[DAILY JOURNAL] - Going Full-Time

April 27, 2011
Family visit has been hectic! Finally found a couple hours today to myself to work. Looked at my stats and noticed that I have picked up almost 300 visitors to all my niche sites! No conversions yet (in some cases I dont even have my CB products advertised on the niche sites yet!) Once the family gone I'll be going through each of the themes to update them to ensure that they have actual ads on them!

Also spent some time going through my SEO sales thread responding to potential customers that had been neglected while I was out of town for the last couple of days. Amazing how fast threads get buried! With some of the family gone, hoping that some SEO work starts to come in!

April 27, 2011 Income Summary
Adsense $0.01
 


April 28, 2011
Left on a hike in the mountains with the family for the day and returned home to find some payments received in my paypal for some SEO services! Timing will be good as family leaves this weekend, so will be able to start concentrating on this work.

As I was up in the mountains for the day (man its great not having to ask a boss for the day off!!), I didn't have any time to do anything other than respond to the new customers to clarify some details of their service! Hoping that a couple more customers will come in tomorrow as well!


April 28, 2011 Income Summary
Adsense $0.01
SEO Service $210.00
 
Looking awesome exsuit! I dropped my job with $1500 in the bank on a whim. Don't forget about writing articles if times get tough. Good work ethics and customer service skills can mean "instant" money if it takes you a while to get your SEO or affiliate game in check.

Your thought process is a lot stronger than most of the guys posting up journals. Good luck! :D
 
jeffrey said:
Keep this updated man, good to hear other people are staying true to their journals.
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Thanks! I have actually started a blog as well, but want to keep this conversation going as its much more interactive in a forum then a blog environement. (right now I think my mom is the only one reading it!)

IMHopeful said:
Looking awesome exsuit! I dropped my job with $1500 in the bank on a whim. Don't forget about writing articles if times get tough. Good work ethics and customer service skills can mean "instant" money if it takes you a while to get your SEO or affiliate game in check.

Your thought process is a lot stronger than most of the guys posting up journals. Good luck! :D
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I am doing link-building instead of content creation for now, but if I find I have time and no money, content creation is also an option! Thanks for the tip!

cpyou said:
A M A Z I N G thread.......
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thanks!
 
April 29, 2011

ANother short day, spending last couple hours with Mom while she is still here visiting - all I want to do is get at my work! (especially after making $210 yesterday!). It's really refreshing to have this much energy to want to work every day! Spent the couple hours I had available sorting out some of the work I picked up yesterday, and also responding to some additional customer queiries (picked up a couple new backlink clients as well!).

April 29, 2011 Income Summary

AdSense $1.03
SEO Consulting $60.00
Total $61.03
 
> My plan is to start offering SEO services (I understand SEO, I have the tools)
> I want to master the art of ranking for profitable search terms

Hope you don't mind this question...

How'd you learn how to SEO sites enough to offer services to other people who want their profitable search terms ranked, yet you say you still need to learn to do it for your own sites? What have you been SEOing so far?

Cheers.
 
That question is perfectly fine! I know enough about SEO to sell backlink building services to those that know what SEO is. Someone who wants directory submissions, someone who wants blog posts, someone who wants social bookmarks understands SEO themselves and wants something specific. I can provide those specific services. The sales cycle is short (minutes-hours) as the webmasters already understand SEO and they are hiring me for a certain aspect of it. Eventually I can start offering more complete solutions (for example, instead of just selling "high PR blog comments", I can start offering custom packages (comments, mininets, high PR links, SERP tracking, etc.).

For now, as I can build backlinks efficiently. Once I master the combination of backlinks that are most effective I likely won't be offering SEO services anymore (not on webmaster forums anyways) and my time will be better spent ranking my own sites, or taking on clients that know nothing and I can charge a pretty penny for their SEO work.

When I say I want to "master ranking terms" I mean that I plan to experiment with different link building techniques and watch what is most effective, what works fast and what sticks. I will be tracking everything, running my own experiments as I rank my niche sites and tracking my results. I am going to be an SEO scientist of sorts :)

Hope that makes sense!
 
April Summary

No income on my last day, so will be summarizing my first month working from home!

I know I'm still in the "honeymoon" period, but I have to say that the lifestyle change for me has been absolutely amazing. I sleep properly, I go to the gym, I cook (I love cooking) and I LOVE my work. I think a big problem that alot of people run into in the "work at home niche" is that they want the lifestyle and don't care for the actual work. For me I love the work, and the lifestyle is a great benefit!

Summary of month 1
- Researched and found 20 niches to promote (10 monetized with clickbank, 10 with AdSense)
- Built out all 20 sites (still pending some cosmetics, and need to add some CB banners to some of the sites once traffic starts coming in)
- Did directory submissions for 16 of the 20 sites
- Already seeing some traffic (563 UV's acrros the 20 sites, mostly at the CB sites, however only the AdSense sites earned money)
- Picked up 13 "SEO" clients (just simple backlink building)
- Put together a blog that mirrors this daily journal, with the intention of turning into an industry blog (once I have something of value to add)
- Enjoyed 10 days with my family visiting from out of country (another 10 days in the middle of may with sister and her husband)

April Income Summary
AdSense: $10.86
Clickbank: $0.00
SEO Service: $442
Total: $552.86

Was not expecting to earn anything in my first month, so pretty happy that my plan to generate fast cash flow by providing a service is working! Looking forward to improving those stats in May!
 
