If you’ve been trying to learn how to make money online, I am sure you’ve came across claims like making money on the Internet is easy, you can become a millionaire overnight using a “fully-automated” or “turn-key” system. All you have to do is sit back and wait for the money to roll in.

But if it’s that easy why hasn’t everyone become an Internet millionaire by now?

Good for me that I started with no money at all so I couldn’t afford to buy every marketing product that claimed to have the answer to the secrets of Internet riches. I had to and still exercise good judgment and common sense when it comes to spending money on how to make money products.

At the same time, I knew there were many real people and those that running websites that became popular enough that their owners have quit their day job. I always wondered how they did it, how they got started and what they were doing differently that made them successful while others failed.

Once in a while, a product came along that really captured my attention. While money was still an issue, I strongly felt that using it as an excuse not to buy the product would mean that my curiosity on how some people become successful would remain unanswered.

Don’t get me wrong though as I doubt an ebook that has all the answers to the secrets of Internet riches exist. For me, an ebook is good if it doesn’t just dish out theories but proven ideas about specific ways of making money online.

I needed to treat what I do like a real business.  That means I needed to invest money in order to make more money. That seems obvious now but many newbies fail to see that including me when I first got started. And there’s nothing better than investing money in a good marketing education.

Spending money on improving your knowledge is one of the best investments you can do as you try to make money online. Your readiness  to invest in yourself shows whether you are really serious about becoming successful.

OK, let’s get straight to the point. If you want to learn how to make money from pay per click, the product that I am going to recommend is a must have. But…

• If you are unwilling to risk losing some money in return for the opportunity to make even more than you can stop reading now.
• If you want an easy way to make money, this product is not for you.
• If you want to become a millionaire over night, this product is not for you.
• If you want a fully automated or turnkey system, this product is not for you.

Anyway, this is what I’ve made from just ONE website in the first week of January (in USD) a few weeks after I implemented the methods. I made fantasy becomes reality because I took action, I didn’t just learn but I put what I’ve learned into practice.

Click image to enlarge

I used the extra money to indulge myself in my other newly found passion and got myself a Canon EOS 50D DLSR camera. Then I flew to Singapore for a couple of days for some shopping.

I am not telling you this to boast. I am just trying to show you the possibilities. Personally, I still need to work harder before I can say I’ve achieved my target, which is to make USD10,000 profit consistently monthly.

Can I guarantee that you’ll make money after reading this guide? I don’t know because I don’t know you. But what I can say for sure is that the methods really work for me.

The creator, Jeremy Palmer is using this exact technique (his personal way of making money online) that has made him millions of dollars in affiliate revenues annually.

Want to learn more? Check out The Black Ink Project

PS: Check out the bonuses. Jeremy is giving away PPC Classroom for free. I own this course too and paid USD500 for it when it was first released, serious…

Commission Blueprint is a training guide for anyone wanting to make real money from Clickbank or any kind of digital product using AdWords. It consists of a series of instructional videos and written guides in PDF format.

I purchased the guide recently and I have to say that it’s one of the best purchases I’ve made as far as making money online guide is concern. While I am aware that the topic has been the subject of discussion for countless guides and ebooks out there, this little guide is a bit different.

The main content is presented in a video format and for me, consuming the content is like attending a one on one training session with the author. I just have to sit back, watch and listen as the author unveiled the exact steps he did to make an insane amount of money with Clickbank.

If you are trying to make money online using pay per click, here are several things that you may have to consider if the products you are promoting do not bring the expected return.

1. Instead of promoting physical product such as books, try promoting ebooks or audiobooks.
2. Instead of trying to promote audio CDs, try to promote online music service.
3. Similarly, downloadable software will convert better than boxed software

It has been showed that digital products such as ebooks, downloadable software, MP3s and so on convert better because they offer instant gratification to the customers. They are relatively cheaper compare to their physical counterparts and can be delivered directly via the Internet.

