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Make Money Online : Useful Resources

25th April 2018 By martinos74 Leave a Comment

I often end up talking to people about the various ways to make money online and usually people end up asking me how to find out more information about these various ideas. Rather than just directing someone to my website, I thought I’d store all the best bits and useful information in one place so here we go…..

Affiliate Websites

The Idea

Create a website, ideally about something you are interested in. On your website you promote or review products (usually from Amazon). When a visitor clicks on your link and goes to Amazon, then you receive a commission (4 – 8%) of anything they purchase in the next 24 hours.

Internet Marketing Tools

Keyword Tool: The goto resource for researching niches, keywords, backlinks and pretty much everything internet marketing related is ahrefs.com it’s not cheap but you should be able to get a free trial from them.

Hosting: I tried a number of different hosting companies but have found the Siteground have the best deal, great support and consistent service.

Writers: You won’t be able to write all of the content for you site yourself so I’d recommend using upwork.com – simply upload a job description, set a price then review the candidates

My Verdict

PROS: Once your site is set up and you have found a niche there is great potential. The beauty is that this can become semi-passive, at least you don’t need to be constantly working on your site. Websites are also selling for multiples of 25x their monthly income, so if you get bored with your niche, you can sell up and move on

CONS: You will need to heavily invest your time up front and rewards won’t be seen for 6 months to a year later at a minimum, which is why a lot of people give up on their sites.

Merch by Amazon

The Idea

You create a design for a Tshirt, upload it into Merch by Amazon, which creates a product listing for you on amazon.com. If your T Shirt sells then you receive a royalty for it, usually between $5 – 10 depending on how you price your Tshirt

Merch by Amazon Tools

At the moment I use:

upwork.com for my designers
Chrome extensions:
Merch Momentum is a weekly newsletter that you can subscribe to for $10 a month and is packed full of useful info

My Verdict

PROS:

Once you’ve created your T shirt designs the rest is passive as Amazon handles everything for you.
You can outsource the design work and even the keyword research so this is very scaleable. In the future Amazon will expand to more products and into other countries other than the US.
This is still really young so I would really recommend that you sign up for an account and get in whilst you still can as people are making good money from this without being an amazing designer

CONS:

It can take a while to get accepted (although this is improving now) and initially you are limited to the number of slots (different designs) that you can sell, which is frustrating.
Amazon have recently reduced the royalties as well so you make less each Tshirt sold.
The market is also fairly saturated with lots and lots of competition, so you really need to niche down to make sales.
You can not outsource the uploading of your designs as Amazon will likely close your account
Amazon can close your account and your entire business at any time, as they are very hot on Trademark infringements

eBay Dropshipping

The Idea

List products on eBay with a 40% markup on the retailers price, but optimise the titles so people buy the products. When someone buys the product from you on eBay, you buy the product from the retailer and they send it to the customer…. you never even touch the product

Dropshipping Tools

If you’re serious about dropshipping then you’ll need to use a couple of these tools at least:

SKUgrid which is software to detect when the products you are dropshipping go out of stock at the retailer or change price. It automatically updates your eBay listings. Without this software then you’ll be in a world of pain and find lots of your sales will be for out of stock products, which in turn will lead to negative feedback.
Title Builder – This is a free tool, that gives you great suggestions to create killer titles for your listings
Hydralister – This software comes with a fee of about $79 a month so it isn’t cheap, but allows you to take a source URL, add it into the software and then it will automatically create the listing for you in eBay after it has scraped the information from the source listing. It also then automatically links to your SKUgrid listings and will save you heaps of time. The only issue with this software is you need to be a bit careful when adding lots of products and make sure you check your product listings after adding them as it is prone to error… which can be costly.

My Verdict

PROS: Is a great way to get started making money online and with very little investment you can make a good sideline. The nice thing about this model is that you should be able to get sales within a few weeks, and that becomes kind of addictive. This also has the potential to scale out if you have the correct processes in place

CONS:

If you have a new eBay account you are limited to the number of listings you can add initially, which can be frustrating.
You have to deal with the general public and customer service issues can really suck the life out of you (returns, missing orders, faulty products, unhappy customers blah blah blah)
It isn’t particularly passive as you need to check your account daily in case you have orders to process (unless you outsource this)

Matched Betting

The Idea

Online bookmakers run promotions such as “Deposit £50 and get a free £50 bet”. Matched betting uses simple maths and differences in odds, which allow you to extract about 80% of the value of these free bets without any risk.

