Smarter Wealth

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Thanks for visiting!

Well today is sunday and I thought I would share with you guys some great articles I have read over the last few weeks that I think you might be really interested in.

Firstly let me mention that Bryan Clarke from his site SiteFlipU has written a reply to my post about why website flipping sucks. You can read his reply here. He shunned me a little but it is all in good sport and you should check it out

Balkis wrote a great blog post on whether or not entrecard is really worth it. I have never used entrecard but read this post and see what you think

Hussein wrote a fairly decent post on making money on his website. He answered some really interesting questions. Short post but well worth a read

Jarret wrote a great post on finding a profitable niche which I asked him to write and he wrote it for me. So DEFINATELY check this one out. Jarret is the man.

My man Jessel from TycoonDreams has written the killer post for the week on How to get anyone to do anything you want

Want some link love? Then send me the links to your articles. Looking forward to posting everyday this week even though I will be working my ass off at the chemist saving for my wedding.

As you may know I am soon (October 15th) releasing my first ebook “Make Money Commenting” which will be for sale for just $7. One of the greatest marketing tools you can have when selling an ebook is having a professional looking ebook cover. People do judge a book by it’s cover and the better the cover of your ebook then to more sales you are likely to achieve.

Take a sneak preview at my new “Make Money Commenting” Ebook Cover which I have just made and see what you think. 

There are three things you need to make a great ebook cover

1. A Great Title/ Subtitle

This is something you can easily do yourself. I could have created the same ebook and named it “How To Comment Well” or “Why I Comment” but it definitely wouldn’t sell as much. The title of your Ebook needs to stand out and be catchy. People need to want to buy your book. Upon reading this title you know that you can learn how to make money through commenting. Coming up with a great title and subtitle shouldn’t be too hard, just be creative and think “Would I want to buy this book based on the title alone?”.

If the answer is no then keep creating until you  get one where the answer is yes.

2. An Amazing Cover Design

Now this is a little harder. Personally me and photoshop don’t go very well together and I would prefer to keep my $500+ dollars it would cost me to buy and learn how to use photoshop. So I outsource my designs to someone who does know how to use photoshop.

I use digital point forums to find my ebook designers. You can get an ebook designed anywhere between $10-$50. You need to be careful though because some of the cheaper ones you don’t get very good quality. Personally I have found a guy who does all my ebook designs who I think is pretty good and he does them for just $20 a cover. If you would like to get one done then send me an email via my contact page and I will pass on his detials.

3. A Fantastic Ebook Creator

You can create ebook covers in photoshop. However this is very difficult for someone who has no idea what do to in photoshop. I don’t want to pay to get my design rendered and turned into an ebook so I use BoxShot3D. This is a fantastic program because

• It is so simple

• There are so many options

• It is so cheap

• It works on PC and Mac

Many entrepreneurs are famous for the impossible challenges they set themselves. Robert G. Allen is famous for the impossible tasks he has set himself such a taking 3 people from an unemployment line and teaching them how to create wealth and buy property in just 90 days, or his challenge to earn $24,000 online in 24 hours (he earned over $90,000 in 24 hours).

Recently I set myself some goals (which you can read here) and I have pretty much smashed all of them. So I (Ryan McLean) have set myself an impossible challenge for myself (being the entrepreneur that I am). The challenge is this:

Earn $1,400 per month by 1st January

This means that in January I need to be earning at least $1,400 per month every month. This seems completely impossible as my blog only gets 150 uniques per day and that everyone knows that blogs grow exponentially and mine is still at the bottom of the scale.

But I say screw the statistics and screw that everyone else says it cannot be done. I am going to go for it and I am going to go hard and just you guys wait. By January 2009 I will be earning over $1,400 per month every month and I will be a full time online internet marketer.

Ok so how do I plan to achieve the impossible? This is a very good question

1. Write Quality Content

I want to continue writing killer content that is really really useful to my readers and that is so good that people will link to it and bring in more traffic from other sites and from search engines

2. Get a Success Team Around Me

I was reading ProBlogger recently about How To Use Stumble Upon To Get Traffic and I am looking to build a team of bloggers in my niche (around 20 of us) who can help each other stumble and digg and talk about each others stuff. We will all work together to help each other other, both with social media sites and with other marketing strategies. If you would like to be in my success team then contact me, my door is always open.