From the affiliate point of view, selling digital products offers higher profit margins and therefore you can afford to spend more with your pay per click (PPC) campaigns.

While Commission Blueprint focuses on Clickbank products, you could easily adapt the formula to any other affiliate networks and still make good money from it. 

This guide is not perfect for everyone. Beginners will likely face a rather steep learning curve ahead but it’s not impossible for them to master all the necessary skills as long as they put an effort to it.

The author goes through several crucial subjects rather briefly which I think is important for everyone to understand them fully. The discussion on Google Quality Score for example is rather brief and without the full understanding of this subject, it could cost you in the end.

Secondly, some keywords selected in the example are too general. The readers should be aware that selecting general keywords to start a campaign with may bring tons of traffic but this can put a hole in their pocket faster than they can top up their credit card.

That said, the guide touches almost everything you need to know about how to make money from Clickbank or any other digital products via pay per click search engines.  All you have to do next is continue to educate yourself by further reading all the relevant topics online.

One of the most useful pieces of information that I’ve picked up after I went through the videos is that it made me rethink how I research, launch and manage my PPC campaigns. All the other ebooks that I’ve read recommended me to work systematically but they stop short of sharing their exact system when it comes managing the business.

Commission Blueprint does not stop there, for instance, it recommends you to stop your campaign if

• You’ve reached your budget and no sales were made
• If overall conversion rate is less than 0.025 after getting over 500 clicks
• If after getting over 500 clicks, you’ve spent more than 4 times what you made in sales.

You have a reason to hang in there before you ditch a campaign if it’s in the borderline. For example

• You wait about a week (or at least 500 clicks) to “settle” the campaign down
• Your overall conversion rate is over 0.025
• If you’ve spent less than 4 times your sales
• Keep optimizing and get at least another 250-500 clicks

After weeding out the bad campaigns and you find a winner, you should

• Scale the campaign (something that people don’t do enough of)
• Constant tweaking to increase profitability
• First 30 days, tweak the campaign for every 2 to 3 days
• Second 30 days, tweak the campaign once a week
• After 60 days, you may tweak the campaign only monthly

If you are new to the game, these might not make much sense to you right now. But  I am telling you those points provided a crucial guidelines for anyone doing PPC marketing on how to arrive at a correct decision in order to move forward.

But of course you can adjust them according to your own needs.

Finally if you are a veteran pay per click marketer, you may discover some gems here and there, if not, the training provides a refresher on things that you may have forgot to do or stopped paying attention to.

How does the training affect me so far?

I started spending around US100 per day for one of my campaigns as an experiment. That doesn’t worry me much as long as I know I’ll not only breakeven but will make a tidy profit after adapting what I’ve learned from the training.

If you’ve been wondering what other successful PPC affiliates know that you don’t, well this training will help you understand the secret to their success. Read more about Comission Blueprint here.

I had received several emails and comments from my readers wondering if I’m still around to update this blog – the answer is yes I am still alive. Sorry if I’ve kept you waiting guys.

One of them came up with several guesses as to why the lack of posting and allow me answer those lingering questions

1. Gaman is giving this post high priority, tribute to Gobala (could be Gobala giving him big sum of money :p )

Well it just happens that it was the last post before the blog went temporarily quiet. Good for Gobala for the extra exposure

2. Gaman is testing this page, can give big traffics or income return (i’m no SEO expert)

Not really, although the AdSense income has never dropped during those period.

3. Gaman is doing a couple of projects, testing this – the new millionaires – strategIES.

I am doing several projects but they are not directly related to the book.

4. Gaman is out of town, NO INTERNET CONNECTON.

In a way it’s true. I’ve been travelling a lot for the past few weeks so I have to admit that once the momentum is broken, it’s hard for me to pick up the pace and get into the blogging mindset.

