First, no office would be complete with desks. Two large desks came with the office space. Here is a shot of my desk.

I spung for an expensive chair since I will be sitting on it for 8 hours a day! I out together a nice coffee bar and fridge for the early morning and late evenings.

I picked up a free couch from my brother.

That’s my office where I will be running my internet businesses and blogging on TW3O.com.

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I will start blogging much more over the next two months as I transition from my military career to my full time job working from home. There are a lot of steps in transitioning from a traditional, full-time job to a stay home, small business. The internet is a great place to make money and I will finally have a job that I love. How many people can say that they love their job? That they wake up looking forward to going to their job?

TW3O.com is not a primary source of income. It is more of a hobby and a way for me to blog my journey of going from a full-time military man to a guy making a living on the internet. I plan on blogging my transition from a traditional “9-5″ working class slug to becoming a successful small internet business. There is a lot of risk in what I’m doing. I’m giving up a big military pension to do this and will be my own boss.

So, follow along as I start to blog the initial steps starting this week and then depart the US Air Force in December. 2009 will be a great year for me!

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Last month I decided to try Ticketmaster for my Hawaii blog. I post a lot of events that happen in Hawaii each month and it made sense to sign up with Ticketmaster. I had some results, but not high earnings.

Anyone who buys tickets has likely heard of Ticket Master. They are one of the largest online sellers of tickets for sporting events, entertainment shows and more. If you run a website that promotes events I recommend looking at Ticketmaster’s affiliate program. It is run by Buyat.

Ticketmaster Interface

If you use Google Adsense, you will find the Ticketmaster affiliate area much more complex and not as user friendly. When you first log in you will get the current’s month statistics for your website clicks and sales. That is where the simplicity ends. Generating banners is not as user friendly as other affiliate programs I have used like Google Adsense and Commission junction.

Earnings

Unless you have a site with a lot of traffic, don’t expect to earn a ton of money. On average I average I earned about $1 per ticket sale. For the first 2 weeks on August I had 472 clicks returning 12 sales. From that I earned $11 based off $781.50 in sales. My Hawaii Blog gets about 12,000 to 18,000 unique visitors each month, so it gets some traffic, but it is far from a popular, known blog. I also didn’t post a lot of events in August. Having said that, receiving a measly 2.5% commission rate is not great.

Recommendations

If you run a small blog with little traffic stay away from Ticketmaster’s affiliate program. The code that you embedd on your site tends to slow down your pages. If you have a popular site and don’t mind a little slowness I recommend using the affiliate program if you are not having success with other affiliate programs. Here are my recommendations for using the program.

1. Post informational articles about an upcoming even that is at least two weeks away
2. Embed the Ticketmaster code into each article. Forget about having a simple Ticketmaster banner on your site. It won’t get clicked!
3. Submit your articles to these seven social media sites to gain tons of traffic and helping your article rank well in Google and yahoo

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• RegNow Affiliate Program - Software Sales!
• PayDay Loan Affiliate Program

One of the most successful referral programs on my Zune Site (Microsoft Media player like iPod) is RegNow. The company manages software affiliate programs. For example, there are dozens of companies that sell software for the iPod. There are software companies that sell programs that help convert media files to play on your iPod like a DVD to iPod program. You can pop in a DVD into your player and convert the entire movie to play on your iPod. There are hundreds of software vendors on RegNow and I’m sure some will fit your site. The great news for website owners is many of these programs pay out 50-85% commissions!

One good example is Cucusoft. The company pays out a 85% commission of programs for iPods, Zunes, iPhones, PSP and other popular media devices. Most of my commissions have been around $22-25 per sale. During the holiday season I have made well over $1,000.

The great thing about using RegNow is most companies allow you to post links to the trial versions. This allows users on your site to download trial software versions and if the customers purchases the software down the road you get the commission.

I highly recommend trying RegNow if you have a website or blog that is geared towards electronics, video games or tech. Let me know how it works out for you!

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• Ticketmaster Affiliate Program Review
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Why Your Blog Isn’t Getting Anywhere

You aren’t a dedicated blogger. If you aren’t dedicated enough, then expect to see no improvements. If you post once a month, don’t even bother assuming that your blog is gradually growing… per month. If you own a blog, make sure that you spend some time on it everyday or at least thrice a week.

You never listen to suggestions. You are close-minded. Sometimes, you can only realize the best things that you must implement through suggestions from readers and other peers. If you think you’re so great and you don’t need any more improvements for your blog, then you’re nothing but a loser. Remember that you (and your blog) can only grow if you are willing to take constructive criticism and advice from BETTER and MORE KNOWLEDGEABLE people.

You cheat yourself. There are people who cheat by forcibly increasing their subscriber count. They think that by having more (fake) subscribers, more adverstisers will come their way, thus they would make more money. If you do this, then obviously your blog won’t get to the next level! Even if you have 1,550 subscribers, but 1549 of them are fake, then you still won’t make it to blogging stardom.

You blog because you want to make money — and that’s it. Seriously now, many people create blogs solely to earn money. Helping people? Giving advice? Publishing their thoughts and opinions? No, nada, zilch. Those things never come into their minds. The only thought that they have is “MAKE MORE MONEY”. Now if that’s your goal, then why don’t you beg on the streets? Blogging should be considered as a way to help others, keep track of your achievements, and express your opinions. It should not be used as a tool to MERELY make some money.

