Michelle Khang Dot Com

I LOVE my new banner!!!!!

If you’ve been reading my blog from day 1 you’ll notice how it has evolved from an online marketing blog into a working mummy blog. I think it was about 2 weeks ago after my “Too Young For School” post that I felt like the whole “This is how I make money online” thing was not working for me anymore… No doubt, I still blog a lot about making the extra 1k a month online but recently I’ve just been so involved with my boys and I’ve suddenly got so much to say about parenting these days so I decided to ask my Graphics Designer to create a new look for me.

So here it is…after much discussion back and forth this is version 6D. You must think that I was a real pain of a customer to be dealing with … (hahaha) … I am NOT! You see everytime I make a small change like the font or the colour of the font, one version gets created. So 6D is actually pretty good, doncha think? Much better than 12M LOL..

When we first started out, Tsulin did all my wording for me and the picture editing, but I only decided on the wording today. I was thinking of how I would include the fact that I work from home and I am also pretty much a hands on mum.

So for a moment I actually thought of using “excerpts of my life as a part-time mom and a full-time internet marketer“!!!!! ROFL…  Can you imagine the look and the thoughts that would be going through my reader’s heads when they read that?

There is some truth in the funny tagline above because I am really kind of a part time mummy since I don’t need to be glued to my boys and have to follow them around all day long as I have my Indonesian maid who does everything for me. All I ever do is referee their fights (between the boys) and supervise the maid after giving her some instructions to follow (While I’m also their driver and meal companion and their tutor….etc etc..I actually spend a large percentage of my time working). BUT for the sake of humankind (human rights NGOs haha) I’ve decided to make it sound a little mummy friendlier!!!

So then…..forget what I SHOUTED out in my first line in this post and tell me what you really think? Nice or not nice? Do you hate it or do you love it…. Do you like the font? Do you hate the way the pictures were edited? Do you think the colours match my blog theme? How do you think I can improve on it or should I change anything else? (Tsulin must be thinking…. OMG…we will end up with Version 20C at this rate!!!)

If you’d like to see more of Tsulin’s graphics work, you can go to her blog and see the lovely pictures there. You can get her to create banners or edit your pictures for your “About Me” page or for any or all your posts. She can even edit a nice profile picture for Facebook! You can contact her at (tsulinplusplusATgmail.com). Please change AT to @ before you email her.

The internet is such an amazing invention as it gives anyone regardless of race/religion or nationality the ability to start an online business with literally no money down.

When I started out one year ago, little did I expect to be earning this much a year later. Although I am not making megabucks only small bucks, I have hope that one day I will hit the ultimate dream of making a 5 figure pay cheque.

On this special day as I turn one year older, I’ve received some surprises from Google and Clickbank.

Starting last year around this time, I began experimenting with Google Adsense in hopes of making some…I figured that even if it took me a whole year to reach my first payout it would be worth it. And I have just made it to payout (minimum $100) BUT you should note that it was so blardy difficult to even make $20 let alone $100.

After several months my Adsense balance was going no where and hovering around a few bucks..I really gave up then and forgot about Google Adsense for a long time till very recently. I am sure most of you remember my Google Adsense Experiment which started on the 14th of August which is exactly 43 days ago.

Before the whole experiment began I had roughly 20 bucks in my adsense account. I managed to qualify for my very first payout yesterday when my account surpassed $100, in the past 43 days since I began my adsense experiment I’ve made $63.68 from the very same free info webpage.

My account balance stands at $102.45 as of this morning, this means that Google is paying for dinner tonight at Michelangelo’s Kitchen.

Here is a screenshot of my adsense account.

To make my birthday even sweeter I received my second cheque from Clickbank just 2 days ago for only $146.12, it’s not a lot but enough to pay for a nice birthday present for Aaron who turns 2 a week from now and pay for his birthday party too.

Here is the screenshot of the cheque, (I forgot to take a picture of the first cheque a month ago before I banked it in)

Thank you to whoever invented the internet,

Thank you Google for the best CPC ad service in the world.

Thank you Clickbank for allowing me to sell other people’s digital stuff to earn huge commissions.

Thank God for another wonderful year, a wonderful family and good health to enjoy more wonderful years to come.

When I first read about this cool tool, I tested it out on all the blogs that I am familiar with. It’s quite fun to see how much other blogs are worth compared to your own. This blog is only worth $1693.62 as I really have not done any ‘marketing’ work on it.

My blog is worth $1,693.62.
How much is your blog worth?