As I’ve mentioned in my previous post I rather not write anything for the sake of writing. If I am not in the correct frame of mind, I am not motivated enough to write and this will affect the quality of the post.

5. Gaman is in jail or under ISA Detention (although impossible – kakaka !)

Nah… I am not a political blogger.

6. Gaman is giving up this blog and leave it to be expired (unless this blog gives return more than USD100 monthly )

I won’t let this blog drift off into Internet oblivion. It’s the only place where I share my personal experience making money online. I’ll be doing a disservice to my readers if I were to let that happen. Oh btw, yes this blog earns around that much monthly, which is not much unfortunately but that’s not the reason I blog or rather not blog.

7. Gaman is getting married and still in honeymoon for 40 days 40 nights (hey that’s Elvis Presley lah), if true then don’t forget to drink Kopi Tongkat Ali lah hehe.

May be I’ll have a 40 nights honeymoon when I get married

8. Now it’s mystery, and wait for the next post by Gaman

Now it’s no longer a mystery . I just hope that you don’t take the lack of updates as a sign that I am abandoning this whole money making on the Internet thingy.

I’ve been doing this for a living since the late 90s and I can’t imagine not doing what I am doing now. Just that, I am not a full time blogger so thing can be rather quiet at times.

If you are blogging, keep building your momentum up. If you are learning to make money online, keep learning and keep your passion alive. You and you alone can make the difference if you’ll be successful or not.

Now, I’ve also received the following question from a reader via email recently.

I knew you good with blogging and so on. I really want to know on how your leverage your daily task as internet marketer. Im sure sometime we need to outsource our tasks and maybe you also can write a review about any forum you’re actively involved. I want to know a lot but maybe next issue

I have one full time assistant to help me in the daily maintenance of several websites as well as locating suitable products to promote using the pay per click search engines.

If I can do the programming, web designing, content writing, I’ll do them myself, but sometimes it’s more efficient to outsource some tasks via websites such as RentACoder.com and Elance.com

As for the forums, I used to be active in Sitepoint.com forum; sometimes I visited the DigitalPoint.com forum. For the local ones, I visited WebmasterMalaysia.com.

But that was before, these days we are managing our own general forum which has little to do with Internet marketing. It’s a rather crazy but fun forum where the members write in Sabahan Malay and English .

Ok.. I guess that’s about it for this update. I’ll write more again soon.

If you don’t know this already, Gobala Krishnan – one of the most prolific Malaysian Internet marketers – has released his first paperback book with a fascinating title: The New Millionaires: Work From Home Make Money Online Live Like a Millionaire.

The book should be available in book stores near you as you are reading this.

I got a complimentary copy from Gobala a couple of days ago and I initially flipped through it to see if there are new nuggets to pick up. This book is written by someone who has been there and done it, so of course I did expect to find something interesting.

While reading the first few chapters, I found myself scribbling down on sticky notes marking interesting paragraphs and then continued scribbling in my notepad. By the time I was finished, I had several pages filled with points that I wanted to pay attention to.

Making money on the Internet is a vast subject and your imagination is the only limit as to how you want to make money online. The book explains not only the How part but the

• Why (why should you do it)
• When (part-time of full time)
• What (what to do and what to avoid)
• Who (success stories of Malaysian Internet marketers)

The Who part fills about half of the book. It’s a compilation of interviews with 12 Malaysian Internet marketers making money from various methods from eBay and dropshipping to the well known Google AdSense and affiliate programs.

What’s so valuable about this chapter is that, people are sharing their own experiences giving you some insights into things behind the scene. You’ll find valuable tips and tricks as well as pitfalls to avoid.

Be warned though, the variety of business ideas may overwhelm you especially if you are just testing the water. Most newbies make the mistake by thinking that they probably have to learn everything in this chapter in order to become successful.

