If you are anything like me, you have more ideas for projects than you know what to do with. Personally I’m always thinking up new ideas and concepts for websites I’d like to start and always putting them on the back burner for fear that they will fail or take way too much to complete. Apparently the old saying “You never know until you try” has never resonated with me. Over the past 3 years or so I’ve probably started (more like barely started) over a dozen different projects only to lose interest or never fully commit to starting them. What’s the problem? Fear!

It’s hard to admit, but yes I am afraid of my own projects. Afraid that they will take too long to complete; Afraid that they will never be successful; And afraid that I don’t have the knowhow to do everything that needs to be done to make them successful. I’d like to think that I’m not alone and that those of you that have never really had a largely successful website are having similar fears and doubts. But the better thing to think about is how to overcome these fears and take the necessary actions to bring my ideas to life.

So how can beat our fears and kick our procrastinating habits to the curb? Well there are a few tips which I am starting to employ that are making project management easier and my fears disappear:

1. Divide and Conquer – The saying that “Rome wasn’t built in a day” has always had some wisdom behind it. Any project worth doing probably isn’t going to be completed in days or weeks, but will probably demand months of your time. It’s disheartening when you pour months of your own time and effort into a project only to see another 8 months of needed work and time to see it to completion. Instead of looking at the project as a whole look at the project as the sum of its many parts.

Simply put, take the project and divide it into smaller, more manageable tasks. Map out your project and list all of the little steps it takes to get to your final goal of project completion. Then take the items you KNOW you can complete from the list and complete them one by one. Be sure to cross them out when they are completed to get the sense of accomplishment.

2. Incentivize Your Tasks – It’s human nature to have the “What’s in it for me?” attitude. Why should I complete this task or how will I benefit from doing this? Besides the end result of having your project completed and hopefully becoming successful, consider rewarding yourself as you complete milestones and cross things off your list. By telling yourself that you get to go out to a fancy dinner or get to have 1 day of complete video game vegetation if you complete one of your tasks, you will WANT to complete the tasks even more.

3. Embrace Mistakes – One of the things that I’m learning more and more each day is that you are bound to make mistakes. They are simply unavoidable. Instead of letting them bring you down and instead of using them as a reason for not moving forward on your projects….embrace them! Realize your mistakes and learn from them. Use what you’ve learned to not make the same mistake again and to help your next project or phase of your project succeed.

The moral of this post is to simply move forward with your projects no matter what. Don’t let yourself use fear as an excuse. If you truly think your project has the potential to succeed then what do you honestly have to lose? Perhaps its a few months of your time and some money. Are you willing to exchange that for the possibility of making it big? As far as I know, those who have made it big didn’t sit back and wonder IF they should start their next project or IF they were capable of completing it. They set their goals and went for it.

What are your fears? Do you have any projects that you have yet to start due to procrastination? I’d love to hear your take. Leave a comment!

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Imagine a site with 100 different, yet highly related products with accompanying reviews. Now imagine that 80-90% of the content within the site is generated solely by external users. Finally imagine each of those products having their own SEO optimized page containing your own affiliate product links. I don’t know about you, but I think that could bring in some very nice profits.

Over the past few months I have been experimenting with creating what I call “Niche Review Sites”. Basically I setup a site based on a tight group of niche products and provide product details and a few reviews. Each product gets its own page which displays the information, photos, etc. But these pages also allow users to leave their own ratings and reviews.

In my case I started with niches that I had some interest in so that I could write a few product reviews myself to generate the initial content. However this content could just as easily be outsourced for those looking to scale this method…something I am considering in the future. These initial reviews and product pages have embedded links and banners that are affiliate links to the product being discussed making the path to purchase as direct as possible.

Now once you have your initial content developed, you can begin to advertise and link build to increase traffic and off-page SEO. On-page SEO is something that I paid close attention to when developing my site template and because of this I started to see traffic from Google and the likes in a matter of a week or so! Traffic which ultimately could do one of three things: 1) write a review of the product which adds to the unique page content, great for SEO. 2) Click an affiliate link and make a purchase, great for making some money. 3) Read the review and be on their way…not so good, but not every user will obviously convert.

