Can you really make money with companies like these?

So for the next 30 days I’m going to see how much money someone can really make with paid surveys by completing them in my down time (watching TV, just sitting around bored etc).

Why Bother With Paid Surveys In The First Place?

Building a website is hard work and there are a lot of variables (Google, competitors, individual’s ability etc) that can impact the chances for success. I believe that websites and other methods that provide an opportunity to scale will always remain my primary means of growing my business, but what if you just want a guaranteed way to earn an extra $500 per month or $1,000 per month?

I know not everyone hates their job and instead they just want to make some extra money on the side. If that’s what you’re interested in this 30 day challenge is for you.

How Much Am I Trying To Earn In 30 Days?

I’d like to earn $1,000 in 30 days but at the very least I’d like to hit $500. Quite frankly I’m not even sure how much money I can make, but I can’t find another reliable resource on survey’s I trust that will actually show me what is realistically possible. Additionally, because I’ve been building my primary business in a way to maximize my free time I have plenty of extra time to try this out and write extensive blog posts about the companies that I find.

How Can You Follow Along?

I’m going to be documenting the companies that I use to make this money and sharing the good and the bad via this blog and through my email newsletter. Near the end of last month when I was contemplating this challenge I signed up with a company called CashCrate.

For example, I made $2.40 for signing up with a company called Manilla and linking 3 of my accounts to them (i.e. Netflix). It didn’t cost anything for me to join them and took me about 10 – 15 minutes to do it. (They do have some offers that cost money but they’re denoted with a dollar sign before you fill them out – I haven’t done any of those yet).

In total I’ve already made $9.65 with them by filling out some of their offers and from what I can see they have available I should probably be able to make at least a couple hundred dollars from them. CashCrate will be the first company I document as it’s one of the few I could find that people had proof they’ve been paid. I plan to sign up for a bunch of others and determine which ones are the best based on my own experiences. With that said, in my next blog post I’ll show you how to maximize the money you make with CashCrate.

You can sign up for CashCrate here (it’s free to join): Join CashCrate

That’s my referral link and I only make money if you actually do something, but for the purposes of this challenge I obviously can’t include referral income while determining if this challenge to reach $1,000 in a month is a success or not. I want to make $1,000 by literally filling out paid surveys and offers from a variety of companies.

The whole purpose of this challenge is to provide a replicable plan for anyone to follow that wants to make some extra money on the side. Again, I’ve already proven there are more lucrative methods of earning money online but they aren’t guaranteed. In either case, I plan to catch up on a lot of TV shows while I’m at it as most of these offers are pretty easy to fill out.

What do you think of this challenge? Frankly I’m just excited to be trying something new. I’ve been so busy doing (out there building my business) instead of teaching (writing blog posts here) so this should be a lot of fun.

May 10th Update: Added a live earnings stat so you can track how I’m doing (at least with CashCrate alone):

I’ve just released my second Kindle book that details a method I’ve been using to earn extra money for several years now: Buying websites.

Download My Book Here:

Get my book here for $2.99
(Outside the US? Scroll to the end of this blog post)

If you don’t want to buy my book for $2.99 but would still like to learn more about buying websites then feel free to read some of these past blog posts. In the book I’ve greatly expanded upon what I’ve shared in the blog posts and at only $2.99 it’s pretty dang cheap as well.

P.S. If you’re outside the US then here are the links for the other locations:

UK
Germany
France
Spain
Italy
Japan
Canada

P.S.S. I’ve got a great podcast that I’ll be sharing with you early next week from a guy who really helped me grow my business.

Podcast episode number 15 is now live on iTunes. In this podcast episode I interview Josh Dorkin founder of BiggerPockets.com – a real estate community website with over 110,000 members. His community also receives over 500,000 unique visitors per month.

But it’s not all about big membership numbers and traffic for Josh, instead it’s about the community. In this interview Josh shares the successes and failures he’s experienced from working on BiggerPockets.com for over 8 and a half years! There are great lessons to be had here so listen in.

