How I Make Money Online: CGM Technologies

It’s time for that obligatory post of all “Make Money” sites, showing you how much they earned the previous month.  As much as it tends to seem like bragging for some people, it’s a great way for everybody out there to see the people taking their own advice and performing the work that they’re talking about on their own sites.

Last month ended up being a decent month overall.  I sold my proxy network, as well as a few other sites that I had started building over the last month.  I realized that I didn’t have much time to work on them, and also that I probably wouldn’t be able to maximize their potential, so I decided to sell them off.  All those sales brought in about $325 for the month. 

I also built a couple ebay sites, earning me another $80.

My affiliate earnings were entirely from Commission Junction, which did quite well for the first 2 weeks of the month.  I didn’t earn anything after that for some reason, but I did pull in just over $30, meeting my goal to beat last month’s earnings.  I also received my check from January, which was a nice gift.

My adsense earnings for the month were pretty good too, since my proxy network started to really perform right before I sold it.  I even had one day that earned over $3, which completely surprised me.  The month ended with about $32 in my Adsense account, so I also succeeded in beating last month’s earnings as well.  On another note, I got my first Adsense check yesterday.

 With those results for February, it’s going to be tough to top it in March.  I’ve trimmed off all of my extra sites, so I’ll need to come up with some more ideas for sites to flip.  Those are now averaging $50 per site, which is pretty nice.  I also built up a new proxy site and did some promotion on it.  The major promotion went out today, so I’m hoping it will start earning me up to $1 per day, but we’ll have to see.  I’m going to give it a week before trying out another promotion tactic or two.  In the next couple weeks, I should know exactly how each promotion has affected the site, and be able to just use the most beneficial ones for new sites.  In the end, I want to be able to build a proxy site and promote it to $1 per day earnings in less than a month for under $15 - $20.  I don’t see this as being too difficult, and if I can do this 2 - 3 times per month then I will be able to earn an extra $60 - $100 in Adsense each month.  Just 3 months of this and then that’s my car payment, so it’s something I’m really hoping to see happen.

I also have my ebay sites running still, and plan on starting to try making them better with a few articles on each site, and even working on a press release or two for each one.  This will work to make the sites more relevant to Google, and should help them rank higher to bring in more organic traffic.

I’ve also been looking more at affiliate marketing, using PPC to drive the traffic.  Unfortunately, I didn’t have enough money to start up accounts in Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft, but I did find a $75 Microsoft Adcenter voucher here, and it only costs $5 to create your account.  I have learned that the traffic from Adcenter tends to convert really well, so I’m hoping that it should be a great way to start out.  I’ve recently earned some money from a programming job, so I also plan on starting up an Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing account soon, after I find some good vouchers for them too.

As always, my goals for the next month are to earn more than the previous month.  I don’t consider website sales and programming in these goals, only income that is earned without my work, from Adsense and Affiliate Marketing.  My other goal is to make at least 2 conversions from Adcenter.  I am currently promoting an offer that earns $40 per sale, so if I can get 2 sales this month without spending more than my $75, then it’s going to be considered successful.

Well, I stopped getting my Adsense earnings from the first of my ClassHelper Proxy Networks that I sold for a nice chunk of change.  It was really fun watching the earnings go from $.14 to $1.50, then $2.00, then top off right above $3 in one day.  I’m now back down to $.03 earnings today, which is actually kind of depressing.  I earned a nice $1.10 off one click yesterday, but today just isn’t very good.  The good thing, however, is that my traffic is starting to increase to the proxy site, and I still have it being sent out in a newsletter on 3/2.  Until then, I just have to wait.  I don’t really have any more money in my Paypal to build any more sites or buy promotion, since I finally treated myself to a few things, but I have 2 high-dollar programming gigs that I’m working on.  I’m going to focus my time on those, and work on getting a little more money together.  Once I finish that work, then I’ll probably work on building about 3 or 4 more proxy sites, and then work on what I believe is going to be my major money-maker.  Actually, I have 2 things that I believe will earn me the majority of my money this year.  One is a membership site, but I haven’t worked out all the details yet.  I’m also planning on getting into Affiliate Marketing.  After reading up on several blogs, this proves to be something that can really take you places, if you dedicate the time and money to learning how to do it effectively.  In fact, the guy over at uberaffiliate.com recently posted regarding his one year anniversary in affiliate marketing.  In one year, he went from $0 to over $500,000 per month in earnings.  Now, this is where I want to be.  Yes, you can earn great money from proxy sites, and from website flipping, and even Adsense, but how many people who do that stuff full-time can say they earn 1/2 a million dollars per month?  Not that many.  I have a couple checks coming in that I plan to use to start out with my affiliate marketing business.  I will try and update things here, passing on little tidbits of information that I uncover along the way.  There’s no reason that anybody can’t make obscene amounts of money online, if they just put their mind to it.

