100$ / Day : My Quest for "freedom"

Status
Not open for further replies.
Rasta_Cook

Rasta_Cook

New member
Apr 4, 2007
365
7
0
Montreal
Intro
Yes another journal, Ive been reading alot of those journal, it is a great source of inspiration to me but It sucks that most of them never reach their goals.
Thats why before starting the journal, Ive been reading here and there for quite some time now, I started some projects a few months ago, they all were failures in terms of profit ( details below ) but i learned alot.
3 weeks ago I was able to make some profit, I waited 3 weeks to see if results were consistent, and so far they are. Thus I can official open my journal.

Background
Im From montreal,I studied in graphic design and worked in web agencies for the last 5 years, and im sick of it. I love design tho, I just cant stand working for people anymore, especialy those people that get rich ( with your work ) while paying you shit.
A few month ago I wrote about this in the forum, i wanted to quit my job and do some money online, Some people talked some sense out of me, and after a 2 month vacation, I came back to my work but part time only, 2 days a week, just to have money to pay rent and food.

What Is my goal ?
100$/day profit in passive ( or minimal maintenance ) income thru the net. 100$/day to me = financial freedom... meaning I can quit my job and live normaly, with alot more time on my hands to work on my projects.
Senior member, keep in mind that im a noob, so even tho it might seem easy to you, it is quite a challenge to me / us, this is why i posted this in the noob forum.
I am a realistic person, I wont set any deadline but I want to get there ASAP. Once I achieve my goals, i think that will only be the begining... I want to move on to bigger project, I have tons of ideas, I also want to give back to the community ( online and offline )...

History :

Failed Projects :

#1 pokertipsnstrategies.com : This project failed miserably, but i did learn alot... basically i kinda knew this wouldnt make any cash, if i made 1 sale i would have considered this a total sucess.
I made this website after reading a post where Jon talks about how we should just stop thinking about stuff and actualy do it... So thats what i did, i picked a product from clickbank.com , a poker ebook, and built a site around poker tips / strategies... I knew this was a very competitive field but i didnt care, this was for educational purpose.
I got used to using wordpress, which honestly i think is way WAY better than blogger... Tons of themes, plugins an option available, very flexible. I had a few problem with it, but overall satisfied.
I used a Adsense ready theme and subscribed for adsense.
I experienced submiting to tons of directories, this is so boring and i hate it... but i think it worked to some extend... the site is PageRank 1 now, i submited to about 20-40 directories / blog feeds / comunity website ( i dont know how many accepted the site tho ).
I tried google adwords for the first time to bring traffic to the homepage and also the "book" page where i promote the ebooks.
I tried buying traffic from a traffic company ( Buy Website Traffic - Context Targeted Traffic Increases Your Sales! )... After Many emails of harrasing support without any answer, i finaly got my traffic, but it came very slow and none of it bought anything too, I think traffic came from some pop ups or some other shady way, probably a scam.

#2 "random" ppc affiliate marketing : I picked a few click bank affiliate programs and setup ads that link to them directly... mostly ebooks, one about Tatoo ideas, one about memory increasing... I also tried a poker ebook , and a high quality porn website (HD vids)... Ive spent overall maybe 100$ on all these, non of witch gave me anything... I tried having a landing page for some that i thought would do well, so i could track data, but it didnt workout well.
This was a big waste of money as i didnt learn much anyways... except that ebooks suck, and ppl who want to buy porn will click alot but wont buy anything.

In Progress :

#3 more-cash-less-work.com :
This project is not over yet, website is beta, I am still working on it with 3 partners. Basicaly they sell a product that will help people that have many types of financial problems ( debt consolidation for example ) but also wealth management, life philosophy and other little things... Additionaly this product can be a business oportunity, people looking to start a business can sell the product, MCLW offers the coaching on top of the product manifacturers basic coaching, only the first 2 sale the affiliate makes goes to MCLW then they are independant.
So far, I did alot of offline marketing print work and helped the guys setup an office downtown, now i need to optimize the website for seo while everyone else write articles and hopefully some leads will come in. We also need to submit this to billion of directories and think about some viral marketing scheme.

Whats Next ?
Thats it...
I will post a report every week once per week ( at the end of the week )

This first post is more like an introduction, my next post will be about my 3 first weeks, what I did, how I did it and how much I made.
Feel free to contact me , I am open to working with other people or just collaborating, link exchange or i dont know... If ever i succeed in this business i will make sure to give back because thats how I learned, thanks to people like everyone here.

This is wickedfire so be has evil or good as you want when commenting my posts, i can take critism, as long as it is constructive.

Please if you know a way that would help me reach my goal faster, tell me !
 


It's not clear how you are attempting to drive traffic. I agree that buying traffic is likely a waste. The SEO and directory submission should do you fine. Also, the PPC stuff should work if if you choose the keywords that indicate they are ready to buy. I have to think your initial problem is getting the right traffic (aka buyers) and the volume of traffic. The rest seems like you are setup for success.

Oh yeah...

Rasta_Cook said:
ppl who want to buy porn will click alot but wont buy anything.
Click to expand...

Sorry about that.
 