Items Discussed In This Episode:

BiggerPockets.com
How first failing at real estate investing served as the inspiration for this website
How to stand out in a sea of competition
How to monetize a community with over 500,000 unique visitors per month
Why BiggerPockets sends an email out on Sundays
How to get over 30 writers to blog for free
Why paying for ads isn’t worth it for community websites
My BiggerPockets Profile <- Just getting started with real estate investing...

How To Get The Podcast:

Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or via RSS to get future episodes automatically

Download the podcast MP3 here (Right Click + Save As)

When You’re Done Listening To The Podcast Please Review It

When you’re done listening please leave me an honest rating or review on iTunes – I really appreciate it and it helps to get more people to listen to the podcast. Currently each podcast episode receives well over 10,000 downloads and I’d love to get that up to 15,000+ downloads!

Just because you’re approved doesn’t mean you should buy it
photo source

Why We Bought A Cheap House For $130,000

1. When it comes to areas with a high cost of living it’s incredibly risky (idiotic) to buy a house when it can just as easily be rented for less money.

Late last year we bought a house south of Seattle for $130,000 with a 15 year fixed mortgage at 2.875% interest, 5% down and our monthly payments are now $1,150. Now depending on where you live and how much money you make that figure may sound like a lot of money or veryyyyy little. In our case because of both the income from my business and the average house price where we were living in Seattle was $400,000+ it’s actually really cheap.

We lived in West Seattle for about 4 years but it’s always been too expensive to buy when we could just rent instead. In fact, the house we moved out of would have cost us $550,000 to buy (they put it up for sale while we were renting). The 30 year mortgage on a $550,000 house would have run us roughly $3,000 per month and yet we rented the house that was being offered for $550,000 for only $1,500 per month for nearly two years. Why then would we buy a house that would cost us $3,000 per month in mortgage costs when we could rent it for half that? And yet, millions of idiots (people) continue to do just that.

I could continue making these arguments but I think Patrick.net does a better job than I and with more data points:

Why It’s A Terrible Time To Buy An Expensive House
Defend Yourself From Bogus Arguments
Calculate House Value Via Rents (My Favorite Tool)

We did make offers on a few less expensive houses in West Seattle that could have rented for close to the monthly mortgage but with one house we offered on there were 14 other offers on the house. When there is that much competition it’s idiotic to bid more just to get the house. So because I can live and work from anywhere we decided to cut our costs and buy a cheap house instead.

I will miss my back yard view though

2. The less I have to spend on personal expenses the more I can invest in my business or spend time simply not working at all.

Most Americans have it wrong. You don’t go out and buy the massive house, two new cars and a boat all on credit with an income level that can barely meet those monthly bills. Just because you’re approved for the loan doesn’t mean you should do it. That is complete idiocy, especially if you’d like to retire before you’re 65.

I had it wrong when I bought a brand new 2008 Subaru WRX for $25,000+ after getting my first “real job” as a sales rep back in 2008 with a base salary of $31,250 per year – a laughably idiotic mistake. It was especially stupid because when I bought the car it was just before the economic meltdown so my interest rate was also 5.9%. Later that year my friend bought a new 2008 Subaru WRX STI (a better / faster version of my car) for what we figured out would be only $3,000 more because he got 0% interest and extra money knocked off the car because car companies were desperate for sales (typically it should have cost nearly $10k more to get that car – not saying he was right either but just further illustrating my failure).

Since that mistake in my mid twenties we paid that car off last year ahead of schedule and have since paid off most of my wife’s student loans after having a change of heart about my $26,000 mistake. But the real point of reducing my personal expenses was so that I could invest more money into my business. Now with less debt and less monthly expenses I’m able to take more risks with projects that may or may not take off. Am I frustrated that a project I spent $10,000+ on last year looks like it’s going to be a waste? Of course. But because I’m always taking risks I also had another project last year do $300k+ in gross sales with my net on that being over $60,000+ in profit.

