I’m not THE guru, eating my words.

When I started this blog I was all set and ready to make money blogging, take on the world and show everyone how it was done. Well I got my words handed back to me and I am humbly asking for what little audience I have to forgive me.

I really didn’t know what I was talking about and for the most part I don’t know as much as I thought I did.

I was going to do this blog on Niche Marketing and tell you how you can make tons of money effortlessly with Niche Marketing, but the fact is, the way I was doing niche marketing was rather boring. So I make a niche site, I put an ebook on it and sell it. Oh Boy, how exciting and how many times can I talk about that? Once, maybe twice then its dead.

I make money with a few dating sites and Google AdSense. I just started blogging, and I just started to do niche sites and selling ebooks. I have made money on the ‘net before and I thought I knew everything there was to know about making money on the ‘net, but boy did I find out just how wrong I was. And for that I apologize.

Blog Profits Blueprint, learning how to blog.

So I started this course on blogging and learning how to make money blogging, or rather how to make a full time living blogging, and blogging when I want, not blogging everyday, all day long. The place I am learning this is Blog Mastermind, which is headed and built by Yaro Starak. From his site alone I have learned an incredible amount of information and technique. I have also started blogging on topics that I am comfortable with like my Hollywood Glamour Photography and Pinup Photography at Darkmans Darkroom, instead of trying to teach people how to make money on line which I know very little about. At least I realize this now.

Lazy Super Affiliate, Desperate Buyers Only and Niche Profit Classroom Reviews.

I have in my sidebar some links to techniques and methods for making money online. These methods include Affiliate stuff, Desperate Buyers Only, and Niche Profit Classroom, these are all good techniques and ways to make decent  money online. I have bought these programs and used them all. I promote them because I have used them, I like them and I continue to use them, so again, I promote them. So if you want to know what I think about making money online with these programs, I highly recommend the ones I am promoting. Otherwise if they didn’t work, I wouldn’t promote them because I only promote that which I believe in.

Choir Lessons, instead of  preaching to the choir.

So now my blog is shifting focus. Instead of me trying to teach you something I really don’t know much about, I am going to document what I am learning. I am doing this so others who read my blog can learn how to do it too, and learn from my mistakes and successes.

So far I have been enrolled in the Blog Mastermind course for 3 months now and I have actually started to make some small change. Not huge amounts of money but enough to help pay a few bills. Not all of it is from blogging but from some of the techniques I have learned through Blog Mastermind on building traffic. If you want to know the secret to all of these things, it’s traffic. If you have traffic, the sales and money will follow. This is one big thing I have learned from my studies so far, but it’s not the only thing.

First Good Money, aside from Google.

I have made money with Google and still do on my dating sites and other sites, but I have other websites that have traffic and I want to monetize them as well. I was hearing everyone talk about Text-Link-Ads. Since I had Google AdSense on some of these sites already, I wanted another way to monetize the sites and the one tool that I really like is Text-Link-Ads.  They didn’t take all the sites I had, usually the sites with a good bit of traffic that had some back links, but the money I got from them for the Text-Link-Ads on those sites is nice!

I started in August 2009, and my first month payout was about $5, September was about $20, October was about $32 and November is about $56 and still going up, and this is from just one site. It depends on the number of links that sell and are placed on your site and each month my pay would go up because more links sold and that means more money. I still have link space on my sites that have the Text-Link-Ads on them, so I am not up to capacity yet on any of my sites. So that means I have more potential for more money on each site. I really like the Text-Link-Ads system because I do Nothing at all. They do all the work and I just collect the money, just like the banner says, “Earn while Snoring”. See my sidebar for that banner.

The big payoff, actually smaller ones adding up.

So this month will be about a $56 payout from Text-Link-Ads, and that’s from just one site. That’s $56 I didn’t have before, right? That’s a tank of gas, or a bill paid or whatever, but it’s cold hard cash! And that’s what I like right now. This economy has really screwed things up for me and my IT business, and I was getting desperate for a while. I mean really desperate. So I turned to the Internet to try to make some extra money and that’s how I stumbled upon those things in my sidebar, and the Blog Mastermind course, which has helped me immensely.

So I may not be making huge amounts of money, like huge payouts, but I am making a few smaller ones, and those add up really fast. My Google AdSense stuff, while Google prohibits me from telling how much I make, I’ll just say that I have several bills that are due at the beginning of each month that total around 300$ together. My AdSense payout takes care of those 3 bills and then I have some left over for what ever other bills I decide to put it towards.

So with Google AdSense, the Text-Link-Ads and membership fee’s from my dating sites are starting to add up quickly to pay for a good chunk of my monthly expenses. I have several other little things happening too, affiliate sales. On one of my dating sites I have an eBook download that is a sales product from Clickbank. It’s a product on dating and dating psychology and he last time I checked I had a few sales of that product which is adding up for yet another bill here or there.

Makeup… a line…

On my photography site I have affiliate banners for a makeup company called E.L.F.  E.L.F. sells really cheap makeup but it’s good makeup. Since I use makeup artists on my various photo shoots, they all use makeup, and makeup is not cheap, usually. With E.L.F. Cosmetics it’s very affordable, especially if you are doing a lot of photo shoots and going through a lot of makeup. People who find my site or makeup artists looking at my site and my photography see the links and banners to E.L.F. Makeup, click on them and investigate. They see how affordable the makeup is and they buy right then and there.

Many times I get traffic from search engines, where my posts are indexed, from people searching for affordable makeup. They are searching for “really cheap makeup”, they find my posts, click on them, see the low makeup prices and buy. I in turn get a commission from that since I am an affiliate.  This too I have learned from the Blog Mastermind course I am enrolled in.

Knowledge is Power.

There is a wealth of knowledge that Yaro Starak is imparting at the Blog Mastermind site and I am realizing I didn’t really know as much as I thought. This is OK, because I am open minded to the idea that I may not know as much as I thought, so it makes me teachable. Therefore I learn, and you shall too, if you follow me on my adventures in blogging in the blogosphere.

If you are interested in learning how to blog, become a blogger or learn to be a better blogger, please feel free to check out the licks in this post or the little square ads over there —> in my sidebar, you’ll be glad you did, I guarantee it.