It’s once again time for my goal project update. August was a bona fide ball tearer for swollenpickles.com in terms of both revenue and traffic. I also edged closer to achieving a couple of my other goals.
1. Develop Swollen Pickles into a webs…

@Opal – Sorry this is so late, but just wanted to say thanks for the very descriptive insight. Always taking the time to help readers is really becoming your hallmark and I’m sure everyone appreciates it.

I left a 9-5 to avoid doing stuff like that. Many opportunities I don’t like. I was just lucky that I found four in the past five days that I really liked. I bid on them and received them. This month was the most I’ve written in a while. I wrote four, and I did three already.

I might open up another spot on my website to another advertiser, but I highly doubt that if I do they really have to be offering a good incentive to my readers just as my first advertiser did. My readers get $5 off their total order.

The advertiser on my site now approached me in the contract I wrote yesterday I told them they would pay me six months in advance. was pay me in advance. I gave them options for one month, three months, and six months the higher the time on my site they better I made the deal they went for six months. I didn’t offer them a year because I might want to do something with that spot when February 2008 rolls around.

They liked the contract and told me they would have my money by the end of the day. As you already know when you deal directly with the advertiser, you eliminate the middle man.

I received all the money for that ad placement. I didn’t have to split anything. When I woke up it was sitting in my PayPal account. This week I made $614. $440 for affiliate marketing and direct advertising, $150 for paid posts, and $24 for Google Adsense.

I don’t need to wait to get a high amount of traffic to make money I can do that right now which I guess is why I’m not really looking at the pro bloggers exclusively to pattern myself after.

I look at people that are similar in traffic to myself and do some of the things they are doing. One of my blog pals makes over 3k per month (she has less traffic) and she doesn’t write any reviews. Another one made six figures last year. He was making in less than 40k about five years ago.

Again he doesn’t write reviews. He does not blog about how to make money. He’s an affiliate marketer. In real life, I have a buddy that does well with affiliate marketing on his website he made over six figures also.

He’s been doing that for at least five years. I never paid attention to it before until I thought about making some “pocket change” from my personal websites. People like that I can relate to since I can definitely do what they are doing right now and start to see results fairly quickly.

I wouldn’t be surprised if some of your highest paid bloggers don’t even talk about it. Neither of the ones I mentioned does, but I’m very observant, picked up on things that they briefly mentioned, and emailed them. You would never guess how much they are making by visiting their websites because they don’t talk about it.

I suspect they don’t talk about it because they don’t want to deal with the people coming to their site or constantly emailing them on how can they make money online.

I actually like that approach. I don’t think people would believe I’ve made anything on my website unless I write about it, lol and I shall slow down on that and just talk about it with my friends because I don’t want to think I’m bragging and I don’t want to turn my regular readers off by constantly talking about monetizing my website. I have a lot of readers and lurkers who could care less about that type of stuff, but quite a few have purchased some of my affiliate items.

Regarding the magazine, It’s legit I don’t get carried away about something unless I go over it thoroughly. ☺

@Gnomey – Make sure you ask around, ppl are willing to help.

@Aaron – HERE HERE! (#):D

Shine on,
Aaron