My other blog, Systems That Profit is worth $2258 which is a bit more than this blog. I don’t market that blog too but it receives a lot of free search engine traffic.

The price calculation is made by counting the number of links that you have pointing to your blog and mutiplying it with the same dollar ratio that sealed the AOL-Weblogs Inc deal. Now you realise how important link building is, one way links are viewed as way more ‘worthy’ than 2 way links… incase you are going to go on a link exchange rampage!!

Enjoy!

Yes I know a lot of you just want a simple straight forward blogging profit strategy to deploy. These days there is just way too much information out there causing most of you to suffer from information overload.

Well, pay no attention to all that noise out there and just do this! Read this post carefully and follow the recommendations to start making money soon.

Pick a topic

We all need to blog around a topic or about a topic, it’s no darn good to have a blog about everything or nothing in particular. Here’s why.

When you have a blog about a particular hobby or interest, most of your posts are related to the same subject so all your posts will be search engine friendly because you naturally keep mentioning your keywords. This will help you rank higher for your keywords and when people search for that keyword your blog will show up on the search results, thus brining you free traffic. Before you can make any money from blogging you need to have a blog with interesting posts about a particular topic that will keep your reader interested. A blog with no readers will not make you any money.

I have 2 blogs, one is a gambling themed blog that focuses solely on gambling product reviews and then I have this blog about.. how I make money online. I have only monetized my gambling blog and have not implemented this strategy on this blog yet.

Since my gambling blog at http://systemsthatprofit.com  is strictly about gambling related products, my blog shows up on search results for horse racing, football and other gambling related topics. This is why you’ll notice that I get a lot of free traffic from search engines. You can see this by going to my blog, on the right panel you’ll see my Neo Counter.

I’ve had 6279 unique visitors in the last 1 year since I started this blog, half of them were from United Kingdom which is pretty much my main target market. 95% of the traffic that this blog receives it from search engines and the other 5% is from my past customers.

All the traffic that I get are people who are interested in gambling. So since my blog is only about gambling, they tend to stay on and read a few posts at least. A lot of them end up making me some money one way or another. (more about this later)

Once you get your blog focused on a certain topic, you’ll now need to get their details (name and email address). This is key to making long term profits. This may seems a bit difficult at first but once you implement a simple method, it is automatic after that and will keep collecting names till you stop it.

How To Collect Email Addresses?

Most readers will gladly give you their details in exchange for some quality information. So all you really need is to give them what they want. At my gambling blog I offered something gambling related but since most of you are having a hard time thinking of what to giveaway, let me help you. Here is an example;

I have a friend who loves digital scrapbooking, you can see her lovely edited pictures at her blog http://tsulin.com . She can start a blog about digital scrapbooking and giveaway an ebook entitled “Best Places To Find Digital Scrapbooking Tools” . She can easily compile a list of websites (using affiliate codes) and give this away. Or she can write a short guide “10 tips to using adobe photoshop to make your pictures look better” and you can still add a list of digital scrapbooking websites to the end of the ebook.

Everyone who visits her blog is into Scrapbooking so they’ll be more than happy to get some free help.

So now that you have a product to “bribe” your visitors, you’ll just need the html know how to implement this. All you need is to download and install MaxBlogPress Unblockable Pop Up and best of all it is free. This works with all wordpress blogs and it comes complete with installation instructions.

You can set the frequency for how many times the pop up displays on your blog, so as not to annoy your readers. This tool works very well to get you your visitor’s names and emails to help you build your email list. Getting this right is an essential part of making money from your blog.

The Pop Up will collect names and email address from your visitors and it will automatically send them to an email address or an autoresponder.

Now that you have a blog and an email list, you can start making money.

Recommended Weekly Routine

The best thing about running an online business is the flexibility, you can blog at 2am or 10pm and it really won’t make a difference as long as it gets done. You should blog regularly and write quality posts every so often. As part of your money making effort, you can incorporate product reviews into your blog posts for products that have affiliate programs.

Do try to write at least 2 new posts a week so that your readers become familiar with your routine and can start looking forward to more of your work. Imagine waking up in the morning wondering if there will be a morning paper today? or will the next issue be made next week. People like familiarity, so try your best to have weekly targets.

Whenever you write an above average blog post you can send out an email to your list to inform them that you just wrote this “amazing post about…” Many of your readers probably keep a busy schedule and may not visit your blog as often as you’d like them to.

How Will The Traffic Make You Money?

1. As I mentioned earlier, you need to give away a free ebook/product in return for the details. You can add some important links to several products that you recommend in this ebook. This way if a person were to click on the link in your ebook and ends up purchasing a product from that website you’ll make a referral fee.

