March was a little better than the month before:

Total Spent:  $8,555.97
Gross Profit: $14,638.15
Net Profit:       $6,082.18
ROI:                        71%

So it’s not the bigtime, but I’m happy to have done better than the month before. On top of that, I basically took the month off.  I did do a little work here and there, but mostly I’ve been on sabbatical. I’ve been working on hobbies like brewing (honey mead, merlot wine, apple cider, dark beer), and fixing up an old RV I bought to take the family camping this summer. I’m really enjoying the intellectual challenges of fixing up the RV. This thing has been sitting for several years and has a lot of complicated systems that need to be brought back online. Maybe I’ll shoot some pics/video of it.

Anyway, I expect the next few months to be okay, but I’m planning on taking a lot of time off this summer to take the family to some camping events.

To your success!

Danger Brown

February has been the worst month yet for me in a long time. First some numbers:

Total Spent:  $6,580.07
Gross Profit: $10,242.92
Net Profit:       $3,662.85
ROI:                        55.7%

I really hate posting numbers like this. It’s embarrassing. But I made a commitment to share my results on this blog.

The 3 main reasons my income sucks right now:

1. I’ve been lazy

2. When I did work, I neglected my active campaigns to work on upcoming projects.

3. I have 5 kids and our 11 month old and my wife haven’t been sleeping well at night. So I wind up babysitting until 1 or 2 pm while my wife gets some shuteye. After that, I have trouble getting motivated feeling like the day is shot already.

I spent several days looking into and studying new niches and new traffic sources. Basically, it’s like I’ve been going back to school.

I spent about 7-10 days side-tracked working on developing a board game. Probably sounds silly to some people…. I’m a born entrepreneur and have always been easily side-tracked by whatever new idea infatuates me at the time. I’d put this as the #1 reason I’m not rich yet. A person really needs to focus on one thing to achieve great success in life. Learn from my experience. Focus on only 1 or 2 traffic sources and 1 or 2 niches.

To your success!

Danger Brown

My income is in the shitter. I’ll probably only net about $4K or so this month.

There are 3 reasons:

1. Normal cycles. I’ve been pushing financial related offers like payday loans. They always perform badly this time of year so I expected this to happen.

2. I’ve stuck with doing paid search and have started having trouble with MSN slapping campaigns or inexplicably not giving me volume. So I’ve had trouble scaling my campaigns.

3. I’m not building out new paid search campaigns right now. I’ve decided to switch to alternate traffic sources and new niches. Because I’m getting into doing completely new things, I’ve been spending time trying to figure out this new stuff and not doing things that will make me money today. Also, there will be a learning curve that’ll probably eat into my profit margins.

So you ask, “What is Danger going to do next?”

I’m thinking I’ll try some dating offers with small targeted media buys on individual sites. Later, after I understand media buys better, I’ll scale up with network and larger media buys and make a mountain of cash.

Why dating? Because it has the potential to go massive but also has low payouts which should allow for more efficient optimization of creatives, offers, etc. Example: A $30 payout diet rebill would require me to spend a bare minimum of $30 to test each new ad variation, but a $3 payout dating offer would require a minimum of only $3 per creative. So I figure with dating I’ll be able to throw a lot more shit at the wall and see what sticks.

Why small media buys? Because I’m sick of having a lack of control over my traffic. Most traffic sources involve a wildcard element. With search engine dependent traffic you can get a slap and be out of business in the blink of an eye. I know dating is big on Facebook, but they love to disapprove ads and even ban accounts over there. I figure that media buying gives the maximum amount of control over traffic and most especially traffic volume.

If you happen to know something about pushing dating offers via display, I’d love to hear from you (please comment). Right now I’m struggling to figure out the best sorts of sites to target.

The legendary Jeremy Schoemaker AKA Shoemoney has a great contest going on right now. Here is my video entry: (spoiler alert:….if I win I’m going to shave my head! and give away up to $4000)
UPDATE 12/31/2010:

I’m listed in the top 10 and need votes from you to win! Please GO HERE to VOTE for Danger Brown right now. You have to scroll down to the bottom of the post to vote. Thank you so much! PLEASE vote for Danger Brown!!!

Final Update: 01/04/2010 I didn’t win. But placed 4th out of 90+entries. The winner got most of his votes using Amazon Mechanical Turk to pay $.05 each for people to vote for him. Some people might cry foul, but apparently there were no rules. I predict that next year either the rules will change, or it’ll just be an MTurk war between finalists.

It was fun to participate and overall has been a great experience.

Check out what the winner of this contest wins:

A platinum pass to Affiliate Summit West.
2 nights hotel accommodations paid for at the Wynn.
$500 Airfare Reimbursement.
$2000 to gamble on 1 hand of blackjack
Roll with Shoemoney at Affiliate Summit.
A pass to the Epic Advertising Playboy Mansion Party this fall.

When I read that, here is what I heard. “blah, blah, blah, Playboy Mansion Party!!” OK, this is a contest worth entering!! Thanks Jeremy!!! See you there!

UPDATE: I really need your vote to win this thing! Please go vote for me now! Thank you.

