Business

It has been a while since I wrote about my million dollar case study. To be honest with you all, a lot has been happening in my life and not much has been happening on the site. There’s a lot going on with both my business life (the websites I run) and my personal life (my location / relationships).

As I have big goals for this life I’m living, I have decided that I’m going to settle down for 12 months in one location: Cape Town. I know the place well and it offers me an excellent standard of living for the money that I make. This will allow me to focus on my goals with ViperChill and my affiliate sites, and ultimately reach my next goal — making sure my siblings don’t have to work.

Minimalism seems to be a hot topic these days and rightly so. People like clutter-free living and getting things done. After listening to a recent podcast between minimalist Leo Babauta and problogger, Darren Rowse, I started thinking about how I could apply minimalism to my internet marketing operations.

After all, I’m sure we can all agree there is time we spend on a computer each day that isn’t spent doing relevant tasks. I personally know that I check Tweetdeck, Facebook, and my email inbox far more often than necessary. Over the last few days, I have completely overhauled the way I do business online and setup the system and principles I’m going to share with you today.

Everywhere I look it seems people are releasing eBooks and trying to cash in on their audience. There are quite a few success stories out there, but for the most part, people just aren’t making the sales they want. As I have had a lot of success with my own eBook, Cloud Living (no longer for sale, follow this instead, I thought it would be helpful to a lot of people if I wrote a guide about the whole process.

For those of you who don’t know, Cloud Living is my eBook which teaches people how I make a living online. That being said, I want to make it clear that I don’t make a living by teaching people how to make a living online. My biggest successes are in personal services which offer an affiliate program and various sites I run in the health niche.

This website, right now, has absolutely no way of making money. There are no ads in the sidebar, there are no hidden affiliate links and I have nothing to sell you. This lack of promotion isn’t coincidental: I have a genuine aim to help as many of you as I can succeed online and I’ll do that by focusing purely on the content that I put out there, and not the money I can make with it.

Now that we’re beginning a New Year, many people (myself included) feel like they are able to wipe the slate clean and try a ‘fresh start’ or a new strategy for a brand new year. My job right now is to catch you in this enthusiastic and energetic mood by showing you the one thing you need to do first: build your brand base online.

This is one of the most important blog posts I’m ever going to write. It’s also a blog post I won’t share and recommend you don’t either – you can think of this post as my Christmas gift and thanks for subscribing to the site. If you’re someone who normally skims articles to get the ‘meat’ of them then please, allow yourself to make an exception just this once. You’re going to want to read what I have to say. As a quick note to save your time, if you’re reading this after December 2009, it will no longer be relevant to you. The people who are going to benefit from what I have to say will need to act quickly.

The reason this blog post is so important is because the people who take action based on what I say here literally have the potential to become the hottest blogger in their niche within 30 days. In fact, if I’m wrong about what I’m saying here, I will pay each of you individually. Anyone who fully takes in and executes what I’m about to share with you and does not notice a dramatic improvement in their blog stats can come to me for an easy $10 via Paypal (I’m not being tight, we have a lot of readers).

I built my first website at 15 years old. I built my first website with the intention of making money at 16. Based on what I’m about to tell you, you could say it took me either 3 years to “make it online,” or 4. Three as at 18 my blog managed to get me a lucrative job in the internet marketing field or four as I managed to quit my job and start working for myself.

Either way, I am successful online but my success took a very long time. Time that has obviously taught me some lessons along the way. You can find people promising you overnight riches online or success in two weeks, but that’s not what you’ll read from me. I think these things are possible, but they’re the exception. They’re not easy to make happen. Instead, I believe that a genuine, ethical, liveable income can be generated online within 6-12 months. Perhaps more importantly is that I believe this online income can be achieved by someone of any experience, gender, or age. That means you.

I was blown away with your response to my new $1m website project (read about that here) so I have decided to kick things off with the next installment. Now that I had my niche, it was time to get a domain. This domain would become the home of my million dollar website so it had to be good. When you’re thinking about domain names for affiliate sites, its best to be as relevant as possible, but also choose something brandable.

Relevant so that you get a small ‘boost’ from the search engines but also brandable becuase you want people talking about your project or trusting the name when they land on the site. I don’t think many web users would trust the products on my-affiliate-keyphrase-baby.info.