Basically that’s it. If you do the aforementioned things, then your blog won’t be getting anywhere. It will slowly die, trust me.

P.S. A friend of mine is going to launch an internet marketing blog, and he’s looking for ‘early’ subscribers. He’s not publishing posts yet (as far as I know… well, you gotta trust me, I’m subscribed!), but I’m pretty sure that once the blog is up there would be some awesome posts.

Confirmed e-mail subscribers will be automatically included in a raffle, wherein one lucky e-mail subscriber will get $20 cash through PayPal. I am urging you guys to subscribe and not miss out on this one!

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• Blogger Sweatshop
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• Brainstorming for Blog Posts

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Ucoz

Currently, you can use Ucoz to run a forum, blog, photo albums and a dozen other features. You can see a full product list of features here. Have a few questions? Check out the Ucoz FAQ.

If you develop a website using Ucoz let us know by posting a comment!

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You guys probably know that I started a new paid web directory just a few weeks ago. If you’re thinking that I’m writing this post solely because I want exposure for my site, then you got it all wrong. I want you to be aware of certain factors that make or break web directories!

How to Know If a Directory is Worth Submitting To

Check the web template/web design… and then THINK. If the directory is using a free template, would you think that it’s worth submitting to? I wouldn’t. Why? Because the owner has not even invested on a premium/custom template and now he wants us to believe that his directory is worth it (and would stay for long)? No way.

Look at the stats, if they’re available. Some directories have a little box or sidebar item that contains some crucial information that you have to know. Look for a box or whatever that has the number of listed links, pending links, and other stuff. If you see that there are thousands of pending links, then don’t submit anymore. It just shows that the owner has stopped approving/rejecting websites for a long time and yours would just probably end up in the pool of pending links.

If you’re running after PR, look if the categories have a good amount of PR. No, don’t even bother
using the main page’s PR to analyze if it’s worth submitting your site to that directory. If you’re just submitting to get some PageRank, then check if the category that you’re submitting to has a decent PR. Why? Well, ’cause that’s where your link will go!

Check the latest links. Most directories have this “latest links” section wherein you could see the recently added listings. Now see if the listings are of high-quality. If they aren’t, it means that the owner is in an approving-frenzy mode and does not check whether a site is good or not. Don’t bother submitting to those directories, otherwise your site will be “surrounded” by JUNK.

See if the directory is indexed by Google. No need for me to explain this. C’mon, you should know by now that sites that aren’t index by Google aren’t worth getting links from.

Ah, there you have it guys and gals. A pretty short post from me, but you might find it useful nonetheless. Bye, I’m out.

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I have not spent money using Google AdWords in months, but I still use AdWords powerful Keyword Tool to help me decide article topics. The Keyword Tool will detail the current month’s search volume, the average search volume for the past 12 months and give you an of the advertiser activity competition (how much advertisers are actively campaigning towards specific keywords). Google AdWords provides you insight into what keywords are hot in Google Search, helping you focus your content and gain tons of Google traffic.

To continue with this tutorial/article you will need to log into your Google AdWords account. If you don’t have an Google AdWords account I recommend Google Trends or other services that can provide the keyword tool data.

Once in to your AdWord account click on a existing or expired campaign (or create one if you don’t have one). To do this go to “Campaign Summary” in the navigation bar and click on a campaign. Then click on one of the Ad groups. Click on “keyword tool.”

Use the “Descriptive words or phrases” option and type in a keyword for the theme of your site/blog. In my example, I will use the “Hawaii” keyword for my Hawaiitopia.com blog.

You will get results for all keywords including and/or related to the “Hawaii” keyword. You can easily sort these results by relevance, current month search volume or past 12 month search volume. I recommend sorting the results by current month search volume. This will show your the current “hot” keywords. It also gives you an idea of what keywords advertisers value the month thus giving you a better chance of getting solicited down the road for advertising money. Here is an example of my “Hawaii” keyword results sorted by current month search volume (by current month I mean the last month Google has full data on).

I now have a list of 100s of keywords relevant to my blog/website and have a starting point on where to focus my next few articles on. Based on my results I would focus on a few articles related to “hawaii vacations”, the “big island hawaii” and maybe even “hawaii beaches.” Here are some articles I will be writing based on this information.

• “Top 5 Hawaii Vacations”
• Things to do on The Big Island Hawaii
• Top Hawaii Beaches

While writing my articles I would focus on the keywords and ensure they are in the subject, meta data and through out the article. I would include at least 2 pictures with the ALT TEXT containing these same keywords. Once the articles are completed I would submit them to these 7 websites knowing they will help me get noticed quicker by Google, Yahoo and other spider/bots. I have used these techniques with a lot of success on my other blogs to gain tons of traffic.

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I don’t ever see myself needing a payday loan, but I’m sure there are thousands out there that can use cash fast. Payday loans are typically deposited within 24 hours with a required payment plus interest due in 14 days. The interest is typically very high. That is the drawback for getting fast cash. If you have an emergency or need cash quickly Payday loans may be the best way to get cash quickly. You can see Payday One’s rates here.

Payday One’s affiliate program pays out $25 per commision. The payout is based on the referred person completing an application, being accepted by PayDay One , have the loan funded, and not be a previous PayDay One customer. If this affiliate program interestes you sign up for the Payday Loan Affiliate Program.

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