Michelle Khang Dot Com

Oh man, that was by far the best performance this entire season. David is the one to beat in this years competition.

Check it out!

Yes I know … I haven’t been blogging as much as I normally do, you’ll soon understand why..

I have had the flu for more than 10 days…since I wrote ‘How to Make an Extra $500 a Month in 6 Months‘ so I haven’t really had those blogging juices flowing, know what I mean..? Anyhow, I am all better now after OD ing on Vit C over the last few days…

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Over the last week while I did not have my head buried in all my websites, I sat back a bit to look at the whole online business thingy and it all looked quite daunting to me again…

While I make a nice 2k now every month, I still struggle like mad sometimes to hit the mark. You see, we always need to be on top of our game and keep on our toes all the time. Even small things like checking to see if your graphics are loading when your website loads are all important things that need to be done.

I’ve had a tough time this month trying to hit the 2k mark even after launching a new membership website and running an Easter Promotion. The new membership website only managed 3 new signups and the Easter Promotion has brought me 6 sign ups. This time I ran a different promotion offering a free 7 day trial which would only benefit me if they found any value in my service. So I need to wait 7 days to see any money!!

I’ve just checked my sales so far on Paypal confirmed that I am struggling…HELP!

Month to date sales is just $1437.04 and this is before paying Paypal commissions! So we’ll see if any of the 6 sign ups stay on to make my grand total 2k. I’ll need at least 5 of them to stay on to hit 2k but I also have other products that should help a bit! lol… tough… this month since the bar was raised to 2k last month.

You see it is always a work in progress, even the big guns have this ‘problem’. It is not so much a problem for them as they have an army of affiliates to promote their stuff for them and this is really where I am lacking. I have no affiliates and have not even bothered recuiting any affiliates. Even with an army of affiliates, they still need to keep coming out with new products and new promotions for their affiliates because affiliates sell the lastest hottest products or best paying ones.

This month has been a real challenge for me as I had expected and I think I’ll just barely get by. I’ve taken steps to try to stablelise the recurring income from my 2 membership sites that really depend on me to perform. If my selections under peform like they did in February then I few members drop out and I need to look for new ones and that is a problem. It is always better to keep your customers happy than to find new ones.

The most important lesson learnt this month is to have more $7 websites. The total passive income generated from my two $7 websites is only $154 and another more expensive product is $403, making the total of $557.92. So you see the bulk of my income is from the membership websites, I need to have an equal balance.

So that is my mission for April… another 1 or 2 products that require little or no daily maintenance work.

Whether you own a blog or a website, the only way you are going to make any money is to have people visit your website. To make a full time income online, you need to drive bus loads of traffic to your websites everyday. This is not easy and is a work in progress.

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Back in June last year, I gave myself no choice but to TRY my hardest to make a living online. I had left my job and had bills to pay…so failing was not an option. If I had not made the decision to TRY to make a living online without a job to fall back on, I would not have worked that hard and may not have discovered that it was possible to make an income online. STOP!!! I am not suggesting to any of you to do the same…

As I had been scammed too many times into believing in all those plug in websites and instant online businesses, I decided to give it a shot at creating my own product and try to market it without an expense account.

Since I had some experience in horse racing systems and had made some money this way, I decided to write about my experience in an ebook that I titled “How To Make $50 - $100 a Day From UK Horse Racing” .

I supposed you can call me lucky in a way because I was using the keyword “money” that the online and offline world can’t get enough of. So the video that I created to market my product was quickly picked up by many people and has been watched 5225 times as I write this post. While I’ve sold more than 100 copies of that first product, it was only the beginning of things to come.

Creating Videos

I find that creating a video is the easiest thing that a newbie can do to drive traffic very quickly to your website. You can create all sorts of videos and link them all to your website. They do not need to be of the same theme as your product or website. The best way to get people to view your video is to make it an interesting video. Funny, scary or even accident videos get a lot of views. People are just curious and look for such videos and if you managed to get 1000 viewers, some of them will click through to your website. If your product is free, the click through rate is even higher.

This method is FREE to get traffic to your websites. You can create 10 videos for each website and that should really help with the traffic.

I make an average of 20 sales every month from that first website since I uploaded the video and I only created one very amateur video.