As explained by Gobala in the book, the problem starts when someone starts researching into hundreds of different ways of making money online. First they read about eBay and they dream of becoming an eBay powerseller, then they came across this thing called blogging, and they want to become a successful blogger making tons of money from it. They spend all their time learning but still fail because they never really put what they’ve learned into practice.

There’s one element that must absolutely present if you want to make money on the Internet – that is to identify things that you are passionate about and these are things that should be the foundation of your online business. As they said, find your passion and the money will follow.

In any online endeavour, often times it begins with you making no money or little if any for a while and it would seem like throwing the towel is the only sensible option. Passion is what will keep you going during those trying times and this book talks about this early to help you start off on the right path.

That said, you’ll also have to be realistic in that your business idea has to be feasible. No matter how passionate you are about it, there’s little point selling ice to the Eskimos for instance!

I find the discussion about How to grow exponentially on page 186 really inspiring. While they are not entirely new to me, they’ve definitely reminded me to pay attention to those things that I’ve been tossing in the back seat.

This includes things like not to put off the creation of new products, realise that residual income won’t last forever without constant “nudging” from you to keep things rolling and focus on things that bring the most return.

The book touches on other subjects including how Gobala made RM31,500 selling a 12 page ebook (an insightful chapter I must add), how exactly he makes money online, an introduction to keyword research, email marketing, understanding resell rights and so on.

While most people can draw something useful from this book, I’d have to be realistic here, reading this book alone won’t change your life unless you are able to extract useful ideas and apply them in your own online business endeavours. In a nutshell – you have to take action!

If I were to start a new online venture here’s what I’d do:

• Discover whatever I am passionate about at the moment
• Create a website, a product or a service
• Drive targeted traffic and continue to improve on the website, product or service
• Only then I’ll try to make money from it.
• I’ll focus on this particular venture before I move on to the next business idea.

You can read more about Gobala’s book here

My planned was initially to test the withdrawal process by transferring a smaller amount but since many people have reported that they’ve successfully withdrawn funds into this card, I upped the amount to US500, my daily withdrawal limit.

The process went through without glitches.

Withdrawal dates from Paypal

The funds appeared in my Public Bank account in 3 to 5 days. Notice the increasing amount as they arrived in by Public Bank card account which was obviously due to the weakening Ringgit against the US dollars. I was making RM20 more in a matter of days due to the forex fluctuation.

Unlike some people who are probably hoping the Ringgit weakening trends to reverse, I on the other hand accept this with open arms, and actually quietly hoping the trend will continue (up to a point of course)!

Now, I am going to transfer the amount into my Public Bank account via their Internet banking facility. I’ll be investing the money back into my business, no partying or shopping will ensue at this moment

However what if the amount you want to transfer is larger than USD500?  That’s what happens to me as I am trying to transfer some USD3000 plus to my Public Bank Visa Electron card.

I’ve started receiving payments to my PayPal account from the commissions I earn from MaxBounty. I opted for the PayPal payment because MaxBounty converted my commission checks into the equivalent Malaysian Ringgit but at a lower exchange rate than what I would normally get over the counter.

By the way, if you are interested in making money promoting pay per lead programs, MaxBounty is one network that you should consider. The payouts for certain campaigns are sometimes better than what you would get from other networks. They even have offers targeted to Malaysian. Personally, I’ve been making around USD500 monthly from MaxBounty, not much I know but good enough for a passively generated income.

Anyway, at first I wondered if there’s a way to lift the USD500 daily withdrawal limit if I upgrade my account from Personal to Premium. I did that but the limit remains in effect. I contacted PayPal and here’s their reply:

This is Michael, and I am honorable to assist you with your question regarding your PayPal account.

Upon your email, I understand you would like to lift the withdrawal limit on your account.

After checking your account information, I find it has been verified, which means there is no limit on it.

However, in accordance with local financial regulation of Malaysia, there is still a $500 USD daily withdrawal limit to withdraw funds to the Visa card on your account, which can not be lifted. Please kindly understand it.

