Hi Everyone,

Life has been pretty hectic my end of late, hence why its been ages since I last posted here.  After spending a large chunk of 2010 travelling, scuba diving, and volunteering in Malaysian Borneo and the Philippines, I returned home to the UK.  It was December so the weather was pretty depressing (very cold and wet), I was broke, and I was also unemployed.  It was a bit of a depressing and stressful time to be honest.

Since then I am very please to say that I have managed to get myself back on my feet.  After attending loads of job interviews at the start of the year I have now found employment and am pleased to be earning a steady wage that I know will be coming in each and every month.  My salary is good enough that I can afford to invest roughly £300 every month in to my online business, in addition to earnings from my internet marketing endeavours.

I also bit the bullet in early march and bought myself a new laptop.  My old one was a real slug and it became unbearable to use.  I had been toying with the idea of crossing over to mac for a while but was unsure about how easy it would be to move from windows.  After much deliberation I finally opted to go for it.  Moving to mac was actually really easy and I really encourage others to consider it.  I cant tell you how much I love my new mac.  Its really quick, and I now have all the software I need installed and working.  Its made working so much more productive as I now don’t have to wait 30 minutes after turning my computer on before I can do anything.  Now I press the on switch and my computer fires up immediately, ready for action.  There are also very few applications that are unavailable for mac these days, and I think the only program that I don’t have anymore is Traffic Travis.  Its no real problem though as I also use Market Samurai which does pretty much the same thing as TT and is available for mac.

So I now have the equipment and investment budget to really take my online business forward.  This year I will be focusing on driving sales through free search traffic.  This involves lots of link building and adding content to my website network.  My priority at the moment is to find some article spinners who provide good quality writing for a decent price.  So far my search for spinners hasn’t gone all that well.  Human Rewriter has disappeared off the face of the earth, and some of the other service providers I have tried have proved to be rather erratic in terms of writing quality.  As I use these spun articles solely for link building they don’t need to be pulitzer winners, but I do want them to be readable to a human.  My outsourcing of article spinning is proving to be a bit frustrating as I seem to spend lots of time rewriting chunks of spun articles that I have already paid to be written.  Maybe I am being too fussy about quality.

So I am in a good position in terms of moving the business forward and am very excited about what the rest of 2011 will bring.  Hopefully my next post will be a bit more interesting as purchasing my new macbook pro has really limited my outsourcing efforts so far this year.  I still feel that I made the right decision in buying a new laptop as I am now so much more productive when I sit down to do some work.

All the best,

Rodders

Hi everyone, and a happy new year to you all. I believe that it is essential to set goals for your online business to ensure motivation, and in this post I want to outline my big plans for 2011.

For me, 2011 is going to be all about linkbuilding. Currently, I have around 25 websites in various stages of development. 14 of these websites are online with all of the infrastructure built (articles, product reviews, email newsletter series, and bonus giveaways) with the remaining sites just skeletons at present. The 14 websites that are finished are all in big juicy niches where people spend money online, with multiple information products to promote as an affiliate. Most of the remaining sites are in niches that really interest me such as SCUBA diving, snowboarding, marine aquarium keeping, and travel. I plan to put these sites to one side for the time being as creating content, finding good products to promote, and finding advertisers is more complicated and time consuming than for the 14 sites that are already built and largely promote Clickbank info products. I will come back to these sites in the future when I am earning a good amount from the ‘Big 14’.

I have decided to go back to full time employment in 2011 (currently attending lots of interviews) in order to be able to invest more into my business. I plan to invest around £300 (just over US$450) per month plus whatever my websites earn themselves. I hope that by investing $450 per month earned from an offline job I will be able to kick start growth. After 6 – 12 months I will cease to invest money from my offline income and will just reinvest all website earnings back in to the business.

For the 14 websites that I will be concentrating on this year, the focus will be building links and achieving high search engine rankings for highly targeted buyer keywords. With a budget of £300 (just over US$450) or more per month I should be able to outsource plenty of article writing and spinning for article marketing, hopefully employ someone as a part time linkbuilder (to build forum, blog, directory, profile links etc), and cover the costs of subscription services such as Unique Article Wizard and Article Marketing Automation. I will also spend some of my budget on adding some new content to each of the 14 websites over time and therefore going after more keywords.

It’s difficult to know exactly how successful my business will become over the next 12 months, however I don’t think that it is unrealistic to expect to get my earnings up to $500p/m consistently within the first 6 months, and $2000p/m within 12 months. My confidence stems from the fact that other newbie’s such as Clayton have achieved this level of success using similar methods to myself. I think that I have uncovered some excellent keywords to get me started, and as I will have an offline income to live on, I will be able to reinvest everything back in to the business to ensure that growth is as rapid as possible.

