I’ve been dreaming to write this post for many years and I finally have a chance.

There is just too much information (and too little hours per day). Everytime I’m searching for new infromation, I end up downloading tons of new ebooks and softwares. Every ebook that I read, I end up opening 5 new websites, each of this websites leading to others and so on.. So much time wasted.

I know most people say, just stop reading and downloading those ebooks, but, it’s hard, it’s damn hard. I just want to know more and more.

When things start to work in the Internet Marketing / PPC world, I guess this information is less attractive, since you already know what you are doing and you can be more specific with the information you search, but before you begin, you try to learn every piece of information you can to save you from making future mistakes and make profits quicker.

Got it out of my systems, now I can go back to install some more applications and read some more ebooks

Unbelievable, one week after opening this blog, 1 week after my first post in this blog and opening my first niche website, I can already write my “first sale” post. Let’s hope I won’t need to do” my first refund” or “my first chargeback” anytime soon.

This is my first ever sale in a project I did all by myself, and I’m thrilled. I had very little traffic, all coming from Yahoo Answers (still no love from Google), and it seems 9 of them clicked to one of my affiliate links, but one of them went all the way and bought the item. That’s 1 people out of 9 who pressed the button, thats incredible.

I actually started to think this service was a waste of money, since I saw a lot of answers being answered together with my answers, but I guess I was proven wrong, this service already paid for itself.

Google is showing 3 of my pages, but so far didn’t have any organic visitors, I start every morning with searching myself, waiting to see some love.

First on my TODO, need to add a new feature to my site framework, I need to track the original referrer and pass it as “tid” (clickbank tracking id), so I can know where the sale came from. I don’t know if this is possible to do with Google Analytics, since I’m using PHP redirect (no JS is showed to the user) , but I will search, maybe I will find a way to do it in GA.

New category created, “Revenues”, hope this will be the first and not the last post in this category.

Google still didn’t index me.

I bought 2 banners to add some graphics to the site, another $7. I think it came out very nice.

Not all the services I ordered from DP were done yet. Didn’t receive any report yet, I think tomorrow I’ll email and ask about it.

I can only keep waiting..

After reading so many articles, PDFs & forums, I decided I must start doing something.

Last week I thought to start with EPN (eBay Partner Network). I purchased PHPBay Pro got all excited, and then applied to EPN. It took them about 2 days to reject me and the nice part, they don’t even give a reason. That’s how they work, no reason. I was really bummed, but nothing to do there.

I then started to read another PDF who gave great detail plans on how to build a website for a niche with many competitors (a lot of competitors = a lot of buyers). Since I already have a user in ClickBank (with no earning so far), I decided to follow this plan.

I suck at copywriting, and I’m pretty lazy to do research (since I’m an expert programmer, I’m used to making scripts to automate everything), so I decided to cut some corners and just copy other websites from this niches that are clearly done according to this PDF.

I found one site, which I’m 99% sure belong to the writer of the PDF, so I decided to make it my number one choice to copy.

I paid a writer to rewrite few of this website articles, bought a domain with the keywords, got a template (took me hours, thats one of major weakness) and started to work on it. Since I’m a programmer, I decided not to go on some ready made platform (like wordpress), but to build my own.
I already had a very very basic framework I wrote a while ago, so I sat down to implement the template and insert all the articles I received from the writer.

It took me about 8 hours to finish it, all in one sitting.. found myself going to sleep at 06am after fighting for 30 minutes with the templates, which apparently, looked fine in Firefox but not on Internet Explorer (did I mention I hate IE??)

After putting the site up, I had to start promoting it a little so search engines will see it. I started by using some automatic search engine submission online tool I found, but today I decided I have to make some extra links from outside sources, so it’s time to find some services.

DigitalPoint is the forum I look for such services. Google sandbox is a scary thing, and I knew I can’t go with the “submit to 5000 directories” on the first week the domain is up, so I chose 2 simpler services:
1.  links from article directories (including writing the article) for $10
2.  yahoo answers links for $5, I think this might be more effective to get actual traffic and not for links juice.

I think thats enough for the first week, now I wait for google to crawl me. Already added my site sitemap to Google Webmaster, hopefully it will speed the crawling.

My expenses so far:
$20 – Domain for 2 years
$57 – Articles rewrite
$5 – Yahoo answers
$10 – Links from article directories
Total: $92

Spending about $100 for the first site sounds reasonable, I don’t pay for hosting, because I have Dreamhost account that I can host unlimited websites.

Now I wait. Let Google do it’s magic and hopefully will start to see traffic to the site in the next few days and maybe even make a sale

I’m really proud that I finally made something, I just hope it will show some result.

When I researched the Niche, I found many websites from 2006, 2007 that looks like they weren’t touched since then. It’s amazing, they still get traffic, the affiliate links still work, but no one touches them.  I wish I knew if they still make money or not, if they don’t why keep them online? and if they do, why not update them and increase traffic & profits?

That is some long 2nd post, but actually this is the reason why I opened this blog, I think it’s a good way to keep track on all my work.

Can’t wait to post the “First sale” post

Took me a few years to open my own blog, but it’s better late than never. Of course I’ll be surprised if I’ll write here for more than 1 month, but it will be an interesting experiment.

After years of reading and fantasizing about PPC, SEO, and affiliate marketing, I finally decided to jump into the water and try it.

I’m a PHP programmer with years of experience, read a lot of online and offline material about affiliate marketing. Unfortunately for me, I don’t feel that I’m creative enough for deciding on colors of website or writing up landing pages, but I’m very good at copying what other people do, so I hope I will find enough examples to copy and change.

Last night I put up my first website (will be dicussed in my next post) and now it’s time to wait and see if all this “make-money-from-home” thing is working.

Good luck to me