I’ve only begun testing this idea out with a single product page with already developed content including a review and additional user reviews and the results have been encouraging. Just that single product page is bringing in 75 unique visitors a month from just organic sources….free traffic! Now imagine if I fully develop the site and have 100 products all producing 75 unique visitors a month? That’s over 2200 unique visitors a month!! 2200 potential user reviews or affiliate commissions.

My plan now is to expand my test to include a full group of niche products and see what types of conversions and traffic the site can muster. My question to everyone reading is would you be interested in a product/script that you could use to setup a complete niche review site? Setup the script, upload a logo, pick a template and add products. No site building or HTML knowledge necessary. Leave a comment and let me know if you’d be interested in such a product.

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With the US economy is a recession and the unemployment rates getting larger by the month it’s no wonder that many Americans are questioning their own job’s security. Personally, I find myself looking into a cloudy future with respect to my current 9-5 job. I could literally be out of a job in under a month! Planning ahead I’ve already begun my search of the various online job search tools available to find my next full-time position, but I’m hardly worried about my financial future. Why?

One word….Freelancing. I’ve been doing part-time freelance work through the site Rent-A-Code for the past 4-5 years and earned a couple hundred dollars a month when I chose to take on work. I’ve always thought of how great it would be if I could just do freelance programming as my full-time job. No commute, no co-workers, no boss. It sounds like a great life, but never having lived it it’s hard to say. Yet finally the economy and job market may give me the opportunity to embrace this lifestyle and see what I can make of myself.

So the question remains is freelancing the answer to job security? Well in some respects yet and others no. It’s true I could never lose my job because I’m self-employed at that point, but it also means that I need to get a steady flow of paying jobs to keep the money coming in and the bills paid. I know that if I am to succeed at freelancing full-time that I’ll need to pull in $2000-$3000 a month and that I’ll need to push myself to take bigger and better (paying) jobs.

Am I worried? No! The internet provides me with so many different ways to bring in income that I know that the worst case is that I just break even month to month until I find a full-time 9-5 position. Better yet, the best case is that I make far more than I would at my full-time 9-5 positions and embrace a lifestyle that from afar looks attractive….only time will tell.

Are you a full-time freelancer? Do you have any dreams of making money online as your only income? Leave a comment and let me know your thoughts. I’d be very interested in knowing more.

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Yes it’s true, I’ve gone ahead and decided to rename my blog to give it a more professional and brandable appearance. It wasn’t an easy choice to make because of all the work I’ve already done under the ErikKarey.com branding, but it was a move I feel that was essential to get this blog off its ass and producing again.

There were several reasons for the change of domains. First, as you might well know, I’ve let this blog decay over the past 4 months or so to a point where I haven’t made any new posts and those posts which do exist are constantly attacked by comment spammers. I can’t explain why it happened….but I lost interest and motivation…..not a good thing at all. So I’m confident that this name change will light a fire underneath my ass and help me resurrect this blog.

Secondly, by using EntrepreneursWealth.com as the domain and title, it provides more brandability and professionalism in my opinion. With this domain I feel it will allow me the possibility of expanding this site into more than just a personal blog about internet entrepreneurship. If I can get traffic and interest back up then I feel that I can eventually create a whole community based around internet entrepreneurship with this blog as its foundation.

Lastly, the name change simply distances this blog from its predecessor to a degree. It allows me to put the infrequent posting mistakes behind me and to once again start something great on a fresh new domain. Forget about my personal blog (for now)! My goal is to make this a top blog on the topic of internet business and entrepreneurship. I have a lot of plans for this blog over the next few months and hope that you will stick around and experience them.

For those of you that knew this blog as ErikKarey.com thanks for sticking with me and remember to update your RSS feed with the new URL. For those new readers welcome to EntrepreneursWealth.com! I hope you all enjoy!

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About

If you’ve ever been interested in PPC or CPA marketing then you MUST head over to CashTactics to read Ruck’s latest series entitled “The CPA Marketing Series” It’s only just begun over the past few days and already a wealth of information has been covered and knowledge has been shared. I’ve really been impressed with all of the information, strategies and knowledge that Ruck has shared with his readers.

This series is not the typical series of posts where everything is glossed over and just barely touched upon. So far each post in the series has gone in-depth explaining everything you need to know to get your PPC CPA campaign off the ground and profitable. I’ve been intently following this series and trying things out and I’m finally excited to get into PPC. As Ruck has said he’s only scratched the surface so far and has a lot more information in store for his readers.