I think that my plans are pretty solid, and I am excited about seeing how successful my websites will become using this strategy. I will be posting regular updates detailing how things are progressing, as well as any modifications that I may make to my outsourcing strategy, so stay tuned over the coming months. I should stress that I have calculated how much I can afford to invest very carefully so that I am not investing money that I can’t afford to lose. I guess that some people would see investing money earned offline into an online business as a bit of a gamble, but I have faith that I can build a viable business online. I am really excited about what 2011 will bring, and am confident that the $3000 that I plan to pump into the business over the next 6 months will be money well spent.

What are your goals for 2011? I would love to hear what you guys hope to achieve this year, and would like to invite you to leave comments below detailing your plans and goals.

It’s been a long time since I last posted on this blog, so I wanted to write a quick update of what I have been up to these past few months.

At the beginning of September I took a break from internet marketing to go to the Philippines to conduct some voluntary work.  I lived for the most part on an Island in the Visayas, where the conservation charity that I was volunteering for was based.  The work involved lots of SCUBA diving in order to conduct marine life surveys, as well as working in the community raising awareness of marine conservation and the science behind it.

I had a really wonderful experience in the Philippines.  I loved volunteering and I made some great friends.  Unfortunately I didn’t get much internet marketing work done while I was in the Philippines.  The main reason was that I really threw myself in to the conservation work that I was doing, and therefore had very little time to work on my online business.  Another issue was that the internet connection was very slow.  While I was in Manila I purchased a Globe Tattoo USB internet device.  In towns and cities the Globe Tattoo provided a pretty quick broadband speed and worked really well.  Unfortunately I was based in the middle of nowhere most of the time, and the speed was very slow.

Ultimately I am glad with the way things panned out in the Philippines.  I really got a lot out of my volunteering experience and I also enjoyed having a break from learning about internet marketing.  I have now returned to the UK feeling really refreshed and ready to work hard on my online business.

I will add another post in the next couple of days detailing my big plans for 2011, so stay tuned.

All the best

Rodderz

Things have been pretty quiet on my blog lately as I have been building sites like crazy over the past couple of months. I changed my direction pretty dramatically after I have decided to go back to full time employment upon returning from the Philippines in December.

Tomorrow afternoon I fly from the UK to Manila to do 10 weeks of volunteer work on a Marine Conservation project. I studied marine biology at university, and I am very excited at the prospect of spending the next few months diving on some of the most diverse coral reefs in the world. The data that I will be helping to collect is part of an ongoing assessment of marine resources in the area, with a view to helping local people care for and manage their marine environment more sustainably. The work is going to involve a lot of diving surveys, as well as working with local communities. I have done similar work in the past and I really can’t wait to get out there and get involved.

As I mentioned above, I changed my business strategy fairly radically a couple of months ago. Basically, I decided that the best approach for the growth of my business would be to go back to full time employment, while investing some of my wages each month in to outsourcing. As I will be working fulltime, hopefully from January 2011, I decided to get on with building lots of sites and getting them up and running so that next year I can focus solely on building the sites out and doing SEO work on them. This was quite a relief as I was getting a bit sick of spinning articles and submitting them all over the web for backlinks to my older sites. Also I don’t think I was very efficient at it, as the process seemed to take me forever. Now I will just outsource the whole process and concentrate on the things that I enjoy, giving my business direction, and setting the websites themselves up how I want them.

When it launched a while back, I signed up for Affilojetpack, and I have been busy building 10 new sites in 4 different jetpack niches since then. All 10 new websites are now uploaded and complete with email autoresponder sequences, squeeze pages, a few pages of content, as well as some product reviews. While I am away I hope to spend a bit of time writing some articles for these sites and adding content to flesh them out a bit more. I have done some research and found that Globe (a telecommunications company in the Philippines) offers a USB device called “Globe Tattoo” that allows you to connect to the internet from anywhere with a mobile signal. It seems quite affordable, and will make working on my sites while away much easier than hunting down free wifi spots. I have checked and found out that the marine research station where I will be based has a decent Globe signal, so that should work out pretty well.

While I plan to do a bit of work while I am away, I will mainly be focusing on the marine research project, so I doubt I will get a huge amount of work done. I get back to the UK in December, at which point I will start applying for jobs and look in to recruiting a full time writer, probably from the Philippines funnily enough. I will outsource all the article writing, spinning and backlink building for all of my existing sites, and maybe build a couple more once I have finished SEO on my existing ones.

