5 Bucks a Day

All major successes start with an idea.

Thomas Edison had an idea that it would be possible to light up dark rooms with a little tube and electricity.  It took quite a while, but the light bulb came out of it, aren’t we glad he didn’t give up after only a few hundred failures?

I don’t know who, but someone had the bright idea, after many decades, that a telephone didn’t really need to be wired into a wall.  A multi billion dollar industry was born.

A young man in the U.K. had an ingenious idea last year that he could sell ads on a web page for a dollar a pixel, and sold out of the entire inventory of a million pixels.

Bill Gates had an idea that IBM could use some programming help when he heard they were coming out with a personal computer, while he was still in college.  The rest is history.  Microsoft outlasted the IBM PC, imagine that.

Ideas can be a dime a dozen for some, in fact most people, hopefully not for you.

A single idea, sometimes a simple idea, sometimes a very easily implemented idea, can be worth 5 or 6 figures annually, sometimes much more.  The key is that the idea has to be acted upon.

I’ve recently started a new membership site, called Earn1KaDay.com, which in essence is several things, but the thing I’m most excited about is that it’s an idea incubator.

Not only do we provide members with fresh downloadable reports and software programs that help them succeed, we also discuss income generating ideas.  Some old.  Some new.  Some have been done before.  Some haven’t.

The other day we were discussing something at the forum, and I started responding off the top of my head, and I suddenly realized that what was coming out was a great idea.

I almost decided to erase that thought and save the idea for my own action, but then I said to myself, let’s have some fun and see if anyone notices what this idea is capable of.  Let’s see if anyone picks up the ball and runs with it.  I have no idea if someone has gone off into a dark corner and started working, maybe more than one person, time will tell, but I’ll tell you this about that idea …

It has the possibility of being a 6-figure idea.  Monthly.

Yes it will take some work.  Less than Thomas Edison worked though.

Yes it will take some technical skills.  Less than Bill Gates used though.

In coming posts, from time to time, I’ll give more insight into Earn1KaDay.com as it evolves.  Right now, it’s a low entry price membership site.  Yes, you do have to pay to join, but think about it.  If everyone in the world was let in, there would be tremendous competition for those 6-figure monthly ideas, wouldn’t there?

As it is, there’s not much competition at all, and never will be, since the membership will be capped at a maximum of probably around 800 people.

So how much is an idea worth to you?  Earn1KaDay is full of them.  If they’re worth a dime a dozen to you, then don’t bother joining.  However … well, let’s leave it at that for now.

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I just read a very informative post over at the Google AdSense blog (not that others aren’t informative, but this one struck me as especially so).

Have you ever clicked on an AdSense ad on your own page?  You’re not supposed to, but many people do, or ask their friends to, and that’s clearly against AdSense TOS and will probably get you banned and your earnings forfeited.

But in case of accident, it’s refreshing to read this about accidental clicks.

I remember doing that once upon a time.  I was trying to copy and paste some text near the ad block, and I put the cursor a little over into the AdSense area, clicked my right mouse button, and was whisked away to an ad.

My heart stopped.  OMG, what will happen?  Right away, I found out my IP address, and sent an email to AdSense support to tell them about it, and that it was an accident.

Turns out you don’t really have to tell them if it happens, and if it doesn’t happen except once in a blue moon, it’s not a problem.

Just make sure it really is an accident, otherwise it could be a serious matter, to be sure.

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As I’ve mentioned before, one of the keys to the 5 Bucks a Day strategy is focus.

In fact, many of my readers email me to thank me for reminding me about that.

It’s such a simple thing, isn’t it? Yet it’s so easy to overlook. And so devastating when you forget this key principle.

It’s like driving down the road, you should be focusing on traffic, but your cellphone rings, you pick it up, you start talking, you miss a turn, and you end up going the wrong way. Or worse, you end up in an accident.

Failure to focus is an accident waiting to happen.

The reason I brought this up today is someone forwarded this little movie clip to me today, it’s worth watching:
http://www.thefocusmovie.com

The ability to focus on a single project that has a likelihood of producing income for you is what makes the difference between failure and success.

I’m convinced of it. Before I started paying attention to focusing on small individual projects, I was an educated failure. After I started focusing, my education didn’t change, my skills didn’t change. My income took off like a rocket.

Hmm. Worth trying, isn’t it?

Don’t forget to watch the focus movie.

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I just saw a post on the official Google blog talking about their new Hot Trends search page.

Here’s yet another research tool to tell you what people are looking for right here, right now.  Or yesterday or the day before if you care to go back in time.

Admittedly, most of the results won’t be anything most people will create a web site for, or even be able to monetize if they did, but occasionally I suspect you’ll find something that will be interesting that you can promote or design a page for.

You never know what’s going to get hot overnight.  I might have told the story here before, if I did I apologize, but I think I just might have told it more privately.  In any event, I had a page go crazy a couple years ago, I know it was May 15th because it was on my son’s birthday, I think it was 2 years ago, whenever the latest Star Wars movie was about to come out.

Out of nowhere I had 10’s of thousands of hits on a single page on one of my sites.  All those people were looking for Star Wars t-shirts, and my page was ranked #1 on Yahoo at the time.  Normally I would get a few hits a day, on that day it exploded.

That’s why I advise people to build VRE (virtual real estate), the more pages you get out there, the more opportunities you have for serendipitous events to occur.

The Star Wars hit wasn’t the only time I’ve been fortunate, and it won’t be the last.

