So I have been with the greatest girl in the world for 2 months and 12 days. So if you wonder where I have been, its all her fault!
I think I will be occupied for awhile! She is amazing and I love everything about her! Maybe I’ll post more in the coming weeks/months
Read the rest...
Derek Cladek on July 17th, 2009
Since I updated my tattoo site its been really bringing in the traffic and keeps bouncing around the top 10 of google for a major keyword. Tattoo Designs gets roughly 9000 searches each day, so being anywhere on the first page of google will bring in a lot of traffic. I have been averaging around 5000 visitors to the site for the past week. Adsense income has gone up to $21 each day! I know that seems really little to most people online who make thousands of dollars each month but for me to make $21 in a market I never really expected to make money at all is pretty sweet. Before I updated that site it sat for 9 months while it made between $400-$600 each month. See that is what you call residual income. Its an income that comes in all day long 24 hours a day 365 days a year.
In the graph above there is still 4 hours to go in the day. The picture below is my Adsense earnings for July 16th and “Today’s Earnings” of July 17th
The above is my Adsense earnings for 7/16/09 and for 7/17/09 with 6 hours to go in the day. I am not really suggesting you get into tattoos for money making sites, but there are loads of people searching for tattoos. The only problem is that there is not too much money in advertising cost for tattoos online. Basically it takes a lot of traffic to make a little money. You get thousands of visitors to this site for $900 a month, but if this was a different niche I would be making loads more money, depending on the niche of course.
From now on I plan on updating my blog with stats from my sites making money and how much they have done over the week. This way it will help me keep track of what I am doing, how much I am making and to show you that I am making money online. In fact I am self employed and have been since that great day of September 22nd 2007! Ah that was such a great day, my last day working as an Environmental Specialist. Now if I can do this, you can! I got a little motivated last night to buy sites that have potential with making money online and making those sites better from this blog: Self Made Minds.
What would an extra $900 each month do for you? I know it pays my car payment and insurance and some of my gas.. ah the joys of a gas guzzling car! But seriously the Lexus LS 430 is a pretty sweet car!
That’s it for me for the week. Its going to be a very busy weekend as one of my best friends is graduating a Leadership School here in Washington. Exciting times ahead.. and I leave for Africa in 24 days! Wow time flies!
Derek Cladek on July 16th, 2009
Becoming an authority on a subject matter takes a lot of work. People go to school for years to learn a specific skill set. Doctors for instance will go to school for 8 years before they get their degree! But does that really make them an authority? Having a degree in a subject matter should not be all that is required to become an authority.
First off what is an authority and how do you become one?
Well on google you can become an authority in your subject matter by getting loads of links to your site, both on the home page an internal pages. You will see some of these authority sites when you search for something and the first result has a list of links from their site. This is a great authority to have but there is also another authority like what John Chow holds. He holds an authority in that everyone knows he makes a ton of money blogging.
A person with authority either has a gun or has a specific skill that they are good at. If I had a gun I would have authority over you. If I had a specific skill that you didn’t have I would also have an authority over you. Its something that people have that you don’t. Being an authority isn’t just a skill set though. Its something you have mastered the art of, its something that is second nature to you. For instance Jonathan Volk is an ‘authority’ in Affiliate Marketing, while Andy Jenkins is an authority in Ecommerce, SEO, Social Media, Email Marketing, Sales pages, and the list goes on!
I own multiple online stores doing over 1 Million dollars in sales each year, does that make me an authority in the Ecommerce world? Some would say so, some would say not. I know I have a skill set that I could teach others that would replicate success. Owning your own online store takes a ton of work and I know that successful affiliate marketers are probably laughing at me or even making fun of me because they probably make much more money than I do. I like the fact that I have something I can sell, I supply products to a market and people buy these products. I like that I can be self employed and I like that the opportunities online are endless.