On the other hand, if you have a US bank account, I suggest you add it to your account for withdrawal. And there will be no limit to withdraw funds to that US bank account.

I hope the above explanation would be helpful for you to better use PayPal. If you have further questions, please feel free to let us know.

Thank you for being part of the PayPal community.

Sincerely,

Michael

PayPal, an eBay Company

So once I have upgraded my account to Premier, there’s actually no limit (even though I haven’t confirmed that card with PayPal) on the amount I could withdraw. Apparently the limit is imposed by Malaysia’s financial regulation so for the time being it appears that we are stuck with it.

In my case though, it’ll take 6 withdrawals to transfer the amount and will accrue (USD5 x 6) USD30 transfer fees in total. So here I am trying to transfer USD500 a day. I’ll let you guys know if the withdrawals are successful. It would take 5-7 days for each transfer to complete.

Talking about withdrawing your PayPal balance to Public Bank Visa Electron, there’s one last step you need to perform after your card is approved before you could do so. You would initially be asked by Public Bank to deposit RM25 into your account. If you do that and then try to add your card to PayPal you’ll most likely get the following error:

This credit card has been denied by the bank that issued your credit card. For details on why your card was denied, please contact your credit card issuer’s customer service department. Or, you may want to try adding a different credit card.

The reason is because in order to start transacting using your card with PayPal, you card balance has to be larger than RM25. If it isn’t, you would have to top it up over the counter of via an ATM machine. In any case, you should contact Public Bank customer service if you are still having problem.

Does anyone know of a Malaysian Visa card that doesn’t impose the USD500 daily withdrawal limit?

Since I plan to sell advertisement directly, regular readers may notice more ads on the sidebar. However the content section will remain like it is now with one inline AdSense rectangle ad.

I am also interested in incorporating a new, professional looking logo for Sabahan.com. Since spending some money hiring a designer to do that isn’t something that I’m looking forward to, I’ve decided to design the logo myself.

I was looking for inspiration when I stumbled upon this rather inspiring and informative article from evernerve.com

The new Sabahan.com logo design was based on the ideas I got from the article… let see if my logo designing skill is up to the standard

As for the template itself, I’ve decided to spend a little money to purchase a commercial template instead of following my inclination to use a freely available template.

Actually I’m feeling a little under the weather right now; let’s hope it won’t get worse so that I can finish this upgrade ASAP

Whether you are a full/part time blogger, an Internet marketer of some sort or someone who are just getting his or her feet wet in the world of netpreneurship, there’s a benefit to be had by having a business plan that guide you along the way.

Talking about business plans, the recent silence period in this blog has to do with me trying to catch up with my own business plan schedule. The recent Internet outage has threw me slightly off the track and time needs to be spent to catch up.

Being self-employed with no boss looking over my shoulder gives me the flexibility to do as I wish as long as it keeps me focused on my main objectives. While the unfortunate blogging is not one of the priorities, it doesn’t mean this blog is destined for neglect. It’ll be updated as soon as I have the time and truly useful subject to write about.

So back to the question posed by the title of this post, do you really need a business plan for your Internet business?

You have no investors that need convincing, no lenders to fund your business, and no corporate objectives to define. All you have is your trusty computer, your Internet connection and yourself. I’d imagine most of Sabahan.com’s readers fall into this category.

Some don’t even do this full time so why wasting time writing about a business plan that nobody reads?

There’s a logic behind that reasoning. For instant I believe some full time bloggers become successful by “following the flow” such as LiewCF.com and PaulTan.org and not by having a business plan – correct me if I am wrong guys. As long as you consistently write about topics that attract the masses you are bound to attract the search engines spiders (when combined with a good SEO practice of course) and at the same time keep your readers interested.

On the other hand, not everyone falls into that category especially if you are not a full time blogger. In most cases having a business plan improves your chances of succeeding as an netpreneur.

