That’s why focus is important. Its also why its so difficult for newbies to do. There is just SO MUCH SHINY STUFF online. I realized something yesterday though, and its really quite profound (ok thats a bit pompous but it was a bit of a revelation for me!). There will ALWAYS be new techniques and good keywords and new products. There will always be special deals. There will always be rabidly popular films/books like the Hunger Games. There is no need to thrash about and flail around in confusion. Its utterly exhausting and gets you nowhere.

Ideally, concentrate on one thing and then go to the next one. I had a great plan recently which seems to have been chucked out of the window. I was going to build one website from scratch (following the Success in 30 Days Training at Wealthy Affiliate), keep it going for a year and if it isn’t making an arbitrary amount of money at that point, sell it. Honestly concentrating on one thing at a time, especially while new, is the way to go. I wish I could get that into my thick head!!!! Haha!

So how to focus? Well, I’m going to plan my time. I’m going to write out what I want to do. What my goals are, what my priorities are. Then a list of tasks. Its so easy to get distracted online and do whats easy or whatever. If you have a plan and a task list you have a tool to help you stick to it. I might go do that now! Catch you next time!

Now, it wasn’t a very big sale. It was also for a physical product that I was an affiliate for, so it wasn’t all that much money – about $14 to be exact (if I ever liberate it from CJ… but that’s another story). I was so excited! I, knowing very little about affiliate marketing, was making money on the internet!

How did I do it? I’ll get to it!

I had just read somewhere, no idea where, about how some wise and all knowing internet marketing gurus capitalise on the torrents of traffic around special occasions. It was about a week until Mother’s Day and I thought it might be nice to have a site up to try and jump in on this market. I was so new I hadn’t used anything except Squidoo at this stage so I immediately thought about making a lens.

I’m pretty proud of that lens. I was really excited about html at that stage and I pushed it to the max to make something rather pretty. But now I’m getting ahead of myself. The first thing I did was to look for a keyword that wasn’t ridiculously over saturated using Google Adwords.

I came up with the slightly Engrish Mothers Day Special Gifts. That is very hard to use naturally in a sentence! Anyways, it was the best I could come up with at the time. I just kind of crossed my fingers and hoped.

Then I went looking for some affiliate products that would suit the theme. I found some flowers and chocolate without too much trouble. I was trying to go with slightly unusual gifts but not too far out there. I was actually quite brilliant (if I do say so myself). Flowers are exactly what people are looking for on Mothers Day.

I spent hours working on that lens. I wrestled with the html code back and forth until it gave me what I wanted. Phew!

Once I finished making the lens, I pinged it and then I think I posted tiny articles/ads of probably 100 words or less in 3 or 4 places. That’s it. I watched the traffic go up over the week before Mothers Day. I don’t really know how I was being found, but I didn’t want to question a good thing! I noticed I was getting a lot of clicks out on the Squidoo ads and a fair few on my affiliate links too.

I’m a bit embarrassed to admit that it took me probably about a week to even notice that I’d sold something. When I did I was like, wait, wah!? Where did that come from!!!? I haven’t noticed that before! I sold something from the flower website I was promoting. Not entirely sure what it was, it didn’t say.

If you promise not to laugh at any of my other newbie lenses you can click on this link to see the lens that made my first sale.

http://www.squidoo.com/mothers-day-special-gifts

Clicking on the above link constitutes acceptance of the terms of not laughing at newbie lenses created by this lensmaster.

Wow, this post turned out longer than expected. I think I’m going to write up a kind of tutorial in greater detail on how to capitalise on the special occasion market and send it out via email later in the week to all my loyal readers. I hope you all enjoyed this post and got a few ideas out of it.

This is just a quick post to get back into the swing of things. My next post will be coming soon and its about the exact method I used to make several sales. Stay tuned! Oh and sign up for my newsletter so you don’t miss out on anything!

I got a job.

A good job. But it takes up almost all my time. I’m also studying two nights a week (Business Management). This pretty much takes up the rest of my time.

So what about time for IM? Its really easy just to let IM fall by the wayside – it can be a lot of extra work after all, particularly when you are just starting. However – I try to keep reminding myself that I want passive income, I want to pay down debts, I want to save for the future and invest and I don’t want to have to rely on a J.O.B.

Since I don’t have as much time as I used to, I’m trying to concentrate on things I can get results with. For the moment, I have decided not to create any new IM campaigns and to concentrate on building the ones I have going already.

I’ll end this post with a list of things you can do in a very short amount of time.

• short blog post
• short article
• blog comments/forum comments
• Facebook update
• Tweet

All About Squidoo

Squidoo is a good to learn the basics of:

• SEO (Search-engine-optimisation)
• keywords

I’ll let you know a bit about my reasons for making a serious attempt to make money online. Like most internet users, I found the idea of making money online compelling. However, looking for a solid answer online as to HOW to go about this is like trying to find a needle in a haystack.

The first thing I ever tried online were surveys. It didn’t work. Maybe it works for other people, or it may have improved since 2005, but I never had any luck at all with surveys. I gave up after a short time and put up with ridiculous amounts of spam until I unsubscribed from all the mailing lists.

My next online adventure was in the area of competitions. I actually did have a little success with this. Well, I won a single prize from about 20 competitions entered so that was kind of cool. The prize was a $100 gift voucher to an accessory shop. I soon discovered that I don’t really have the stamina for constant competition entering so I eventually gave up – plus once you have entered all the competitions you want to win or are eligible for, what do you do?

So I wrote off surveys and competitions as an avenue for a consistent income and went back to my office job.

I wanted to do more though. I didn’t want to sell all my time for a cheap wage which left me a few hours each day where I was too tired to do much more than eat, unwind and occasionally do the laundry or make a half-hearted attempt at cleaning something.

I have always liked writing. I won’t claim that I’m very good at it, but I WANTED to be. I also really liked the internet – what can I say, I’m a geek. It was Stumbleupon that ultimately put me on this path. And writing. I was Stumbling, one of my interests was writing, and I found a page that was reviewing various sites that would pay you to write for them. I was intrigued! I bookmarked the top two recommended, Hubpages and Squidoo and promptly made accounts at both.

Squidoo looked like more fun, so I started there and oh wow, what a world was opened up to me! I learned about people who are making thousands of dollars every month just Squidooing! People who are selling things through Squidoo pages! I learned about affiliate marketing! It was electrifying. I had no idea what I was doing, but now I knew what I wanted to be doing – making an income through internet marketing!

So thats how I got started. I’m going to go through the rest of my journey in more detail in further blog posts.

I’ll finish up with why I am determined to succeed online:

• I want to support myself, my family and be independent
• I want to be my own boss and make my own rules for work
• I want to be able to experience things and travel which is difficult while working a full time job
• I want to be present in my families lives, not always working or tired and grumpy

I’d love for you to share some of your reasons, if you care to!