Like I said before sometimes making money is not always fun, however I think that after doing my books over the weekend I would like to change that stance somewhat.  Making money is fun, however sometimes all of the shit that you have to do to ensure that you are making money is not so fun.

Now I realize that it is always fun to watch you bank balance go up.  I recently have been doing some equity trading and am watching some on my picks go up and up.  However the kicker is that the commissions that I paid are very high compared to the amount of cash that I have at this time to invest, so it does some serious eating into my profits.  However my Adsense revenue on the other hand is going up every day and I am not doing ANY work to promote my biggest earner.  Sure this is going to hurt me in the long run, but I have really lost interest in the topic.

One other balance that I am watching go up is my poker balance.  Yesterday I was sick as a dog, so I skipped out on the day job and played some limit poker on line.  I made just about as much money as I would if I went to work, but I am pretty sure most of it was luck so I withdrew everything except what I started with.  Right now I am completely even

So I guess I was wrong to say that making money is not fun, the work that is involved may not be fun but seeing your balance go UP is ALWAYS fun

Well the niche site that I started earlier this year is not performing to my expectations. Sure I may not be giving it enough time, and if this site was a labour of love then I would probably still be trying to get it going. However this site is a site of MAKING MONEY and I set a deadline of one month, with me spending 15 hours a week development, to get the site to a point where it is breaking even. Sure I invested about $200 into it, but the hosting bill is only $5 and I am currently making $3 from adsense a week. That is not enough to cover the hosting and start to pay back the investment funds, and continue marketing.

So now I go back to the the drawing board and look for a new niche to start a site in.

I am a little dissappointed that this site didn’t work out, since I feel that it is a niche that I could continue to participate in for years to come. Maybe I will just keep the domain and go from there.

The following is a paid review of ShoeMoney Blog.

I have been reading Shoemoney blog since about Dec 2005 when I REALLY got interested in webmastering and coding and making money online. I like the blog so much that it made my round of cuts from my reading list. The post that made me put him in my rotation initially was Matt Cutts memo to Shoemoney - ‘I cant be bribed’, strange post to get hooked you say?

Hey, we try to keep folks in webspam from accepting gifts, so it’s only fair that I do my best to uphold that. I appreciate the thought though!

Matt

Well a lot of people in the blogoshpere would have flamed Matt, sure they would have sent a nice email back saying that they like his blog, but they would have definitely make some snide comment about how he is too good for a Shoemoney T-Shirt, or make a rebuttal of his “webspam” comment.

Shoemoney has a lot of tips, keeps you up to date on what is happening in the webmastering world and all of this without getting TOO full of himself. He will help you out with all of the information that he has in that head of his, and his story on how he got to where he is today is one of the ones that you hear all of those marketing gurus on TV tell you about. However he will NEVER tell you that it was easy, he didn’t sit at home and spend 15 minutes a day online, he spent hours and hours.

Shoemoney will also talk about his failures along with his sucesses. I have found that you will learn A LOT more from where people have gone wrong than where they have gone right. Most of the blogs that I deleted, after the ones that were obivously just gathering feeds, where the ones that you would swear that they were perfect. No one is perfect. The best post to describe what I am talking about is My Top 10 Worst Ideas To Make Money.

There are also a number of posts on his site that I keep bookmarked. One of them being New Adwords Quality Score Bot Aims To Nuke Arbitragers, this is a great post on how to “cloak” you affiliate links so that you aren’t going to be killed by Google. I am an old hat at this now, however I keep it bookmarked since it is easier to point someone to that post rather than typing it all out myself.

I am not sure what else I can say about ShoeMoney Blog, or about Jeremy himself other than add his blog to your reader, blogroll, or just your reading list. Love him or Hate him he knows what he is talking about (or he is very good at bull-shitting) and is worth your 10 minutes a day to read. The funny thing is that even though I am getting a bit of quidd to do this post, but I was actually planning on doing a post on why I chose to add the blogs to my list that I did. So go out there and add Shoemoney Feed to your list.

::EDIT::

I forgot to add that Shoemoney does have some great tools. My favorite is SERPs tool. If you read through his archive you will find some other tools, however some of them don’t exist anymore. If there is one there that you like send him a note….maybe he will revive it.

I am starting to think that the hardest part about starting a new website is finding the topic/niche.  Like I mentioned before I am going to be smarter about my online business.  I am going to make a business model for all of my websites, and therefore when starting new ones I have to be sure that I have a possibility of making money off of them even before I start.  That means that I have to do a lot of research on every topic that I come up with.

My problem right now is that every topic that I can think of, well the ones that I am interested in actually building a site around, aren’t getting through the initial weeding phase.  Basically my ratio target for sites/searches is still WAY off, and this is getting frustrating.  I have all of this energy to start something but I can’t figure out what to start.  It is like a writer staring at a blank piece of paper or an artist staring at a canvas.  I need some inspiration.

If anyone out there has an idea, and wants to help a guy out send me a note.  If I make millions with it I will give you a cut.  Or if you have a “process” that you use for brainstorming for ideas send me a link.  I am running out of options.

It was soo much easier when I was just jumping on any bandwagon and spending money on sites thinking that it would just happen.  Sure I usually broken even, but that was before I started keeping track of the time that I am spending on any one project.

One of my sites is a forum.  I have been running the site for sometime now, but since it is basically a hobby site I haven’t really done any good business work to it.  This is something that I am going to change.  There are a number of things that I am going to do to double the traffic by April, and double it again by this time next year.

1. Create a new front page. Currently the site looks like a forum, I need the site to look like a news source WITH a forum.  To do that I am going to re-create the front page.  The front page is going to have a number of “news” stories that I will pull for different sources, or write myself.  It will also have the recent links that were added to our News Links engine.

2. Create more content.  The next thing that I am going to do is write better stories.  These will be picked depending on what keywords I want to target.  Usually the keywords will be something someone searched for already or something that i think that people who will want to write in the forum would be interested in.  I am going to strive to create at least 1 page every 2 weeks.  These pages will be huge, with LOTs of information.  I will also be searching for links to these pages with wild abandon.

3. Make site SE friendly  This is one that I am not sure if I am ready for yet.  Currently the siet is as friendly to the SEs as I can make it without adding MOD-Rewrite support.  I may actually have to do this in the near future, but the best way to do that costs a fortune (for a site that makes little to nothing).

4. Write more posts.  The only way for the forum to become active is if it looks active.  To do that I am going to have to do more posting myself.  I am planning on  10 posts a day till April, and by then I should have enough to cut back and work more on promotion.

5. New look.  In April I am going to give the entire site a NEW and IMPROVED look, from a PAID designer.  Currently I am using free styles that really don’t fit my site.  I am also going to be working on a new logo, name and brand.  In the coming months I am going to brand the site like branding is going out of style.  I am going to make cards to give to all my friends, I am going to get T-shirts made to wear to the gym, in public, etc.

6. Contests, I am going to be running monthly contests and guess what 1st prize is going to be….A T-Shirt and a spot on the winners board.  That’s right I am going to have the community create my content and promotion and then for a prize they will get some more promotional material

So that is my plan, I will give you an update in April to let you know how it went.  I am hoping that everything goes smoothly from here on out.