3. Run a Competition

This month I have been running my Top Commentator competition and next month I am going to up the prize pool and offer more for commenting and also for writing reviews about my site. This will drive a lot more traffic to my site increasing my income.

4. Give Away Free Stuff

I will be giving away free ebooks in order to build up my newsletter subscribers. I will market them both on this website and through forums in order to gather names quickly. Once you get 10,000 names and email address of people who are interested in a certain topic you can easily become a millionaire. At the moment I have 120 which is 1.2%…not a lot but better than none. I want to build this up to over 1000 by January 1

5. Write My Own Ebook

I am currently writing my first ebook which will be up for sale titled “How To Make Money Commenting”. This will be for sale for just $7 and though I will need 200 sales to make $1,400 I believe this will be a good thing to supplement other income.

6. Sell Affiliate Programs

Once my newsletter subscription readers over 200 people then I will begin running affiliate sales campaigns of products that I believe will be really helpful to my readers. This will hopefully make me around $300 per month by January

7. Receive Donations

Although I don’t expect to receive any donations I am hoping that some generous people out there will donate to Smarter Wealth so I can afford to spend more time on it and make it even better (and then I could increase posting to twice per day) and still really good quality posts

8. Advertise

I am thinking about advertising once I release my ebook. I will advertise through getting product reviews on other sites, through some 125×125 banners (maybe) and maybe experiment with some pay per click advertising and see if I can make any money.

Did all this confuse you? Then here is a simple list of my goals in order to achieve $1,400/month by January 2009.

• Gather over 1,000 names and email addresses of people interested in making money online
• Increase traffic from 4,000 unique pageviews per month to 50,000
• Create and sell over 200 copies of my new ebook “Make Money Commenting”
• Increase RSS readership to over 1,000 Readers
• Run Affiliate Sales Campaigns to make $300/month

I wrote a post recently about how commenting is the number one method for building up your traffic. I am a strong believe of this an currently about 60+% of my traffic comes from comments I have left on other blogs.

Codrut from LazyBlogger recently asked me if I would recommend outsourcing my blog commenting strategy. This means would I pay for someone else to comment for me so that I can get the same amount of traffic but I work less time (because I pay someone to do the hard yards for me).

This is a really interesting question because as you may know I am getting married and going on my honeymoon soon (Oct 23rd is the BIG DAY!) and this means I will be away for about 3 weeks -1 month and though I will have a blog post lined up for every day I am away I will not be able to spend my time commenting other blogs while I am away so I will lose a lot of my momentum.

For this very reason I am actually considering outsourcing commenting for just one month while I am away so that my blog can continue to build it’s momentum. I think by doing this I will take in a loss (it will cost me more than I make) but I am more concerned about the momentum because blogs tend to grow exponentially.

So I cannot write a post about how it is a good or a bad idea because I have never done it before. But I am going to ask if anyone would like to be a commentor for me? You will need to work a short period everyday and comment on around 20-40 blogs when each of them has a new blog post.

I will pay $0.10 for every single comment you do (one comment per new post) and I will pay you $0.50 if your comment lands in the top 3 comments for that blog. So if you get in the top 3 for everything then you can be making $50 for just 100 posts! Talk about an opportunity.

You will start on the 23rd of October and finish around the 21st of November and I expect comments on every single post of the specific blogs I choose.

Comments that land below the top 20 I will only pay $0.05 for. So the quicker you do it the more money you make (and the more exposure for me).

So if anyone is interesting you could make a couple of hundred dollars in a month just by commenting for me then contact me. If not I will go to digitalpoint forums to find someone (but I would much rather reward one of my readers).

So email me using my contact form if you are interested.

The other night I was watching the movie “Run Fatboy Run” which is a hilarious movie and definately worth seeing. But it talks about when you are running a marathon how there comes a time when you hit a wall and you feel like you cannot go on. Personally I have never experienced this because I am a lazy bugger (though I am failing trying to get fit for the wedding) but it is a concept I am well aware of when it comes to building your business online.

There are times when building your business that you seem to just hit a wall, it is either a wall within yourself or it is a wall in the growth of your business. Over the last 15 days the traffic (and the income ;-)) coming into Smarter Wealth has done a significant jump from about 40 unique viewers per day to around 150 on average. But now I see to have hit a wall and instead of getting around 150 and growing I am getting about 100.

I am so so frustrated because it is my hearts desire to work full time online and in order to accomplish that I need to break through this wall and see a significant increase in my traffic and my income. So I started pondering about what you can do when you need to break through a wall with your business.

