How I Make Money Online: CGM Technologies

I was just doing the old daily routine of looking through all my accounts, checking to see what my earnings are for the month and got hit with a surprise that completely shocked me.  I’ve always believed the idea to be profitable, but haven’t received more than roughly $.50 in any one day from it.  You’ll see the shopping sites in my sidebar, those are what I’m talking about.  They are wordpress blogs that pull ebay feeds, gathering all the items neatly into a central shopping location.  I get a commission from ebay when somebody clicks through one of those links and wins an auction.  Well, since I started the sites around the beginning to middle of November, I’ve only earned about $5 total from them, which isn’t enough to declare them profitable.  Keep in mind, though, that they are only receiving 10 - 20 hits per day, so I was actually pretty proud of those earnings.  Yesterday, however, I got hit with a real boost to my account.  Somebody won an auction, generating almost a $9 commission for me.  My account actually doubled!  It’s still not enough for a payout, but I stand by my original feelings of the sites, still.  Once I get more traffic to them, they will really take off.  I am currently working on SEO for the site “Gucci Gallery”.  I plan on taking them one at a time and focusing on each one to get it onto the front page of Google, and really bring in the search engine traffic.  As soon as this happens, I’m really expecting them to do great things.  Now, they all won’t succeed with at the same level, but they should average out to be quite lucrative.

Yesterday’s killer earnings (for me, anyway) of over $2 just brought me shy of my Adsense goal for the month.  I found out that the reason my earnings for the last few days were so low was that my proxy sites were completely down for about 3 days.  They came back up yesterday, though, and started earning again.  They still aren’t bringing in much, though, with the majority of my money coming in from ITxTU.info.  That site had brought in $9.52 so far this month, and if I’m lucky, I’ll break $10 from this one site alone.  It’s hard to believe that it’s actually bringing in half of my Adsense income, just that one site.  I’ve been thinking about how to make that site even better, so it can bring in more money.  I think that putting wordpress up and maybe using it for the site might help with SEO.  Wordpress is very good for SEO, so that’s something that could help out.  If I don’t do that, then I’m going to just switch over to a cleaner, simpler template.  It would be awesome if I can get another $5 - $10 from that single site next month.

Well, it seems like one thing that happens when you own proxy sites at Christmas time is that kids no longer need to use proxies.  This causes a decline in Adsense earnings from proxy sites.  I thought I might be able to actually hit $20 this month, but I don’t believe that’s going to be the case any more.  I should hit $15, though, which still beats my earnings for any month so far.  I think that now I need to start focusing on changing my plans, and trying a different approach to building my business.  I have just a couple more websites that I need to finish making, then I’m going to focus my efforts on doing some articles to promote the sites that I have.  If I can get them to show up well in the search engines, then I know I’ll start getting some really good results.

Well, this is slowly turning into a successful Adsense business.  I’m not making much yet, but it’s a start.  I have passed my highest month’s earnings by at least $1, bringing in a total of $13.52 for this month so far.  I feel that this is decent, considering 56 clickthroughs.  ITxTU.info is still the major earner of the month, bringing in around $6 - $7 so far.  I really need to work on getting some more traffic to this site.  Article marketing might be a good way to do this, as well as some link building tactics.  All but about $2 of the rest of the earnings has come from my new proxy sites that I’ve built this month.  Once I start getting some more traffic to them, I really see them taking off as well.  As you can see, the biggest thing with any site is traffic.  Even the best site is worthless, unless you can get the traffic to it.

Here it is, not even half way through the month and I’ve almost passed my Adsense goal for the month.  Last month I earned just over $10 through Google Adsense, which was my first month of not meeting my goal.  $10 is nothing to complain about though, as it’s still better than $0.  Well, about 3/4 of the day through today and I’ve hit $9.08 in Adsense for this month.  I bought proxy hosting at $1.34 per month, and got my proxy site I-Hide-You.com up again.  This, along with my 3 new proxy sites that I brought up are mostly responsible for the surge of earnings.  I have 2 more sites ready to set up and get running, and also plan to bring more online this month.    I think that now is the time to review my goal and look at different things.  Now, I think it’s time to set a goal for $20 for this month from Adsense.  I’m almost halfway there, so that should be a great goal for this month.  I might be able to get my check from Google by February, if I can keep this up.