The first 4 Weeks : 560$ - 100$ = 460$ = 15$/day

So after a few failled attempt, it was time for me to find something that works, I brainstormed tons of ideas.
I did this using keyword tools like overture, tools at seobook.com and just plain logic. I keep track of all my research using Microsoft OneNote, which is pretty cool for many little reason that I wont elaborate here.

The Strategy
What are people looking for ? what do they WANT to buy on the web ? and why on the web ? The main advantages of buying something on the web is, Choice/Price comparaison, Anonimity(to a certain extend), Worldwide shipping, Availability of "rare" things. I thought the easiest thing to sell on the web would be things that are not practical to buy in real life, or perhaps things that people DONT want to buy in real life, in front of other people, or maybe because its illegal or not well tolerated by society. Once I narrowed down a few key topics I searched for a specific product that wasnt already in deep competition and found an affiliate for it.

What I did
Unfortunately I wont tell you what the product is but what I did is simply set up an Adwords campain, 3 adgroups, at first with only 1 ad each all sending traffic to the sellers website directly. I separated my ad group in 6 initialy, but 3 were rejected by google ( dont know why they let the 3 other run tho cuz they were pretty similar... ) It took less than 24h to get 1 sale, obviously I was extremely happy.

Over the next few weeks I spent alot of time fine tuning my ads, I created 3 ad version let it run and pick the ones that had the best click ratio. I read some stuff about sales pitch, ad copy, powerfull keywords etc.. It helped some, but in general its pretty obvious. Some of my ads were "anti-marketing" style , some were more traditional, stating the prices and advantage etc.
I also optimized my keywords, fine tuned the bidding on each one of them in order to minimize my spendings. I only kept keywords that were 0.12$ or less, At first my average was about 0.10$/click but today after all the fine tuning it is 0.6/click. I get about 3 sales on good days, but in average 1 sales /day.

My Mistakes
Now my big mistake in the first few days was to leave Content Network enabled... which sucks because it made my impressions to click ratio really bad thus increase the per click prices, i didnt find it worth it to have a few more clicks but tons more impression.
One other thing was that I just last week added other language that would trigger the ads. Using google trends I saw that alot of other countries are searching for the same terms in english, so why not ? The affiliate site offer the site in multiple language too so its perfect.

At the same time
So obviously i didnt do just that during those weeks, as soon as i saw potential, i started looking for other products that were similar. I found another one but so far it only made me 35$, the comission % is alot smaller and the big problem is google doesnt allow the ads to run for the main keywords that attract alot of traffic, so I am building a site around it. I am also building a site around my first affiliate product.
For both of these sites im using wordpress and blogger. Which might have been a mistake because debugging the templates is ending up to take more time than if i would have gone with static html in tables ( yeah I know im old school but damn its just so damn easier to do for crossbrowser crossplatform fast integration )
Both should be done within the next week. Once everything is done I will use one of wicked fire's member ( Kamesh ) services to submit the sites to directories. I will also submit to rss aggregators ( which i wouldnt be able to do with static site ). And probably buy some TLA ( text link ads ) to get my site referenced ASAP. Once all that is done ill look for more relevant link partners or other ways to better rank my sites. PS : for now I will just copy content from other sites. no time or money to get original content.

I also started another "test" project. Basically i think of a product that is HOT, and see if the www.buy-hotproduct.com is available, I buy it, put some content related to it and a list of links to places where u can buy it ( affiliate links )
I did one, its starting to get referenced but the competition is very intense so maybe I got the wrong product... Commission % isnt that great too, ( 3% to 8% ) ... so im probably gonna drop this. Anyways it doesnt require any of my time aside from the initial setup ( 2-3 days ).

BlaBlaBla
During does weeks I also had to do alot of web design/developpement freelance work on top of my 2days/weeks office work for the web studio, it gives me more money but at the same time slows me down alot, I have a big contract coming in ( about 3500$ for my part ) which will require some serious time.
I seriously hate working for other things than for my project... It really slows me down and because of that I end up doing research/work until 6am, and then go to work at 9am. I really had to cut on my social life, i grew a beard hehe.
I have so many ideas and nowhere near enough time to do them. I need to do as many as I can because for sure some of them wont work, but some of them should work and I need to find those ASAP.
 
Rasta_Cook said:
My Mistakes
Now my big mistake in the first few days was to leave Content Network enabled... which sucks because it made my impressions to click ratio really bad thus increase the per click prices, i didnt find it worth it to have a few more clicks but tons more impression.
Click to expand...

Run content network in a separate campaign. It should not affect you search network bids.
 
Nice detailed work, thanks. One thing I should point out, don't worry about content network screwing with your CTR - is has no impact on your real CTR as it relates to QS, so if it's converting let it run and don't care about the number of impressions. Good luck
 
Cool thread, keep it up! I sure know what you mean by being sick of working for other people. That's what go me into this business also.
 
Rasta_Cook, thanks so much for taking the time to tell us about your experiences in detail.

I've been in IT for a lifetime, but I am just getting to get my hands dirty in this, and I often wonder whether I am not completely wasting my time.

Reading posts like yours is what kicks my a## to try some more new stuff. Again, thanks and keep us posted, please.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top Bottom