Q & A With Me – Part 1

As I am sure you can tell yesterday’s post was the first in a long time. However, reading it again I felt that it was not as clear as I would have liked it to be. The overall tone was correct but I think it could have been a bit more straightforward.

So, today and tomorrow I am asking and answering a total of 10 questions to myself. Hopefully you will find them interesting but if not, they should at least serve as an outline to where I am coming from and where I hope to go in the future in terms of my own Internet business.

1. Do I make enough money online, to live on?

The short answer is yes I do. However, as you will see below, many people will probably think that I what I earn would be enough for them.

2. So how much money do I make?

This varies a fair bit from month to month but recently my net monthly online income has been between $1,600 US and $3,200 US. Both my revenue and expenses can change dramatically from month to month so there is not as much stability as I would like.

However, that being said, my non-Internet related expenses are usually less than $1,000 a month (including rent, food, booze etc.). So even in bad months I am able to save some money. I live very frugally, but that is not to say I would not be happy earning more money. I will elaborate more on this point tomorrow.

I am sure many people reading this, think $1,600 US a month is too little to live on; but the fact is that I can work (almost) whenever and wherever I want. This independence for me is the most important thing for me at this stage of my life. If I had a family this arrangement would probably have to change, or I would have to start earning more.

3. How many hours a week do I work?

Again this varies widely from week to week depending on what I want to get done and what needs to get done. For example, last week I took a short trip and I think I probably only worked about 5 hours. And to be honest I never work more than about 30 hours a week due to my laziness.

I can work so few hours because, as you will see in the answer to next question, I earn passive or relatively passive income. This means that I do the work once and get paid for it over and over again. This is the great thing about the Internet. Moreover, this is the kind of income all entrepreneurs should strive for. It is the only way to achieve freedom both in a financial and personal sense.

I often wish I could focus and work harder when I had the time to devote to it, but I guess I am not doing too badly. I will say that it is not easy being self-employed and a procrastinator. If you are a procrastinator like me, I honestly don’t recommend an entrepreneurial career. I love the freedom I have right now, but unless I change my working habits, I think it is unlikely I will be able to continue doing what I do now, in the long term.

4. How do I make my money?

Currently the vast majority (around 90%) of my online income comes through Pay Per Click (PPC) Search Engine Marketing. However, I don’t spend any money through Google Adwords, although I think it is a great program. The reason is that I have been banned from Adwords (fortunately not AdSense).

I got banned as a result of not following their terms of service. If you want to keep advertising with them, I strongly recommend you follow their rules. As a result, I currently use both Yahoo and Microsoft as my pay per click providers. They are good because the overall cost is lower, but unfortunately they aren’t able to deliver as much traffic as Google was.

To actually make money I generally just find affiliate products with high payouts, either pay per sale or pay per lead (I prefer pay per lead programs). I then bid on related terms in the PPC search engines and direct people to a landing page. In the past I direct linked to merchants but this is what got me trouble with Google so I have stopped.

As I stated above, this means that I earn passive income, because I only have to create ads and landing pages once and I keep earning as long as a given affiliate promotion goes on. I have tried to diversify into affiliate programs which should stand the test of time but unfortunately these tend to be highly competitive, so I need to supplement my income with special limited time offers.

Even though using PPC is still quite profitable for me, it will most likely not remain so in the future without Google. It is very difficult to make a living online when you can’t market to 75%+ of Internet users. Moreover, as Google gains market share it will become increasingly difficult. Thus, I have been forced to reexamine my situation, which ultimately I think is for the best.

Finally, I should just mention that I have tried other Pay Per Click search engines but I don’t recommend any of them. Either they don’t deliver enough traffic to make it worthwhile, or they deliver lots of traffic of little or no value. I know some people will disagree with me but this has been my experience.

5. Why am I starting a new project?

Well if you read my answer to the previous question it should be pretty obvious. I want to keep earning a full time income online, but I don’t think that it will possible to do so, using my current methods. I plan on posting more about how my new project is coming along as it develops.

However, I remain by the statement I made yesterday. I am not going to reveal what the new project is about because I don’t want to influence the results, and quite frankly I can do without any added competition.

Tomorrow I will post answers to questions 6-10. Hope to see you then.