If you are serious about doing business on the Internet, you need to treat what you do now as a business. Having a business plan is one way to do so. As I’ve said before, the real reason for creating a business plan is not having the finished results, rather the act of planning helps you analyze things more thoroughly by looking at your ideas critically.

Having a business plan help keeps you on track for success. Other benefits include the ability to determine whether your products have sufficient market demand, provide an estimate of costs needed to run your business, identify your target market, reevaluate your competition and how you could stay ahead and so on.

During the early days of my software development business, I laid our a plan for the year ahead where I broken down the activities on how my software projects should be ran. There’s nothing scientific about it, I just wrote down the timeline for each software development and marketing cycle. At the end of that year my Internet income more than tripled than that of the previous year.

Then, I stopped writing any business plan the year after. This non-action consequently resulted in the stagnation of my Internet business income, except the occasionally spikes or plunges which do happen when you leave things to chance.

How much details you want to put into your business plan will depend on what you want to achieve. More importantly you need to have a clear idea where you want to be in a year, or in three or five years time.

I personally prefer planning an annual business plan, any longer would increase the chance for me to veer off course as I would probably discover new trends or new ways to make money online as I progress along which could be a departure from the initial plans.

In addition, you’ll have to keep in mind whose your intended audience is. If you have investors to entertain, or intent to use your business plan to apply for a bank loan, you could delve right into the formality by including the description of your business, strategy, SWOT analysis, competitive analysis, marketing strategy, expected ROI, feasibility studies and the whole enchilada.

Writing a formal business plan is a big topic in itself, and it’s beyond the scope of this article. Google will be able to help you better if you want to learn more about it.

On the other hand, if you are the only person who read it then draw up a plan that’s right up your alley. You’ll need to focus on ways to get you ideas into the marketplace and start making money right away. So you can do without much of the formality and focus on how to obtain the results.

I personally draw up a business plan that focuses more on the actions part. Rather than trying to stick with the specific format of a typical business plan, I create a project timeline. I can afford to do that because I don’t have anyone to convince but myself.

Now I don’t pretend I have the best plan in the world, as long as it works and help me achieve my own personal goals such as make more money then I’ll go for it. The most important thing is to draw a plan that you will be able to follow and execute.

The level of detail is not as important as the ability for me to organize my time and resources.

The following is a sample of my own personal business plan. As you may notice, it’s nothing more than a rough project timeline. I find it’s more beneficial to do so as it keeps me focus on the actions rather than the theories. You don’t have to follow my way, just draw the type of business plan that you are comfortable with. Sorry I have to erase some details for obvious reasons.

Click on the image to view a larger version.

Running simultaneously, I plan to create a new landing page every two weeks. This would include keyword research for Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing and Microsoft AdCenter.

There are other plans not included which is mostly handled by my assistant. I am not telling you this to brag about my business plans or whatever . By all means, I could’ve spent more time crafting them to make them better in so many ways but that’s besides my point.

I hope this article will give you some ideas on how you could draw your own business plan, while at the same time telling others about it will remind me to keep moving if I fall behind.

If you haven’t written your business plan yet, spend sometime thinking about it and start writing today. Who knows where it’ll bring you one year, three years or five years from today.

In addition, while I’ve started working since a couple of days ago, I didn’t feel motivated enough to do tasks that require too much attention.

As much as a workaholics that I am, shifting gears to return to work would be as hard as going away in the first place. I guess the thought of having to return to my regular routine, with all the disciplines it demands takes a certain amount effort.

With no boss watching over my shoulder or expecting me to return to the office, I can easily use those as an excuse to sit back and extend the vacation. Then again, that won’t help a bit if making 2008 a better year is one of my New Year resolutions. To overcome that thought, I reminded myself about the potential income that would be generated this year, which can only be done if I start working. That helps set the ball rolling.

There’s not better time to start ramping up your online business than now. Make sure to get your business off to a great start in order to make more money in 2008. Here are some of the strategies you can use to generate more profit this year.