In the near future I would love to teach what I have learned, to give insights on how I became successful online by starting an online store and how I make money online every single day. Some of that money is from Adsense, Clickbank but the most is from Ecommerce and hopefully one day this blog.
See, you can establish yourself online as an authority by simply giving away knowledge that you have acquired. What can you give to your audience that no one else is? What makes you unique, because I am here to tell you that most people are copycats, but its what makes you unique that will set you apart.
Derek Cladek on July 15th, 2009
You have to start somewhere with blogging, but where do you start? How do you start blogging if you don’t know what to write about? Whether you want to make money from your blog in the near future or if its just a hobby, you have to start somewhere. I was once told that sometimes you must ‘fake it until you make it‘. Whether you want to become a Pro Blogger one day you have to start somewhere. Most of the time you have not the skills, the knowledge or even the money to become a successful blogger. That is why faking it until you make it can be your best friend.
Of course I am not saying to be a fake blogger, you just have to know that you must start somewhere. Write about what make you live, what are you passionate about, share life stories and experiences that have gotten you through hard times. With your knowledge you can help others and also gain knowledge. Relate to your audience and write about what they have questions about, ask questions and then give them answers. A great writer that does this is Dave Taylor at AskDaveTaylor.com. He started off by asking people to send him questions and all he does is research the answer, gets them the information they are trying to find and he makes good money doing it! How do I know? Well I actually met Dave Taylor in Seattle once for lunch.
Also piggy backing off of other successful bloggers and even following their lead can be something that gets you by. What are professional bloggers such as John Chow Dot Com or Jonathan Volk writing about? Follow their lead and learn from them. The reason why some of these people blog is because they want to teach you how to make money online and because you are reading their blogs and following them, you are making them loads of money.
I believe in educating yourself and gaining knowledge that will help you become the best blogger on the net. I personally just signed up for a blogging course that is 6 months long and promises to teach me what I need to know about becoming a successful blogger. It’s so much better than going to some college to learn how to get a JOB and its so much CHEAPER! As long as you start somewhere you can’t really go wrong. Of course you will mess up and have tons of mistakes but with a common goal in mind of making this is a business, one day the traffic will start and by then you should have learned enough to make it a business.
Derek Cladek on July 14th, 2009
This post will give you a little background information on how I started to make money online. I started back in the day when “Paid To Surfs” where king of the Internet. Those all failed during the Dot Com Bust back in 2000. Some lone survivors changed their programs to incentivized paid programs, much like affiliate marketing today.
Fast forward to December 2006, I created an Adsense site in the niche of tattoos. The site was horribly designed and basically thrown together. I don’t have the programming, website building skills needed to create a great website. So I hired a guy on Elance to create a template for me. The site actually has 2 different designs an old design and a new design as I kept on creating pages to the site but used the new design.
- November 2006 I had 27 visitors, but ended the year 2006 the site had 561 unique visitors to my newly formed tattoo site which created $14.75! (Grand Total For The Year 2006 = $14.75)
- By the end of 2007 I had 331,856 unique visitors to the site which created $2,534.67 of income! (Grand Total For The Year 2007 = $4943.80)
- By the end of 2008 I had 618,781 unique visitors which created $4,630.25 of income! (Grand Total For The Year 2008 = $7668.54)
- So far this year the site has had 401,901 unique visitors and created $2,405.92 of income all from Adsense! (Total Up To July 14th 2009 = $4159.78)
The site also sells a few Clickbank items and did $3038.29 in 2008 and so far in 2009 has done $1,753.86 from commissions. (2007 it made $2,409.13 from commissions).
I tell you all of this to show that making money online is possible even if you have no skills like me! I did not know how to make a website. I basically bought the articles for the site and put it all together myself. I did have a little knowledge of how HTML works but nothing too extensive. I do know something about ranking well on the search engines and if you can get traffic you can make money! Its really as easy as that.