I’m not sure what’s causing it, but right now I’m on track to blow November’s earnings out of the water.  In only 7 days of the month, my Adsense account has grown by $4.86.  If it keeps it up, that will be about $17 for the month, getting me about one month away from my $100 Adsense check.  One important thing, is that some of my sites are now starting to get a lot of search engine traffic, which is the main goal.  I talk a little about my SEO tactics in another site, http://webportinc.com.  Something that should be pretty helpful this month too, is that I finally bought some proxy hosting and put my proxy site back online.  This host says that you can have unlimited Add-On Domains, so I have a couple more domains that I’m going to set up as proxies and see if I can’t start pulling in $1+ per day.  If these start growing and earning well, I’ll probably work on building up a decent proxy network to help bring in cash for paying the bills.

Well, as you have read on many other IM sites, the month is over and people are checking to see what worked, what didn’t, and how much they earned.  I depend on much more than just Adsense to make up my Internet Income, which is a great thing.  I’m not heavily promoting my sites with adsense, so the earnings aren’t too great yet.  I’m hoping that after some time, they will just steadily increase.  I’m also going to start pumping out sites using another strategy that I discovered, and might lay some Adsense ads in them too, in order to get a little more exposure out there.  I’ll explain that strategy further, probably in its own page, as I’m going to be selling access to the secrets behind it, and the scripts that I wrote to work it.

As I’ve said before, my goal with Adsense is simply to beat my earnings from the previous month.  I started out in the beginning of August, with only 1 site that I built around the video surveillance niche.  That site earned me a whole $5.29 in the month of August, receiving 20 clicks all month.  I felt that was a great start, and was ready to see how it would do in September.  Well, needless to say, I didn’t work on the site hardly any more and ended up focusing on other things to supplement the income.  In September, that site still had some traffic, but earned almost NO money with Adsense.  This was the month that I learned about a couple more things, though.  I built a proxy site, and a few text messaging sites.  The proxy site made a couple of dollars, but ended up causing errors with my other sites, so I took it down.  My text messaging sites really started strong, though.  I built them to initially sell them off, but ended up only selling one of them.  That month, those sites earned me almost $7, which gave me a grand total of $9.22 for September.

My goal for October, then, was to beat $9.22 in Adsense earnings.  Well, my proxy earned me a little over $2 before I took it down, and my text messaging site brought in a strong $4 on its own.  The surprise, though, was my video surveillance site, which I hadn’t touched for a month, that gave me another $5 this month.  I was ecstatic.  I did some work promoting things in October, and making them better, which showed enough to get me a whole $12.58 for the month.  Goal met.

Now, for November.  Obviously I didn’t meet my goal for the month, but I’m not disappointed.  Here’s how it played out.  I didn’t do hardly anything with those sites during the month.  I don’t think I did any sort of promotion or anything, which is why I’m not surprised that I didn’t meet the goal.  I was surprised, though, at how well they did without the help.  My big earner again, was the text messaging site.  Almost $7 came from that site alone, so I anticipate some real earnings once I can get more people using the site.  The rest of the sites combined to get me a total of $10.03 for the month.  Once again, I’m very happy with those results, as they came from almost no extra work of my own.

It will be interesting to see what happens in December, as I’m not planning a whole lot of Adsense stuff, so I don’t expect to see much going on.  I have an entirely different focus right now, which is starting to really take off.  I’ll explain a little about it later, once I get all the kinks worked out.  All I’ll say now, though, is to check the links at the side of this site.  The whole idea involves automated pulling and maintaining of ebay auctions, dedicated to certain items that the site is focused on.

This really is a great way to profit in the internet biz.  I recently discovered how to automate a wordpress blog and feed it ebay auctions, allowing you to create a completely hands-off web site.  For some reason, I wanted to create my first site as a place to get DVD’s for under $1.  I have no idea, but I thought it was a good idea.  When you think about it, I’m only going to get pennies per sale, so time will tell if it is worth it or not.  Anyway, it was fun, and I learned a lot.  My second site took me a few hours to figure out what I wanted to build it on.  I planned to sell this one from the beginning, so I just wanted to make it easy to sell.  I figured that everybody would want a self updating site, but I was a little wrong.  I created this site for Nintendo Wii’s, and had a few different categories available.  Well, after a day or so I still didn’t have any bids, so I lowered the starting price down to $10.  That got some interest, and a few bids.  The first bid came in at $10, then $15 a while later.  Some time after, it was up to $20, and stayed for a while.  I posted at another forum, in order to get more exposure, and after some explanation of the site, got a $25 bid.  Although not bad, I was really hoping to sell these sites for $75 - $100.  I think that I will need to let them run for a while, building up some traffic and revenue first.  Anyway, long story short, I found somebody who needs a site just like this and offered $40 if I accepted tonight.  Of course, I did, and am now $40 richer.  I don’t know what to do with it yet, since I still want to create more sites and start bringing in some real money.  I do have one idea, that I’m going to monetize the hell out of, which should help me get a few hundred extra dollars in a short time.  You’ll have to check back and see how it goes.