See what a lot of smart writers would do is they would write about ‘running’ and relate their business experiences to hitting a wall in running and how they are the same. But as I already mentioned I am not a runner so I do not intend to place metaphors and similies to explain what it is like hitting a wall online. I will just tell you straight up.

I am not a pro but these are the things I will be doing myself and I think they will help me a lot and I also think they can help you a lot too.

1. Be Prepared

When you get into the online marketing game you need to be prepared mentally that you are going to hit a few walls. Some of the most common are ‘writers block’, ‘being sick of it’, ’stagnant traffic growth’, ‘lack of income early on’. Know what you are up against and be prepared to face the wall when you come to it. Learn from others about how they got over this wall BEFORE you get to the wall. An example is the lack of income early on when you are starting. One of the plans you can have to face this wall is to work full time and do it part time until your income increases, or something I am looking at is using my savings/credit to act as a wage so I can work a full year without income and then as my income grows I can lower the amount of savings I am using.

So be prepared for the wall mentally so you can attack it easier when you get to it.

2. Push Harder

Sometimes you are doing the right thing you just need to do it a little bit more. Maybe you are commenting to build traffic but you need to comment more, maybe you are interacting with your customers but you need to interact more. Whatever you are doing if is it working but not as fast as you want it to work then try doing the same thing but go harder. For me I use commenting on other blogs to promote my own blog. In the last week I have subscribed to about 25 new blogs so now I am commenting on about 50 blogs instead of my original 25. This strategy works but I have doubled it so it works quicker and better.

3. Keep Going

Sometimes you are doing the exact right thing and you are doing it the right amount you just need to keep going. Personally I am posting once per day which I believe is the right thing and the right amount for this blog. I can’t go harder because I have to work as well (and I run out of ideas if I try to post more than once per day) so I am going to keep posting once per day and soon the wall will break down as traffic organically grows.

4. Do Something Different

If you have hit a wall and you are finding that the strategy you are using is not working then try something different. If you want a different result then you need to do something different. Examples of a few things I am doing different from most standard MMO blogs is that I am commenting HEAPS, I am posting in forums and I am writing and giving away ebooks, I am doing guest posting. I am tying a lot of different things, not just one avenue. Hopefully this way I can break the wall by using lots of different methods

5. Do Something Huge

Sometimes you need to smash a wall with a lot of force and to bring about a breakthrough in your online business sometimes you need to use a lot of force. Run a competition and give away something massive when people link to your site or are active on your site.

At the start of next month my Top Commentator Competition wins and I am going to be running an even bigger top commentator/link to me competition to pump up the traffic to my site.

I am thinking about giving away an iPod nano (one of the new ones). Would you guys prefer that or would you prefer cash? Let me know.

So those are a few ways to break the wall. If you can add any more to it then please do so by writing them in the comments section below

There is a big craze going on at the moment that is “Website Flipping”. Website flipping is the act of starting a brand new blog (or buying a smaller one) and making it bigger and worth more money and then selling it on to make a profit.

I have tried website flipping in small doses for the last month. I got caught up in the craze and thought that I would give it a go. Flip a few websites, make a few hundred dollars. I had some successes and some failures and I think I ended up in the negative but that’s not the point. I have discovered that website flipping is not for me. I know I posted quite a bit about how good it was but I have changed my mind.

Here are my reasons why website flipping sucks and why it isn’t for me.

1. No Genuine Connections

I think that when you get to the end of your life you are going to think back on the genuine connections you made with people, not the quick money you earned from flipping websites. When flipping websites you are never around long enough to make any genuine connection with your readers. This is what I want to do and this is why I love blogging so much. People like Yan, Hussein and Ethan are great commentors of this blog and I am building a relationship with them. I love this and website flipping just doesn’t support this.

2. Doesn’t Build

The thing I love about blogs (especially about Smarter Wealth) is that they grow exponentially over time. The bigger they already are the faster they grow. When starting out blogging is hard and you need to push to get readership and it builds really slowly. But as you have more readers you find your blog grows exponentially. If you are website flipping you are always doing the hard yards trying to get new readers when you have no established readership base. Blogging for the long term is better because it builds over time.

3. Market is Overcrowded

Website Flipping has gone mainstream with people like SiteFlipU talking about it and loads of other sites. It appear that every MMO man and his blog is trying out site flipping and this is making the market overcrowded. You used to be able to make a couple of hundreds site flipping for a really basic site (so I am told) but now you will struggle to sell because there are so many people flipping websites.

