How To Make A Million Dollars & No I Don't Have An eBook To Sell You

To me, there are two basic ways to make one million dollars:

1. Have one person give you one million dollars.

2. Have one million people give you one dollar.

Two simple choices, but both have their good points and both have some drawbacks. First of all, with choice number one, you have to find a person who has one million dollars and who is willing to let you walk away with that one million dollars. There are a lot of rich people in the world but finding one who will part with their cash no strings attached is highly unlikely. If by chance you do find some of these people, send them my way.

The second choice is actually just as difficult. Just walk up to a stranger and ask them to give you a dollar. Most likely you will get a snide comment for your trouble and be told to move along and stop bothering people. You will get the odd kind soul who will give you a dollar because they will want to help you out. That's the interesting part. A single dollar is obviously not held as tightly by people as a million dollars would be.

That's why I am in online marketing. You can provide a simple service to hundreds, even millions of people every single day and some will provide you with a dollar - or a nickel or a penny - for your trouble. It is difficult to be found on the Internet and elsewhere, but if you increase your online presence one step at a time, by providing solutions to people you will see some money start to trickle in.

Basically with affiliate marketing, you are a bridge helping people find what they are looking for and you can collect a toll for guiding people across to the place they want to go.

Right now it is early September and many people are online, looking for information about this or that celebrity, or wondering what they will wear for Halloween. Some are already shopping like crazy for Christmas, while others are relaxing and considering a trip. There are a million different people all searching online for a million different reasons. That's why you need to concentrate on building up your online presence.

You can try 2 different methods to make money online - you can try to dominate a niche or sector of the online world, like Amazon does with books, or Google does with online advertising, or you can do more of a hit and run kind of operation. By that I don't mean doing anything illegal or unethical, I just mean having a small or tiny operation that generates a small amount every day or so.

To begin, you won't likely be able to stand astride the Internet like a collossus because there are a lot of very big companies and individuals already in place. Trying to immediate dominate any money-making portion of the Internet right off the bat is like asking one person for a million dollars - it's not going to happen for you, unless you are extremely lucky or innovative or both.

What you need to do is to work on a daily basis to generate some income from your online marketing and affilate work. It may be just pennies a day or you may see nothing at all. You will think this is not worth your time and you may want to give up and try something else. You need to picture your goal of one million dollars or whatever your your goal is and take small steps to reach that goal. You will fail at times and you will have some successes, and you need to press on.

From personal experience I have had both successes and failures, but last month I made enough to cover my monthly mortgage payment. That took a lot of work and I think of it as a high water mark, but it is just one step to achieving financial independence.

I was in the position of just starting out and making zilch for a long time but I kept at it and preservered. Some may laugh thinking that all I have made is mere pocket change, but to others, that pocket change would be a small fortune. That goal of one million dollars is now a little bit clearer, a little bit nearer. It is still out of reach, but I am heading in the right direction and sooner or later our paths will cross.

Like I said - I don't have a system to sell you or any eBook. I guess the only system I can promote is that you work every day, try to improve, keep growing, take any failure as a temporary pause and keep moving forward. Every day you will have small rewards and setbacks, but if you continue to work at it, you will see your own goals drawing nearer.

I Made Enough Money Online This Month To Cover My Mortgage Payment!

Yes, I did it. For the first time I actually made enough money online through various websites and programs to actually cover my mortgage program. One thing: I do not have any "How I Did It" program or ebook or anything that I am trying to hawk. I am not trying to sell you anything. I've just been working hard and slowly getting more and more each month coming in and now I thought I would just brag a little.

Yesterday was payday at Squidoo, one of the websites I am on and the payment I received from them put me over the top. I started on Squidoo back in July 2008 - hey, 2 years ago this month! Squidoo allows you to publish web pages (called lenses), that contain links to various other websites like eBay, Amazon and a myriad of others that allow you to be paid when visitors to your pages click on a link they find intriguing. You can just write up a page and publish it and forget about it, but unless it is timeless content that others want to link their pages to, your page will slowly drift into the backwaters of the Internet and you will probably say that "Yeah, I tried Squidoo. Doesn't work." That is not true. As in most things, put in the work and you will see results.

As I mentioned, I started at Squidoo in July 2008. I received my first payment in about 2 months time. A whopping 8 cents. I smiled and thought "Meh. That's all well and good, but how can I make more money online?" I started looking at more and more other pages on Squidoo and went to the forum they have on the website for more answers. On the forum there were many in the same boat as myself, just starting out and pretty much clueless about how to make Squidoo work. But. There are others who have been on the website far longer and who have gathered a fair bit of knowledge about how to draw visitors and make sales. I read and re-read all I could on the forum and went to many of the top pages at Squidoo and tried to figure out how I could get some of my pages to rank highly.