Link Building

In my opinion this is the ultimate traffic generator and it can be free. I say it can be free for those who are willing to do some work.

All internet marketers use this method to generate tons of traffic but will probably never admit it.

The best links are non reciprocal links or one way links that point to your website. There are 2 ways to do this, the paid way and the free way. Both of them are equally effective and will bring you a lot of traffic if done correctly.

Let me explain how link building helps with your traffic and sales.

Search engines think that the more people who link to you the better or more relevant your website is to the given searched keywords. This method works very well for niche topics that don’t have not too much competition.

Here is how to do it the free way;

You need to submit your website to website directories, to as many of them as you can find. There are free softwares that help you do this, I’ll upload one here for you guys to use on another day. Unfortunately some of these websites require you to link back to them. This would render that link pointless. However, there are also many site directories that do not require the link back, these are good for you.

The other more ‘lethal’ method is to write 3 different articles a week and submit them to all article directories that you can find. There are hundreds! Since it is such a tedious challenge you might want to use a software for this too. I am not going to go into the details of how to write an article…as that is a whole post by itself. The point here is just to get your link in the resource box found on every article submission to appear on those article directories. There are a 2 ways that this will help drive more traffic to your website;

1. the numerous links speaks volumes to search engines

2. some people search at article directories for articles to republish on their newsletters, so when their subscribers read your articles they have the ability to follow the resource link to get to your website.

In the old days this technique was used by all successful internet marketers as it was free and very effective.

While this method is still widely used and very good at getting you some results within 2 months, there is another link building exercise that is very effective with much less work involved, WAY LESS work involved. You can get yourself 500 one way links pointing back to your website in a matter of days or weeks. This one costs some money but is well worth it.

This method is considered a bit underground for internet marketers and most people do not want to talk about it for fear that their websites will get penalised, which happened to quite a few top guns last year.

There are many websites that sell links, just do a google search for ‘one way links’ and you’ll have an idea of where to start.

What you need to do is first select a couple of keywords that you use on your website. Say 3 or 4 of them , then sign up of one of the link services and start creating the links to point to your website but not all at once in a single day. You can vary the links to maybe a handful a day or so. By the end of 2 weeks you’ll have a good 200 links pointing to your website. Your google rank and alexa rank will not change so quickly and make take a month or two for the search engines to digest, then suddenly like magic you’ll appear on page 1 or 2 of the search engine searches for your keyword.

You can achieve the same results with the article submission, but for me that is just too tedious and painstaking!

I’ll be writing another article on Articles and Link Building to give you more details. In the meantime you can do some research and check out the websites for article submissions and link sellers.

Send me your questions…

I am feeling a bit under the weather today… and of all days there is sun today after 5 days of rain. My elder son who is attending nursery brings back all kinds of germs and bugs… and passes them to his poor little baby bro and me, of course…it is called sharing !!

I just wanted to write this post before the weekend as I try not to blog on weekends and keep myself free for family outings. Hopefully we’ll be able to take Ethan to see Horton if there are tickets.

I know that there are a lot of you who read my blog who wouldn’t mind having an extra $500 a month just for some little extras. You may have noticed or remembered that I actually need to write a post about how to generate traffic for your blog/website but I decided to write this first before I do the traffic post.  So be on the look out for the traffic post on Monday.

So then, would you like an extra $500 a month? You see it is almost like free money, you’ve just got to hook yourself up to the system and click on collect. This is why the top internet marketers will always be laughing all the way to the bank and they will never go hungry.

Most people are just plain lazy nowadays..and so are you! That is why we are all on the internet blogging, shopping, emailing, socialising etc etc… You see back in the olds days before the internet existed, all the shopping, communication and socialising needed us to move around and basicaly move our butts to get something done. Now there are people who date on the internet, work from home and don’t write letters anymore cos there is the email, then if you wanted to learn how to groom a pet, you just google the phrase “groom a dog” and viola! There is 711,000 search answers for you.

All us lazy people are doing the same thing… why drive to the bookstore or library when you’ve got the internet? Armed with this information, you can be making yourself an easy $500 a month in 6 months quite easily.

All of us have hobbies, some like fish , some like gardening, some like going to the movies to watch all movies, some like cats…the list will go on for pages.