See more of Logan at www.LoganThompson.me

I didn’t achieve my goal of $30k net in September unfortunately. I had a couple campaigns/offers go down and other things that hamstrung a couple hopeful projects. I really hate posting a decline from one month to the next. I’m only satisfied if the numbers get bigger. I made a commitment to myself to post my income on this blog though. I figured it would be a good motivator. Even if nobody were to read this, I think it does help me to stay oriented.
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September 2010 internet marketing earnings totals:
Total Spent:  $11,544.68
Gross Profit: $29,250.03
Net Profit:     $17,705.35
ROI:                153%
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So, things are OK. I’m disappointed that I didn’t make my $30K net profit goal. But of course, big goals are needed to have any hope of attaining anything worthwhile. I’m maintaining my goal to make $500K net profit from Sept 1 2010 to Sept 1 2011.
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Hold onto your hats. It’ll get a little worse before it gets better. I’ve focused my energies on paid search and have been using Yahoo for about 90% of my traffic. In the next 2 weeks Bing is absorbing Yahoo search advertising and I expect it to be a setback that will take me a month or two to recover from. So be warned that I expect October and November to be weak. We’ll see though. I’m busting my tail to recover my income as quickly as possible.
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To hit my $500K goal, I’ll need to hit $60K net or more per month within a few months. I’ve also got several offline obligations that will eat up time that could be used to increase profits.
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Want more? Subscribe to my newsletter, or check out my affiliate marketing earnings from August 2010.

I was honored to be included in Jon’s affiliate interviews friday. Thanks Jon! If by some incredible chance you don’t already know who he is, he has a wonderful blog sharing the secrets of the internet money making universe. Check it out. The interview I gave is an 18 minute long video. He has lots of questions. I tried to keep it short.
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Yesterday, I got a pile of emails…. my phone was ringing. I didn’t get one bit of regular work done. Couldn’t even get this blog post out. A contributing factor is that my entire family has a cold. I just want to stay in bed.
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So if you’re curious about the technical details of shooting the video for that interview read on. Warning!! Boring stuff ahead. Disclaimer: Those are affiliate links. I get paid a bit if you buy one of these things.
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I bought a Kodak Playtouch which shoots HD video. It worked OK as I shot a few videos for work and personal, but after less than 2 hours recording it failed. Screen freezes up and nothing works. You have to take the battery out to turn it off. I returned it for that reason. So I don’t recommend purchasing it. To be fair though, the product was only just released, and a firmware upgrade would probably have solved the problem.
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Anyway, I had never shot or edited HD video before. I wound up buying Sony Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum 10.0 after trying 4 other editing programs I already had. Nothing could handle the larger file sizes.  Also, note that I first tried Sony Vegas 9 and it didn’t work for some reason. But 10.0 worked great. It’s pretty impressive software with a lot of capability.
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Then in order to send the file to Jon and his crew I had to shrink it down from the initial 4GB to 1.2GB. It needed to be under 2GB to upload to Vimeo.
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Good news for the future, my wife just bought a Canon Rebel T2i. With extra lenses and cases it wound up being about $1550 all together. It’s a regular camera, but has a reputation for shooting superb HD video. It even has an external microphone jack making for better audio. I’ll be using that for future video blog posts.
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But if you’re on a budget consider a Flip Ultra HD. It’ll work best in environments without a lot of background noise though. It’s internal microphone has it’s limitations.

I’m going to ask you 2 questions, talk about your answers(and mine), and show you how to expand your mind and possibly your wallet.
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Quick, without thinking about it. Answer this question. How much is the most you think you could possibly earn if you worked your ass off, or got really lucky with the best job you’re capable of doing?
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What is the most amount of money you might get paid for 1 month if your life was AWESOME?
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Got it? OK.

Hold that thought. Now, answer this. How much money are you making per month right now?
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The rule of thumb is that most of you have a built in ‘”dream limit” regarding money which states that your wildest expectations are about 10X your current income.
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In other words. If you make $2500.00 per month, you might not be able to really comprehend anything over $25K per month as being POSSIBLE for you.  Now, your answer is probably a little off from the 10x rule, but it’s a good guideline if you average out a group of people.
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My “dream limit” right now is actually pretty close to the 10x rule. I think I might possibly be able to make $200K in one month. Beyond that, it gets hard for me to comprehend or believe I could actually make that much.
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But I’ll tell you what, a year ago my “dream limit” was about $200K per year.
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The only advice I can give you is my personal experience. I have been feeling like this…..If I believe it’s possible to make more money on the internet, I feel like a failure if I’m making less than my ‘dream limit’. So I have this certain expectation that I need to be earning something closer to my “dream limit” income.
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Then, because I set these high personal expectations, they tend to come true. I tend to make more and more money. As I make more money, my “dream limit” expands with my own confidence level.
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I hope this helps someone. Really, this post is just a peak into the way I think. This way of thinking has helped me to push my own personal limits and avoid resting on my laurels.
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So to recap,
1. Ask yourself how much you could be making if you worked for it.
2. Work for it and make some progress.
3. Then repeat the process.

You’ll find your dreams will get bigger and bigger. The bigger your dreams are, the easier it will be to achieve something great in your life. If you can expand your “dream limit” to something really big, then only succeed at doubling your income…..that’s actually a pretty good result isn’t it?
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Now please consider that this way of thinking can apply to more than making money. For instance, if someone set a goal to climb Mt. Everest 3 times in one summer. It’s more likely that they will succeed in climbing it at least once.
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I really appreciate your comments. How close does the 10x rule apply to you? Do you use mental strategies to improve your life?

Learn how I got started and where I came from. I was poor in the beginning, but now make well over $10K monthly profit from my living room.

This is a follow up post to My First Ad Buy just began.

It ain’t real pretty. I ran it for two weeks and now it’s over.

Money spent:       $320

Money earned:     $145

Net loss:              $175

It made sense on paper anyway. I had received some conversions from Adwords placements on this site. On paper I thought I might make a killing….like $4K/month net from this little ad.

It was worth a shot. In hindsight, I could have done a better job at rotating ads and offers to find a sweet spot. I changed the ad out once and switched to direct linking and rotating offers, but this thing was pretty much a dud. My landing page is doing well. There just wasn’t as much traffic as I thought.