I haven’t done anything with most of my sites this month, and I’m just over $8 in Adsense earnings for the month.  I know my goal was to earn more each month, but I’m quite happy with the results so far, considering I did almost nothing to earn it.  All I need to do is multiply my efforts, and watch the earnings continue to grow.  My surveillance site could really use a few more articles, but with just 3 of them it’s still not doing to bad.  In fact, that site alone made me a little over $1 this month.  It has a lot of potential, and I seem to earn around $.50 per click from it, so some day I need to sit down and work on it.  The text messaging site that I have has only averaged about $.30 per click, but at 20 clicks for the month it’s brought in almost $6.  This site is going to be the big earner for me, I think.  I still need to promote it some more, but I have a total of 158 people that are signed up at the site.  Those people are sending an average of 700 - 1000 messages per month from the site, so far.  I have 3 things that I’m thinking of doing with the site that will help it grow, and start bringing in more money.  For starters, I plan on creating some sort of way for people to use it in their MySpace profiles.  This would allow them to let people text them from MySpace, and would be somewhat customizable.  It would have a way for them to only allow certain people to text them, or anybody, and would keep their phone number private.  I feel that this would attract a lot of people, and really help the site grow.  I’m also thinking about selling a little bit of the text message space.  I could add a website url (a small one), and add it to the end of each message that gets sent.  I figure that this could earn a decent amount of money, but have no idea how much to price it at.  The third thing that I’m wanting to do with the site is hold contests for the visitors.  I have a way to track referrals, so I’m thinking about offering a cash prize to whoever refers the most people.  I haven’t quite worked it all out yet, but I think it will help grow the site as well.  I have a few other sites that combined to bring in the other $1 or so this month, and don’t really know what I’m going to do with them.  One is a web directory, the other is another small text message site, and also an old page that used to be a proxy site.

Overall, I think my Adsense will continue to grow each month as I get more visitors, and add more sites to my portfolio.  If I keep up my $10 per month average, I should get my first Adsense payment in another 4 months.

I knew that this was profitable, and had successfully done it once before, but didn’t make too much off it to really feel that excited.  I had another go at it this weekend, though, and was very surprised.  Surfing through the DP forums, I found a thread that someone started listing a bunch of expired domains.  I saw a domain that looked decent and registered it at Dynadot.com, which is a great place for somebody who is wanting to do what I do.  They will let you drop the domain within 5 days if you decide that you don’t want it any more.  Anyway, I bought the domain and immediately went to work on it.  I installed wordpress and found a nice theme to use for the site.  The next stop was at thenewsroom.com, to get some videos that I could use.  They will pay you $4 per 1000 views of their videos, and this was how I was going to start out monetizing the site.  After using several videos from there, I strolled over to Youtube and found some more videos on the subject.  Those videos really helped round out the site, and get it filled with content.  The next stop was a clickbank to find some products on the subject, of which there were 3.  I added those in the “Blogroll” section as “Recommended Links” or something like that.  After that, I threw a little Adsense up at the top of each page (in the template, of course), and was ready to roll.  I then set out to market the site.

The result was this; I paid $9 for the domain, put in about 2 hours of time setting things up (while watching tv), and sold it for $40.  I think I just found my preferred earning method.

Like I said, I had done this before with a text messaging site, which I sold for $30.  I tried it again after that and didn’t really have any success, which ended up being fine because I decided to build on my other text messaging site and make it what it is today.

Anyway, that’s a little example of one great way that you can really bring in some good money on a small deposit.  Try it out for yourself and see how you do.  If you have any questions, feel free to ask.