Matched Betting Tools

Oddsmonkey.com provides pretty much everything that you need in one single package. Read my review of the service here

Accumulator Generator is some additional software that you can purchase, which helps to find and track your accumulators

My Verdict

PROS: This is a nice way to get started making money online as you need very little investment up front and you can get rewards very quickly.

CONS: This is not at all passive and requires you to spend time researching the best offers and finding matches. There is no longevity in this because your accounts will be limited by bookmakers after a while (as they don’t like you making money).

Also, even this is definitely not gambling, it could lead you into the murkier world!

Social Trading

The Idea

You invest in traders, rather than investments. The idea is that by looking at things like a trader’s attitude to risk, what they are investing in and their percentage gains/loss over time it takes out a lot of the hard work. When you invest in a trader then the software will automatically make the same investments that the trader makes (albeit only a fraction of what they invest in).

Social Trading Tools

I didn’t go too far down the social trading path and the only platform I really used was etoro.com

My Verdict

PROS: If you’re really lucky you could make big gains in a short amount of time

CONS: Most likely is that you will lose a large portion of your investment. I wouldn’t recommend this at all as it feels like you have no control over what is happening and you are totally at the mercy of erratic traders!

The Low Hanging System (Print on Demand)

The Idea

You use a Print on Demand company called Gearbubble and create simple text-based designs, which get added to coffee mugs and then sold on Amazon, Etsy and eBay. All you need to do is create the design and Gearbubble integrates with the other platforms and does all the shipping / order fulfilment for you.

Low Hanging System Tools

Wordswag is a handy little app that you can use to make designs on your Iphone
wordmark.it is a tool that allows you to type in a phrase and it will show how this will display using the different fonts you have installed on your phone
relatedwords.org– is a great help for you to create the titles and descriptions for your listings if you’re struggling for ideas
Pixabay – is the goto place to get Royalty Free Commercial use images
Font Bundles – Worth signing up to for their free fonts that they give away
tess2.uspto.gov – Should be in your bookmarked sites as this is where you goto check for Trademarks

My Verdict

PROS: If you’re waiting to get approved for Merch By Amazon or you are new to print on demand as a concept then I would definitely recommend taking the course

It’s a low cost way for you to get into selling products on Amazon in particular and doesn’t require you to have great design skills. You just need to focus on finding the right niches and creating funny, sweet or cool sayings that you think people will like on their mugs. The only effort on your side is uploading the products into Gearbubble and if they sell, you make about $7 – $10 per mug.

Don’t bother doing the holiday jumpstart programme but the course for $297 is well worth it

CONS:

You’ll need to be good at niche research and create a lot of designs. The approach is low hanging as you’re going for niches that don’t have many competitors, but that also means you need to create a lot of designs. The approach is more like throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks rather than any scientific approach to it. The other downside is that 80% of the sales comes during Q4 so if you’re doing this then you want to get up and running a long time before that or else it gets stressful.

Loi Krathong Festival : Chiang Mai, Thailand

9th January 2018 By martinos74 Leave a Comment

We were lucky to be in Thailand during one of their main festivals and also being in Chiang Mai was a bonus as it’s kind of the epicentre of the Loi Kratong festival.

Now, I’m not exactly sure what the festival is all about. I’ve heard it is to celebrate the Thai New Year, celebrate the 12^th moon of the year and generally cast away your sins as you cast burning lanterns into the sky, so excuse me a minute whilst I do a quick google….

OK, so I just found the following out from bangkok.com:

It's because the main rice harvest season has ended so its time to thank the Water Goddess for the abundance of water and apologise for polluting it.
Others say it symbolically helps you float away all the anger and frustrations from the previous year and getting rid of all the darker side of yourself
If your candle stays alight until your Krathong disappears out of sight, it means a year of good luck.

Krathongs in the River, Chiang Mai

As usual we hadn’t particularly planned what to do and after the SEO Conference finished we just went for a bit of a walk down to the river from the Le Meridien hotel.

As luck has it this was where all the activity was happening and thousands of locals and farangs descend onto the Iron Bridge and Warrorot Bridge en masse to let off lanterns into the sky.

Firstly, I have to say that it’s a pretty awesome sight, but one thing you don’t often hear about is that most people have never lit a lantern before in their life and are completely clueless about what they’re doing.

Multiply this by a few thousand all lighting lanterns in a tight space next to each other and you can guess what kind of pandemonium is going on….