Well, as 90% of the other online marketers will do, I’m placing a record of my earnings for January online. January was a great month for me, as I met every one of my goals for the month. Granted, I don’t set my goals too high yet, but the main premise is to grow my earnings every single month. I’ve been successful in doing that except for one month, I think it was October. Anyway, without further ado, here goes.

$30.35 - Adsense Earnings

$21.21 - Ebay Sites (GucciGallery, etc…)

$100 - Affiliate Earnings (Web Hosting Sale)

$42.90 - Affiliate Earnings (Earn10Cents.com - One Aff Site)

$14.2 - Affiliate Earnings (Earn10Cents.com - Won’t get this money until the account gets to $50)

$14.75 - Affiliate Earnings (Earn10cents.com - Another Aff Site)

$185 - Sale of 2 Websites

$45 - Building Ebay Sites For People

$30 - PHP Repair Work For People

$75 - Freelance Web Programming

$10 - Moola.com

As you can see, I’ve had a really good month. Granted, I haven’t actually received all the money yet, but if I can keep the earnings consistent then the money will be too. My biggest bonus was the Adsense earnings. I’ve finally pushed over the $100 mark to be able to receive my check. I’m expecting that in the next couple months. Do you guys who actually read this blog like seeing the pictures of checks? Even the small checks? Leave a comment and let me know if they help motivate you, and I’ll make sure to take some as they come in. Anyway, my Ebay Sites are really taking off too. The last day of the month brought in a surprise $5.40 commission from one of them, which shot the total up by 30%. I have some work to do to the sites, because I changed a few things around on one of them and it has really helped it gain traffic and sales. I’m going to make the same changes on the others and watch the earnings just grow. Earn10Cents.com was an experiment for me in building and running an incentive site without shelling out the $150+ for a script. I built it on Wordpress and wrote a plugin that allowed me to track the leads through Commission Junction. I paid out approximately $30 in incentives, but at least $10 of that was for link building. That meant that about $20 in payments brought about $60 in earnings. The sites also brought in some really good Adsense earnings as well, helping me out by about $10 this month. I then sold the site for the most I’ve ever earned so far for a site. All together, this one site that I built earned me over $200 this month. I also get asked to do some PHP work for people that I have dealt with in the past. I’m slowly charging a little more for my services, and they’re gladly paying, so I’m realizing that I’m worth a lot more than I think. I don’t plan on raising my prices any more, though, as I think $15 for fixing a simple issue is a great balance. I do some contract work as well, which comes closer to paying me what I’m worth, but still pays well.

That’s it for the month of January. As always, my goals for this month are to exceed the previous month’s earnings. For affiliate commissions, I’m not planning on trying to beat that because I don’t have the power of an incentive site to help me, so my goal is to earn anything again. I have placed a few affiliate links nicely in my ebay sites, which means that if people click through them and make a purchase, I’ll actually earn more than if they buy through ebay. I’m expecting them to really help out with the earnings. I also built 6 new Ebay Sites, with 2 more left to create. 3 of them are real tight niches, africastamps.info, buyaustraliastamps.info, and buychinastamps.info. Another nice site that I built is buydinaronline.info. I’m hoping to start showing in the search engines real soon (2 already are after less than a week), to start ranking well, and to start getting some sales. Along with those sites, I threw up a couple anime related sites, because they seem to be extremely popular right now, and I’ll be more than happy to join the others making money from it. Animeauctions.info and buyanimedvd.info should really start bringing in some decent money by the end of the month.

