Late Night Observations

I slept about 2 hours last night... a few days ago I started getting a tooth ache....long story short.....II WAS KILLING ME and I could not sleep. So to get my mind off of the pain I turned on the TV. (Something I rarely do by the way).

I learned at at 4am in the morning almost everything on is an infomercial......one caught my eye.

Jeff Paul's "Shortcut to Internet Millions"...first of wall what a SCAM! Stay away from this guy and his program..... His infomercial shows these two ladies who are sitting on a couch talking about how much money they made from Jeff's program....they also looked like porn stars with a lot hanging out if you know what I mean.

Anyways something they kept saying made me think.... they kept saying:

"It's as easy as sending email."

Well no business is as easy as sending email but I do agree with one thing. If you can learn to send an email.....you can learn ANYTHING online. Now what you decide to learn is a different story. If you use your time to play games and chat with friends.....you will never get rich.

If I were in the situation where all I knew was email but wanted to start a business online I would spend every spare minute learning learning and learning!

I really do believe that learning how to send email is the first step. Where you take it from there is up to you.

Take Care....

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Yes "Old" People can make money - October 29th 2007

Interesting article at USA Today.

http://www.usatoday.com/money/smallbusiness/2007-10-25-retirees-google-adsense_N.htm

The story is about Jerry Alonzy who runs a website called "The Natural Handyman". this guy's site just looks pretty well shall I say...."Not Fancy" but he still makes $120,000 a year.

How does he do it? He writes articles on handyman projects....go ahead check them out. They are really good.

But how does he make the money? See the screen shot above? See what I circles in red? These are called "Google Ads"......yes Google advertises on other websites.

In a nutshell people pay to advertise on Google's website. It's a program called AdWords. They also have the option to allow Google to show the ads on "Other people's sites". Jerry who runs The Natural Handyman allows Google to places ads on his site. He gets paid a percentage every time a visitor clicks on one of the ads.

Sounds like it is a pretty good deal? It is..... This program is called Google AdSense and you can make A LOT of money if you know how to do it. You see that's just the trick.....you've got to figure out the system. It's not going to happen over night though.... but in my opinion anyone can learn this business model.

Whats the downside of AdSense? One minutes you are making a ton of money.....the next minute you lose all your traffic and therefore your money.....or even worse...Google can claim that you have "Invalid Clicks" on your website and shut your account down AND NOT PAY YOU. It happens all the time....... I know someone who made $100,000 in one month on AdSense and Google did NOT pay them claiming they had invalid clicks....which they did not.

So is it worth playing the "Google Game" as I call it? I think it is....but don't put all your eggs in one basket. Make sure you have other income sources.

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How I Did It - October 22nd, 2007

A lot of people ask me how I was able to quit my nice corporate job and go out on my own.... let me give you the details.

I've also been the "entrepreneurial" type... ever since I was a kid. In high school I started a "Door View" installation service where I would go door to door and install peep holes for $10. I'd go out on a Saturdays and come home with $100 after about 6 hours. That was pretty good money for a 16 year old kid back then.

I'm not going to list all the businesses I've done in my life....I'll write about that another day....

Fast Forward several years…..

Here I am….working at 3M as a software tester. Had a great job a good salary and a nice group of people I worked with. The problem I faced like many of you out there….. I couldn’t stand having someone tell me what time I had to get to work each day, how much I could make and how much my pitiful raises were each year.

As I posted last week, I had $20,000 in credit card debt. I’m not proud of it but the year before I had been laid off 3 times in one year…… I think looking back this was a blessing in disguise. There is nothing like having your income go from $5,000 a month to $0 a month…..3 times in a year!

As with all my other jobs I got tired of it and wanted to go out on my own again. About this time I came across a website that a friend of mine from collage had put up. His name is David Frey http://themarketingbible.com/.

He had this thing called an “e-book” that we was selling. This was a new concept to me. I bugged him and bugged him to tell me how much he was making on it…… Finally he caved in and told me that he had made $10,000 last month….and that the only thing he had to do was check his email and ship out a few physical copies for people who paid extra to get a hard copy.

$10,000 a month blew my mind away. Now don’t get me wrong….he worked his tail off to create the book… I think it took him a year to write it and then he started promoting it online.

This is when the light bulb clicked.

I was currently selling things on eBay and I had created a tool to help me calculate my eBay fees. In fact I created a stand-alone product in Microsoft Excel that I tried to sell on eBay for $10. Nobody purchased it.

I then realized that I had something I could turn into an e-book/product and market the same way. I also came across two other e-books that helped me in my inspiration. Rosalind Gardner’s http://superaffiliatehandbook.com/ and Chris Carpenters http://googlecash.com/

At the time these books were new and a lot of the principles worked well out of the box.

I took that product and created a site called http://profitcalc.com/ It was my tool for eBay sellers. I raised the price to $37 and added a bunch of free bonuses……

I then started writing some Google Ads and contacting everyone I knew who had some large email lists of eBay sellers. I setup the ordering for ProfitCalc on http://clickbank.com/ so I could have an affiliate payout.

Long story short…..I made $5,000 my first month and $10,000 my second month. To this day that product earns money each month. Not as much as when I first started it…. And that’s only because I didn’t keep up with that product like I should have.

Like I said the light bulb clicked. I started other products and promoting other products online. Pretty soon I had tripled my income from my current job. I had made an agreement with my wife that I wouldn’t quite my job until I had maintained that income for 12 months……

Well after 9 months of doing it I quit. October 20th, 2004 I walked out of the offices of 3M never to look back.

Since then it has been one great ride. I’ve done a lot of great projects. Not all of them online by the way.

I think my biggest turning point is when I realized that I just needed to work smarter and find opportunities that I could run on “auto-pilot”

Today I have two teams in India that work on projects for me…..and yes they are my teams…not just outsourced…..and yes I work at my home. I could go get an office and hire employees locally…….but that’s not my personality. I love the freedom of running my projects from my laptop…..where ever that is…..

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All I wanted was an extra $25 a day...October 18th, 2007

Would you believe that before I became extremely successful working at home....all I wanted to do was make an extra $25 a day.

I remember well. I was 32 years old and had about $20,000 in credit card debt. I sat down and figured out for me to get "out of this hole" I needed to make $100 a day.

At the time I remember thinking....there is NO WAY I'm going to make an extra 100 bucks a day....so I then said..... "What do I have to do to make an extra $25 a day?" I knew I could figure out a way to make an extra $25 a day.

So I sat down and brainstormed.....thinking of anything I could do to make an extra $25 a day...... I'll go more into detail in the coming weeks on exactly what I did.

You know what?

I met my goal in about 2 weeks. Now an extra $25 a day doesn't sound all that much.... that's about $775 a month. $775 a month that I didn't have before that is!

So what was my next goal? Well if I could do $25 a day why not $50?

It took me another week to get to $50. Next goal $75........ I think you get the idea.

In about three months time I was making about $500 a day! (That's 31 days a month by the way....not 20 working days....)

I had actually tripled by current salary.....and that was part time.

I attribute it to setting that first goal of making $25 a day......

Maybe you will start out with a goal higher or lower than that. The important thing is you get a goal and work to achieve it. I found it easier to focus on a smaller amount each which lead me to larger earnings down the road.

If you want to know the details of what I did visit the "How I Did It Link" on my homepage.

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