How to make money in 2012

No goals, no money. Simple as that. This is not a new year resolution post. It is a target setting post where I outlined my plan for achieving financial independence.  In this old article on mine about targeting buying keywords for beginners, I talk about my money making 2011 target was USD5000 per month. If you read this post on why my adsense dropped in 2011, you will know that I have actually achieved it. Even if I did manage to lost a big chunk of my adsense income, my other online income sources are still keeping me alive : ). Overall, 2011 was a year that was filled with its ups and downs. It was exciting to see my online...

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Low competition keywords: How to check your keyword competition

A favourite question among beginners making money online is this: can my site rank top in google?” A lot of times, this boils down to your keyword competitiveness. This is not an easy thing to understand. Many seo blogs or money making blogs will advise on some simple rules for beginners to check the keyword competition. Such common advice include:          Check the PR of the top sites      Check your keywords in ‘quotes’ and see how many pages are there in Google. There is even a blog post I read recently that says you need to click on the last result to see the true competing...

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How to sell a website and make money

If you want to know how to get more money when selling your website, here are some tips that you might want useful. These are questions that are being asked by a reader so I thought it will be a good idea to share the answer to everyone. Is it better to try to sell them all at once, group sites that are in similar niches or just sell one by one? Which alternative do you think will be able to give me the maximum profit? It depends. If you have sites that generate significant income i.e. anything above 50, it is better to sell them one at a time. Bundling also reduces the average price per site. That being said, if most of your...

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50 amazon sites challenge progress report #3

Want to learn how to make money with amazon? Follow my updates on the 50 amazon niche sites challenge resource page. Since the last update, things have been moving along quite nicely. First, the progress! I have added two more amazon sites, making the total to 8. 42 more to go! I got my FIRST sale from the first batch of newly created sites (site 4). These domains were registered 2 weeks ago with no content and backlinks. Now, it is making sales. Who says you can't make money with new sites? I have spotted another 2 niches. Domains have been purchased but the sites are not built yet so I didn't put them here in the table below. Good...

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How to track amazon sales

This is a simple tutorial to show you how to track amazon revenue from the different sites that you might have. This is one of the reader’s question from my previous post about my amazon niche site challenge progress 3 report. It is a fairly easy process but not obvious so this step by step guide with screenshots should help. For those who are not sure why we need to do this, it is to help you to know where the sales are coming along. It works in similar ways as the channels in adsense. Knowing which sites is making amazon sales can help you to know who are your winners. The first step is to log into your amazon affiliate account. Note...

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Why I am not making money online

Some of my regular readers might remember my little experiment in setting up an adsense money making course. That experiment was of course a big failure as most of the participants failed to put in any work. I got an email from one of them a couple of weeks ago and this is what he has written: "Dear Aaron it has been sometime since you last guide me on making money online on niche. I has register the domain as promise But I find it hard to do autoblogging for this niche as i find little website about it. Need your further guidance here." Firstly, I must apologise for making this email public as I have not seek the permission of the...

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My adsense earnings down for 2011

If you want to know the ups and downs of an average guy who is trying to make a living with adsense, this is the post for you. I started making money with adsense in Sept 2009. I remembered my first month earning was around USD7. Despite the small amount, I saw the potential and was excited by the fact that I can generate money just by writing content. Adsense success stories Since that USD7, I am been working hard to build my adsense sites until earlier this year. This is how my adsense earnings look like from just focusing on one niche. The earnings are from Sept 2009 to June 2011 and doesn't cover my other niches: Sept 2009: USD7 Oct...

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50 amazon sites challenge progress report #2

Here is an update on my 50 amazon niche sites challenge. If you are new, you can refer to all the articles and "how to make money from amazon" guide in this resource page: amazon site challenge. Let's look at the progress of the 4 sites that I started towards the end of November. The biggest news is that I am starting to see some money, although the amount is not signficant. In total, I earned about USD29 for these sites. Not surprising, these earnings came from sites that are either purchased or aged. It really goes to show that making money online takes time. If you are not willing to wait for your site to mature, then do what I do: start...

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How much traffic to make money from Amazon

Knowing how much traffic you need to make money from Amazon can help you to forecast your earnings and the efforts you need to put. Of course, this is all useless if you only think and not do! In this post, I will give you actual stats from 2 of my amazon sites to see the kind of conversion rates that you need if you want to make money with Amazon keywords. The first site that I am analysing is not part of the 50 Amazon challenge. It is a 2 year site with 5 posts that is ranking in the top 3 for its primary keyword. It makes around USD50 per month and is the kind of ideal size and earnings level that I hope to achieve for all my new 50 amazon...