I’d use a Wayne Gretzky quote about missing 100% of the shots you don’t take, but I prefer Mark Cuban’s advice on failure and luck instead:

“It doesn’t matter how many times you fail. It doesn’t matter how many times you almost get it right. No one is going to know or care about your failures, and neither should you. All you have to do is learn from them and those around you because… All that matters in business is that you get it right once. Then everyone can tell you how lucky you are.”
Mark Cuban

When I ultimately exit from a business with f&^! you money I’ll have plenty of critics saying how lucky I was or whatever, but they also won’t know how many times I failed or how earlier in life I was willing to drastically reduce my personal expenses by buying a cheap investment house so I could try and grow my business faster.

3. If I can work from anywhere I may as well work from someplace cheap to live.

There is a massive consumption problem here in America. Certainly no matter what I say will stop it – heck – I’ve even profited handsomely from it, but hopefully some of you that read this will take this advice to heart. The point is that if you truly want to build and grow an online business the last thing you want to do is to overextend yourself financially to large monthly payments on a massive house, two new cars you can’t afford because you’re unwilling to use alternative modes of transportation like a bus or train perhaps?

Our personal monthly fixed expenses are now lower than they’ve ever been in the past 3 years and yet my income is dramatically higher than what it was when I first lost my job. After I finish work on fixing up this house and meet the 1 year HUD requirement of living we could turn it over as a rental and just as easily buy another house to fix up and turn into an eventual rental as well.

This has turned into somewhat of a rant, but all I’d like to say is this:

Bottom Line: Don’t be a typical American idiot and over commit yourself financially to bills you can hardly afford. If you ever want to break free and build your own dream lifestyle then try to cut your fixed monthly expenses while at the same time finding ways to increase your income.

Update: I’ve sold some websites and some didn’t sell. It’s clear people aren’t interested in taking over sites that need work (which is fair since as the owner and seller I’m not interested either).

I’ve removed all websites from this list for both buyers privacy as well as my own.

Most likely I won’t try selling websites via my blog again as there just wasn’t really enough interest even in some of the good sites that didn’t need much work but were simply below my required threshold for earnings.

My New Product Launching Dec 5th at 8:00 AM PST:

As an Amazon affiliate I’ve sold thousands of products and for years have tracked my results from links clicked and where people buy. I discovered that the links people clicked the most that resulted in the most sales were from in content simple text based affiliate links followed by image based affiliate links.

So that’s precisely the focus of my new software Simple Azon.

Simple Azon allows you to create Amazon affiliate links from within your WordPress dashboard in the form of text and image based affiliate links for use inside the content area of your blog. Additionally if you rely on VA’s or other content writers this is a huge help because you can tell them to just use the search box that’s created below the post area when they’re creating affiliate links in the content of your blog.

The problems this software solves alone are easily worth more than the $10 use it on all of your websites price we’re offering it for. But I wanted to do something really unique this time around…

Bonus: Complete Resell + Rebrand Rights Included For Free

Inside the members area there is a complete rebranding tool so that you can simply go in and change the name of the plugin, the site URL, author URL and description and then download your completely rebranded plugin. You can then take that plugin and resell it for whatever you want and keep 100% of the commissions. To make it easier for you to sell we’re including a marketing tool kit complete with source files for banner ads, a sales page and promotional articles about the software that you can easily edit.

Watch Video Demo Of SimpleAzon + Rebrander Here
(Product is now live)

Why Am I Selling For Less Than $10?

Late last year I started to dip my toes into creating and selling software based on pain points I wanted to solve in my own business. Since then it’s been a profitable new pillar of my business in 2012 and I wanted to give everyone else an inexpensive way to try out this software business model as well.

In addition to Simple Azon we have a couple optional upgrades that are made available after you purchase Simple Azon as well that are incredibly valuable as well.

I hope you can see the value in this software both in it’s utility for use on your websites as well as the ability to completely rebrand the software and resell it for whatever price you’d like.

Watch Video Demo Of SimpleAzon + Rebrander Here
(Product is now live)

I published my first book on the Kindle at the end of September about how to make money as an Amazon Associate. Now after nearly 2 months I wanted to share what I learned from the experience, how many books I’ve sold since then and other advice I’ve learned along the way.