Lanterns being lit on the Iron Bridge

There were lanterns caught in the trees, stuck to the rafters in houses surprisingly not doing any significant damage, well at least we didn’t see any! The most worrying thing however, was the number of lanterns that people lit which weren’t properly heated up, so instead of flying off peacefully into the night, cleansing you of your sins through the year, they would just descend rapidly onto someones head, causing mass panic and mild burns to the unsuspecting victims.

Loi Krathong Chaos Chiang Mai

Apart from that there were people everywhere, surrounded by cars, some crazy people driving mopeds through the crowds and the occasional lantern just decided to fall out of the sky and hit you on the head. My personal highlight was seeing the lanterns which had rockets attached to them… of course the rockets were pointing down towards the ground… genius!

It was all pretty spectacular to watch though and I enjoyed the full moon and sky full of glowing lights, but it was also nice to retreat to a safe distance for a bit as well and enjoy a cold beer without fear of immanent combustion!

Loi Krathong Chiang Mai Iron Bridge

Loi Krathong Lanterns

The second day of the festival was a little more serene, although the crowds weren’t much thinner than the night before. The focus of Saturday night was a parade from the old City to the River, which featured a variety of floats with costumes, dance and music from Lanna, Thai and other Asian countries.

The lantern show was a little less bonkers than the night before but was still fun to watch the craziness, which contrasted well with the serenity of Thai families adding floating offerings of flowers, incense and candles which they added to the moat around the old town, I believe as another way of cleansing.

Overall the festival was pretty cool to witness. I think I’d recommend trying to find a spot near the river, on the banks ideally, where you can watch things go by without placing your life in imminent danger!!!

Chiang Mai SEO Conference 2017 Review

10th November 2017 By martinos74 Leave a Comment

Completely out of the blue I found out that whilst we are here the first annual SEO Conference was taking place in Chiang Mai and the lineup was a cracker…

Put together by Matt Diggity, there was a stellar range of Guest Speakers from the SEO World:

Daryl Rosser	Tim Soulo	Gareth Simpson	Jonathan Kiekbusch	Charles Floate

Daryl Rosser from Lion Zeal talked gave a really structured approach to easily find your first 10 SEO clients within 6 months. This assumed you had a certain degree of SEO knowledge, but I liked the way he hustled and the approach he took to prospecting leads.

This involved reaching out to prospects and saying that you had made a video of how to improve their search rankings and whether they were the right person to send the video to. If they responded then he made a simple 5 minute analysis video and had his foot in the door.

Tim Soulo is the marketing director of ahrefs and he gave an overview of how they get their data from something called Clickstream, which seems to be a lot more accurate than other providers. He gave a couple of nuggets of information, such as checking the amount of traffic to the #1 listing in the SERPS for a certain keyword, rather than just the monthly traffic volume.

Gareth Simpson – Talked about outreach and how he structured his link building campaigns. I liked the way he focused on finding shoulder niches and put emphasis on personalising your campaigns to get maximum link ROI.

Jonathan Kiekbusch from PBN Butler then talked about structuring your business for longer term success, focusing on game theory and making sure that your employees are super engaged with the business.

Charles Floate was the last man on the roster, who everyone was looking forward to hear. He smashed in with a detailed technical talk about Black Hat SEO, most of which was over my head to be honest, but was exciting to listen to another side of SEO that you can get into.

There was plenty of chance for networking during the day, which I am particularly bad at, but if that’s your kind of thing this conference would have been perfect for you.

Chiang Mai SEO Conference 2017 Ask Me Anything Panel

The final part of the day was a QA with some of the above speakers, Jesse Hanley and Holly Starks, where the audience threw a variety of questions at the panel, and for me this was one of the most rewarding parts of the day.

Just to top it off, the closing session was a ‘special announcement’ where Matt Diggity got down on one knee and proposed to his girlfriend!!!

Matt Diggity Marriage Proposal

Overall it was an awesome day, even with a mild hangover, and great to be in a room of 400+ people who are all totally passionate about what they do.

During the week prior to this event there were a number talks held by the Empire Flippers guys, Holly Starks and a talk about A/B Testing, which made it even more of an exciting time to be in Chiang Mai, and of course the event ended at the start of the Loi Kratong festival…

I met some awesome people during this conference and have been given access to some groups with immense knowledge that I can tap into. More than anything this has inspired me to get my SEO action going and the overall message is SEO ROCKS!!!

and relax… You’re in Chiang Mai!

9th November 2017 By martinos74 Leave a Comment

Finally we made it to the place I’d been hearing about for months now whilst listening to podcasts in the pouring rain on the way to work in London.

