Post Last Updated:
2/26/2014
Note To Reader: Most External Links on this page are affiliate links and benefit me in some way, shape, or form.
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I share a lot here on Chezfat.com about how I go about making a livable income online. As I've noted before I make pretty good money online but I haven’t yet fully replaced my day job salary. I'm getting closer but I'm not there yet.
My online income thus far is roughly half of what I made in the traditional job world prior to me quitting. The goal however is to get to the point where I’m making more online than I did off and I'd like to eventually be making roughly the salary of a dual income household (all by my lonesome).
I'd love for my wife (a highly educated woman with a high power job) to be able to take some time away from her very demanding job if she wanted to.
Over the past few years I've gone from not knowing very much of anything in IM to coaching a few people both online and off on how to make a run at this business.
In my time working online I've come to find that the following IM tools are essential to my workflow and if I were to start from scratch I would setup the following accounts (or purchase some of the following products) right off the bat to hit the road swinging.
Domains
Godaddy has always been a viable option for a long time and it's my choice when buying expired domains through their auction house but for new domains I have stopped using them and use NameSilo instead.
You can see NameSilo's pricing page here (aff link) or just head over to GoDaddy here (aff link).
Hosting
You need hosting for any site you run. A good starting host that many people use (including myself) is HostGator. You can easily get a site setup and running for less that $10 out of pocket every month. It's not the cheapest or the fastest but it's well known and fairly reliable.
For my smaller sites I’ve also opened up a reseller hosting account with Host Nine which allows me to host a lot of multiple sites on the same account but not have them all on the same IP (the big benefit of H9).Other Tools & Programs
PinWootIf you are setting up Pinterest accounts for your sites then you need to use PinWoot. It will give you lots of good stuff to pin onto your boards, help you get real people following you and your boards, give your pins likes and will even features specific pins of your choosing for others to repin. Invaluable. You can read my full review of PinWoot here.
Easy Product Displays is a program that I started using on 1/22/2014. It makes making responsive grid based affiliate links to Amazon & Zazzle super easy. I used to hand code my grid link systems but this is so easy and cheap I will likely be using it for some time to come. You can read my full review here (whenever it goes live that is).
Jaaxy is one of two keyword tools I recommend right now. It's slick, easy to use, and will help you chose excellent keywords right out of the box. They typically come up with more keywords than Google autosuggest scrapers tend to find. Not always but usually.
ILovePage1 is a brand new tool to me and I love it. If you've ever wanted to do allintitle keyword searches in bulk to check keyword competition in the SERPs then this is freakin' sweet. I've recently started using it as the last step in my keyword research. I mine a bunch of keywords and then I take a CSV file with all those keywords and run it through ILovePage1's software and it tells me exactly what the allintitle competition is for each keyword. Run that through a filtered excel spreadsheet and you've quickly got a list of keywords to spend time creating pages for. They are the most likely pages to rank. Awesome. Soon, I'll do a full review of this software but for now you can pick it up through the MyCommerce market. Pond forum members get a 50% discount right here. See more about joining The Pond here.
ProMediaCorp's Suggester is the other tool I've got my eye on currently. It's free and it simply scrapes Google's autocomplete. I like it for it's simplicity but wish it had a wildcard option where I could place a wildcard between words.
Revenue Sharing User Generated Content Websites
These are commonly referred to as Web2.0 sites. Some of them you provide your own form of monetization others are monetized for you. Each has it's own set of rules and user guidelines. below I've presented the sites I find most useful.
Infobarrel.com - This is a revenue sharing website that allows you to publish information based articles predominantly. The ad revenue from each article is shared with the article's author but only for those pieces that are high enough in quality. Low quality articles will not serve ads thus they make no money for their author's or the site. You can read my full review of InfoBarrel here.
Bubblews.com is more of a web2.0 social mendia revenue sharing site. It is vastly different than most article writing sites and it is pretty addicting. You can really do a lot of networking there in addition to all the writing. There payment system is very unique as well and you can earn money very quickly on the platform. See this page for my full review of making money on Bubblews.
Other sites that allow you to write and earn money from your work include Squidoo, Seekyt, & HubPages to name a few. I will expand on these at a later date.
<<< This Page Is Being Updated - A Lot Of The Info Below Is Old And Out Dated >>>
Marketing Your Blogs With Revenue Sharing Sites and Social Media
I also recommend setting up free accounts with HubPages, Seekyt, & Squidoo as these are revenue sharing websites which allow you to publish on them and link back to your blogs. To earn on each of these sites you will need advertising accounts which we will go over below.
Lastly you should market your blogs with basic social media as this helps with indexing of posts, guestposts you publish, and with credibility. It is often nicer to come across a website which has a social presence which is why we make sure to build one even if it is not the main focus of our websites.
Advertising Accounts For Monetization
Once we get our blogs setup and content published on them and then we start marketing them we need to monetize them. The easiest way to do this is to put Adsense on them. This is easy but is not always the best way. As a beginner it may make sense to start with Adsense and then work your way into other advertising methods. Chitika is another major advertiser that you should open as is Amazon Associates.
The above three will make the bulk of your revenue on all the revenue sharing websites you just opened up above and will also be the easiest way to start monetizing your main blogs too. You may want to open up some affiliate accounts at Commission Junction, Clickbank, Share-A-Sale as these are some of the industries largest affiliate management programs. Many marketers find that pages which make good money with Adsense will make far more with these affiliate programs so it pays to start learning about them and how to use them better.
You can also check out http://www.imautomator.com/ for basic low volume submissions to social directories and bookmarking sites among others.
