Danger Brown

August was my best month ever! In terms of my previous income, I kicked some ass! Here are the numbers in US Dollars.
|
Total spent:  $13,360.41
Gross Profit: $32,528.97
Net Profit:     $19,168.56
ROI:                   143%
|
I’m pretty pleased overall. Most of the increase was due to improving ROI through systematically improving/split testing my existing campaigns.  These numbers are the grand total of everything and I included hosting, domain, etc. fees in the ‘total spent’ number.
|
Mostly, I’m just building my business capital. I expect to make a shift at some point to media buying. But I feel like I need to be prepared to lose $20K to $40K in the learning process that will entail. It might be smart to do that this year so I can reduce my tax liability a bit.
|
I do need to confess that I’m enjoying having a little extra cash. Though I normally tend to be a cheap bastard, I’m taking my wife to England, Scotland, and France for 12 days in early November. She saw a 1 day thing in London that she wanted to attend, and I said “Let’s do it.” then we decided to extend it out a bit and see some things.
|
P.S. Please forgive that my blog’s theme is a little wonky. I plan to customize a theme at some point in the near future, but for now I’m using one off the discount rack.

The FTC just decided to kick a small USA based business woman’s ass because she was providing ordinary publicity work paid reviews for clients with wares to sell.

The defendant victim was using ordinary sales puffery. If you are unfamiliar with the term; it refers to a legal concept that salespeople may make positive statements about their products that are exaggerations of the truth. It’s inspired by the ancient belief in caveat emptor (let the buyer beware). Customers expect, and commerce requires salespeople to be able to puff up their own products. Outright lies of course shouldn’t be tolerated.

If the following statements were made in a commercial on TV, Radio, or printed media, they would have garnered no attention.  These are the statements made by the victim Tracie Snitker’s company Reverb Communications Inc.’s employees:

That’s my goal anyway. $30K USD net profit. I think stating it like a fact makes it more likely to happen. And by telling you about it, it forces me to be accountable. On October 1st I’ll have to confess to you how much I made (or didn’t make).

Also, speaking of confessions. When I tell you how much money I make, I’ve left something out. For about a year I’ve been running a set of accounts I set up for my retired mother. I figured I probably owed her about $30K from all the times she’s helped me out over the years and I wanted to pay her back.  I generally just duplicate some of my successful campaigns that are of the auto pilot sort. Since December 2009 I’ve earned about $15K for her.

So for example, when I said I made $11K+ last month what actually happened is that I made $9318 for myself and about $2000 for mom. This month, I’m on track to make $15K for myself and $3000 for mom.

The biggest factor that affect my September goal is the merger between Yahoo and Bing search. I’m making nearly 100% of my money from paid search traffic from Yahoo and Bing. As Microsoft takes over Yahoo search it will affect the traffic volume and quality for both. I’ve got plans for how to deal with that, but I do expect it to affect my bottom line. We’ll see what happens.

I’m expecting to spend about $20K with a 150% ROI = $50K gross or $30K net.

Heck, I might as well also mention that my medium term goal is to make $500K net profit from September 1, 2010 to September 1, 2011.

Here is a snippet of an e-mail I got today.

……”I was looking at your website and it looks great.

I have to ask man…do you have any recommendations for a internet marketing ‘starter’? I’m sure you get asked that alot but I really really want to do something online, just a little lost on direction.

Any advice would be sooo helpful…….”

Here is a copy of my e-mail response to him. I realized he’s right, and this is what I generally tell folks that ask me where to get started.

“Hi [removed],
I’m sure it might sound evasive, but you’ll need to find something that fits your personality and resources. There are infinite ways to make money online. Also, by resources I mean not only money but skills and time, etc. By personality I’m thinking risk tolerance and interests.

Digitalpoint forums and Warrior forum are good resources for beginners. Abestweb is nice. Blackhatworld is good too. Wickedfire forum is pretty harsh. If you go there, only lurk for several weeks. They tend to be hard on newbies.

I would advise you to keep your money and avoid buying e-books, etc. All the information you can buy is available for free elsewhere. When I was getting started, I stumbled upon something that let me make enough to scrape by and spent about 3 months reading Digitalpoint forums. Like 14 hours per day….7 days per week. Now, I spend almost no time in forums. I just do the shit I know how to do to make money. But if my shit quits working, I go back to the forums.

Good luck bro!
Danger

P.S. When you’re ready to start building money making websites, get some good hosting and sign up for some affiliate networks.”

Now, I’m sure he just wanted me to tell him to do exactly this and that and cash in, but I’ve come to believe advice like that isn’t really practical. You gotta find something that fits you, that you will enjoy doing. Also, the internet is ever-changing and to be successful long-term requires broad enough knowledge that you can reinvent your business models often.