What if you had a website that brought in 500,000 unique visitors a year, or even a few hundred a year? You could put a few ads, Adsense, Kontera, Affiliate products or programs, create an email list, Clickbank or sell ad space on the site. With a large amount of traffic you are almost guaranteed to make money. The tattoo site was never supposed to be a huge earner for me and it really isn’t. I basically use that site to pay for my 2006 Lexus LS 430 and it pays each payment for me. My online stores make loads more money than that site and I know if you were to get into affiliate marketing you could make TONs more than me, just like Jonathan Volk (who is my new hero! Seriously though, he’s a highly successful Affiliate marketer and someone I look up to).
It All Started In 2006!
My first month of making money started with the first 27 visitors to that tattoo site that I created. I remember making $0.09 my first day and how excited I was, because I created something that WORKED! It was just a matter of making it bigger and better, because if it worked, why would it stop if I made the site bigger.
Now today its pushing $20/day and over 4,000 visitors/day. That’s only because I spend the past month making changes to the site and getting it to rank better in Google, and now its paying off, just check out my screen shot below.
Really anyone can do this stuff, whether you make 1 Adsense site and go from there or create a Yahoo Store. It just takes time and effort. Start learning today and tomorrow you will see the rewards. I will post more about the ‘how to’s‘ to creating a successful site that will make you money day in and day out without doing anything more to the site. The tattoo site that I created runs itself with zero effort on my part. I only put time into it when I want it to do better.
Also you have to be careful on what niche you pick because really, there isn’t too much money in the tattoo market online. There are not many products to be sold online for tattoos since its mostly an offline business. I will go over more on how to pick ‘more’ successful niches and what to look for in the future.
The large jump in traffic is because I made changes to the site to help it rank for some keywords that get loads of traffic daily. The site hit the first page for one of those keywords and you can see the results. It also caused a jump of about $8 extra in Adsense income daily. If you look at the ‘Hits’ column you will see the jump. This shows how many times its been ’seen’ in the search engines, not necessarily bringing traffic to the site. It takes about 14 Hits for the site to get 1 visit.
Derek Cladek on July 13th, 2009
I usually wake up around 8:30 on Monday mornings because I know that we have a lot of catch up to do with our online stores. When you are running 5 Yahoo Stores things tend to get hectic. Multiple orders through each store can add to the stress of any busy work week. One problem that can arise for any entrepreneur is that with so many yahoo stores running at the same time, you can get ‘too’ many orders to keep up. This past week has been one of those weeks!
Finding the time to do ‘everything’ such as SEO, Article Marketing, Social Marketing, Phone Calls, Emails, Order Processing and Shipping and then doing that for 5 businesses becomes a rather large task! That is why it is highly important to start off any week right. Mondays are our days we get the ‘tedious’ jobs done. From my earlier post about our credit card processor calling you can see how many orders we have to deal with and that was just for 1 of our Yahoo Stores. Building a yahoo store is actually really easy but maintaining the store is what gets even seasoned veterans in trouble sometimes.
It’s very important to keep your cash flow moving from credit cards to product purchases. For us, we use American Express business cards because the minute you pay the bill online, you can use the credit. There isn’t a waiting time for the payment to go through, so it allows us to max our credit cards about 3-4 times each week. We try to put all of our purchases on the credit cards because our business debit card can only do 37 transactions each day, so if you are doing 40-50 sales/day there would be no catching up, ever.
Why would we use credit cards?
Well that my friend is an easy answer! We get a load of points usually used for airline tickets or hotels. If I could start over I would have signed up for an Alaska Airlines Credit Card. (If you get the business credit card you can have a limit of 1 Million miles/year rather than their low 100k limit on most of their cards).
We also have to use our debit card to process orders but try to only use the credit cards to get the points.