Improve Your Blog

OK, there’s nothing new about this but some bloggers fail to realize that it usually takes a year or longer to generate a reasonable amount of income from your blog. You have got the whole year ahead of you. If you plan to make blogging as one of your major source of income, you should start providing useful and valuable content for your readers. Get some links from other reputable blogs, even better aim to get into the front page of the social networking sites like digg.

Good content will usually attract links from other sites and help improving your blog’s authority. You’ll rank well in Google and other search engines as they continue to serve relevant links to what their users are searching for. However, keep in mind that writing the best content in the world won’t be enough if nobody knows your blog exists. Continue to promote your blog in any opportunities you have. The amount of traffic you have can make or break your blog.

Explore Pay Per Click Marketing

Pay per click marketing is big in 2007 and it’s going to be even bigger in 2008. Market analysis firm comScore reports that American online spending during the end-of-year holidays increased 19 percent compared to that of last year. In total, consumers have spent over $29 billion during the 2007 holiday shopping season.

With the increased in consumer trust in online shopping, more and more consumers will continue to value the convenience of online shopping and more will choose to shop online. It’s likely that this upward trend will continue this year.

So what can you promote? The fastest growing product categories in 2007 holiday season will give you some clue:

Video games, consoles & accessories was the fastest growing online retail category, jumping 129 percent versus the 2006 holiday season, with popular consoles like Nintendo Wii and Sony PlayStation and games like Halo 3 driving strong sales in the category. Furniture, appliances & equipment (up 67 percent), event tickets (up 24 percent) and consumer electronics (up 23 percent) also experienced above average growth. After seeing substantial softness early in the season, online apparel sales picked up considerably in the latter part of the season, finishing up 18 percent. Meanwhile, sales of jewelry & watches declined marginally versus year ago as rising costs in precious metals like gold and platinum may have dampened consumer demand.

Pay per click,as usually, will be one of the areas that I’ll concentrate most of my effort on this year. If you don’t know how to get started, check out the AdWords category in my blog for some tips and tricks.

Just remember that PPC marketing changes frequently. New development occurs everyday so keep yourself informed by frequenting industry blogs and pay attention to the news. In addition to Google AdWords, you should start exploring other PPC search engines such as Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft AdCenter.

Develop Your Own Products or Services

If you are serious about running your own business, start thinking about offering your own products and services. While promoting other people products has its own benefits, you can potentially make more money by selling your own products.

Think about it, if you promote a US99 ebook from a merchant and get 30% commission for each sale, you’ll have to sell 44 ebooks to make US1000. However if you are the product owner, you can keep 100% of the profit and essentially earns over US1000 just by selling 11 ebooks.

The best products to sell online are those that don’t require physical delivery, manufacturing, stocking and packaging which can take a significant chunk of your profit margin. The type of products that fit these criteria is digital products such as ebooks or software. You just have to create them once and then ready to make countless copies of it virtually at no additional cost. Creating your own products is a big topic in itself. I’ll write more about this in my future posts.

Once you have your own product, you can start to set up your own affiliate program and let other people to do all the work promoting your product. You don’t even have to pay them until you see the profits they bring in.

Like anything on the Internet, having your own affiliate programs won’t make you rich overnight unless you follow the correct strategies. I outline some of them below:

1. Offer great commission – Seriously, nobody will promote your products if you give them 1 dollar commission. The more you pay the harder they will work for you. I would recommend paying at least 30% commission if you are selling digital products such as ebooks or software.
2. Provide marketing tools for your affiliates – OK I have to admit that I am guilty of not doing this myself so 2008 will be the year to do things better. Provide your affiliates with banners ads, product boxshots, good salescopy and great headlines.
3. Find the super affiliates – Super affiliates are the top 2% of your all your affiliate that bring in more than 90% of your sales. These are affiliates who make good living by selling other people products. Sometimes super affiliates could generate more sales in a few hours than nearly all of your regular affiliates will make in a year.