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50 amazon sites challenge progress report #1

I have been busy starting the 50 amazon niche sites challenge. I will be posting my progress regularly to update any of you who might be interested to follow the challenge. If you do, I guarantee you will learn something about making money with amazon. With the sheer volume of sites that I will be making, there will be insights that will surprise both me and you. In the worst case scenario, at least I can tell you which niches suck for amazon : ) As I mentioned in the first post of the challenge, my objective is to create 4 amazon micro sites per month. Out of the 4, 1 will be purchased, 2 will be set up with content supplied by an outsourcer...

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One or many sites to make money?

After posting about the 50 amazon site challenges, I had a few private conversions about whether do you need one or many websites to make money. Rather than highlight the pros and cons of each methods, which many had already talked, I just want to say you will need to do both. It is just a matter of timing in terms of which one do you embark on first. I believe that focusing everything on one site will make the site a quality site. However, the challenge is knowing what niches to focus on. Some will say follow your passion, which is a good advice but you better have a concrete plan on how to monetise your passion beyond just adsense, which...

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How to choose amazon keywords

As part of my 50 amazon niche sites project, I am literally spending hours doing product research on amazon to uncover good products to promote. Since some of you might also be trying to find good amazon keywords to promote, I thought I will share how I am doing it. Before I begin, let me state that there is no one way of doing it. This is just my way. I am sure there are other ways that people have found success with as well. Let's go through the basics Expensive products with good reviews: I choose products above USD100 and have at least 5 good reviews. This is quite common advice among many amazon affiliates. There will be some that...

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50 amazon niche sites challenge to make money

I am starting a 50 Amazon niche site challenge. As the title implies, I am going to create 50 amazon sites with an intention of making USD2500 from them by end of Dec 2012. In this article, I will going to set the rules of the challenge as well as to give my reasons for doing this. For older readers, you will know that I made nearly USD1k in amazon last Dec. You can read the post here on how to make money with amazon. In case you are lazy to click on the link, here is the screenshot of my earning last Dec. Unfortunately, after the Google Panda, most of my amazon sites were destroyed in the ranking, resulting in the fall of my amazon income...

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Why are cute taiwanese actresses pictures on aaronchua.com

Some of the regular readers might notices the cute images of taiwanese actresses in this blog. Why I doing that? Well, for aesthetic and testing purposes. This particular blogger template that I am using always takes the first image in that post to create a thumbnail for the homepage and sidebar widget. The problem is that it distorts the images and making them look damm ugly on the site. I know there must be some way to change this in the html section but I am not a coder so I came up with a funny way so doing it, which is to use a standard size picture of a taiwanese actresses so that visually, the blog looks pleasing : ). Another reason...

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Finding long tail keywords - A case study

As allured in my previous articles, I have been using a long tail keyword tool called keyword strategy tool. Today, I am talk about how to use to tool and why I trusted it.  The point about this tool is that it gives you an easy way to mine long tail keywords. Why is targeting long tail keywords important? Well, they are uncompetitive and can even rank without backlinks if they are aged enough. More importantly, you are not vulnerable to any particular keyword's ranking which save you a lot of heartache during Google update such as the recent Google Panda 2.6.  The challenge is that you need to produce a large volume of content...

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Make money with elegant wordpress themes - I just did!

I have been buying websites to make money faster and have actually lots to share. That is for other posts but for today, I just want to make a quick note about something I am quite happy with. A new site I bought last month has lots of potential to make different revenue streams. The upside is obvious but the downside is that each new source of online income is a learning curve. One such income stream is actually affiliate sales from selling wordpress themes. I have never earn any online income from selling wordpress themes so all this is rather new. Today marks the first sale I have with this source of income and I am rather pleased with...

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How to build niche sites after Panda 2.6

Ever since google panda has affected many niche site owners, there have discussions talking about whether the niche sites are still viable ways to earn money online.  I think it all depends on your definition of niche sites. If you think niche site is all about putting up a few pieces of outsourced content targeting a keyword, then believe me when I say this model will not last long. You might get away with it for the short term but Google will catch up with you one day. For me, niche sites does not mean low quality. It only mean focusing on a smaller topic but giving it the maximum value that you can. So, how does a high quality niche...

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