Derek Cladek on July 10th, 2009
So it was a crazy day in the ecommerce world this past week! I started a new online store with a friend of mine back in February 2009 and we had a new product launching this past week. I saw this coming and we prepared the product page, got it to rank number 1 on google and had a list of just over 400 people interested in buying with a 10% off coupon. Things were set and all we had to do was wait for the product to be officially out. When the date came, the product was available we started taking orders around 4pm PST. By the end of the day we had done 70 sales! For any ecommerce store that is pretty good but since we had only done about $4,000 in sales the past few months it was a shock to our Merchant Provider for the store.
We processed the sales and now were waiting for the money to be dumped into our bank account so that we could buy the products and have it shipped to our customers. Sounds easy, doesn’t it? Well then crap hit the fan! Friday comes around the day our money is supposed to be dumped into our bank account and our merchant processing bank calls… These calls never go well because they only call when there are problems. They never call to just say, “Hey, thanks for your business, you really make us a load of money!”
“We noticed there was a very large volume and unusual transactions for your account”, well no duh! Is that wrong that we made 70 sales in 1 freakin day? Now they are planning on holding our $8,500 until we can provide tracking numbers on 10 of the sales we took.. Hmm.. do you see a problem? I do! How can we send them 10 tracking number if we don’t have the money to place the orders to get the tracking numbers? Well its not that we didn’t have the money, this was a new store for us and so we didn’t have the cash flow built up to sustain a large volume like that. I am just trying to show some problems that may come up for new store owners.
This brings me to ask a question. Would you be able to survive if you were new at ecommerce and your credit card processor decides to hold a substantial amount of your money until you can provide documentation that they require? Most newbies would not be able to make it. This has been a problem for me twice. The first time I had to eat into my own credit cards just to keep the business alive. You cannot run a business if you do not have the cash flow.
This is the point I want to hit:
Do you have a great relationship with your merchant account manager?
Do you have a great relationship with your credit card processing bank? -Most likely not, even if you are a seasoned veteran at ecommerce.
The point is, you must find a good merchant for any store you start. I am very grateful for our contact Bob Bryant. We got that phone call around 10 a.m and I emailed Bob to call me ASAP. Within 3 minutes he was calling me, how cool is that? I told him the problem, what the bank wanted and my issue with it. He said he would talk to the president of the credit card processor and would get them to release the funds. By noon I received another call from Bob who said they released the funds and would still want to see 10 tracking numbers from 10 of those orders. Now that is what I can live with. We get the money and can process these orders without going into our own credit cards, they get their 10 tracking numbers and our customers get their products and the world goes round and round.
Here is a quick screen shot of the store’s volume for the day just so you don’t think I’m full of crap.
admin on July 9th, 2009
So I have decided to get serious about blogging. This is basically my coming out of the ‘closet’ in the blogging world. I have been online for many years and saw Johnchow dot com become the great blogger he is today. I watched as many different bloggers went from every day people to the professionals they are today.. which I must say are making a killing on the internet.
I have always dreamed of becoming a great blogger just like them, so why can’t I? I figured out that the only thing holding me back is myself. Its not money or a lack of knowledge because anyone can start blogging for free and anyone can search google for answers to any question. I have spent the last two days looking through successful blogs and the one common instance I keep seeing are these bloggers are young and persistant. They never give up and they blog every day. Consistancy is key.
Below are some small examples of successful bloggers online today and what people are achieving from their own websites and online ventures.
These are some of the stated incomes from some popular bloggers:
These people are making their living just from blogging and some are making just enough to pay their bills, pay for a new car, buy a house to traveling the world. Whatever your dream is, you can accomplish it just by starting somewhere. One lesson I have learned over the years is that if you ever want to be successful you have to start.. that’s it. By starting something you are way ahead of the countless other people who just dream of success. Failure is starting something and stopping or never starting in the first place.
Blogging is something anyone can do and I am here to prove it. I currently run a few online stores selling physical products (one store with 8 months above $100k in sales) and built a rather large adsense site that gets roughly 65k visitors every month. That same site has been making on average $7k/year for the past few years and there is nothing more I need to do with that site, it runs itself.
