How I Make Money Online: CGM Technologies

Yes, I’ve been a little preoccupied with things and have neglected the blog this week. Sorry about that. This last week has been somewhat profitable, earning $40 by doing 2 PHP programming jobs for people. I also took on another job that is going to be pretty decent, which I really need to work on a little more.

I feel that I did pretty well with Adsense this month too, earning a whole $12.50 for the month. I didn’t do a lot of work to earn it, other than getting the sites set up, so I’m pretty proud of it. It’s also more than I earned last month, which is my goal. I want to earn more each month through Adsense than the previous month.

Here’s the breakdown of sites/earning:
itxtu. info    3,911   $3.56
i-hide-you    627    $2.38
surveillance side   72   $2.05
surveillance top   80    $0.36
findmysite     8    $0.27
smsmessaging   24   $0.14
theforgottenlinks.com    248   $0.08
free4txt       736    $0.07
As you can see, my main text messaging site brought in the most profit. I did a few stumble exchanges with it to get the traffic, and it tends to get around 20 - 50 hits each day now. The surveillance ones are a niche site that I set up, and only wrote 3 articles for it. The traffic there is both organic and some stumbles. I-Hide-You was a proxy site that I built, but it caused all my other sites to get 500 errors occasionally. I took it down, but there are still some links that point to it, so I built a small page to try and monetize the traffic. Those are the big ones in the list. My other ones aren’t really worth mentioning, so I’ll wait until they do something more noticeable.

After spending a little time reading on a forum that I like to visit, I realized that although I am happy with the results that I am getting from my websites, there are things I can do to make them so much better.  The sites themselves look good, but I want to work on getting them to bring in more money.  Right now, the only way that they get traffic is from Stumbles, which isn’t very reliable for a long-term profit.  One of my sites has been up for about 2 1/2 months, getting a visitor every few days.  Something changed, though, and it recently started getting around 2 - 6 visitors every day for the last week.  It’s been in the search engines since the day I launched it, but being a 2 page site didn’t help it much.  I neglected it for a while, but then with the visitors that have appeared lately, I’ve started earning from it again.  Out of 1500 page views, I’ve earned a little over $7.00, which is pretty good so far, I think.  I’m going to work on making it better, though.  Yesterday, I wrote another article and added it to the site, bringing it up to a whopping 3 pages.  My plan is to try writing 1 - 2 articles a week using long tail keywords, and work on getting some more traffic from the search engines.  My traffic right now seems to be about 35% from search engines for this month, and my goal is to not only increase that number, but to increase the number of visitors too.  I’ll post back on my progress with this.

I also have another project that I’m working on related to SEO.  I’m going to post about it at my other blog, http://webportinc.com, so check it out there.  It should be a pretty informative case study, and I’m hoping it will be quite lucrative as well.

Today is another unproductive day for me.  The only thing that I’ve done to earn any money is to look for some stumble exchanges, trying to increase traffic to my sites.  They haven’t helped much yet, though.  I just checked, however, and noticed 2 Adsense clicks on one of my sites that I haven’t touched for about 6 months.  I’m quite surprised, actually.  It’s a 2 page website, built around video surveillance.  I really need to write some more articles so I can get more traffic to the page, and just make it better for the visitors.  The nice part is that I’m finally half way to my first Adsense payout!  I’ve been steadily increasing my Adsense income over the past few months, going from about $1 - $3 per month up to $9 in September, and almost $8 already in October.  In about 2 months or so I should be able to get up to about $15 - $20 per month in Adsense.  I have 3 or 4 more domain names that I can use to build on, so we’ll just have to see what I can do with them.

Today is just one of those days, where I really don’t feel like doing anything.  I don’t even feel like finishing my work for my job.  I doubt that I’ll actually do anything tonight online, but you never know.  I may get the urge to do some programming, but I don’t know.  I have a site that I’m redesigning for a guy, but I haven’t been very good at working on it.  It’s functional, so it isn’t a big deal, but I need to get it done so it’s one less thing on my plate.  He wants me to change the site to use AJAX, which will speed things up, as well as just make it cool.  Anyway, nothing new done today to earn any money.

Wait, I did make a purchase today, for $2.  It was a report about how to make $3000 in 7 days, and I think it included the $7 script, which in itself is a great deal.  I think I should work on reading through that over the next couple days and try putting some things into action.  I have a ton of resale right and plr materials, so I may be able to actually get something started with it.  We’ll just have to see.

After seeing how great itxtu.info turned out, I felt that it might benefit me to redesign another Text Messaging site that I have, http://Free4Txt.info.  I found a really cool theme from http://oswd.org that I used, and I think it makes the site look really nice.  The script and site were so basic, and everything about this theme just felt right with it.