Hopefully I will be earning enough to both get by myself, and pay for the growth of my online business. I have checked the figures and they look feasible. Over the course of 2011 I will keep a close eye on my online income, reinvesting all of it back in to the business as I will have a full time wage to live on myself. When my income hits $1500 p/m over the costs of my outsourcing activities, I will go back to working on my sites full time (or maybe just do the whole 4 hour work week thing and keep the sites ticking over while my outsourcers do the heavy lifting).

I am not sure exactly what sort of job I will look for when I get back from the Philippines, but at the moment I am thinking of trying my luck with some local webdesign and SEO companies. Although I am a qualified marine biologist, there just aren’t any jobs around that pay decent money. My last job was as a science technician in a local college, so I might go back to that. I guess it just depends on what is available at the time I get back. Hopefully I will find something fairly interesting in the science/technology area, but I would be pretty happy to do anything for a while. The fact that I have an online business gives me something to look forward to and should keep me going through the 9 til 5 drudgery.

My dream would be to work for most of 2011 while building my online income, then hopefully by the end of the year be able quit safe in the knowledge that my business will be able to support itself and me. That would free me up to chase my passions, maybe doing some more voluntary marine conservation work, build some schools, and generally just help people less fortunate. I really hope I can achieve my goals and do something positive with my life. Nothing frightens me more than the thought of an easy comfortable life earning money for myself and never doing anything good for anyone. What a waste that would be.

I can see myself spending lots of time in the Philippines if my plans come to fruition. Not only are there marine conservation volunteering opportunities, but there are also numerous other charities for great causes, such as helping street children (of which there are many in the Philippines). The opportunity to do some really fulfilling voluntary work, coupled with the great outsourcing opportunities that the Philippines offers for my online business, could be a match made in heaven.

So I have lots to look forward to and am very excited about life at the moment. I will post another update in a week or so when I have settled in to life on a marine research station in the Philippines. Im sooo excited.

Now back to the packing, I wonder where my passport is?

Rodders

As I predicted in my last progress report I have been so busy building up the business lately that I have had to keep delaying the writing of this update.  I have been very busy the past few months adding content to my sites, learning about link-building and article spinning, as well as researching some new niches.  My efforts have proved fruitful as I am now starting to rank for some keywords, and have also begun making Clickbank sales.  One of my niches has a huge long tail and I went a bit overboard, adding about 90 pages of articles to my website to try and take advantage.  I now have 3 affiliate websites live and steadily rising in the search engine results as I continue my SEO efforts.  I have found Market Samurai to be an excellent tool for tracking my rankings for target keywords, and thoroughly recommend it to everyone.  Over the past month I have also researched some more niches and have 6 excellent new domain names to build websites for.

During April and May I took to the road for a while, travelling around Malaysian Borneo.  I had a great experience travelling and simultaneously working on my online business.  I have written a detailed post about my remote working experience in Malaysia Here.

My goals for the next few months are to continue building links and writing valuable content for my existing websites.  I can see a lot of article writing and spinning coming up over the coming months as I continue to distribute high quality content to article directories and web 2.0 sites.  Rapid Rewriter has proven to be a wonderful article spinning tool and I strongly recommend it. I also want to build 4 new sites of at least 10 pages each before the beginning of September this year.  I am heading off to the Philippines for a few months in September to do some volunteering and it would be good to have the new sites live and indexed with a few links before I go.  I don’t think I will be doing much work on my sites while I am away, so I plan to send some spun articles to Article Marketing Automation. before I leave in order to drip feed a few links back to my sites over time.

I return to the UK at the beginning of December, at which point I will take stock of the business and decide how best to take it forward.  Initially I will revisit all of my websites and see how best to improve them, link building, adding new content, and tweaking the design and layout of the sites as appropriate.  I also plan to start building email lists and using Aweber to automate the sending of emails to subscribers, hopefully building a long term relationship with some customers.

Once I have completed all of the tasks above, I will have roughly 10 websites online.  At this point I will begin my adventures into pay per click advertising and outsourcing, while also building a couple of new websites.  I will have to see how website revenues are coming along before I make a final decision, but at the moment I am thinking of taking a full time job again at the start of 2011.  This will mean that I can reinvest all of my website income back into outsourcing article writing and spinning, and starting out with pay per click advertising.  This will speed up the growth of the business while also giving me a decent full-time salary.  At the moment I am thinking about contacting some local web design and SEO firms to see if they need any new staff.  I am actually quite looking forward to the prospect of working with other people for a while again.