I’m happy to have found CashTactics and even happier that there is someone out there that isn’t afraid to share their knowledge in an in-depth no topic left untouched manner. I highly recommend you take a look at this series if you are even remotely interested in PPC. I’d also recommend signing up for the forums at CashTactics as there is a lot of information in there, plus Ruck is pretty quick with helping you out there too!

Posts:

• The CPA Marketing Series And Affiliate Directory
• The CPA Marketing Series Primer
• CPA Marketing Series - Networks, Offers And Tools Overview
• CPA Marketing Series - Google PPC To CPA Introduction
• CPA Marketing Series - Choosing The Offer
• CPA Marketing Series - Keyword Research
• CPA Marketing Series - Domain Variation Examples

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I probably say this in most of the monthly reviews I post, but it’s hard to believe that February is already over! (even with an extra day) February turned out to be a busy month for me in a number of ways both online and in my day to day life. In terms of this blog, it’s been a relatively successful month, though I there are places that I would like to improve upon. So without further ado here’s my month in review and goals for March.

Income
Income seems to be the thing that interests most people so I’ll start out with that. In my February goals post I posted saying how I’d like to reach $1000 income for February, but unfortunately I didn’t make it. A few setbacks in my eBay affiliate sites made it a slightly slower month than I had hoped, but it still turned out to be a decent one:

eBay Affiliate - $500.62
Tribal Fusion - $204.98
———————————
TOTAL: $705.60

As I said above, I had a few setbacks with my eBay stores and wasn’t able to create the 6 new stores I had planned for February. Unfortunately my eBay earnings have been trailing off at the end of the month. Even so, I was happy to hit the $500 plateau for my eBay earnings and already have a $490 check on the way from Commission Junction. For March I’d like to reach at least $600 in commissions from my eBay stores and launch 3 new stores by month’s end.

RSS Readers
February has been an up and down month in terms of readership and I can certainly understand why. As I discussed back in the middle of January, I’ve decided to reduce my posting schedule and only write when I have something meaningful to say or have the time to post. However, this method has led to only 4 posts last month. Ideally I’d like to see myself posting around twice a week or 8-10 posts per month right now.

With only 4 posts last month, my RSS feed count tended to rise with the new content and then dropped in between posts. In February I hit a high of 118 readers and for March I’d like to see my readership level off around 125 which is quite doable provided I write more content!

Personal
As I mentioned at the start of this post, February was a very busy month for me personally as well. At my job we launched a new version of our software which entailed a lot work from everyone on staff. That coupled with the fact that I had bronchitis for a good week made for a stressful few weeks. I’ve also found myself increasingly tired after work and need to figure out how to re-energize myself for the evening where I think I have the most potential to work on my internet ventures and where I have the most time to spend with those close to me.

Overall I’m happy with what February brought me, but not content with it. I know I can do better and produce more and that’s my overall goal for March. If you have a post reviewing your February or outlining your March goals feel free to leave a link as a comment on this post!

Good luck in March everyone!

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I’ve been using Entrecard now for about a month and have raked in right around 600 credits as it stands right now. Instead of using them myself, I’d like to give them away as part of a contest! (how nice of me?)

So what do you have to do to enter? It’s quite simple! All you need to do is subscribe to my RSS feed and leave a comment on this posting saying you’ve done so. If you are already subscribed, please just leave a comment and I will still give you an entry! If you’d like a bonus entry, please subscribe to my feed via Email and I will give you an additional entry! Just leave a comment saying you’ve done so.

Now what is it that you win? Well obviously the winner will receive my 600 entrecard credits as well as any credits I accrue from now until the end of the contest. In addition to the credits I’ll be throwing in 1 month of advertising on my blog in the form of a 125×125 banner. I will also be linking to your blog in the post announcing the winner.

The contest will run until Friday, March 7th, 2008 at which point I will randomly select a winner, write up a post about the contest and contact the winner via email.

Good luck in the contest and thanks for reading!