In July:
Gross profit $28,099.62
Spent              $16,514.51USD
Net profit      $11,585.11
It was a good month. My best so far. The extra spending represents a fair amount of testing where I expected some losses. So the ROI isn’t as good as I’d like. I’m expecting to reap some rewards in August. I think I’ll have about $15K net with a better ROI. So far in August, things are looking pretty strong. I went on vacation for a whopping 5 days. From the 4th to the 8th I was in the Colorado mountains camping with friends and family at a spiritual retreat. There wasn’t even cell phone access, so my campaigns ran on auto pilot for better or worse.I figured the worst that would happen is a server would fail and I’d only break even or something. While gone for 5 days…..
I spent: $1952.43
Gross profit: $4541.17
Net profit: $2588.74

So, I made over $500 per day while I was completely relaxing. I think I spent about $1000 on camping crap and $400 on junk my wife bought and food. It’s kinda hard to figure that I can play and get ahead at the same time. But I really focus on building campaigns that will have staying power for just this reason. It’s nice to be reaping what I’ve sown.

Kaizen is the secret. It’s a Japanese philosophy of constant and never ending improvement in all things, all facets of oneself or one’s business. I had practiced this philosophy for years before I even knew what the word meant. I am always trying to be a better man, a better father, a better friend, and a better business man.

How you can implement kaizen to make more money online?

1. Always be learning.
Expand your knowledge and skill in SEO practices, advertising strategies, web design, copy-writing, analytics, cash flow management, time management, etc.

2. Always be improving upon your successes (and failures).
Constantly split test and improve ads, landing pages, offers, traffic sources, keywords, business relationships, etc. etc. etc. Split test, improve, and track results in everything you do with internet marketing, forever!

3. Aways be networking.
If you can afford it, go to industry events and meet new people. Participate in local events and meetups. Most urban centers have affiliate or SEO meetups. If there isn’t one in your area, start one. You don’t need to be an expert to organize a monthly meetup.

4. Be relentless.
Never give up! Never surrender! If you have a setback, take a moment and try to figure out what went wrong. Learn from your mistakes. Then try again with a different or improved strategy. Live, eat, and breath IMPROVEMENT. As long as you’re constantly improving, you will eventually attain greatness.

In a big business corporate sense, kaizen often refers to aggressive cost cutting which sometimes has negative human impacts. For instance, lower level employees working all night (for free) to correct mistakes or meet deadlines. Cutting employee benefits, or reducing quality to increase profits is not congruent with my philosophy.

Be careful when dealing with people not to “glean the field”. This is a reference to a Christian belief that farmers should leave some remnant crops on their fields for the poor, widows and orphans to eat for free. Use the philosophy of kaizen to improve yourself and your life while continuing to live in abundance with others.

Do you already practice kaizen? Have I left something out? Tell us about it in the comments please!

Yesterday, my combined income from my various online revenue streams totaled $600.77 net profit. Gross was about $1050. I don’t really pay much attention to gross profit as it doesn’t mean much other than for cash flow considerations. Lots of people get hung up on ROI or gross earnings. That shit doesn’t matter to me. As long as I can afford to keep things running, all I care about is net profit.

When I started this blog over a year ago, I was giving these constant updates about my progress in growing my online income.  I have shied away from that a bit as my income has grown. I don’t want to sound like a braggart. Hell, lots of people are making lots more than me, but in the interest of continuing what I started I’ll let you know things are going well.

I’m not rich yet, but I’m on my way. My online earnings for this month are on track to be very close to $10K net. My family and I live frugally on about $2.5K monthly. I draw a monthly check from my LLC which has been accruing assets. Right now, I could live for a year with zero income if things went bad.

Having that cushion of 12 months worth of money in the bank has given me the confidence to say that I’ll never get another “job”. I have had my online earnings rug pulled out from under me twice now where my income dropped nearly to zero. Both times I was able to reinvent myself within 6 weeks and get back to earning enough to survive. One time was a close call. I actually started job seeking as a back-up-plan.  Things worked out fine though.

You might think from reading this that I’m content. Not even close buddy! I’ll never be content with my online earnings. I know enough about this business to understand that a guy can earn tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars per day online. The potential is greater than most people off the street can comprehend. Although my current earnings are at a 6 figure level, they are likely to fluctuate in the future. The uncertainty of online income has me highly motivated to build a nest egg I can use to secure an offline 6 figure income by buying 1 or more businesses.

So, personally I’ve been using Yahoo Search Marketing pretty heavily this last year and am anticipating the merger between MSN Adcenter and YSM with trepidation. In an attempt to boost my Adcenter skills I’ve been messing around with some campaigns on a few MSN accounts and increasing my skill level.

Being a fairly big fan of DKI (dynamic keyword insertion) in my ads I was faced with the small challenge of having all my keywords show up in lowercase in my ads. MSN has an article about this subject where after the first paragraph, they mention that the quick and easy solution is to upload your keyword lists in all caps. That’s where I stopped reading.