You can turn your passion into an income stream just by ‘putting pen to paper’, not literary but start writing a ‘How To’ book about your hobby and you can easily make some nice profit with it. If you have a great topic but still lack some content, simply do some research on the internet to gather up content. Even if it takes you all of a month to write a whole book about something that interests you, that book is worth it’s weight in gold because it can bring you $100 a month for the next 3 years. When I say book, these are short reports, not 70 page long junk that people put together to get you to pay more.

Even if you do not know a great deal about your hobby, take some time to learn more about it and write it down in a short book. After you’ve written the short book, read my post about http://michellekhang.com/2008/01/31/how-to-make-money-from-your-hobby

and very quickly set it up. You keep doing this once a month for 6 different topics and hook them up to a sales page and promote them. You’ll be seing some nice income rolling in. Making money requires you to have a plan, then it is just like walking. Put one foot in front of the other and walk. Complete one website then another then another then another and in 6 months, you’ll have your $500 a month and more.

That’s one way of doing it, the other way of doing it is to buy 5 domains and start blogging about 5 different topics. I think both of them are equally easy to do but I personally prefer the $7 to $10 websites because these websites require very little attention from you. You just need to set it up once.

The most important part is still getting the traffic to your websites and this can be relatively easy for the big boys but for a newbie this would be their most difficult task. There are ways around it and I will talk about this on monday. One of the most important ’system’ that will yield results really quick is for you to get a lot of people to link to you.

More on traffic and link building on monday, stay tuned…

Hmmnn… sounds good doesn’t it? How to make your blog make money…

You see your blog and all your websites are your employees, you can order them around to do whatever you like. Their performance is entirely dependant on you. If you are a lousy boss, your employees will be equally lousy if not ’shitty’ for lack of a better word :p

Let me take my blogs as examples and we will have a look at what this ‘employee’ is doing to make me money.

Systems That Profit

First, you need to click on the link above and it will open up my gambling theme blog in a new window.

I bought this domain back in July last year with the intention of writing racing system reviews. So I did write a few reviews and that is how I attract people to my blog. Every blog needs to have an identity, it is sort of like the employees’ charisma. If your blog has nothing interesting to offer to readers, then this ‘employee’ lacks charisma. No charisma, means that this employee won’t be bringing in any dough for you. You need to sack her right away! And hire an interesting person to work for you.

An interesting employee would be one with many searches on Google. The reason I chose gambling as my niche/theme is because I have some experience with it and also people LOVE to gamble. Find your niche and get it in front of the correct audience and you’ll make money. It is really that simple, it is not rocket science you know!

Advertising Revenue

These ad revenue are from ad agencies.

I make advertising revenue from Google/Bidvertiser ads on my blog. Google Adsense ads are better than Bidvertiser as they change according to the IP of the person viewing the ad. That way the click through rate is higher.

You’ll also notice that there are links on my blog posts that have a pop up box whenyou place your cursor above them, these are in text links. My favourite at the moment not because I am making a lot of money from them but they blend in perfectly with the blog and are non intrusive. Since I added Kontera links to my blog in Dec 07, thats about 3 and a half months - the money I’ve made from Kontera alone is enough to pay for my domain.

Advertising Space

You’ll notice that I have 2 columns on the right of my blog. There are two box like products that I promote, they are my own products but if you don’t have a product simply sell that space for money. Even if it is $10 a month and you sell 3 ad spaces, that is $30 a month for 12 months a year.

Selling Affiliate Products

Before you go out there and create a blog full of affiliate products, you first need to have content for your blog. Then you can incorporate some affiliate products to generate some sales by writing a review about the product.

I used to write reviews about other peoples product but these days I prefer to write a review for my own products… for obvious reasons…

I get a lot of traffic coming to my blog and then I funnel this traffic to my other websites and some of them go on to buy my products or services.

I have also earned some affiliate commissions for other peoples products, either way it works for me.

Mailing List

There is a very famous saying that goes like this ‘ the money is in the list ‘

I have set up once of those irritating pop ups before on my website but back then I could not configure it properly so I left it alone but one of these days I’ll get it up properly. Here’s why.

You may have read about my Valentine Promotion that I ran for 48 hours that resulted in 5 sign ups. If are just starting out and have no list you need to create one. The best way to do it, is to give something away for free in exchange for the persons name and email. Once you have a list of say 100 people, you are on your way to making some money from that list too.