In my mind Chiang Mai was this place full of young entrepreneurs setting up different types of online businesses in a laid back surrounding with great food and a more relaxed pace of life than Bangkok, so was this the case?

Well, in a nutshell, yes.

There are definitely hundreds of entrepreneurs, Digital Nomads or Digital Gonads as a lot of people refer to them, and there are plenty of opportunities to network with people.

Chiang Mai has a bunch of active Facebook groups with all kinds of activities from the weekly Digital Nomad Coffee Club meet up where speakers talk about a different topic each week to something called Shedance (which Ania went to)!

There’s also a bounty of Co-working spaces that you can head to where you can either plugin to a comfortable work station or start to network with other Nomads.

Dvieng Santitham Apaartments

In addition to this it seems pretty easy to get high quality low cost accommodation for monthly rentals. We were extremely lucky and found an awesome condo for a month, with the best swimming pool in town, a gym and a really awesome location at the D’Vieng Santitham. All of this for just 15,000 baht a month, which comes in at about £350. For this you get a fully furnished 1 bed apartment with lounge, kitchen and wifi!

This time of year, the climate seems just perfect to me… about 25 – 30 C in the day, but cool enough at night not to cause any sleeping problems.

The overall vibe in Chiang Mai is relaxing, but there’s also heaps to do as well, and strangely my day just flies by.

We’ve found a couple of great Yoga places to go to, and by the time I’ve done a bit of work, gone to the gym or had a swim, it’s time for food and then the day is over!!!

The only downside for me at the moment, is I wish I had a bit longer here, so we could properly explore, build up a few more contacts and really focus on building the different businesses up.

My original plan was to focus on building out my affiliate site and start outreach campaigns whilst I was here. Well, I went to an excellent link building talk and then the Chiang Mai SEO Conference just happened to be on at the same time we are here, so that should really have focused my efforts.

However, instead of this I decided to focus most of my attention on the Low Hanging System and creating Print on Demand mugs via a Gearbubble and Amazon integration!!! This probably was a bad move as there is a massive rush on to hit the Christmas season and this has stressed me out incredibly and consumed most of my time.

However, there could be worse places to do this, and for once in my life I’m actually enjoying working and cracking through my own stuff each day….. Doesn’t sound like me right???

Welcome to the Thailand – The Land of a Thousand Smiles

7th November 2017 By martinos74 2 Comments

So we finally made it to Thailand and the Land of the Smiles and are about half way through our trip now, so you may be wanting to know how the heck are you getting on, so I’m going to give you a long overdue update now.

Bangkok Skyline by Night

Firstly, the holiday stuff. So we started off with 5 days in Bangkok, which was big, polluted and extremely noisy, however, it was great to be in Thailand at last and we had a lot of fun in the big metropolis. After a few days though enough was enough so we headed for the islands.

Tonsai Beach - Railay Peninsula

Well, actually it wasn’t really the islands as we went to Krabi, which is on the mainland. Krabi Town itself is a nice enough little place for a night’s stop over, but then we headed over to the Railay Peninsula, which is the location most synonymous with Thailand with the Limestone cliffs jutting out of the sea and the white sandy beaches.

We decided to stay on Tonsai beach, which is the quieter hippy / stoners side of town, which can only be accessed by boat or by a 30 minute walk through the jungle. Now, not a lot of people will say this but my overriding feeling was of disappointment with our stay here. Because it was the low season and the weather was pretty poor to be honest, the whole place felt depressing. Everywhere was empty, there was a lot of rubbish and generally it didn’t really feel like the tropical paradise we’d hoped for.

Of course when the sun was shining it was still pretty beautiful, however, it just felt like something was missing, and for me it definitely didn’t live up to the tag of one of the best beaches in the world.

South of Phra Ae Beach Koh Lanta

After a few days we decided to move onto Kohlanta and stayed in a wonderful Resort (Relax Bay) kind of place on the south side of Phra Ae beach. We had an amazing room for one night before being kicked out into the cheap seats as a French family moved in, but nonetheless, it was great to chill out for a few days in relative luxury. Disappointingly the beach was a bit dirty with litter again, and low season really does give a bit of a downer vibe on everything.

Highlights will have been going to the animal welfare centre where we nearly adopted a dog, and an amazing sunset:

Koh Lanta Sunset

As the weather had been so temperamental, we thought there was no point staying south any longer and I had been itching to get to Chiang Mai and check out the Digital Nomad scene, so we got an earlier than expected flight up North to the Land of the Lanna people….