I’ve been working with some fairly large keyword lists. My latest campaign had 48,000 keywords. Needless to say, I didn’t feel like doing this by hand. Also, being a cheap bastard, I’d rather avoid paying for a solution. So I wound up trying a few free tools. The first two failed in one way or another. But Keyword Pad got the job done quickly and effectively. It’s free and I’m not getting paid to blog this. I just wanted a break from my other stuff and felt like blogging something.

The steps to follow are:
1. Import your keyword list.
2. Click “Modify” and select “First Letters to Uppercase” from the drop down menu.
3. Buy me a beer next time you see me.

One small issue is that within keyword phrases, you may prefer not to capitalize some words like “to” “in” “of” etc. This Thing Will Capitalize All Of The Words In Every Keyword Phrase. I didn’t bother with this secondary problem and decided to move on to other things. Got a better solution, great! Let us know in the comments.

Here is a screenshot:

I live a few hours from Denver and am getting ready to head out this morning. I’ll be getting there about noon so will miss some of the 1st day. Affiliate Convention is a pretty small affair and hasn’t been the best received in the community.

I debated at some length whether I would attend again this year. But decided I might as well. I met a few people last year that justified it. I’m really only going for the networking, but I’ll sit in on a few sessions as well. Sure, you can make friends in the industry long distance, but nothing really compares to shaking someone’s hand in person and sharing some experiences like lunch, dinner, or a drunken bender that lasts into the night.

Sorry, I haven’t been updating my blog very often, frankly it is because I’ve been too busy with my family. We just had our 5th child 10 weeks ago. Also, if I’ve been at my computer, I’ve generally been working on scaling up my stuff. I used to give updates about my income monthly and have really been remiss about that.

Here is a general update: Things have been pretty steady over the last year. Increasing a little bit every month. Last month I made about $8,600.00 net on about $16,000.00 gross. I have a goal of making $30K net in September. Cash flow has been one of the biggest factors limiting the rate I can scale things. I’ve finally reached the point where I have enough business capital to scale things as fast as I can do the work.

I just wrote a pretty big e-mail to a friend who hasn’t had much success getting volume out of Yahoo PPC. These days, I’m not doing huge volume, but am paying for about 500 clicks/visitors per day via YSM (Yahoo Search Marketing). Here are some of the highlights from the e-mail I sent him:

Some of what I do is:

1 . Start with a high CTR by pausing low CTR keywords and possibly overbidding

2.  Start with many diverse ads (10-15) some of which use DKI and usually my winning ad has DKI. I will write my own ads first then I’ll look at my competition and borrow common elements and mix and match them. I might copy 1 or 2 ads from the competition, but not always. Only if I get brain fried and need a couple more in the mix. I’ve never used my competition’s ad as the winner. Note that the more ads you start with, the more money you have to lose on the campaign to start out with, but the more likely you are to strike gold.

3. After my winning ad has established it’s quality index of 4 to 5 bars I’ll start backing down my bid

4. I back the bid off by no more than $.02 at a time. In some niches I may be starting with a bid of $1.50 or more and back it off every 30 minutes until I have at least a break even or a profit. So I’m losing money generally for about 3 days to a week(building ad quality), then breaking even or slight profit for about 1-2 weeks(building keyword history), then backing off on my bid more to attain a sustainable profit. If I’m losing money with the campaign I’ll limit my daily spend to about $30-$50

Note that the most important factors are split testing many ads, and having lots of keywords.

Another thing is that if you lower the bid on a keyword often it kills the volume on that keyword. Even returning to the previous higher bid doesn’t fix it. So back them down slowly. Because I make more money on different days/hours of the week I’ll back the bid down so I’m still making money at the worst time of the day/week and then use the ‘Campaign settings’-'Ad Scheduling’ to boost my bid back up for the more profitable times of the week. This does seem to be an important factor in maintaining volume.

If you build a campaign and nothing is happening, go to ‘Campaigns’ – ‘Editorial status’. Your keywords and ads may be under review. These reviews are either very fast or may take up to 3 days in my experience. You may also be waiting for a review of your landing page without knowing it. To test this, I may set my daily spending limit to say $10 and raise my keyword bid to as high as $5. If you still aren’t getting impressions, it’s a review you’re waiting for.

Assuming you aren’t waiting on reviews, if you still aren’t getting impressions. Just bid more. I’ll raise my bid by $.10 every 30 minutes until I see impressions. Then I’ll leave it there until I get some clicks. Then I’ll start backing it off very slowly. Set your daily spending limit at the beginning to protect yourself against over spending.

There is a lot more to what I do, but I don’t want to bore you too much right now. I hope you find something helpful here. Never give up! Always be refining your campaigns/landing pages