Entrepreneurs-Journey.com Down-To-Earth Advice For Bloggers and Internet Marketers

In the previous article on living the 2-hour workday I introduced the concept of travel buffers, cash created either through saving or selling assets that is designed to give you a buffer of capital you can comfortably spend if you need to while you travel.

Travel buffers are mostly for piece of mind so you can relax while you travel or use in case of emergencies, but ideally speaking it’s better if you don’t dip into your capital while you travel. In order to facilitate this, you need some form of consistent income streams that are greater than your total expenses, including costs to travel.

What Is Event Independent Income?

My largest source of income has come from significant events, either selling an asset or conducting a launch for a new product.

There’s an inherent weakness with this type of income – you have to do something, often significant work, to get the result, or once you do it’s difficult to repeat, for example once you sell an asset, it’s gone.

Conducting a launch is definitely NOT two hour a day work, it takes a lot more than that. Depending on how you travel it’s quite possible to integrate periods of time where you conduct a launch, for example I did a reopening campaign for Blog Mastermind while traveling in Toronto, resulting in well over six figures in income. However to complete the work required to conduct the launch, I had to settle in Toronto for a summer, renting a house and effectively living there as a local.

You can choose to travel, stop and work, then travel some more, if you depend on event income like launches, but if you really want true flexibility and never want more than a two hour a day work commitment, then you need to develop some event independent income streams. In other words, you need money that is either completely passive, or nearly-passive, consistent as a result of working only two hours a day or thereabouts.

The challenge with this sort of money is keeping it consistent. So many systems for making money online are fantastic as one-hit-wonders, and they work again and again in different niches, but the problem is the amount of ongoing work required to keep things going or to get started in the first place.

Sure you can outsource much of your work (I’ve got a couple of great podcast interviews about outsourcing coming up soon), which is a great strategy especially when you have a system that is already making money, but it takes time to do this and still you have the challenge of always staying one step ahead of the market or finding new markets to enter once one dries up, or the competition catches up.

In my case I’ve always had a solid independent income stream that’s served me well for almost ten years now.

So what is it? Read on to find out…

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It’s been a long time coming, but my latest free report is live and ready to download.

The Membership Site Masterplan is a walk through of all the ingredients necessary to make money with an online membership site, based on the model I used to launch two six-figure membership sites in the last two years.

You can download your complimentary copy from here -

MembershipSiteMastermind.com

What Is In The Masterplan?

The Masterplan is a content report. By that I mean I wrote it to be a standalone document that provides real value, and is not just a light lead-in report that essentially only promotes a product, and isn’t going to teach you anything helpful.

Of course the reason why I invested so much time to produce this report and give it away for free is because I expect many of you to read it and then decide that you would like to take my membership site coaching program too, but that’s entirely optional.

The Masterplan is a solid guide to my system for launching successful membership sites. In the report I take you through the following process:

• How to find topics for a membership site
• How to develop preeminence, which means people choose to join your membership site over all the other options
• What sources of traffic I use to bring members to my site and build my list
• What technology I use to deliver content (this is so simple, anyone can do it)
• How to make money from a membership site BEFORE you create the content for it
• How to fill your membership site with hundreds of new members in a matter of days by conducting a powerful, yet simple, launch campaign

and much more…

Click Here to download the Masterplan

My Simple Formula

The Masterplan shows you exactly how to set yourself up with the right conditions so when you launch a membership site you have a crowd of very hungry people ready to join. It will teach you how you can get started quickly (you can open before you create most of your site content), how much you should charge, how you can conduct a strategic launch, and so much more.

There is one key difference, and I believe this is the real power behind my system, which makes what I do different from most other membership site trainers.

Most people get caught up with the technology they can use to deliver their site. Technology has been the biggest roadblock for me and I expect for you too. Because of this over the past two years I’ve been constantly changing parts of my membership site process to make it as SIMPLE as possible.

I like simple. I’m not looking to get everything perfect or have all the cool features that membership site scripts can offer. I just want to deliver value to as many members as I can get as quickly as I can with as little hassle as possible. Plus I’m focused on setting it up to be an automated system so once it’s created I don’t have to work hard to make good money.

If you’re looking for a program that makes the technology challenge as simple as possible, you want the quickest path to success and you’re committed to finally creating a long term stable business, read this report.

The Membership Site Masterplan Download Page

Isn’t It Time You Produced A Product?

One of the biggest mistakes I made with my online business was waiting so long to release a product of mine own.

The next mistake I made was taking so long to realize that a membership site is the best product to sell online.

Learn from my hindsight, commit to releasing a product this year and make it a membership site.

If you’re a blogger, then you are in a particularly good situation since you can use your blog as a launchpad for your membership site. Since you are already familiar with blogging tools like WordPress, which is what I use to store the content of my membership sites, you have another advantage.