2. Google adsense will be part of your blog. You can have a single skyscrapper that is visible on one of the panels on your blog. Most readers will look for something to click on to continue on their journey, so if they find something that is related to what they are looking for they are very likely to click on it and that is when you’ll make money for serving google ads.

Do remember that you will be emailing your list to inform them of a certain post that you have just written, so take the opportunity to make a google box ad present on this particular post so that they have an ‘exit’. However, there is an exception to this rule, if the post is a product review it is best to omit any google ads as you want your readers to be focused on the product review and hopefully follow the link to the recommended product site in order for you to earn referral fees.

3. Once a month you can send your email list an email reviewing a new tool/product that you came accross. You will write the entire review on this email and provide a link direct to the product website. This is a surefire way of making money every month. Please be reminded that you cannot send a product review email to your list everyday as all your subscribers will unsubscribe. You need to keep them happy, so 75% free information and 25% products recomendations is ok.

I’ve just started recomending other people’s products and this is what my Clickbank earning are since I started in mid July. In the last 2 months I’ve made $383.69 just for writing a few reviews.

If implemented correctly, this blogging profits strategy will make you money for years to come. It is a virtual Automated Money Machine.

Please be aware that while it sounds pretty simple to deploy, you will need to be patient and perservere. You won’t see $$$ overnight but there is a good chance that you’ll make at least a few thousand in your first year if you follow my instructions to the letter.

I have managed over $1000 a month on average over the last 1 year that I have been online and no one thought me how to do this. I learnt through lots of research and trial & error.

If you need any help, just ask me. Post a comment here and I’ll get in touch with you.  YES… free help… no strings attached!

I am subscribed to many different newsletters online, some are online marketing newsletters and others are from the gambling scene. So far I’ve found that I have benefited most from 2 newsletters that I do not miss reading, I even check my spam folder occasionally to see if I had missed one of them.

Here is the publication from Yaro Starak a few days ago that I thought was really worth sharing with you.

The tittle is The Secret To Successful Blogging.

Hello Michelle,

I expect you already know about the very famous
movie, The Secret, and the underlying principle it
talks about - The Law of Attraction. If not, go
watch it now - http://www.thesecret.tv/

I’m a fan of The Secret. I’m not necessarily a
pro-active devotee, but over the course of my life
I have implemented law of attraction style
thinking without realizing it. To me this was
another case were someone came up with a fantastic
methodology - a label and system - to encompass
something I was already doing.

Of course we are all manifesting things in our
lives all the time, but there is a difference
between doing this actively vs passively, and The
Secret can help raise your awareness regarding how
you think about your life. It’s empowering to
know you are capable of controlling your outcomes,
to a certain degree.

What I like about the law of attraction is how it
can unify your thoughts with your actions. If you
truly believe that you can manipulate reality
through thought and subsequent action, then you
gain a sense of inevitability about everything you
strive for - it’s simply a matter of time.

Having faith that an outcome is possible given
enough consistent action towards a specific goal,
and actually believing that it will happen, means
that you become completely congruent - your
thoughts and your actions both drive you towards
your goals. This I believe is when the law of
attraction can truly manifest and it’s a powerful
thing when you experience what you are working
towards. It’s a self reinforcing pattern that if
you can sustain, can lead to achieving whatever
you want.

HOW DOES THIS APPLY TO BLOGGING?

A congruent thought process with action and
positive reinforcement from celebrating each
little step forward, are critical for successful
blogging.

As bloggers we all have similar goals and we can
break things down into very specific outcomes. We
may desire a certain amount of RSS readers, or
unique daily visitors, links from other sites,
opt-ins to our email newsletter, exposure on
popular sites, monthly income or any manner of
achievements.

As you study more about blogging you collect a
body of knowledge largely made up of tactics. Some
people teach strategies as well - this is
something I personally like to focus on - but
mostly you are taught techniques, tactics that
should get a certain result.

Techniques are great, they are the foundation of
every successful blog, but unfortunately most
people don’t follow through with enough of them
to realize a result. It’s great to know how to
get something, but if you don’t actually do
enough to earn the reward, then it’s pretty much
useless knowledge - it doesn’t move you closer to
your outcome.

This is why most people, despite reading so many
blogs about blogging and uncovering hundreds of
great techniques, never grow a popular blog. They
lack a strategy and the necessary mindset to carry
through the strategy.

