or directory.

Del.icio.us Extension - Adds a “My Bookmarks” button to easily access your bookmarks and a “Tag” button to easily bookmark websites you visit. You need a Del.icio.us account to use this.

StumbleUpon Toolbar - Same idea as the Del.icio.us extension. Add sites to your favourites easily. You need a StumbleUpon account to use this.

ScribeFire - This is some really nifty blogging software. You can add your blog account(s) and . I didn’t even know about this until I saw Ed Dale using it yesterday on his 30 Day Challenge blog. I’ve only used it once (posting this!) but it looks really cool.

ReloadEvery - This is a very simple tool. If you right-click on a webpage, it will give you an option to reload the page at a set interval. I don’t use it too often, but it’s great for sites that log you out after a few minutes of inactivity!

Adsense Notifier - It’s a customizable little extension that sits at the bottom-right of the status bar, showing you clicks, impressions, earnings, etc. Great tool!

Allow Right-Click - Some websites don’t let you right-click for one reason or another. This extension bypasses most sites that try to prevent right-clicks.

IE Tab - Most internet marketers or webmasters use at least the two major browsers, Internet Explorer and Firefox, so they can make sure their website looks the same in both of them. As the name suggests, this extension lets you use IE within a Firefox tab.

ColorZilla - Another great tool for webmasters and internet marketers alike. It lets you select the colour of any pixel in the browser window, among other things.

MeasureIt - Another web tool which lets you drag out a ruler box and measure anything in the browser window in pixels.

Pearl Crescent Page Saver - The basic version lets you take a full screenshot of an entire webpage, top to bottom. Great for surveying the layout of a website.

VideoDownloader - Lets you save videos from YouTube and other flash video sites in FLV format.

DownThemAll! - This little gem allows you to mass download anything on a website. Got a lot of files or photos on a page you don’t want to spend the time to click and download? Just use this!

Fetch Text URL - This is little time saver that lets you highlight and directly open text URLs (like this one: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~jchien/code/ftu.html) in the current tab, or a new tab or window, like this one.

Twitterbar - Lets you update your Twitter from Firefox. Has a little unobtrusive button that you press after typing your message in the address bar.

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Music is a great motivator. Unless I’m having trouble concentrating, I’m always playing music as I read internet marketing material and work on projects. Maybe that’s why I’ve been working for months with only one $25.78 cheque to show for it… hmm…

But seriously, I love listening to music while I work and it’s almost always something that gets me pumped. Lately I’ve been listening to a lot more rap and hip hop, although I’m definitely not a stranger to it. Specifically, I listen to rap songs with themes of “grinding” and “hustling,” about “getting that money.” As an aspiring (read: struggling) internet marketer, that sort of “grinding” mentality really resonates with me. Suuure, they’re usually talking about popping caps, dealing drugs, and smoking trees but it’s the idea, the underlying theme that resonates with me. Add some lyrics of grandeur to tickle my imagination and stroke my ego and you have something that I’ll repeat on my foobar2000 playlist. Fabolous’ new album From Nothin’ to Somethin’ is the best recent example of the type of rap and hip hop I’m enjoying right now.

For those with less urbanesque tastes, you’ve got classics like Eye of the Tiger (an old favourite) and Live to Win by Paul Stanley. The latter gets me really pumped and I feel like all my farfetched goals and desires are attainable. Even non-lyrical music like techno or trance or whatever similar music can have similar effects. It might not be inspiring or motivating, but if it gets my heart rate up, I’m sure to continue working on my projects with increased vigor. Maybe I should compile a list one of these days.

Time to get that money. Dolla dolla bill y’all.

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I’ve made over $100 online since I started getting “serious” (not really) about internet marketing eight months ago. Pretty pathetic by most internet marketers’ standards, but I earned it. It’s mine. Well, sort of. As I stated in an earlier post, I just recently hit the minimum payout for a sponsor (actually, CCBill). I got the cheque in the mail today. After processing fees, it came out to $25.78 USD. After exchanging the currency it came out to… a little over $25.78 CDN.

Suffice to say, I was fucking excited. Sure, I could’ve made that much in a couple hours at a menial job, but where’s the fun in that? Unfortunately, I forgot to take a picture in the style of Shoemoney. Actually, I didn’t forget. I decided not to because I would probably embarrass myself if I posted it! Still, even if it were a $1.00 cheque I would’ve been just as excited getting it. I felt even more excited than when I made my first sale. I was actually holding the money in my hands. Great feeling!

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This is going to be an interesting update. I published my first hub the other day. It’s essentially an expansion of my post about how to earn money online without any initial monetary investment. I can’t believe I wrote so much. I received my only two visitors to this blog since I published it, but I’ve just gotten started. I won’t lose faith so easily.

Unfortunately I can’t say the same about my other projects. I’m thinking about abandoning my Blogger blogs and starting with something new from scratch. Instead of three blogs, I’ll just work on one. One heavily SEO’d blog (not this one!) and another SEO project. I have an interesting generic domain that I could use to set up a small website with AdSense ads. A single keyword, which is the same as the domain, is searched for just under 2000 times a month and has only 500k or so results in Google. This may be my SEO pet project if I don’t find any buyers for my domain.