I never know how to end these posts, so I’ll just leave you by wishing you the same success that I’m experiencing in my online business.

With 8 days to go, I’ve done very well this month and met all of my goals so far.

Adsense Goal:  Beat $20

Adsense Earnings: $23.12

Ebay Goal: Beat $12

Ebay Earnings: $12.26

Affiliate Goal: Anything

Affiliate Earnings: $ 142.91

Now, the Affiliate earnings had a little bit of help from yours truly.  I needed to get some more web hosting (a plan that allowed Cron Jobs), and felt that my best option would be to go with a different company for now, rather than my current host.  I didn’t want to lose the money that I had already paid in, so it just made sense.  Now, it also made sense to go through my affiliate link and purchase the plan.  I made $100 commission, and have a $9.95 hosting plan.  Not a bad deal, when you think about it.  Anyway, the rest of the Affiliate earnings was from Earn10cents.com, which I sold.

I’m going to let you in on a little secret if you’re into flipping websites.  Always, always, always put your Adsense code in every website that you sell.  You don’t know how many people are going to switch it right away, or ever, and you can still earn money from the site until that happens.  I have a few sites that still bring in a little bit here and there, and one that has still earned me about $5 since I sold it.

Not many people read this blog yet, so you privileged few who do, remember the above advice.

All successes so far, no failures.  That’s the way it should be, and this month is a wonderful start to the new year.  I was able to flip my site earn10cents.com, selling it for $150 on Namepros.  That site was live for about 2 - 3 weeks and earned me $50 from affiliates, plus about $5 through Adsense, and $150 on the sale.  That was a great earner, and really pumped me up for the year.  I’ve also earned about $8 from my ebay sites, and just have a few more bucks left to beat that goal.  My Adsense goal is well on the way to being met too.  I have averaged $1 per day through my whole network of sites, so I’m pretty sure that I’ll hit $30 for the month.

I’m also selling ProxyForSale.com, just because I don’t know how to get the traffic to it in order to make it successful.  I was hoping to get $50 - $75 for it, but it looks like I’m only going to make about $35 for it.  For the time involved to get it ready, it’s not quite worth it, but there’s nothing I can really do about it now.  I also created an automated wordpress site that sold very quickly for $25.  I’m thinking that may be the way to go, for a while. If I can create a few of those sites every few days then I can earn a fairly easy $300 - $400 per month.

I thought that now would be a good time to look at my earnings so far for the month, so here it is.

My Goals:

• Over $20 in Adsense
• Over $12 in Affiliate Earnings from Ebay
• Over $1 in other Affiliate Earnings

How am I doing so far?

My newest site, earn10cents.com has really been a great earner for me.  It takes about 20 - 30 minutes each day to run it and make payments.  I have earned $46 from affiliate sites, just from this one website.  I’m not sure how much I have paid out for it, though.  I will have to figure that out real quick, but I’m guessing it’s around $25.  That gives me a net total of around $20 from just one site.  I also earned $3.62 from an ebay sale the other day, but I’m not doing anything at the moment to actively promote those sites.  With the traffic to earn10cents.com and the traffic that I’m getting for ITxTU.info, my Adsense earnings are topping out at $8.47 at the moment.  If I can keep up these earnings, then I’m set to do about $25 - $30 this month in Adsense.  I’m considering selling my best performing site, however, because I’m not sure how much I want to be in the incentive site business.  The only difficulty, though, is that it does perform quite well, and I don’t know if anybody will actually want to pay me what the site is worth.  Oh well, if all else fails I can just ride it out for a couple months, earn some good money, then convert it to something else.  We’ll just have to see.

All in all, my earnings are on track and I’m extremely pleased with how things are going.

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.