But as you can see, I start off on the right footing in following John Chow’s advice on Beginner’s Blogging Tips.

John Chow’s Free E-Book “Chapter 3, Page 9”.

Talking about passion; I love to write.  I can write my mind off and sometimes it doesn’t really matter to me if it made sense or not. I gather a lot of ideas from writing. Not to mention that it improved my language skills too. I love to elaborate on things that may seem simple. From there, an argumentative platform gets created and ideas pour in abundantly. I don’t usually save what I write, because it was there to just put my mind in writing and improve my skills.

I started off this blog in trying to write about making money online and find out how certain people reap in that success from blogs. Although I started with really no experience in making money online, by starting out really new, I can share what many bloggers go through; starting out. There must be a starting point at something. If I were to be a successful blogger, I must start blogging right? Well, so this is it, my first blog.

Domain Name and Hosting Your Blog

I could easily use a free blogging platform and start my blog. It wouldn’t cost me anything except time and passion. It would be a real waste if I were to see that blog grow into something and doesn’t have an identity of its own. I decided to purchase this domain and start off from there. Whether or not it makes a name out of itself is a separate matter. What is important is that I create an opportunity for it to grow with an identity and not regret later on.

Having wanting to own a domain name comes the cost of maintenance; domain renewals, hosting fees and premium themes. I treat this as a small investment for bigger things to come. More importantly, it gives me the drive of confidence and provides an anchor to avoid me giving up. It is always easy to give up on something if it doesn’t cost you anything. With this small investment it ties me down to make sure it works, or at least try hard to make it work. Also, I may not be as committed with a free blog.

Another good thing of having a hosted blog is that I can be flexible with the designs and whatever I want to be included in the blog. I can choose from thousands of themes, both paid and free. Even when its free, I can still customize it by learning some PHP and CSS codes.

I purchase this domain from GoDaddy.com and hosted it on HostGator. There are several discount coupons you can use if you just search them on Google.

Custom Search

The hosting fees are minimal actually starting at less than 10 dollars a month. I found a coupon that gave it to me free for the first month. As for the domain, I bought it for 5 years. Plus a coupon, it really isn’t expensive.

I hope this post motivates you to start a blog if you haven’t done so. You need to make that first step of being confident that you can do this and just put your mind to it. The rest of things should come freely after you make that first decision to start blogging.

See you at your blog…

First stop, Kontera Content Link.

I was able to register without a hitch and upon clicking the link included in the confirmation email, I was all ready set to go.

Since I’m using Wordpress as my CMS, I downloaded the Kontera plug-in off the site. I had some trouble initially with the plug-in downloaded off Wordpress admin page. You can read the installation instructions that came with the download. Under Kontera settings, if you don’t see your publisher ID, you’ll need to search for it.

I can see my publisher ID in the “create tag” section in the code block that reads like this…

var dc_PublisherID = xxxxx –> where xxxxx is your publisher ID you’d need, to key into your Kontera settings.

If you are using blogger, you can simply click on the  button. And you will be brought to blogger.com to log into your account. As simple as that.

I’m not too sure if the phrase below that was extracted from John’s ebook still applies today…

“… Kontera requires a site have a minimum 500,000 page views per month before being accepted…” chap. 2, page 6, para 2

I have activated the plug-in, insert my publisher ID, and now waiting for the tags to go live, that may take up to 24 hours. If it doesn’t happen, I’ll find out why and let you know.

See you in the next post…

Does that mean I’ll be successful? Well, I hope it’ll happen someday. No more “I hope” or “I wish”. That’s positive thinking.

I would have to agree with John Chow that the first step has to be taken to achieve success. That’s taking action as mentioned in his e-book. And it has to have a time limit. I set to reach my goal in 2 to 3 years, with a posting each day. That’s over 700 posts! Well, maybe the interim success would be to earn the first cent in a few months time. I know it’s possible.

I’ve actually already made my first cent, but not from this blog. I paid for an advertisement space to promote a Clickbank product. I tried affiliate marketing.

My first cheque is USD73.99 and the second cheque at USD19.60.

Not very successful as an affiliate I would say, but at least I know it’s possible. I stopped buying the advertisement space to try other traffic generating methods. Another reason is, the product I’m promoting is really not that very suitable for the kind of content the site is offering.

That’s my mistake. Like John Chow said,

“… failure is required in order to succeed”. – page 5, para 5, Make Money Online with John Chow.

The mistakes I made…

• Too eager to advertise without doing much research.
• The site is offering “free” downloads, so the chances of people wanting to pay for a product are actually very slim.
• Hence, the click-through rate is very low, not to mention very low clicks too.

I did not make any profit from this internet marketing campaign, but I learned a lot along the way. I paid $150 for a month of the advertising space. You do the maths…

So much for the second dissection of John’s e-book. Next post will be more interesting, covering the whole list of John’s Recommended Money Makers, out of 130 advertising networks he posted on his blog.

Chow!

That’s the sub-header on the front page of his e-book. That statement followed by “How You Can Too”, attracts almost everyone who wants to create some income from the World Wide Web aka Internet. Each of us aspires to make online income our source of living while giving us freedom of time. When that aspiration seems too hard to grasp, we conclude “maybe some side income would be good”. That side income too seems difficult for many.

Along came this free e-book that I stumbled upon and finds it very interesting, with no lack of humour. Thanks to John Chow for giving this away, free.

First off, page 4 of the book, last statement… “I make money by blogging, not by selling E Books.”

How true. My personal opinion is that it’s difficult to sustain writing e-books and make sales of the same book over a long period of time. I would argue that e-books are easily circulated; hence the profit margin drops significantly if you know underground sources of getting them. Also, methods change. What you write today may not be relevant in a few years time, or even worse, a few months time. This fact makes it tiring to sustain a living by only writing and selling e-books.

However, I would also say that if you hit the jackpot, selling your own e-book can bring short-term lucrative returns. Looking at Clickbank Vendor’s Spotlight, you can easily see that the highest gravity product have refd (referred sales) of 90% to 100%. This means that most, if not all of the sales are through affiliates. Vendors did their product, launch it and marketing are done by affiliates. The biggest winner would have to be the vendor, as he profiteers from all the sales while affiliates take 50% to 75% of the sales but divided over many affiliates. How then an affiliate wins? I would opined that a super affiliate makes the biggest money when he has diversified his affiliate product range and rake in from multiple vendors.

My conclusion… It’s hard to say or argue. There’s money to be made on the internet no matter which approach is taken. The only difference is the amount made.

Cheers!

The world of internet marketing, affiliate marketing, monetizing blogs etc., all boils down to one common goal: to make money online. Although it is true that there are very successful people in this industry, there are also those who gave up halfway along the journey.

Well, I was one of the latter a couple of years back. I bought some e-books and thought it would be a breeze with such guides. The truth is, such guides are not as straight forward as I thought. There are a lot of unknowns that needs to be dug up to actually make that very first cent. I didn’t make that first cent a couple of years ago, so I gave up.

The thought of online money making crops up my mind again recently. I stumbled upon John Chow’s blog and was mesmerized on how he created his success around the World Wide Web. Now that he made $40,000 per month from his blog, made me wonder if such successes can be replicated.

I would like to invite you to join my blog and discuss along with others on how such successes can be achieved, through time and perseverance. I believe John Chow did not achieve what he had today without time and perseverance.

My first mission is to dissect John Chow’s free e-book and create discussion points for all to share. If you have not downloaded the free e-book, click here to download now.

Good day!