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As you’ve seen over the past month or two, the eBay affiliate program has been my major money maker. However, in keeping with the general consensus of the make money online community, I’m trying to diversify my money making techniques and not put “all of my eggs in one basket”. So with that being said I recently made my first plunge into the world of Pay-Per-Click (PPC) affiliate marketing and I thought I would share the experience with you.

Affiliate Offers
Not wanting to dump a lot of money into my first attempt at PPC marketing I decided I would set a small daily budget of $25 per day. My first step was to find an offer to promote and for that I need to join a few affiliate networks. I applied to several of them, but found the signup process easiest at RocketProfit and was accepted within a day. After logging into my account I found that they had a number of different offers and decided to focus on offers that require the least input from the user, zip code and email submission offers. These offers just require the user to input either their zip code or email for me to get paid and seemed like they would be easy to promote.

Keywords
So I found an offer that I liked that “awarded” the user a $250 gift card to a certain store if they provided their email. From here I went to a few of my favorite FREE keyword research tools including SEO Book’s Keyword Tool, Free Wordtracker and even Google’s Adword Keyword Tool. I used all of these services to create a keyword listing that I thought were highly targeted to the reward being given by my affiliate offer. The best part about the offer I was promoting was that there was one HIGHLY related keyword that had little to no competition and a good amount of searches per day and I focused my campaign around this.

Landing Pages
After deciding on some keywords I fired up Dreamweaver and coded myself a landing page and supporting pages. I made sure to code them in valid table-less XHTML transitional code, making sure to put my keywords in H1 and H2 tags. By doing this I trying to make my landing page and supporting pages as dense as possible for the keywords I was targeting which I later found out was very important.

Major things to incorporate into your landing page and supporting pages:

• Put Keywords in H1 & H2 Tags
• Provide unique content
• Link to Outside Related Sources
• Provide a Contact, Privacy Policy and Terms page
• Make use of the Alt and Title tags

I think the one of the biggest things I learned from this first plunge into PPC marketing was that the creation of a solid landing page is important. If you plan to use Google Adwords for your PPC marketing you need to provide not only a simple landing page, but also a lot of related data and content to achieve a good Quality Score. I ended up re-working my landing page 5 to 6 times before I was able to have Google give me an “OK” quality score. It was hardly an easy task, but in the end it allowed me to get $0.10 to $0.15 cost per click prices.

Adwords
After designing my landing pages and uploading them to my webhost I moved on to setting up my campaign in Adwords. I entered all of my keywords, my $25 daily budget and max Cost-Per-Click (CPC) of $0.15. I also setup 4 different versions of my advertisements. I wanted to test out which call to action and text in my ad would produce the best Click-Through-Rate (CTR). After that I let it start up and meticulously watched the numbers come in.

As you can see from my above screenshot, I ended up spending $24.36 on my campaign in 1 day with a CTR that is less than desirable. In my estimation those who were searching for my keyword weren’t necessarily interested in the offer I was promoting, but I also think the campaign need a lot more tweaking and the landing page needed to push them into the offer more.

Results
As I said above I ended up spending a little over $24 on my PPC campaign in the first day and logging into my RocketProfit account I found that I earned almost $30.

So doing some quick math is would seem as though I earned just about $6.00. Now this is hardly worth all of the time I put in to pick keywords, create a landing page and do all of the testing, but it was a good learning experience. Looking at the data in RocketProfit would also suggest that those making it to my landing page only went all the way through to the actual offer 30% of the time while only 30% of those people actually completed the offer. To me it’s clear that my landing page needed to make them WANT to complete the offer more.

Conclusion
As I said above, this was a good learning experience, but the question is would I do it again or will I continue learning about the world of PPC marketing? I’m honestly not sure. I’m not sure I have what it takes to be an effective PPC marketer, but I do know that I will continue to read up on PPC marketing techniques and when I have the extra time I could see myself trying this all again. Until then I have several projects to focus on as well as my eBay affiliate stores.

Please consider sharing your PPC stories by leaving a comment and feel free to ask any questions you may have and I will do my best to answer them.

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It’s been an interesting month for me and my blog. Personally I’ve found myself swamped with work to do and it seems like I’ve had little time to sit down and relax. In terms of this blog, I once again found myself taking an extended break from blogging and came to terms with my blogging failures. With all of this behind me I’ve started posting again, albeit inconsistently, and I’m happy to see my RSS count climbing. It’s sitting at an even 100 readers today which finally achieves my goal I initially set back in November. Below I’ll review January in more detail and give you my goals for the coming month.