So I have lots to do and much to look forward to over the next 6 or 7 months.  I will write another progress report in the near future documenting how I have been getting on.

Thanks for stopping by my blog, please feel free to leave comments below.

Hi everyone,

Welcome to my first online business progress report.  I have been meaning to write this post for a few weeks, however other business tasks have kept on taking priority.  This is likely to be the case for the next couple of months as there really is no end to the workload at the beginning of a business venture.  Hopefully my business progress reports will become more regular once the business is established with a few sites live and earning some money.

I plan to post progress reports monthly from June 2010 onwards, and I hope that visitors to the Working Vagabond website will find the information valuable and relevant to their own online endeavours.  This post is going to be a bit of a marathon read as I have accomplished so much since starting the business four months ago in mid January 2010.

Business startup
I have registered myself as a sole trader enterprise and registered a trading name for my business.  I live in the UK, and this was the most suitable option for my online business.  I have also found out about all of my business responsibilities and the various deadlines that crop up through the year (e.g. tax returns, man power forms etc).  I have opened up a business bank account and invested a lump sum of £750 to cover all business costs for the first year of trading.  I also have a credit card attached to the account to make it easy to purchase business related products and services such as domain names.  I have also been awarded a small business grant to the value of £1000 which I will use to pay for some search engine optimisation work, an email autoresponder, and paid advertising for my websites.

Training
I have learned so much since I started my business in January that I really don’t know where to begin writing about the training that I have undertaken.  I have completed Mark Ling’s affiloblueprint course which has give me a really good general knowledge of running an online affiliate marketing business.  Affiloblueprint really is a great course, covering everything from selecting a niche, keyword research, website building, SEO, PPC and much more.

I have successfully learned how to use Dreamweaver and WordPress to build decent looking websites.  I have also made some nice looking graphics such as website header images and animated adverts.  Recently, I have been playing with Google Adwords as I was sent a £50 voucher.  I ended up using the credit to launch a few direct linking campaigns in the Google content network, although I am yet to make a sale.  The purpose of my Adwords campaigns was really to learn about how the whole Adwords PPC thing works, and I wasn’t really expecting to make any sales.  I have also learned about outsourcing work, although it will be a while before I can afford to start outsourcing the tasks that I don’t enjoy doing.  I have been mainly learning on the job as I go and as yet haven’t found anything that I can’t do which is very encouraging.

Website Building and Affiliate Networks
I currently have 4 websites in various stages of development, own about 10 domain names that I bought using Godaddy, have a hosting account with Hostgator, and am a member of 3 affiliate networks.  I plan on mainly building affiloblueprint style niche websites that promote products from the Clickbank affiliate network, however I will also build some small sites that promote products from other networks such as Commission Junction.  I decided to branch out of Clickbank early on just to get a sense of what other products are available to promote as an affiliate.  My main passion is travelling, and Clickbank doesn’t have all that many decent looking products related to the travel niche.

Working Vagabond is currently the only site that I have online, although I am very close to getting a large affiloblueprint style site uploaded as well.  The niche that I chose for my affiloblueprint site had a huge amount of long tail search terms with high search volume and I just couldn’t stop adding pages.  Eventually the site grew really large which is why it is not yet ready to go online, however It has been structured in a way that will make it really easy to manage and grow in the future.  I hope to get this monster online in the next couple of weeks and I am confident that it will end up being a really good earner.  The other sites that I am working on are still in very early stages of development, but as they are very small niche sites I hope to get them uploaded very soon as well, hopefully in the next two to three weeks.

Short Term Goals
Over the coming weeks I hope to get at least 2 new sites uploaded and begin doing some search engine optimisation work on them.  This will consist mainly of article marketing and posting in forums in order to get high page rank backlinks to my websites.  I will be heading to Sabah in Borneo in less than two weeks, so I will be doing some travelling and having some adventures as well as working hard on my websites from internet cafes and WiFi spots.

Please feel free to leave comments and ask questions below.

Hi everyone,

In this section of the working vagabond website I will be posting regular business progress reports.  These reports will give a brief update of my business activities including website building, affiliate network dealings, seo, email marketing, ppc, and much much more.  I will also document mistakes that I make along the way, as well as any valuable new skills that I learn.  The vast majority of the methods that I am currently implementing are based upon the training given in the affiloblueprint course by Mark Ling, making this section particularly relevant to new affiloblueprint members, as well as people who are thinking about joining the course in the near future.

I hope that you find these reports helpful and relevant to your own online endeavours.  Please feel free to participate in the discussions by leaving thoughtful comments.

Thank you for visiting working vagabond

Rodderz