4. No Reoccuring Income

The best thing about blogs and internet marketing schemes is that they bring you recurring income. The visitors from this blog bring me recurring income from advertising revenues (so thankyou so much for visiting, you are making me rich!). But when you are site flipping you don’t make that revenue every month. You have to work for it by creating another site which is just like having a job. The best thing about being online is you can work less and earn more, in website flipping I have found it can be a lot of work for a return that doesn’t recur. 

5. I Don’t Enjoy It

This is truthfully the main reason why I think website flipping sucks. It is not enjoyable. I don’t like doing it. I think it is boring and monotonous and I would rather be doing other things like posting on this blog and marketing this blog. So I don’t want to spend my days doing something I don’t enjoy. I would rather do things which I really enjoy doing and then I will live a much happier life.

So I think website flipping sucks and I won’t be doing it anymore. Sorry if that disappoints anyone. What do you think about website flipping?

I have realised that lately I have fallen into the mould of blogging about blogging and this is not who I am nor what I want this site to be about. I apologise for this. I guess I just got caught up in the fact that I was blogging so much so it was exactly what I was thinking about.

I want to talk more about other ways to make money both online and offline. This is a young entrepreneurs blog so I need to start shifting my focus away from the “blogging” niche and into the young entrepreneurs blog.

So I will be talking in the next few weeks about how to make money from forums (as I will be experimenting with that soon). I also want to talk about my entrepreneurial adventures which happen offline (which at the moment there aren’t really any but I will search and see what I can find).

So if you have been frustrated that this blog has been boring and has been talking about blogging then I am sorry. Here is a look at a few of the posts that are coming up this week and next week.

• Why Website Flipping Sucks
• How To Make Money By Paying For Reviews
• Outsourcing Commenting
• Creating Recurring Income
• Starting Niche Blogs
• Making Money From Forums
• Make Money Commenting
• Doing My First Affiliate Sales Plan
• How To Write Your Own Ebook

If you have been around the MMO world for any length of time you will understand that John Chow is one of the leaders in the industry. Although sometimes (well all the time) he randomly talks about things like food and outings, sometimes he does have some killer stuff on how to make money online. 

His site is so popular that it would cost you $500 just to get a site review on it. I just wrote a great post about how paying for a review can make you money. Even better when the review is free right?

Well The blog iBusinessTalk is a blog about how to make money online and they are running a competition to win one of these $500 site reviews.

I woudn’t bother entering because I am going to win (because I NEED to win) but if you want to enter you have to do two things

1. Subscribe to their RSS readership via Email
2. Blog about the competition and link to them

I was over at John Chow’s Website today and was looking at his advertising prices. The total cost for a site review is $500 which is a lot of money but I had a great idea where a review could actually make you money.

Now I haven’t done this yet and I probably can’t afford to do this any time soon but I will let you know my idea anyway and possibly you could run with it.

Instead of getting a site review done you could get a product review done for the same price ($500) and in that review have links to where people can buy this product. By paying for a review you therefore get to keep all of the price of the sale and you don’t have to pay an affiliate commission.

Soon I am about to release my first ebook for sale “Make Money Commenting” which will be for sale for just $7 (and trust me it will be worth way more than $7). Say I got a site review from John Chow and paid $500 for it. Then I would need about 100 people to buy my product for me to make a profit (considering John has about 30,000 subscribers this is a 0.33% conversion rate which is achieveable. However, if you sell a product where you make $50 per sale then you only need to sell 10 of them which is a 0.03% conversion rate and this is much more achievable.

So as you can see you can use a paid review to drive traffic to your sales page and you can keep 100% of the revenue (minus the fees some services charge). 

When my ebook launches in just under 1 month I am going to do exactly this. If I can afford it I will pay for a few site reviews on smaller sites and I will also aim to get some guest posts published on John Chow and other larger blogs which will link back to my sales page to increase the number of conversions.

I am going to need a damn good sales page if I want to make any decent sort of money from this product. I need to use other people’s traffic and truthfully I don’t have enough traffic yet. If I relied on just my readers alone I would probably sell 10 max. But with other blog’s traffic the opportunity for sales is endless.

Ok so that was just a simple idea that I had on how you can use paying for reviews as a way you can make tangible money (not just bring in traffic).