So, there you go.  The site’s been redesigned, now I need to work on getting more traffic to it.  I only get about 2 - 3 hits each day, so this will be a good chance to try using some SEO and traffic  techniques to build up the site.  You’ll be able to read about it at http://webportinc.com, when I get things going.

After many hours of deliberating what to do with the new domain name that I just purchased, I think I have the answer.  Searching around yielded some interesting information.  This domain actually used to belong to a website design company, so in keeping with the spirit of the originators I’m going to focus it again around web sites.  I don’t have time to do a lot of websites for people, though, so I’m going to try something unheard of for me.  I’m going to make it into a blog, and attempt to keep it updated regularly.  I think I’ve done a pretty good job with this one, so I don’t think it should be too hard.

Ok, I’ve decided to make it into a blog.  Here’s where it gets fun…  Being about web sites, I can talk about anything I want.  Programming, SEO, purchasing, selling, tutorials, and the list just goes on.  I don’t think it will be hard to build it into a great blog, which will hopefully start earning me some good money within a few months.  I also believe that this way will be a great way to take advantage of the PR3 that is already on the site.

Therefore, if you check both of these blogs, you may see some similar things.  I’ll try to have unique stuff on each one, though, so don’t worry.

I’m so excited with how this turned out! I originally threw things together, and didn’t really like the way it looked, but I just didn’t know what to do about it. Remembering the ever-popular website http://www.oswd.org, I realized that I could find a template there to use. It didn’t take long to find “Zenlike”, which quickly became my favorite. About 30 minutes later and I have a totally redesigned site. Check it out!

http://itxtu.info

I searched most of the day yesterday and ended up finding a site that had a valid PR3 on it. The BIN for the site was only $22, so I snapped it up. I’m just waiting to finish the transaction, then I need to figure out what to do with the site…

Ok, I’ll talk a little about some of the stuff that I have going on.  I got ahold of a few reports explaining how to build a website with the sole purpose of selling it.  After reading through one of these reports, I used my programming skills to make a small, simple Free Text Messaging site that I was able to sell for $30.  Not bad, considering the price of the report was only $5.  Anyway, after that success I thought I would see if I could duplicate it.  I bought two new domain names, and modified the scripts a little bit.  I couldn’t sell these for the life of me.  I don’t know what the problem was, maybe it had something to do with the fact that the domain names were .info’s.  I’ve pretty much given up on one of them right now, but decided to update the other quite a bit.  I added some features to the script, including a login ability and contact book.  This site is http://itxtu.info, if you want to check it out.  Even after adding these features, I still wasn’t able to sell the site.  It hasn’t been all bad, though, because I’ve earned about $5.00 from Adsense.  I’m always trying to figure out what to do with my sites, so I’ve decided that my next step is to try a new template for the site.  Once done, I will decide if I want to try selling it again or not.  I have about 30 people signed up, so it  may be worthwhile to just keep it.

After doing a couple more programming gigs, I had money to buy another website flipping report.  After reading this, I decided that I needed to build a directory site.  I had a name that would work great for a directory, so it wasn’t too much work to get it going.  But now, what?  I decided that the best thing to do is to offer one way links free until I hit a certain number, so I could start growing the directory and getting some traffic.  Many people have taken me up on this so far, and I’m up to about 160 links.  I know that there has to be more that I can do, though.  Then it came to me.  I decided to offer a contest in order to promote my directory.  Every main category will have 2 links randomly selected to be feature links for 2 weeks.  Who wouldn’t like the chance to have their link show featured for 2 weeks?  I came up with one more major contest that will help everybody out.  Whoever sends me the most visitors from a link on their site will get their link posted at the top of the page, showing throughout the entire directory.  The second place referrer will get the same thing, and the 3rd and 4th place will get their link in the sponsors area for a month.  This should really improve traffic to the directory.  I also submitted it to all of the PR6 and PR5 directories at addurl.nu.  I’m really hoping that all this work gets me a pretty good page rank, which will allow me to sell links at higher prices, making a decent profit from the site.

I’ve seen this question asked several times, so I’m going to provide my answer here for those of you who are interested. I feel that the best way to start building your reputation is to offer your services free for little jobs here and there. I’ve gotten a lot of work as referrals just because I’ve done little 5 minute fixes for free for many people. It’s also worthwhile to undercharge for your services at the beginning, but make sure you don’t do it too often, and for the wrong jobs. If it’s a quick, one-time gig, then go ahead and do an hour’s work for $10. If there is a chance of ongoing work, though, you want to build a relationship based on what you’re worth, instead of what you charge. If you’re competent, then it’s easy to get $20 - $40 an hour for your work. You don’t even have to be extremely good at programming, but you must always deliver what you promise, and never change the price of your work without good reason. If somebody wants to add a couple small things, do it for no charge. If they want something that is more extreme, then discuss a price increase in advance, so they don’t feel like you’re taking advantage of them.

Well, that’s pretty much all I’ve got for now. Good luck on your ventures!