If you can get your pages to rank highly, like in the top 2,000 pages, you can make money almost automatically. Look through some of my other posts on this blog to find out about that aspect. Then a lightbulb went off. Hey, why am I fighting to get all my webpages in the top 2,000? EVERYONE is trying to do that and if I just try to get money for a high ranking, there's a limit to how much money I can make. Don't get me wrong. There is a nice chunk of money to be made from getting placed in the top 2K of all Squidoo pages. This month each page in the top tier made was about $26-$27 each! That is not too shabby. Well worth striving to get some pages in the top level of Squidoo.

But if you want to make even more, work on driving traffic to your pages and highlighting products and other stuff people are looking for. You can make money doing this. If a dolt like myself can, than anyone else can to.

Anyway, after making eight cents on my first payday from Squidoo, I decided to start making more Squidoo pages. I did and my payday jumped up to $10. Yea! Not a fortune, but money coming to me for my own effort - every month! This was like found money. I started making even more pages and the amount I got from Squidoo increased again and again. There are some at Squidoo who make far more than I do - check in the forum, one of the top Squidoo people claims to have hit $10,000 with this month's payment from Squidoo. Amazing.

All this from doing what we love - talking to other people about what we like. I am very satisfied with how I have done so far at Squidoo, but hearing that others have made as much as ten thousand dollars, I think I will re-double my efforts yet again. If they can do it, I can do it - and so can you.

Just Got Paid By Squidoo

Just received notification of Squidoo paying me for my work. My payment was down a bit from previously, but that is just a reflection of my neglect of my pages on Squidoo. I haven't been updating or creating new content for a couple of months because I've been working on other ventures. But I have kept an eye on how my various pages were doing and had noticed a steep decline in visits - visits actually dropped to a third of what they were back in December. Since the start of the month of June, I've seen a rebound, back up to about 70% of last December's numbers but I know I can do better.

Several lenses that always are in the top tier have had their visits dry up and I've seen a corresponding drop in their ranking. So I need to get back at work to get them back into their rankings and pump up their visits as (of course) this means and increase in pay from Squidoo as well as an increase in SALES which is where the real money is.

Payday Today At Squidoo! Best Month Ever!

 I was working on a couple of my Squidoo pages and noticed that my revenue for eBay and Amazon sales was gone from my dashboard which usually means imminent payment. So I checked and Ka-Boom! Payday! The Big Blue Box alerting me to the fact that today was indeed payday.

Ad Pool: $16.47 - $2.80 - $0.14

Info Links: $3.22 - $0.55 - $0.03
 
That's what each of the 3 tiers received:
 
1st tier is those webpages ranked at Squidoo from 1-2,000. They received $16.47 from the combined adpool PLUS a further $3.22 from the Info Links revenue for a total of $19.69/lens in the top tier.
 
2nd tier (2,001 to about 8,500) received $2.80 in adpool revenue along with $0.55 from the Info Links for a total of $3.35 for each webpage ranked in the second tier.
 
3rd tier (8,501 to about 80,000 or so) received $0.14 in adpool revenue plus another $0.03 from the Info Links for a total of $0.17.

 
Along with the money made online at Squidoo through the ranking system, we also received money from Amazon and eBay and Cafe Press sales made during December. Your goal should be to try to increase this revenue as much as possible rather than relying on that generated by LensRank because it has a greater upside.
 
For myself, this is the third month in a row that my online money generated from Squidoo has increased and the amount was the most ever.  If you're thinking that you would like to give Squidoo a try, just sign up here:
 
JOIN SQUIDOO

All it costs is a little bit of time. There's tons of tutorials and a great forum for asking questions and very helpful people who have already gone through the start up stages. If I can make money online at Squidoo, just about anyone can, so give it a shot!

Payday At Squidoo Just Around The Corner

How do I know that Squidoo is just about to send notification of payday? The amount in the "Pending" column of my dashboard just dropped, so that means Squidoo is preparing November's payout. All sales made on your various lenses at Squidoo over the month of November will be included with whatever ranking bonuses each webpage earned and that amount will be sent to you (as long as it all adds up to at least $10.00).

Maybe tomorrow, or the next day when you log into Squidoo and go to your dashboard you will notice the infamous Big Blue Box saying "It's Payday!" and how much will be sent via PayPal. Any sales that were made during the run-up to Christmas will still be sitting at the bottom of your pending columnand will be paid out next month. As always, Squidoo pays two months behind - this payout is for activity and rankings for November, and the activity and rankings for December will be paid this time next month. If what you have at the bottom of your pending column is a big fat $0.00 right now (hopefully not the case), the February payout will be just for December page rankings.

So if you are not satisfied with what you will be earning at Squidoo for December 2009, NOW is the time to begin working to improve your results for December 2010.  I know it does seem very far off, but Christmas can be an extremely lucrative time to have webpages up - just ask flowski, whose excellent lenses were at the top of the Squidoo rankings this year (see my post What Are The Top 10 Squidoo Christmas 2009 Lenses?) and he mentioned in the Squidu discussion forum that his top page had passed it's one millionth visitor! Can you imagine what his pending total must be for Christmas?