The successful blogging puzzle looks like this -

1. Mindset
2. Vision
3. Strategy
4. Tactics

Your mindset sits at the top as the most crucial
element. You can establish a brilliant vision for
your blog, determine a strategy to realize it,
which contains various techniques, but without a
mindset in place, even the perfect strategy and
copious knowledge of tactics will help you, your
blog will go nowhere.

This is where the law of attraction can help. If
your mindset is lacking then you need to change
your thinking. One of the best ways to reconstruct
how you think is to establish a belief - even a
“faith” based approach - to how you go about
your life.

Faith is a powerful force and it doesn’t have to
apply to just religion. If you believe you will
succeed, if you see the result and can envision
yourself taking the steps day-by-day to get there,
then it’s only a matter manifesting the process
into reality.

If you believe the law of attraction works and you
apply it to how you think and consequently act,
then you will start making what is in your head
happen in the real world. That’s all there is to
it really.

You don’t have to call it the law of attraction
if you don’t want to. In “Think and Grow Rich”
a book by Napoleon Hill, the author reveals
countless stories of how people simply thought
about what they wanted, then ceaselessly worked
towards making their thoughts a reality. This book
was published long before The Secret came along or
anyone wrote about the law of attraction.

Whether you believe there is some mystical force
linking thought with reality doesn’t matter. What
is clear, is that the mind can be your greatest
roadblock or your strongest advantage.

As you no doubt realize, this principle goes way
beyond blogging, but since blogging is a big part
of my life and I expect it’s important to you
too, I tend to devote a lot of time to thinking
about my blog and my Internet business.

Without having a strong belief in my own abilities
and following some simple principles, I wouldn’t
be sitting here writing this on my laptop in the
middle of the day, earning six figures a year from
an Internet business based on blogging.

I hope you come to realize how important your mind
is to your success and take steps to bend your
thoughts towards positive outcomes.

Here’s to your blogging success.

Yaro Starak
Blog Mastermind
http://www.blogmastermind.com

What Yaro says in this email is so true to online profits because this is really what happened to me. Exactly one year ago I dreamt a dream that one day I would make a living online. Then I started to make it happen. We all know that a business cannot be built overnight and planning and strategizing is needed to make it happen. Just like your baby needs to crawl first before he/she can learn to walk, only to realise that the ultimate speed rush is to run.

Likewise, you first need to crawl online too. By crawling I mean you need to take action and make it happen. I started in Sept last year with only one website and my first month online I made a grand total of 7 bucks! I now have a total of more than 10 websites because I use subdomains to make me money as well. Although I cannot boast a 6 figure income, I make 4 figures which is more than enough for me. Many of you reading this will be very happy to make an extra $500 a month but you should stop dreaming now and make it happen.

You may think that Yaro was lucky or that I am lucky but you fail to realise that we decided what we wanted and sought it out. Go to Yaro’s website and subscribe to his newsletter, he will tell you that making money from blogging is not really so much about churning out post after post. It is about providing quality reads/posts and using a simple strategy that I use too.

The way to make money online I have found is quite simple. Give your audience what they are looking for (fullfil a need or desire) then you’ll need to collect their names (opt in to a newsletter). Once you have a list of even 100 people, you just try to keep them happy and continue to build it. Give them more quality information so that people will enjoy your newsletter and recommend you to their friends. Soon you will have 500 people on your list. Then occasionally you can recommend a product that you think will give them value, your subscribers will now trust you because you have been providing them with quality information. Be your subscribers friend and the money will follow.

Would you believe me if I told you that I can make money by just sending out one single email to a small group of people? A few days ago I sent out an email to 14 people, this resulted in affiliate commissions of $22.16. Tell me something, how often would you send out one single email to 14 people if each time you email them you’ll make $22?

I don’t mean to be a pain and keep talking about this TAKE ACTION thing, since most of you love to blog so much and write like 10 posts every month why don’t you blog about a subject that can make you money? If you enjoy digital scrapbooking, create a blog that details your digital scrapbooking techniques. Of course you won’t be collecting money up front for your free posts, but you can offer a newsletter that you will send out whenever you find new techniques or products. Once a month you can email your list to tell them about a useful scrapbooking tool that you came across and earn affiliate commissions from it. It is virtually a way to set up an online ATM, since you are doing all the work already why not make money from it.

Where ever you are at now, whether you are a beginner or you are an expert blogger you need to stop dreaming of the cheque coming to your mailbox and take action. Make it come to your mailbox. I received my first Clickbank pay cheque last month for a total of $237.57. I make money from many places online and it all adds up to my total monthly 4 figures.

As Nike says “JUST DO IT”

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.