Of course there are many other ways you can make more money in 2008 and the above are just a few of them. Start making some resolutions, and get busy growing your ideas into reality. One thing to keep in mind is that you have to keep your focus in what you are doing.

You’ll risk achieving nothing significant if you try to do everything all at once. Choose a strategy, and work on it until it starts to make money for you, and only then move on. It’s 10 January 2008 today, what will happen on 10 January 2009 depend on what you do, starting today.

Sure, it’s a link bait post but a good one at that, so it’s worth linking to. If you are looking for a real life example of publishers making insane amount of money from AdSense, check this one out. Posting the picture again will continue to “resurrect” readers’ interest and certainly create an opportunity for him to promote his sites.

I quote the FAQ in full below:

1. What site was it for? What does the site do?
   The site is nextpimp. The name was kind of a joke at first… next-pimp like pimp out your nextel phone. It started as a wallpaper site for nextel phones which grew into ringtones and other stuff. All content is 100% user generated.
2. How much of the check was profit?
   At the time my expenses were 1 server @ 299$ per month for hosting. I would say atleast 130k was profit.

3. How much of the traffic was pay per click?
   None of it was pay per click. Back then I did not know anything at all about pay per click.
4. Where did all your traffic come from?
   About 70% of the traffic was direct 15% from search engines and 15% from referrals.
5. How much traffic did the site get to get that much money?
   About 75k uniq per day.
6. Why did you get a paper check and not wire?
   Back then Google did not do wire transfers for amounts of $10,000.00
7. Do you think its possible to still earn that kind of revenue? (most often asked question)
   Yes.
8. How long did it take to make revenue?
   I never tried to make any money the first 1.5 years it was running. I just concentrated on providing a good service. About 2 years after I started the site It started to do good revenue from AdSense
9. Can you show the full month report from AdSense for that month?
   Sure.

He even includes a screenshot of his AdSense report for that particular month. With permission from Google, he discloses his CTR and CPM. Can you imagine making such insane amount of money while only spending $299 monthly on web hosting? Check out his daily income below. Now convert those to Malaysian ringgit, are you thinking what I’m thinking?

And that’s not even his main income, according to him, AdSense has accounted for less than 5% of the incoming revenue for his companies. In addition to that, his blog at ShoeMoney.com is pulling just under $30,000 in October from direct ad sales, 30% from affiliate programs and other sources. Obviously more than the amount John Chow made from his blog. It made my head spin just thinking about those seriously mad figures.

But it doesn’t stop there, in March 2007 he made USD709,626.81 in commission from Commission Junction. I hope that’s a typo because I started to feel a little depress right now LOL. Just joking, it’s great inspiration for everyone. I don’t know if he earned that amount as a vendor or affiliate, regardless, it’s just insane to make that much monthly.

So did you notice a running theme here? He doesn’t make money by serving AdSense or selling paid links on his blog. While creating a blog can make you rich if it’s done correctly, I believe you’ll have to explore other monetization options in order to go to the next level.

You’ll need to create sites that serve certain purposes like PlentyOfFish.com or NextPimp.com, then learn PPC and do affiliate marketing. Remember Ashley, the 17 year old teenage girl who pull in over $70K monthly from AdSense by offering free MySpace templates on her site?

That goes to show that offering a service or products that lots of people are interested in will help you make money online faster.

Now I‘m not suggesting you drop everything you are doing now and start brainstorming similar ideas and hopefully get rich next year. I am aware that there are tons of other ways to make money online and not everyone can be as successful as those above even when they create the next free dating site, or free ringtone download site or give away free Myspace templates.

Often people become successful because they are able to offer the right products/services at the right time. Some may call that luck, but I call it knowing when to act when opportunity presents itself. If we can do that, we’ll be the next ShoeMoney.