|pros • per • ly|

A couple of months ago I decided to explore my farming roots and raise some chickens. I bought 6 chicks and built them a nice home complete with fenced in yard and chicken coop. I spent the next couple of months feeding them and watering them and eventually I started letting them out in the yard to walk around and develop their natural hunting instincts.

I have spent several hundred dollars raising these chickens, waiting for them to finally pay off and start laying good quality eggs. Well a couple of days ago I finally got my first egg. Several more have come since then and soon I will be getting 4-6 eggs a day. It was hard being patient waiting for these chickens to start laying eggs especially since all they were doing up until then was costing me money.

As I thought about this process I realized that it is very similar to starting an internet business. You first start your site and you have to put money into it either to buy it or have it developed. Then you care for it building up its rankings and adding content to it waiting for the big payoff. You wait and work patiently for the “eggs” to come. Then you get your first sale and your excited. Then you get a couple more sales. Pretty soon your making money every day.

The key to this process is active patience. You work hard while you wait. If you are doing the right things to your website the eggs will come.

Having the right mindset for making a living online is crucial. I remember many years ago I said to myself, “If I could just make $300 a month online that would be so great because it would pay my car payment…” Does that sound familiar to anyone?

Now I don’t have car payments anymore but knowing what I know now I would instead say if I were just beginning, “If I made $300 a month online that would be perfect because I will have $300 a month to help me get to $2000 a month.” Right now $300 a month probably sounds like a lot of money but once you get there you will be surprised how little it is.

Don’t start using the money for your own  personal use until you are consistently making $1000 a month. And then only take out $500 and use the rest for buying links, getting programming work done, advertising on relevant sites, paying copywriters and making your site better. Don’t be satisfied with mediocrity (although I think mediocrity doesn’t come until you are making $2000-$3000 a month).

Keep setting new goals for yourself and build the business up. If I would have stopped and only worked on the first website that ever made me money, I would make a respectable income every year, but I wouldn’t have been able to quit my job and I wouldn’t have the lifestyle and freedom that I enjoy now.

Yesterday I decided not to come into work so I could work on editing a movie I shot with my two boys (Adding over 70 laser gun effects takes a long time). As I was home working on it I realized again how lucky I am and how grateful I am to have the freedom to do those kinds of things. It never would have happened if I didn’t build my online business to where it is.

Set your sights high. Take time to learn the things you need to be more successful. And NEVER give up!

One of the most common questions that our readers ask us is how to increase traffic to their website. To make this as simple as possible I would tell you that there are 2 things you should always be doing: Adding unique useful content and building your link popularity.

Adding Content – When I say you should add unique useful content to your site I really mean the content needs to be 100% original and useful to other people. Writing content just for content sake is a big waste of time, especially if you are the one writing all of the content. When you write useful content people will have a reason to come and read it. People will show it to other people, and people will link to it.

Let me give you a great example of how by writing one good post I increased the traffic to my website by 1000%. I came across a new product a couple of months ago and saw that the product was in my same industry so I looked at the site for a minute or two and then went on with my day. The next day I found a site that was almost exactly the same making the same claims and showing the same pictures of checks and sportscars.

I quickly realized that this new product was a scam. I decided to write an very in depth post about this scam and warning people what to look out for. Little did I realize that this scam was so widespread that thousands of people a month were searching for the name of this new product to find out if it was legit or not.

Because I took the time to write a very detailed post about the product we jumped to the top of the rankings for the product name. The result of this one post was going from a couple of thousand visitors a month to over 20,000 visitors a month. Imagine what your business could do with 10 times the amount of traffic it gets now.

Building Links – Because this is such a hard thing to do people will try to tell you that this is not that important in getting more traffic to your site. In reality, link building has proven to be the most influential factor in the rankings and traffic I have achieved with the internet. Nothing sways rankings more powerfully than good quality one way links that point to your website. (Read more about how to link build here) I achieved #1 rankings in Google with my old SEO website for the term “SEO services” when my site had much less content and far fewer pages than all of my competitors. How did I do it? A consistent flow of good links.

If you want to know my secret to success I just gave it to you. Good quality content and relevent quality links. If it sounds too simple then try it another more complicated way. All I can give you is what has helped me become successful online.

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Don’t forget to check out my guide to buying and selling websites online here.

Since we have posted on the internet scam “Posting links on Google” and other money making schemes like Clickety Split many of you have asked about other similar services. One that was recently brought to my attention was iNetGlobal. They are an internet company that claims they will help you get a “piece of the internet pie”.

Based on the information on their website it looks like you download their software and then you have to visit certain websites for at least 20 seconds or so in order to earn credits. They then allow website owners to pay to have their website put into the software so other members have to look at the website in the rotation.

The major problem with this model is that people that are using this software only care about one thing, earning credits for visiting the required sites. They are not going to engage with the websites they are required to view (1) because it is a complete shot in the dark if it is relevant to something they want to see and (2) because that would eat into the time they can visit more sites and earn more credits.

This is a model that has been circulating around the internet for many years. If people like looking at sites that they have no interest in then more power to them. I just don’t think this is the answer to the question how do I make money online?

My big question is, why is this company using an MLM model? If they have the know how to teach people how to make money online, why don’t they just do that? I have to admit that they do a fantastic job getting people excited about these “opportunities” but in reality your time is much better spent building your own internet empire.

Here is what you need to understand: If you want to make money online, you need to start your own internet business. Don’t join an MLM and try to make money that way. All you will do is make money for the people who started the MLM. A common marketing tactic for companies like iNetGlobal is to show you the founders of Google, or Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg (founder of Facebook) in order to try to get you excited about the prospect of making millions online. The point they don’t make is that the thing all of these people have in common is they started their own internet business, they didn’t join an MLM.

Decide what you are good at, think about what the internet world needs and start looking into internet businesses you can start from there.

I got an email from my brother-in-law Jeff this morning explaining to me the difference in adsense money he is making on two of his websites. Site A is his old website(his baby) that he has been building for the last year or so and has achieved nominal success, enough to show him that some money can be made on the internet.

On this site he sells an ebook as his main source of revenue and then uses google adsense as well to make some extra income. Well Jeff is no dumby and has been watching what Jesse and I have been doing for the past year and a half and decided to start another site in a much more competitive yet lucrative industry.

He realized that in order to make a full time living online Site A probably wasn’t going to get him there. So he has been running both sites over the last couple of months and has finally started to see some traffic with the new more competitive Site B.

Here is what the email said:

Adam,
There is AdSense Money, then there is Ad$ense Money.

The first image attached shows how much adsense money i made after 18 ckicks on Site A (url omitted)
The second image attached shows how much i made after only 8 clicks on Site B
I knew the value of each industry varied but i had no idea it was by so much!

18 cents vs $1.33

Jeff

He also attached these two snapshots of his adsense earnings:

These are the adsense earnings of Site A:

Here are the adsense earnings of Site B:

Having seen the difference in earnings per click, where should he spend his time? Even if he only gets one fourth the traffic to Site B it will so far outperform Site A that he should spend 90% of his time on Site B. You can also see here that the click through rate for Site B is much higher as well.

Although working on Site A was good for him because it gave him a lot of internet marketing experience and a taste of success, he finally realized that there were much larger fish he could be going after. He also realized that if he was going to work so many hours on a site there should be a bigger payoff. I promise you that his motivation to work on Site B is at an all time high.

The lesson here is that if you have to take the time to work hard on a website idea, why not make sure that there is money to be made in the industry your website is in. The last thing you want to do is spend hundreds of hours on a site that will cap out at making you $1000 a month.