Like I have mentioned before I have been playing some online poker in my spare time, and when I am getting bored.  Anyway, lately I have been doing pretty good, I invested in some tracking software and it has already paid for itself. 

So yesterday I sat down and figured out the hourly rate I have made playing poker for the last month, and I was surprised to see that it was higher than my effective hourly rate for all of my online business.  Hmm I thought to myself, if I just played poker then I would be able to buy that new computer that I want sooner.

That is when the guy on the other should spoke up and said, “Yes, but remember there is nothing passive about playing poker, online or otherwise.  You can’t go home and read a book AND make money, you actually have to be doing something.”

This is very true, and where the title comes from.  Sure I could decide to just play poker in my free time and spend NO time on my other endeavors, or I could even sell my remaining online real-estate, however I will never have a nice passive income when I stop playing.  The sites and services that I am spending my time on now are gaining speed, and on top of that they are making me money, as little as it may be, while I am at work, sleeping, etc.  That is something that I can’t say about poker.  If I go on vacation I make no money except for the money that my sites pull in via Adsense and affiliate offers. 

So my conclusion to that little internal conversation was this, keep doing what I am doing.  So I will continue to maintain and build my sites and if the mood strikes I will fire up the poker, or set up a home game (that I can’t seem to win, but that is another post)

For the last while, 10 months or so I have been spending some time trying to teach myself Affiliate Marketing and Search Engine Marketing without my success.  It seemed that no matter how much work I did before I started a campaign I lost money.  Luckily I followed Shoemoney’s advice and did small tests.  If you have success tweak to get better success, if not figure out why and then try again.  My problem was that I could never figure out what I was doing wrong.  I did the niche reseach to ensure that I was not trying to get into a saturated market, then I went to CJ and Azoogle to find some good programs for said niche, and then I did the keyword research to get as many cheap long-tail keywords that I could.

Last night I decided that there just seems to be too much money available to affiliate marketers not to try to break into it.  I know that if I spent the 2hours a night that I have set aside the RIGHT way I could reach the goals that I set for myself in no time at all.  The catch is learning how to spend the time correctly. 

After reading around for a bit I bought Jeremy Palmer’s E-book.  I haven’t started reading it yet, so I really don’t know if it is going to do me any good, when I have finished and tried out some of his ideas I will be sure to let everybody know. 

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 have been spending a lot of time researching what topic I would like to build a website around.  There are a lot of things that have to be considered, what I like, is there money in the topic, is there a lot of competition, etc.

However I have also been thinking about doing some more work in PPC arbitrage at the same time.  The plan as it is now is to spend approximately 50% of my time on this until I finally come up with a topic that I feel that is worth the time and effort to put in.  Then I will cut back to be about 25% with the rest of the time being put into my new site.

I am going to pick one product a week, and spend that week testing to see if it is going to be worth my while.  I will be using AdWords to do my testing and if it looks good there, then I am going to try MSN and Yahoo for traffic.  As for the landing page I will buy one from a reputable designer.  I will then test, test, test.

I will let you know how it goes.

I have decided that it is time for me to try something new, and hopefully something that will not be time critical.  So I opened a CJ account and have been reviewing products for the last couple of days.  There are a lot of potential in a lot of them.  For one some companies have HUGE payouts, up to $100 and more, while others have very interesting products.

Right now I am not sure how to make it work, I think that I am going to try to find a high paying product and make a fancy entry page.  To get traffic I will try two methods, one will be bulk traffic from Bluenoser Traffic then if I get at least a 1% conversion, or even a .5% conversion I will try Adwords or YPN.  If I can get a .5% conversion with bulk pop-unders I know that I can do better with more targetted advertising.

I will keep everyone up to date with my progress, I still haven’t found the product that I think is worth the time.