How To Come Up With Book Ideas

The first Kindle book I wrote was on how to make money with Amazon’s affiliate program. Amazon income is what helped me break away from my 9-5 day job in the first place back in 2009 and I already had a solid outline to complete a book on the topic so that’s primarily why I picked it. In my (limited) experience I found the easiest way to pick a book idea was to simply select from a range of topics I already knew a lot about. Having gone this route I’ve since learned that this isn’t always the best idea. Let me explain why…

Are there only a few books competing for your target market? That’s not necessarily a good thing

I like to draw comparisons between the Kindle book market and competing in Google with SEO because they are fairly similar. When it comes to SEO the process is relatively simple. Find a profitable keyword that is searched frequently and build a website to target that keyword. There’s a lot more to it, but part of what removes a lot of the guess work from this process is because Google provides a tool to determine how many people are searching for a specific keyword phrase; however, there isn’t an Amazon equivalent to see what types of book topics people are searching for. Because no such tool exists you’ve got to look at other factors such as the number of books already published on a topic AND the Kindle sales rank for the books already available:

The problem with my niche is that there simply aren’t enough people on Amazon searching for a book like mine which could be because it’s on a very narrow aspect of the small overall “how to earn money online” market. I’m getting a tad ahead of myself, but simply put I should have paid more attention to the sales data of the existing books within my niche before I decided to write on the topic that I did.

If you’re looking for step by step directions on how to come up with a book idea, analyze what a Kindle book sales rank equates to the number of units sold I highly recommend Steve Scott’s book on How To Discover Non-Fiction Book Ideas.

How To Actually Write The Kindle Book

When it comes to writing anything whether it’s a blog post or in this case a Kindle book I always start with an outline or at the very least a list of all the main points I want to cover. This allows me to simply expand upon the main topics or points I want to cover in my writing. Now when it comes to actually writing the content I like to put in a ton of hours late at night when there are no distractions. I routinely would start writing from 10:00 PM at night and move into 5:00 AM in the morning. This process reminds me of my college years where I’d wait until 12:01 AM at night to start work on a paper that was due that day (and I still got great grades – college is too easy).

If you still have a full time job and are not sure how to make some income on the side I will restate that the best thing I ever did was to put a few hours of work every evening after dinner trying to earn money online. There are probably much better ways to write a book but I have an odd productivity period as a night owl.

How To Format A Kindle Book

You can’t just write a book in MS Word and upload it to Amazon. What I found to be really helpful in the actual book formatting process was following along with this great PDF from Amazon that outlines how to write a book in the proper kindle format here:

How To Format Your Book For Kindle
(You can also watch a really boring, terribly sounding step by step video on that page. They really should have a professional redo these videos).

How To Get A Nicely Formatted Description On Amazon.com

Consider your book listing as a sales page and you’ve got to convince people why they should spend their money on your book. Part of that process involves making a nice looking description. Simply writing out your text “works” but it looks much better when you have a proper headline (just like you would at the top of a sales letter). To accomplish this you basically use HTML code but you replace the < with and then you replace the > with

What I’ll do is get the code from an HTML editor and then pop it into notepad and do a simple search and replace.

The orange headlines found in book descriptions are from using an H2 tag in the description like this:

The only thing you can’t create are HTML links.

Hat tip to Steve Scott for the help on this

How To Market A Book

There are books that make money from Amazon by keyword searches (again just like you might try and get traffic from a Google ranking for a website) and this is something you should think about when deciding on what topic to write about as well as the title of your book. With that said, sometimes the most effective way to market a book would be to actually promote it by sending traffic to the book page yourself. For example with my Kindle book I took this as an opportunity to thank all of my blog readers, newsletter subscribers and/or customers an opportunity to download it for free for a limited time. I then marketed to them using my email list and a blog post.

Why Offer The Book For Free At All?

1. Customer appreciation
2. Great way to reach a new audience of readers on the Kindle
3. Helps to get reviews on your book as soon as possible

Overall it’s a really effective marketing tool as well – read this real life case study from a fiction book writer.

