This is my first video blog post. I’ll show you my workstation, introduce myself, and talk a bit about making money on the internet.

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.

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!

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.

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.

July 2009
I had some good things going here, and made about $500net/day on July 4th and 5th. Then Adwords slapped all my campaigns for Resveratrol rebills and I was out of business. I took a couple weeks to rethink my strategies. I would rather not have my business at risk of being crushed at any time by Google. Therefore, this marked the end of my Adwords advertising. All of my July profit was made in the first week of the month. The next few weeks were spent inventing and beginning to implement a new strategy.

July money spent:
$2231USD

July gross profit:
$4158

Net money earned in July:
$1927.

August 2009
August represented starting over with new campaigns and traffic sources. Sorry, I’m revealing a little less about my earnings these days but I will say that YSM Yahoo Search Marketing is fairly prominent in my spending now when it wasn’t before. Late in August, we found out my wife was pregnant again.

August money spent:
$1487.

August gross profit:
$3891.

Net money earned in August
$2004.

September 2009
I shifted offers from one to the next in September and changed all my offers around entirely and by the end of the month things had become pretty stable. With my wife being pregnant I worked towards promoting more stable offers which would be less likely to be pulled down at a moments notice. No rebills for me now. I wanted to be able to take time off to take care of my family. With Janeen out of commission, I’m taking care of the babies, especially in the mornings. Also, it was a real struggle to shift away from my night owl working hours.

September money spent:
$2562.

September gross profit:
$5685.

September net profit:
$3123. +$102 Market Leverage referral income = $3225 total September net profit

October 2009
In October I pretty much just scaled up the same stuff I was doing the month before. I worked a lot less actually even though I made more. I continued to struggle to work while taking care of my kids and my wife. Her pregnancy gives her gestational diabetes which in turn causes her to faint and collapse unpredictably. I have to walk with her even just around the house and she is essentially an invalid until after she gives birth and recovers.

October money spent:
$4745.

October gross profit:
$11,693.

October net profit:
$6,948.
(Also I got $248 from Market Leverage as referral income.)
+$248
October grand total net profit - $7196.USD

I’m on track for November to be similar to October, but expect to be able to increase my earnings in December as I have a project or two in the works and am starting to build up enough capital to scale up a little.

Go back in time and see my affiliate marketing profits for June.

So we now have a:
boy 16
girl 13
girl 3
girl 1
? 14 weeks pregnant

So with her being pregnant she can’t do anything. She has gestational diabetes and suffers from terribly frequent fainting spells. Through each of these last 3 pregnancies she is on bedrest. I have to walk with her even just to the bathroom because she faints so frequently. It’s very stressful.

Therefore, in addition to earning a living I am doing the cooking, laundry, grocery shopping, chauffeuring of teenagers, etc. It’s a good thing I’m able to eek out a living on near autopilot. I’m not growing my business as fast as I’d like but am very happy that I don’t have to abandon my family for some clock punching job somewhere.

This recent shift in my personal duties is my excuse for failing to blog or tweet lately. I usually do my best work at night in the wee hours, but now I’m getting up with the babies at 7am and when I have time for work I’m usually too tired and distracted to focus my energies properly.

I’m starting to adjust to the new schedule and expect to get caught up with some blogging and such. Thanks for your patience

I’m constantly torn between work and family, and family has been winning out lately. I pretty much took the last two weeks off, but work has been nagging at me. So watch out! I’ll be making things happen now.

This sort of work/relax cycle is normal for me. Maybe I’m a little manic depressive. In any case, I gotta get back to work to pay the mortgage. You’ll be hearing more from me in the near future.

Do you find your own productivity level cycles? Got any good tricks for me to maintain high levels of productivity? I’d love to hear them. Please comment.