Christmas 2010 does seem a long way off, but you need to do two things now:

• build Christmas webpages, and
• get them ranked in Google and elsewhere

Don't try to slap together two or three lenses in November hoping to generate a ton of sales. Do the work now. That's what I've been doing. I have been putting together several different webpages that will A) rank well at Squidoo over the oncoming Christmas holiday season, and B) will generate even more sales at that time. I did okay sales-wise this past Christmas, but I think I can do so much better and so can you, with a little bit of preparation.

In the meantime, I'm looking forward to seeing how much money I made at Squidoo for November. I have a general idea of course, but it's getting the actual notice I like.

How Do I Get My Squidoo Lenses To Earn More Money?

Ah yes, the perennial question for those trying to earn a buck over at Squidoo is: What can I do to make more money at Squidoo?

My reply? I dunno. Or at least, I'm not going to tell you everything I plan to do to get money from my Squidoo webpages, but I will tell you what my goals are as far as gaining a greater share of the wealth and what I'm planning to do to reach those goals.

This is something of a game ~ how can I get more visitors; how can I get more sales. As I've said before, there are two basic ways to earn money at Squidoo:

• Getting more lenses ranked, and ranked higher
• Getting more sales

Basically, I want all my lenses to earn their keep. I've put a lot of work into many different lenses and they haven't generate the return I expected, so I guess it is time to re-assess. I think my goals are on the modest side, and I don't think that publishing the perfect lens will suddenly set me on the road to riches. What each of my webpages need to do is provide some sort of a return. In addition to the fun factor.

Currently, I have 45-50 webpages at Squidoo with a high enough rank to earn something each month ~ the problem is, of course, that unless they are in the higher tiers they just do not generate to spend time worrying about their rank. I am appreciative of anything Squidoo sends my way based on rankings alone (thanks Seth and co!), but what we all should be concentrating on is the sales part of the equation. As far as ranking goes, that should be considered as a bonus for doing good work.

How Do I Increase My Earnings From Squidoo Rankings?

Not that I plan on turning a blind eye to the rankings. One goal I have set for myself is to increase the number of lenses I have in at least the 3rd tier to (drumroll...) 200 lenses. That means, adjusting, rewriting, reviewing, adding and subtracting content, doing more from a marketing angle ~ basically make my webpages the best possible, by attracting more visitors, favorable ratings, and (the make money online grail) more links to my lenses. I'll have to start flexing my marketing muscles and get the word out about Squidoo being a great place to do business (yes it is!), and that my lenses are where people will want to visit to find the information they are searching for.

Yes, that is a lot of work, but I do believe that it can be done. My monthly goal from just the rankings is to earn $50 each and every month which if I have 200 webpages in at least the 3rd tier would be around $20. I do have several in the 2nd tier and I have some that are flirting with the top tier, so one of my resolutions for 2010 is to get some more lenses back into the top tier. Hard to do, and very hard to maintain. Earning $50 a month will be nice, but it will not get me to where I want to be with Squidoo. That's where the second part of the plan kicks in.

How Do I Increase Sales At Squidoo?

As far as sales go, more is my goal. Pretty basic huh? One thing I want to state is that although increasing the volume of sales is one of my stated goals, there is no way I will allow my work to become too spammy. Some may say that they are already kinda spammy after looking at my webpages, but on a personal level I definitely try to shy away from stuff about selling a "system" or "buy my ebook" and all that. I have zero interest in writing about those things that do not spark my interest and hopefully, the interest of my visitors.

What I plan on doing is to increase the number of lenses I have with products and content that people are looking for to purchase and read about. I don't think that having a webpage primarily geared towards sales is neccessarily a bad thing ~ more sales are what is needed at this time to get the economy purring along again, and I'm going to do what I can to keep the gears rolling.

There is an infinite number of topics, niches, and ideas, that I think lend themselves to excellent lenses at Squidoo and I am in the middle of a building boom as far as new pages go. I've had what I believe are several ideas for hot lenses and these ideas just keep popping up.

Checking on Squidoo shows they are not covered by others and if an idea seems to be taken, I usually drop it or it morphs into something else. Basically what I want to do is publish content that visitors will find highly interesting and that gets searched out and lends itself to sales of related products.

What Are Your Goals For The Coming Year?

At the start of 2010 I find myself renewed, reinvigorated and eager to get a fresh start. Maybe that's just due to calendar turning, but for some unknown reason, my motivation to do better at Squidoo (and elsewhere with my online marketing efforts) is increasing by leaps and bounds.

I've had some success at Squidoo and I'm looking forward to doing even better personally and seeing what new efforts other lensmasters bring to the table in this coming year. I hope you catch this same enthusiasm and lets compare notes as we head towards a brighter future.