I got a job.

A good job. But it takes up almost all my time. I’m also studying two nights a week (Business Management). This pretty much takes up the rest of my time.

So what about time for IM? Its really easy just to let IM fall by the wayside – it can be a lot of extra work after all, particularly when you are just starting. However – I try to keep reminding myself that I want passive income, I want to pay down debts, I want to save for the future and invest and I don’t want to have to rely on a J.O.B.

Since I don’t have as much time as I used to, I’m trying to concentrate on things I can get results with. For the moment, I have decided not to create any new IM campaigns and to concentrate on building the ones I have going already.

I’ll end this post with a list of things you can do in a very short amount of time.

• short blog post
• short article
• blog comments/forum comments
• Facebook update
• Tweet

Something you have to watch out for when you’re a new affiliate marketer is the pay out limits and also the payment time frame they use. Most big affiliate websites won’t send you a cheque until you reach a threshold – so you might make a sale, but you aren’t going to get paid until you make a few more! It will often take months to receive payments too… I’m not sure why, it just seems to be the way it works in this business.

As I said, I’m pretty excited about finally receiving a cheque. I’m going to concentrate more on affiliate offers from Linkshare as a result – because I know that if I make a sale, even if its only for a small commission, they will pay me!

All About Squidoo

Squidoo is a good to learn the basics of:

• SEO (Search-engine-optimisation)
• keywords
• html
• affiliate links
• analysing traffic and clickthrough rate
• image use and copywrite
• landing pages

How Squidoo Works

• Squidoo puts ads on your lenses (pages), earning money for Squidoo.
  
• Squidoo lenses are all ranked, from rank 1 to rank 1,999,999, and the top 3 tiers receive monthly payments paid out of Squidoo’s pool of revenue. Currently, if your lens is between rank 1 and about 80,000 you receive a payment of between $25 and 4cents…
• You can make money by selling things through the Squidoo modules.
• You can make money by selling things through your own affiliate links.

Positives about Squidoo

• Free to use.
• Easy to use.
• You get paid if your lenses are popular, even if they don’t make sales.
• There is a community of people to interact with.
• Plenty of help and info on how to make money.
• They make it fun, with quests and levels and trophies.

Negatives about Squidoo

• If you don’t make a sale, you have to wait 3 months to be paid anything.
• Certain lense topics are blacklisted, they also don’t tell you exactly what they are – weight loss, health, dating, adult and World of Warcraft Gold Guides are banned at the very least.
• You are at the mercy of any rules changes that come in as you don’t own the site.
• The people on Squidoo who you interact with are extremely unlikely to purchase anything from your lense.
• You have to work within the rules and limitations imposed by the owners of the site.
• Squidoo displays their own ads on your pages.

I still use Squidoo for landing pages sometimes. Its free and much easier than buying and hosting a full website. When I first started at Squidoo, I had no idea what to write about, I didn’t know anything about keywords or affiliates or SEO… I knew nothing! One thing Squidoo is really great for is the informative lenses. Early in my Squidoo career I found a few lenses that went into detail with how much moolah the lensmaster had made each month from Squidoo and other internet marketing ventures.

I immediately knew I wanted to do it! I still had no clue though, so I did some research. I found a lot of successful Squidooers who had a lot of helpful lenses and resources… and eventually I came across PotPieGirl. I discovered that PotPieGirl had actually WRITTEN a guide (One Week Marketing) for how to do affiliate marketing for new people like me. One problem… it cost money!!! I am very, very shy of spending money online and I am completely paranoid about scams. For quite a while I tried to teach myself, using some free guides I found – PotPieGirl has one and there were a couple of others. However, the more I learned, the more confused I became.

Eventually I decided that I was going to throw caution to the wind and buy One Week Marketing by PotPieGirl. I needed guidance and I didn’t know where else to go. I bought it, devoured it and started trying to apply it. Just as an interesting aside, my success only really began after I started One Week Marketing. Oh, it didn’t happen straight away, and some of my projects are unlikely to ever repay the hours I spent on them but others have!

I’ll let you know a bit about my reasons for making a serious attempt to make money online. Like most internet users, I found the idea of making money online compelling. However, looking for a solid answer online as to HOW to go about this is like trying to find a needle in a haystack.

The first thing I ever tried online were surveys. It didn’t work. Maybe it works for other people, or it may have improved since 2005, but I never had any luck at all with surveys. I gave up after a short time and put up with ridiculous amounts of spam until I unsubscribed from all the mailing lists.

My next online adventure was in the area of competitions. I actually did have a little success with this. Well, I won a single prize from about 20 competitions entered so that was kind of cool. The prize was a $100 gift voucher to an accessory shop. I soon discovered that I don’t really have the stamina for constant competition entering so I eventually gave up – plus once you have entered all the competitions you want to win or are eligible for, what do you do?

So I wrote off surveys and competitions as an avenue for a consistent income and went back to my office job.

I wanted to do more though. I didn’t want to sell all my time for a cheap wage which left me a few hours each day where I was too tired to do much more than eat, unwind and occasionally do the laundry or make a half-hearted attempt at cleaning something.

I have always liked writing. I won’t claim that I’m very good at it, but I WANTED to be. I also really liked the internet – what can I say, I’m a geek. It was Stumbleupon that ultimately put me on this path. And writing. I was Stumbling, one of my interests was writing, and I found a page that was reviewing various sites that would pay you to write for them. I was intrigued! I bookmarked the top two recommended, Hubpages and Squidoo and promptly made accounts at both.

Squidoo looked like more fun, so I started there and oh wow, what a world was opened up to me! I learned about people who are making thousands of dollars every month just Squidooing! People who are selling things through Squidoo pages! I learned about affiliate marketing! It was electrifying. I had no idea what I was doing, but now I knew what I wanted to be doing – making an income through internet marketing!

So thats how I got started. I’m going to go through the rest of my journey in more detail in further blog posts.

I’ll finish up with why I am determined to succeed online:

• I want to support myself, my family and be independent
• I want to be my own boss and make my own rules for work
• I want to be able to experience things and travel which is difficult while working a full time job
• I want to be present in my families lives, not always working or tired and grumpy

I’d love for you to share some of your reasons, if you care to!