Ideally I just want to set up a small site with perhaps 20-30 pages worth of information on the subject, and set up some relevant news feeds so some part of it is updated frequently. I won’t use AdWords, just SEO and perhaps submit the site to a few directories. Then I’d just set and forget it. It’s a very small niche and there aren’t any related affiliate programs, so I don’t think I’ll have much trouble with competition from other internet marketers. And it’ll be a great way to learn some SEO building a website from the ground up.

Now for this new blog, I have no idea what to do with it. I don’t know what niche to work with. With this blog I want to write about something I personally enjoy. Maybe computer games? I don’t know. I’m going to have to sit down and really brainstorm. What would I enjoy writing about?

On that note, today I found a list of highest paid bloggers and other internet marketers on Paula Mooney’s blog, which is actually a solid place to read articles about blogging for money. I personally enjoyed looking through the entire list, not just the virtual ballers and hotshots. Less than a quarter of them are making six figures, and of course that proportion is much smaller in reality.

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This post was inspired by a guy who is hell bent on making money online - even if it puts him on the street. On one of the internet marketing forums I frequent, there’s this guy who is desperate to make money online. He pleads for advice, usually ignores the advice he’s given, and then pleads for more advice. What is he trying to do? He’s looking for something that will guarantee profits. There is nothing that will guarantee you anything in this business, and only those who will profit from the advice they give you will tell you otherwise.

You know what worries me about this guy? He’s quick to buy suggested products, pay for futile AdWords campaigns for sites that he has to set up on a free host because he has so little spare money. According to him, he needs to desperately get enough money to pay the rent.

Now hold on a damn minute! This guy is trying to muster a few hundred dollars in less than a month so he can pay his rent? Many internet marketers make this money in their sleep, but this guy is just getting started in this business. I’m not exactly an IM hotshot but I know that this is NOT the way to go about making money online. The only people who are going to make money are Google, AdSense publishers (if he’s using the Content Network), and e-book peddlers who hold the secret to online wealth.

I would never suggest to someone barely hanging on to put what little money they have in the stock market. The stock market is a bit different from internet marketing, but AdWords, hosting, buying traffic, etc. are all investments. And at this point, if you’re barely scraping by, they’re risky investments.

So how do you start making money online if you have none? The easiest way to get started is by blogging. I set up my free hosted blogs on Blogger. You could also use WordPress. I have no experience with WordPress hosting, but their blogging software, which I’m using here, is great. But Blogger is probably easier to use if you’re new to blogging.

Pick a niche for your blog. There are different ways you can find a niche. They’re everywhere. I’d personally use a combination of the keyword tool at SEO Tools or SEO Book, search results, maybe ClickBank or another affiliate marketplace to see what’s selling in different niches, AdWords keyword tool to see advertiser competition. Note, you are not using AdWords, just using the tool so you can gauge how popular or competitive a certain niche is. You can also get some idea of the cost of different keywords.

Update your blog daily. This one hasn’t been updated every day, but I’m not expecting to make much from it. You can and should make more than one. Use some SEO techniques on your blog so you can rank high on the search engines. SE traffic is some of the highest quality traffic you can get. And it’s free.

Promote your blog. Submit it to blog directories. Build Hubs and Squidoo lenses. Make link trades with other blogs. Put your blog in your signature on forums you frequent (if it’s allowed). Carefully spread your links on Google, MSN, and Yahoo! Groups if you can wade through the spam. Never spam your blog and avoid making it even look like you’re spamming your blog at all costs. Submit your blog or blog articles to social bookmarking websites. I put up a list of them a few days ago. Put your blog in your email signature. Depending on your niche, you could find many other ways to promote your blog. Is it a gardening blog? Try answering a gardening question on something like Yahoo! Answers and link back to your blog or a blog post containing relevant information about the question! Be creative, but avoid spamming!

Monetize your blog. Place AdSense ads on it. Plug affiliate products in your posts, but don’t be a complete affiliate whore about it.

Keep updating your blog. You don’t have to update it daily, forever. But the more you update it, the better.

As people visit your blog you will get clicks on your AdSense ads and make money. AdSense earnings are a function of traffic so the more traffic you bring, the more money you should make. Affiliate sales are also great, especially if your blog is matured and trusted.

Once you start making money, reinvest it. But take it one day at a time. You won’t make a million dollars by tomorrow, in fact you probably won’t even make $1000 by the end of the month, but Rome wasn’t built in a day.

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My older blog projects are starting to bring in some cash while my new ones are barely making anything. I guess that makes sense, but considering how aggressively I initially promoted my new blogs I was hoping I’d make a few bucks from them by now. As I mentioned before, I’m losing faith in my Blogger blogs and I’m thinking of focusing more on my older projects, which are now looking pretty good (relatively).

What are these older blogs I’ve had? They’re on their own domains in two very different niches. I’ve been working on one of them since mid-November of last year, and the other one since early May of this year. They are primarily affiliate blogs. I tried PPC ads, but it wasn’t proving very profitable. In the past two and half weeks I’ve pulled in over $60 from these blogs. Of that, about $30 are with one affiliate and I believe it’s hit the minimum payout. That means I’m actually going to get the money in my hands within the month.

I’ve worked in IM for over a year, and became especially focused in the last eight months or so. I’ve made money online before but I’ve never hit the minimum payout, meaning that the money is on hold. I’ve never been paid for this. Yet each sale, even when I’ve yet to hold the money in my hands, motivates me to continue.

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