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.

You may or may not know, but I had a few proxy sites that I tried to start.  Well, shortly into it my hosting crashed a couple times.  After some bad luck with the host, I left my sites down for about a month.  I decided to give it another try, after I found some more proxy hosting.  It’s still kind of a gamble, since I only had to pay $12 for hosting for the entire year, so I’m not sure how reliable it’s going to be.  It’s worth it to try, though.

I set up these proxy sites with a very, very, basic format in order to try and maximize my click-through rate.  After that, I also did some promotion on 3 of the 4 sites by having them sent out in newsletters to proxy groups.  One cost $2.50 and the other cost $5 for 2 sites.  Since that point, my Adsense earnings have grown to an average of $2.50 per day on just those 4 sites.  This month, I’ve made $12 in Adsense from those sites, so I’ve definitely made my money back.

Something came up, though, that is causing me to slightly regret a decision.  One day I was suddenly unable to access any of my sites, or even the main site of the host.  I got frustrated and posted the 4 sites for sale as a network on DigitalPoint.com.  Those sites look like they’re going to earn an average of $75 - $90 per month, and the bid is only up to $70, so somebody’s getting a hell of a deal right now.  I have a BIN of $125 on them, so I’m hoping that it keeps going up and hits that amount before it sells.  Yes, I could hold onto them and earn the money myself, but since I posted it I’m hoping to make the most from them now.

My point in this, though…  It appears that my proxy sites are barely using any of my bandwith of the server.  Therefore, I have an idea.  I know 2 methods of promotion that really help a site.  I also have another newsletter that I can send it out to for $6.  So, I can send it out in 3 newsletters for a total of $11.50.  The price of a new domain is $7 now through GoDaddy.com, using the code CJC695DOM.  I bought a new domain GymClassHelper.com, and set it up just like my other proxies.  This should be really easy to remember, and should cause it to be passed around quite easily.  I’m positive that after sending it out to the newsletters, I’m going to be able to start earning $1 per day easily.  All it takes is 20 days of $1 per day in order to make all my money back.  I would like to be able to start up at least one new proxy per week, using these steps.  If I can manage that, then by the end of March I should be able to pull in $5 - $6 per day, and receive a check from Google each month.  Once I get to a better point, maybe 2 - 5 new proxies a week would be in order.  If I can get up to 100 proxy sites, each averaging $1 per day, then that’s $3000 per month.  Even if they average $.50 per day, then I would still be earning $1500 every single month, on top of my regular job.  I’m going to try this for a couple weeks, and then I’ll let you know the results.