I’m Giving Up TV

I was reading an article late last night about the amount of time we spend watching TV.

The average person now watches 4.5 hours of TV a day.
To put it into perspective, if you watch an average of 31.5 hours of TV each week (which the average person in the US does) and you value your time at minimum wage of $5.85 an hour, you are spending nearly $800 a month ($798.53) to watch TV. That comes to nearly $10,000 ($9582.30) a year.

I’ll go ahead and state now that I don’t spend near as much time watching TV as the average person spends. I spend a lot of time on the internet reading, writing and trying to figuring out new and better ways to make money online.

However, I do feel that I’m losing a lot of valuable time sitting and watching TV shows that bring no value to my life at all and I’m willing to cut those out of my life.

Making Money Online

I’ve got a friend of mine wanting to make some money online. He’s no different than the millions of others wanting to do the same thing. He’ll be heading this way in about two hours and I’m sitting here thinking about what I’m going to tell him.

There are basically four ways to make money online.

1. Selling your own product
2. Affiliate Marketing
3. Blog flipping
4. Google AdSense

Google AdSense

The people who have been successful with this are few and far between, with the average person making a couple bucks a month at best. Most people never see a dime from their efforts.

I’m one of the ones that have been lucky enough to turn $10,000.00 plus a month using a combination of several different ad programs and building thousands of junk sites. Building, monitoring, ranking and all the other wonderful things that seem to go hand in hand with any website became more than I was willing to do and I got out of the business.

It’s not a good business model however you might be able to make a couple extra bucks per month with it. I believe Google pays out after the first 45 days and you have to make at least $100.00 to get paid.

Blog Flipping

I’ve not tried this yet but hope to get the time to start messing with it this coming month. The cash is a lot faster, you can get the money the same week you sale your blog. You basically build and set up a blog, write some articles and stick on it, as well as point some links at it.

Then sell it for as much as you can. You can use sites like eBay as well as several SEO forums to sell the site. Fast easy money, it all sounds good but like I said, I’ve not tried it yet.

Affiliate Marketing

This is where the big boys play. You’ll notice that most SEO experts want touch this area with a ten foot pole. And most people talking about it aren’t making the first Penney with it. This is where you get paid for the paying customers you can send someone.

We averaged about $5,000.00 per month last year in this area and I hope to get into it a lot more this year. I’d say less than 3% of the people that mess with it are able to make a living with it. It’s for the serious marketers and isn’t for the faint of heart.

Selling Your Own Products

If you’ve got a product or service to sell then this is by far the best option. We’ve made our living online for the last 7 years selling website designs. There are times I want to scream but I’d guess it’s that way with any real business.

You’ve just got to keep your head in the game and keeping moving forward.

We’re Not in Kansas Anymore

I ran across what I thought was going to be a very good topic by Jordan over at WPW, however like most things on the web it fizzled out before ever hitting a high note.

This isn’t an attack on Jordan, as a matter of fact had it not been for Jordan I wouldn’t be writing this now.

I believe Jordan’s thread would have been a lot better had he tried new things as he went along. Other words, if something isn’t working try something different.
I currently make a decent amount of money online and have learned over the years that there are two important things when it comes to making money online.

They are the traffic and the sites ability to convert that traffic.

I’ve got sites that make me money day after day on some extremely boring topics. And even though the rest of the world is seeing problems in the economy, I think God that my business has continued to grow.

However, it’s not been without effort, I’ve changed directions more times than most people change their underwear. I’ve spread out into other areas to pull traffic back into the sites I’m trying to make money with.

Let me give you an example;

I’ve got a website selling silicone wristbands; November was the worst month we’ve had in a long time. In December we redesigned the site and hit a record breaking month however January and February sales started dropping off really bad again.

We decided to build a website about fundraising events and once again drove sales back up and hit an all time high in the month of March. As a matter of fact we broke records that had been set over the past years in that one month.

Why the rest of the world is dealing with a recession, I’m dealing with how to break records that were set last month. There are times in life when we have to change directions and try something new.