Great journal exsuit! You're off to a great start, and it sounds like you're building some good momentum. The best advice I could give is to make sure you don't take on more than you can reasonably handle early on. Focus on what's making money and ditch the rest...quickly.

I have a question about what tools you are using for scraping and submitting...your directory lists, etc?
 
DanWesson said:
Great journal exsuit! You're off to a great start, and it sounds like you're building some good momentum. The best advice I could give is to make sure you don't take on more than you can reasonably handle early on. Focus on what's making money and ditch the rest...quickly.

I have a question about what tools you are using for scraping and submitting...your directory lists, etc?
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Thanks for the tip!

I am using scrapebox for scraping, and sick submitter for submitting (although sick has a scraper as well, I am comfortable using scrapebox).
 
May 1, 2011
-Mom has returned home, and I have the next week to myself! (sister returns back to my place to stay with me another week next week)
-Not much work today, just busy compiling my stats for the month of April (see post above).
- Checked my CB stats and saw my first Clickbank sale!! My goal was to get 1 in May, and got it in the first day! Will have to cross my fingers for a couple more throughout the month!

May 1 Income Summary
SEO Service $0.00
AdSense $0.22
Clickbank $24.92
 
Been a hectic week catching up on work after my family visit. Been 5 full days, promoting my niche sites, promoting my new blog and doing SEO work.

- ran into some huge problems with content providers. my own fault, I know you always get what you pay for.

In general what do you guys usually expect to pay for articles you would submit to article directories?? - I mean I was spending $3 for an article, but they weren't great in quality (not well researched, some grammar errors, etc.). I only had to spend 30 minutes fixing them up (would have taken me longer to research and write them myself), but wondering how much I would have to pay to get something that was done properly? $5/article? $10/article?

- no more CB sales, but got all my niche sites fixed up so they include links to the actua CB products. CB Hops starting to come in, so hopefully get another sale or two this month.

- overall traffic picking up across all my sites, but was busy this week dealing with SEO work for others.

- picked up more clients, which is great for cashflow and building my experience, but also slowing down development of my own properties!

April 2-5 Income Summary

Clickbank $0.00
AdSense $1.97
SEO $90
 
Family was visiting from out of country for the last 3 weeks, and left yesterday. Was very difficult to accomplish much on my new business, but I did enjoy the last 3 weeks with them and ready to hit the grind again!

May 6-13
Here is a catch up for the last week where I have neglected this journal.
- completed directory submissions for my niche sites
- picked up a couple new SEO clients.
- traffic is picking up across my network of sites, mostly to my affiliate product sites, but conversions have been slow to follow.
- I plan to start backlinking all the niche over the next week and see if I can get the 20 of them up to the first page for all their respective keywords, after that I expect traffic will be high enough that I can start split testing ad placements and swaping products to see what is the most profitable setup.

May 6-13 Income Summary
AdSense $0.89
Affiliate Sales $50
CB Refunds -24.92$ (the sale from may 1st was refunded :( )
SEO $160.00
 
exsuit said:
May 6-13
- completed directory submissions for my niche sites
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Thanks for keeping the journal going exsuit.

Just wondering what process you used for your directory submissions (did you pay for these or do them yourself?)
I've never done directory submissions before and googling simply brought up pages and pages of people offering directory submission services.
Appreciate any advice!
 
Amazing progress so far man! Excellent plan and good mind set on not spending your savings as your main source of living expenses. I'm starting a very similar journey and we started around the same time. Only instead of just SEO services I'm also doing freelance web development.

Keep up the hard work!
 
Austin said:
Amazing progress so far man! Excellent plan and good mind set on not spending your savings as your main source of living expenses. I'm starting a very similar journey and we started around the same time. Only instead of just SEO services I'm also doing freelance web development.

Keep up the hard work!
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Goodluck with the freelance web development! I imagine would be slightly better money/project then what I'm getting right now!

AYGJoe said:
Well done thus far man, please keep it updating!
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Thanks!

May 14-May 18
Have been scraping like a mofo for the past couple of days. Got about 10,000 PHPLD sites, 25,000 SMF sites. Looking to build out a couple web2.0 properties for my niche sites and use these resources to blast them and hopefully get all my Niche sites traffic levels up.

I was originally planning on buying 10-25 more domains in June to expand my niche sites, but now am starting to see that it may be better to get my own SEO network of sites/blogs built that I can use.

Am thinking about trying to use one of the free domain drop services to pick up a dozen or 2 dozen domains to try and get some existing age/PR/backlinks and then picking up some SEO hosting to build out this network. I would then install a variety of scripts across the domains (article directories, link directories, wp autoblogs, etc) so that they start growing their own content. I think having this backbone setup early on will help me advance my money sites faster in the SERP's.

Does anyone have any recommendations for doing this on the cheap? (To get an idea of my definition of "cheap", I'm still trying to keep my costs under my income so that I use my business to grow and finance itself. ie. I have a couple hundred dollars to spend.).

Apart from my massive scraping spree, have picked up a couple more SEO clients and have been talking with some web firms about picking up their backlink building work. Hopefully that works out, I can stop dealing with mutliple customers and just deal with a couple web agencies instead!

May 13 - May18 Income Summary
SEO Income - $144
AdSense $1.32
Clickbank $0.00
 
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