Income
January was a pretty good month for income for me. I’ve started to get into the eBay affiliate program using the phpBayPro plugin and I’ve continued to gain money from CPM ads on JustPressPlay. Here’s a breakdown of my income for January:

eBay Affiliate - $461.64
Tribal Fusion - $211.34
RocketProfit - $4.23
———————————
TOTAL: $677.21

Be aware that although a majority of this is profit there was probably around $130 used to cover server costs and domain registrations for the month. As for what I would like to accomplish in February, I would like to increase my eBay affiliate earnings. Currently I have 4 niche sites started, but I’d like to build it out to around 10 stores by the end of the month and I think this could get me close to $1000 profit for February if I keep up with it all. Overall I’d love to hit the $1000/mo mark for February and I think it’s a very attainable goal.

RSS Readers
As I mentioned above, today my feedcount finally says 100 and by doing so it crosses that goal of my list. Now my obvious goal is to build upon that and by the end of February I really like to see it in the neighborhood of 150-175. Will it happen? I’m not positive. Promoting this blog has never been my #1 goal. I enjoy writing here and I enjoy it even more when people comment on and read what I have to say, but my main goal is to start projects that will earn me money consistently. So for February I am going to push for at least 150 subscribers and do what I can to make it happen.

Posting
Posting is obviously a sore subject for me. As I wrote in my blogging failure post, I don’t want to give up on this blog but realize that I can’t focus all of my attention here either. I enjoy writing here and it’s a great way to open up and share my experience, but I don’t have the time to post every day. So from now on I am going to be posting when I have something to share or say. I know that doesn’t follow the conventional wisdom of “post consistently”, but I’m going to try it out and see how it works.

Personal
On a personal note I know that I’ve outlined a lot of things to accomplish for myself in regards to my website projects and I’ve also said how busy work is, but one thing I would like to do is take some time out to relax and enjoy the “fruits of my labor”. By that I mean taking some time and doing things I enjoy and spending time with the people in my life. As of late it just seems like it’s been one busy day after another with the weekends offering little relief.

So there is my January in a nutshell and my goals for the upcoming month. I have high hopes for what I can accomplish in the coming month and I look forward to sharing it with everyone.

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Yesterday I was browsing the net and stumbled across an article and video blog on 45n5 entitled “The Best SEO Advice You Will Ever Hear” Mark, owner of 45n5, talks about how SEO isn’t worth your time and it’s the “Lazy person’s game”. Immediately, I felt this was kind of a BS argument. Being able to rank your website in the top 10 for any semi-competitive keyword is NOT a task the lazy. It’s hard work to do link building, on-page SEO and all the research necessary to target the right keywords.

Mark went on to compare SEO to the lottery by saying “Round up all of the people that win $100,000 per year via the lottery and all the people that make more than $100,000 via SEO and my bet is there will be more lottery winners.” Honestly this is a poor comparison as the lottery is just a game of luck while SEO is more of a skill or job. Simply buying lottery ticket after lottery ticket until you hit win $100,000 doesn’t require any skill. The people that do succeed at SEO are the people who know what they are doing, they aren’t lucky; they are good at what they do!

SEO and the result of it (organic traffic) is a great thing and the higher you rank in the SERPs the more traffic you are going to get and the more users you can convert into paying customers. Relying on organic traffic is not taking the easy way out nor is it a bad business practice. In fact, I think it’s a rather good business practice. I would rather users find me versus hunting them down through PPC or any other method.

All that being said, I’ll can agree to a point with Mark and say that SEO shouldn’t be your only concern when building a website. You need to produce quality content, you need to be giving value to your visitors and you need to focus on all of the other things that influence your SEO as well. Focus on exchanging links, creating linkable content, and promoting yourself through social networking and forums. All of these things in combination will undoubtedly influence your SERPs ranking. From there take a look at what you can do on-page to make your SERPs ranking even better.

When it comes down to it, creating and managing a site is a complicated task with a lot of different aspects to it. The overall moral of this story is to give everything attention and don’t over-analyzing any ONE aspect of your website.

Good Luck!

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