It’s Getting Real

20th September 2017 By martinos74 Leave a Comment

It's only over this past week that I've started to realise we're heading out of here in a couple of weeks and venturing off into a new life. Things are starting to get real as this week I've been handing over some of my responsibilities at work and am gradually getting prepared for leaving.

The thing is it's always hard to imagine your next phase of life before you're in it, and when you get to it, it's really hard to imagine what your previous life was like. This is why change is good and makes things so exciting.

Outside the Thai Embassy!

We headed down to the Thai embassy this week and despite being told off by an angry Thai official for queue jumping (which I wasn't) we picked up our visas and got the first tinge of excitement about our journey ahead.

On the online business side of things I still find myself flip flopping between what I should focus on when I'm away. It's great that there are so many ways you can earn a buck online, but focusing on one thing really would be good too!

Affiliate Sites Competition

My original plan was to build up my affiliate website, but I got a bit disheartened this week when I realised the amount of competition that is out there that I'll need to compete with in my niche. On the other side I reviewed my KGR list of keywords that I generated earlier and have found that I have a couple of thousand of keywords that I could write articles for and generate traffic towards my site.

The thing is, most of these keywords are info keywords only, so may not have that much value. After all, there is no point in having thousands of visitors to your site, if you can't monetise it at all... apart from being a meagre vanity metric!

Anyway, this week I planned out another 5 articles to one of my writers, which are all related to the product that he reviewed recently. Then I briefed in another massive product review article and related articles to my other writer, who has been writing awesome articles so far, for only $10 per 1000 words! He's never done a product review before but I think he's more than capable.

My short term plan is to keep getting decent content onto the site, and then when I get to Thailand I can try my hand at link building, which I haven't done any of so far, and am least looking forward to.

Copyright Infringement

The other business that is ticking along at the moment is my eBay business. This week I've put a 10% sale on all my products to see what happens and it seems to be driving a good number of sales already. I've also asked my VA if she knows anyone else that she can work with and possibly train, so we can increase the number of listings that we are adding each day, and it sounds like she's up for it.

So, on the one side, I was all for upscaling this business, then the next day I get an email from some company whose products I've just been listing on eBay, which had a 'Cease and Desist' letter attached. Basically the note said that I am unlawfully using their images, and do not have the right to promote their products so I have 24 hours to take the listings down or face legal action!!!

Not the best note to receive, so I took the offending listings down immediately and sent an email of apology stating it was an honest mistake. After this they sent me a follow up note, asking where I had bought the products from. At this point, I am doing the Ostrich, and ignoring them, because I don't think it's a good idea to tell them that I only buy the products when someone buys them from me!!

Plan for Next Week

Well, I know right now that I will have pretty much 0 time next week, so my goal is just going to be to publish 2 of articles that I received from my writer onto the affiliate website.

Make Money Online : Useful Resources

Affiliate Websites

The Idea

Recommended Reading

Internet Marketing Tools

My Verdict

Merch by Amazon

The Idea

Recommended Reading

Merch by Amazon Tools

My Verdict

eBay Dropshipping

The Idea

Recommended Reading

Dropshipping Tools

My Verdict

Matched Betting

The Idea

Recommended Reading

Matched Betting Tools

My Verdict

Social Trading

The Idea

Recommended Reading

Social Trading Tools

My Verdict

The Low Hanging System (Print on Demand)

The Idea

Recommended Reading

Low Hanging System Tools

My Verdict

Loi Krathong Festival : Chiang Mai, Thailand

Chiang Mai SEO Conference 2017 Review

and relax… You’re in Chiang Mai!

Welcome to the Thailand – The Land of a Thousand Smiles

It’s Getting Real

Affiliate Sites Competition

Copyright Infringement

Plan for Next Week

blog

Affiliate Websites

The Idea

Recommended Reading

Internet Marketing Tools

My Verdict

Merch by Amazon

The Idea

Recommended Reading

Merch by Amazon Tools

My Verdict

eBay Dropshipping

The Idea

Recommended Reading

Dropshipping Tools

My Verdict

Matched Betting

The Idea

Recommended Reading

Matched Betting Tools

My Verdict

Social Trading

The Idea

Recommended Reading

Social Trading Tools

My Verdict

The Low Hanging System (Print on Demand)

The Idea

Recommended Reading

Low Hanging System Tools

My Verdict

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Affiliate Sites Competition

Copyright Infringement

Plan for Next Week

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