Paid Reviews

This is a very popular way for people to make money from blogging. There are 2 ways that you can earn money from writing reviews. The first is to offer to write a review about a person’s product/website in exchange for money. This can be a personal agreement between the two of you. High traffic websites command a very high price per review, John Chow Dot Com charges $500 for a 400 word review.

The other way to earn money from writing reviews is by joining Pay Per Post sites. They have many opportunities there and many people make a full time income by just writing reviews. I’ve only ever written one, it’s here http://systemsthatprofit.com/2007/10/11/football-results/ . It took me all of 10 mins to write it, they paid me $7.50 for it. Not bad huh…

Basically my first blog has made me quite a lot of money as I only paid $7.15 for it! Great return on investment… Now you try it!

Having a great website/blog with money making systems in place is you first step to making money online but you’ll need to get people to read your blog or view your website. Otherwise your money making systems won’t convert readers into pure CASH!

I’ll cover how to get traffic to your website/blog in my next post.

Send me your questions.

I am struggling along today as I have not had my caffeine intake yet. Can you imagine it is already 2.30pm, that’s half a day without my energizer! It’s no wonder that I can barely remember what this post is supposed to be about…hhmmnn…wait..lemme go grab that hot tea…be right back!

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Don’t ask why I am using plastic ware, if you have young kids you’ll know why…

So that is my afternoon tea - seedless grapes for the sugar (not fibre, haha!) and tea for the C.

Ok, then back to business. Talking about testing, I only recently discovered that if I don’t have my usual cup of tea at breakfast, I would almost fall asleep right about after lunch! I only noticed it recently as we have breakfast out on weekends and sometimes I would order a different drink, then by after lunch I would be wondering ‘why am I so sleepy when I had my whole 8 hours of sleep last night?’ So I tested it out a couple of times and came to the conclusion that I really need to drink my tea every morning! 

Everything in life is all about testing. We need to test everything and anything that we can get our hands on, that is how we learnt as babies. I am sure you can’t remember what it was like when you were a baby, but just have a look at your own kids they shove everything into their mouths to check the texture, taste and also your reaction!

Likewise in the online world, we need to test everything. There are many ways to start creating an income for yourself and you would never know if you would have made it if you never take the first step. You need to create your first website and see how it works out. But really that is just the beginning, supposing you get absolutely no sales it really doesn’t mean that your product is a flop. Just like a baby who tries to walk and falls will eventually get the hang of walking, you also need to keep at it. Keep trying different ways/methods of selling the same thing.

More often then not, there is nothing wrong with the product. Most of the time we just can’t get people to view our video or our video is not interesting enough to get viewers to click through to our websites. That still doesn’t mean that you are a failure, you must press on. Be a baby, you need to walk because you’re expected to so you need to keep trying.

I didn’t get where I am today without trying and testing almost every imaginable money making method to find that I can make a living online with very little work. I almost gave up on my first website after sitting around waiting for almost a month and … no sales…

The one blessed sales of $7 did come in just as I was giving up. BUT common… $7, I need to do better than that. So I tried wording my sales page a bit differently and uploading my video to other video hosting sites like google video and yahoo. I added graphics to my website and the sales tripled every month for 4 months then it plateaud, that’s when I knew that I could now walk. I then created a few more products and services to make me multiple income streams.

A few of you who have been following my posts have or are in the midst of creating your product and website. Now get it to go live, go international. 2 of my subscription websites have 99% UK customers and I’m loving it! I have an adrenalin rush each morning when I log into my yahoo account, as most days I get a few sales while I’m asleep.

Once you have your website and video pointing towards your website start to promote it like crazy. Get all your friends who have a blog to write a review about it. All of you know at least a few bloggers, put your website link into your Facebook profile and start making friends. The more people you know and know you the more you’re going to make. Keep making new videos and uploading them to ALL the video sites, you’ll get your first sale in no time, I PROMISE! Once you hit your first sale, you are doing something right. Then start tweaking the sales page and promote it over again…

Making money online is just like walking, you just need to have a plan. Then to complete your plan you need to test every possible path there is.

So get up and walk , start testing…