I know I can start this blog especially since I am already self employed. It should be easy for me, right? Wrong! I really don’t like writing and it’s already hard enough to come up with ideas on what to write about. I do not have the best spelling and when it came to writing school papers I dreaded it. Blogging just seemed like a dreaded task. But that is where I had wrong thinking. Blogging should be fun and it is if you blog about what makes you happy, what you like, what gets you going everyday. If you were to blog about boring stuff, you would quit or give up. So this blog is going to be surrounded by self improvement, which I can write about many subjects that interest me, especially entrepreneurship, making money online, investing, health, fitness, spirituality, and the list goes on. I am going to take the next few months and take this slow.. learning as I go.
I have learned that if you blog about what you are passionate about, what keeps you going every day.. then nothing should stop you. I can tell you my goals are to be wealthy from this blog, but really I have no idea what I am getting myself into. This is a hobby that I wanted to take up years ago, to get my thoughts down. Blogging is a great way to basically keep notes for yourself.
So I guess I’m officially out of the closet 
and not in a ‘homo’ way.
Derek Cladek on April 29th, 2009
With Google mapping the up coming pandemic of the Swine Flu many people are changing their traveling plans to avoid Mexico. But avoiding Mexico won’t stop something that has already started. People who have already traveled to Mexico and returned from a vacation, are the real cause of this virus going world wide. It is all over the news and is turning into a great scare, but will the swine flu be stopped?
According to the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention between 30,000 -40,000 people die annually from the common flu. Most deaths are caused by pneumonia in young children and senior citizens. So why is the Swine Flu making so many news headlines and causing panic in some areas?
Derek Cladek on April 24th, 2009
This is my first post! My very first personal blog. I am currently self employed and am making a living online. I make money online and have been since I was about 17 years old. I remember starting off in the days of ‘paid to surf the internet’ days. I signed up for every single program, referred every one I could and tried to make a living online.
- Clickdough
- Desktopdollars
- Cashsurfers (Still In Existence)
Those where just three of the top programs I was in back in 1999. This was all right before the Dot Com Boom and when I was still in high school. I once won $1000, had a referral downline of over 5,000 people and was making pennies every hour! Boy did I think I was living the life back then. If you don’t know how those ‘paid to surf’ programs worked, you basically had to download a toolbar onto your computer and run the bar when you surfed the internet. Every hour you surfed you would get credit. Advertisers would pay the company to show their ads, which then they would split the profits with the people. This kind of advertising would never work, because ‘forced’ advertising will never work, not then, not today and never in the future. Ads that I saw never interested me so it was just a waste of money for the advertiser, the biggest reason why those programs all failed during the Dot Com Boom.
Right after I made about $2000 doing nothing online I started looking at other ways to make money. I looked at starting an online store (which failed because I knew nothing about what I was doing). I also looked at selling on eBay, which took off and did well for about two years.
What I did not know back in those early days was that they would lead me to where I am now. From making money online, ‘paid to surf’ sites, affiliate marketing, ebay, forex and now ecommerce and small niche sites that make me money, I have been doing this for years. I have learned what works and what does not work. I am no geneous and definitely no guru, but if you do listen to me and follow me I will try to share my wisdom about making money online.
I believe the internet levels the playing field and that anyone who puts time and effort into making money online will eventually make something. I have learned that the more time and effort you put into building a business online, the more you will succeed. I dabbled in Forex for about a year and was on a crazy roller coaster ride with it. I eventually realized that I wanted my life to be more stable than the ups and downs to forex trading. I made money and I lost money with Forex.
I now own a few online stores, a few small niche sites in the tattoo market and this blog. The online stores pay the bills and the small niche tattoo sites are being built to pay for a car and house. One of the first tattoo sites that I built back in 2006 has been making between $400-$800/month since 2008. I plan on sharing everything I know in this blog so that one day you can also make money online, just like me!