You don’t need to have a blog to make this work of course, but if you’re into blogging and you’re going to create your own product, then this is definitely the best product-creation training to take since it’s created by a blogger (that’s me).

Membership Site Mastermind Next Class

I’m opening the doors again to my training program, Membership Site Mastermind, inviting you to participate in an intensive course to get your membership site or information product up and running.

As preparation for the class, please read the Masterplan and leave me your feedback as a reply comment to this post. I’d love to know what you think of the report and I want to see you succeed with your own product this year.

Click Here to download the Masterplan

Yaro Starak

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Download the MP3 [ 31 Minutes - 14 MB]

David Risley recently began blogging at DavidRisley.com, which has all the makings of becoming one of the top blogs in the internet marketing industry. However before David began blogging, he spent over 10 years fostering his PCMech website, which began as a hobby to indulge in his passion for computers and technology, and today is a thriving content site and membership service.

In 2008 David generated over $140,000 and that was the third year running he’s made six figures plus, so he’s not new to success online. In this interview we learn how David got his start, how he grew his website, how he makes money from the sites he runs and what he’s doing today with his blog.

Show Notes

• David talks about how PCMech got started and what the main source of traffic is
• We hear about why David decided to start a membership site and how he faced challenges determining what to offer to his members
• David talks about the different methods he uses to make money with his sites
• Next is the story of why David started a blog and what he’s hoping to achieve with it
• David shares some of the plugins he uses on his blog
• The interview ends with some advice from David for other people looking to make a living online

Click Here to Download the MP3 [ 31 Minutes - 14 MB]

When I posted my September blog earnings of $10,899.83 a few readers replied asking for advice with affiliate marketing. Given nearly $4,400 of that income was from affiliate sales – the largest single source of income – it’s easy to understand why people want further explanation in this area.

I’ll be frank with you, the area I make money from affiliate sales, is a highly competitive one, and I would probably make about twice or thrice as much money if I was doing what I do in a different niche. Selling affiliate offers to people interested in making money online is one of the hardest markets to sell in because it is over saturated and people are very skeptical. Unless you are the Rich Jerk or John Reese, two guys with huge email lists of people who love to buy Internet marketing products, you will struggle in this industry.

If I didn’t enjoy the topics of blogging and Internet business (especially combined together) and I was more interested in affiliate marketing just for the sake of money, I’d enter other affiliate markets like dating or ring tones (although these are quite saturated too) or go hunting for under serviced niche markets, where Internet marketing techniques will work even better because people are not used to them. A search of the various products you find at affiliate networks like Commission Junction and AzoogleAds provide plenty of inspiration for industries to enter as an affiliate marketer, beyond selling make money online products.

Not surprisingly, the Internet marketing industry is one of the most mature when it comes to Internet marketing tactics and as a result, the customers are over exposed to all the techniques we love so much, such as – namesqueeze pages, email marketing, sales copy, testimonials, etc. That’s not to say there is no money to be made, but you really need to be on top of your game. Other industries will be more forgiving.

I’ve been tempted many a time to jump ship after experiencing conversion rates lower than 0.1% on promotions I’ve done for Internet marketing products, although that might be more to do with the type of person I attract rather than the market itself.

The lesson here is that if you plan to enter the affiliate marketing arena and focus on Internet marketing products expect serious competition, and you better know how to find people who buy, which is an art form in itself!

With that out of the way, let’s take a look at how you can use a blog make affiliate income.

It Starts With The First Sale

The first money I ever made from affiliate marketing came from my blog. The grand total – $13 – and that was a couple of days after posting the article I had spent two hours slaving over hoping to make some big cash.

At the time I had an audience of 500 readers a day, although that may have been over exaggerated because I was using Webalizer to track my numbers, which generally provides a higher total compared to other statistics packages (Google Analytics for example shows less than half the visitors that Webalizer does). I was told about 2% is a reasonable conversion rate from people who know these things, so I assumed that would mean I would get at least 10 sales based on 500 readers.

I was like – Wow! if I can get 10 sales of an affiliate product that pays me $13 per sale, then all I need to do is write a great blog article to make $130 bucks! Do that a few times a week and you have a pretty darn good income, was what I thought to myself.

Rather than put in a half-hearted effort I wanted to be genuine and recommend something I knew was good, which I had used myself, from someone I respected and wasn’t too expensive (I didn’t think my readers had a lot of money at the time). I wrote my blog post, talked about how good the product was, used a little bit of scarcity because I thought the product offer was due to finish at the end of the month (turns out it wasn’t), published the article and then went to bed.

You can see the article here (incidentally the offer is still active – so much for scarcity!) -

Limited Time Special Price On AdWords E-Book

I woke up the next day, powered up my computer, opened up my browser and email, and excitedly looked to see if I had made any sales during the night.

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