Email marketing has always been the most consistently valuable marketing tool at my disposable but the key is to use all of your following (website visitors, Twitter followers etc) to send traffic to your book page.

Mark Cuban wrote one tweet and got to #1 in every book category he’s in:

This is an over the top example, but if you really want to drive sales nothing trumps sending traffic to your book page.

How Effective Was My Free Book Promotion?

To thank the thousands of customers, readers and subscribers I made my first Kindle book available for the first 48 hours. In that time frame I received roughly 3,500 downloads and held #1 free in both of my book categories. The highest overall number I saw was #119 in free for the entire Kindle store. It updates hourly but I only checked it a handful of times throughout the day. The fact that I peaked at #119 in the Kindle store tells me that in order to break the top 100 free you probably need 2,000+ free downloads in a single day:

Here Are My Income Results From My First Month

How To Handle Negative Reviews

The day you put yourself out there in the form of publishing a Kindle book, blog post or selling a product you’re going to have positive responses and negative responses. People that don’t like what you’re doing and don’t say so in a constructive manner are what I like to call haters. You can think and say what you want about this blog, me, whatever because sometimes haters gonna hate:

You should listen to negative criticism when it’s something you can improve but sometimes it’s just not useful. In the case of this book I wrote it for complete beginners with some of the tips and strategies likely helping out intermediate level people as well. I got primarily positive reviews, a handful of negative reviews and only actually responded to one negative review to help clarify and address a few of the criticisms. It’s not worth completely arguing with someone in the reviews section of your book because again as I said before sometimes haters gonna hate, but if you can address the problems the reviewer has without coming off as confrontational it helps potential buyers that are on the fence decide if they should buy your book.

Will I Write Another Kindle Book?

I really enjoyed the process of writing the Kindle book and making money from yet another income source, but if I do another book sometime I want to focus on a much larger niche to avoid the mistakes I made with this book. I won’t be publishing anything else this year though because I’m entirely focused on launching a new software business that many of you will be really interested in checking out. I won’t say much more than that for now, but I’m really excited that the last six months of hard work are about to come to fruition.

Feel free to ask any questions you may have about the Kindle book writing process. I hope that what I’ve shared will help in a Kindle book you write sometime in the future.

After announcing my shift in strategy towards higher quality authority style websites in the last podcast I posted, I’ve considered selling off a few dozen of my websites as well.

What Would I Be Selling?

1. Unfinished niche websites

These are basically where I did the keyword research, bought the domain name, had some content created and may or may not have started some limited link building (assume no earnings)

Probably just $100 each for these (to recoup costs basically)

Some of these I’ve paid $250 – $500 for the domains but just got too busy with other projects to really pursue them. In these cases I’d likely just try to sell for the price I bought the domain names for.

2. Income generating niche websites

These are smaller websites that are complete. They’ve had content created for them and have generated money in 2012.

I would likely sell these based on an income multiple of between 12x to 24x monthly earnings (I’d need to do some more searching to see what multiples these types of sites are selling for)

Again in this case some of these sites are sitting on more premium style domain names as well in the $250 – $500 range so that would likely be factored into the price as well.

3. Income generating authority style websites

I’m really trying to focus only on projects that are generating at least $1,000 per month or more. Frankly even my case study website Copy Cat Crafts falls a bit short of the $1,000 per month mark.

Overall, I have about a dozen websites that are generating under $1,000 per month that I’d be interested in selling (might be less than that but I’d need to check my Adsense / Amazon / etc stats as I don’t check them daily or even weekly).

Overall – I want to remove “distractions” in my portfolio

I still like making a few hundred dollars a month or more from each of these websites that I own, but as I’ve stated before I’m at a spot in my business where I really need to focus on projects that can have a larger impact on my business and that’s why I’m looking to sell some of my smaller websites.

So my question to you is, are you interested in buying any of my websites? Update: just sign up for my blog email list below I will send out all the details there (too many emails)

Perhaps I’ll just list every website on Flippa and share the income results from my purge of distracting projects. I estimate that the proceeds from the sale of these websites, domains etc. would be into the five figures so rather than just let them sit it might be worth getting the cash now instead.