Anyway, check out the Hot Trends page, and start thinking about how current trends will enable you to predict future ones, and profit from them.

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There has been some expensive software made available recently, I may not be evaluating it correctly since I haven’t been hyped into joining the memberships that license it, but basically what they claim to do is allow you to supposedly learn what campaigns should be successful by analyzing ads currently being displayed.

The assumption is that if an advertiser has been running a particular pay per click ad for so many days, weeks, or months, it’s successful and profitable.

And if that ad is profitable for that advertiser, you should be able to jump into that market, copy or improve on the ad, and be profitable yourself.

In theory, that could be correct, or not. At least it’s an educated guess based on analysis, that has driven the direct mail market for many years.

There’s a difference in direct mail, though, if you see an ad in USA Today in the sports section, the ad is much more visible and the costs are much more predictable than if the ad was only being run on Google and viewed if someone typed in a selection of a couple dozen specific keyword phrases.

In other words, it’s easy to copy the ad from USA Today and run it in a publication with similar demographics, it’s not quite so easy to figure out what keywords the AdWords advertiser is targeting, or what his bid price is, or what he’s paying to be profitable because of the differences quality score makes.

Of course assumptions are not always correct. The advertiser could be stupid. The advertiser could have deep pockets and is making money not on this ad, but on backend sales. The ad could be profitable for some keywords and not others, and you’re analyzing the keywords that aren’t profitable. Or any number of other scenarios.

One of our members at 5 Bucks a Day, Matt Levenhagen, has written an insightful blog post on the subject here, which you should read:
http://blog.campaignblasts.com/competitive-analysis-tools-is-this-the-end-of-adwords-as-we-know-it.htm

One of the software tools which I almost subscribed to when it came out supposedly has a feature that I found particularly offensive. Again, I’m not on the inside, so I’m not sure this is true, but it’s what I understood from reading the sales page and emails. Supposedly if you found a successful ad in your tracking, you could also find other ads that the same affiliate was running in other markets. It seems that the servers built up a history of all the profitable markets that other members found, and would share them.

So if you found that affiliate X was running a profitable campaign (supposedly) on green widgets, and another member found the same affiliate X was running profitable campaigns for lawn chairs and jogging shoes, the system would tell you that. Forget the fact that the other member was paying several hundred dollars a month to find profitable campaigns, his efforts would be shared with you, and yours with him.

Will these aggressive software tools mean there is no longer a level playing field in affiliate marketing? Time will tell.

Three things. First, read Matt’s blog post, it’s good info. Second, make a comment on this post if I’ve given any incorrect information, if you’re a member of any of these sites that do the competitive analysis. And third: Don’t worry if you aren’t a member. There’s plenty of markets out there for everyone.

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I believe Internet marketers are among the most fortunate people on the face of the earth.

Once they “get it”, their return on investment can be phenomenal. Let’s look at the big picture.

If someone put their money into a safe money market fund, and put in $100 at the beginning of the year, at 5% simple interest (just to keep the exercise simple, we’ll forget about the small advantage of daily compounding), if the account had gotten up to $105 by the end of the year, the ROI would be 5%.

You calculate ROI by dividing the end value (105) minus the beginning value (100), then dividing the result (5) by the beginning value (100), times 100 to yield percentage.

So (End – Begin) / Begin X 100

The ROI in this case would be 5%.

Many banks pay much less, so some people are very happy to get a safe 5% return, or a little better with a little riskier investment.

Day traders can work all day looking for higher returns, but the risk is greater.

Now let’s look at Internet marketers.

Let’s say someone has an eBook that they sell. If it sells for $27, what’s the ROI?

That’s a difficult question to answer until you know the cost of selling it. First of all, it’s not a physical product, so there is no cost of paper and printing. It’s residing in cyberspace, so the cost there is very low, just the cost of hosting per month divided by the number of sales per month.

So for the sake of argument, let’s say it cost $1. If sold for $27 after Clickbank fees, the ROI would be 2600%. But if you sold one a day, it would be 2600% per day, not per year!

So those of you who have your own products, consider yourself very fortunate. Those of you that don’t have your own products, does that motivate you to make one?

Let’s take another scenario. Let’s say you’re an affiliate marketer, promoting products for other people. If you have a web site that’s receiving free search engine traffic, and you promote that $27 eBook, and receive a commission of maybe $13.50 after Clickbank fees, what’s your ROI? Answer: 1250% for whatever period of time it took you to make the sale.

But those figures aren’t fair because you really aren’t investing anything to earn your income. A better scenario is if you are making an investment, and no longer waiting for a sale. What if you can cause a sale to happen by paying for it?

Like using pay per click advertising …

If you know your market, through testing and tracking, and you can consistently earn $1.50 in affiliate commissions for every $1.00 you spend on AdWords ads, then your ROI is 50%. That’s huge, but it’s typical, to be honest, many do much better.

As an AdWords advertiser and an affiliate marketer, the trick then becomes to see how many dollars you can spend. If you only spend $1.00 per day, getting back $1.50 isn’t so exciting.

However, if you can spend $500 a day, and get back $750, you’ve made $250 for your day’s efforts. Plus if you put that campaign on autopilot, and make sure you have enough money available on the credit card that Google will charge for the advertising expenses, you now have an income stream that will make you wealthy.

Ask a day trader how he’d like to make a 50% ROI every day and he’ll salivate all over the floor. Internet marketers do that consistently, once they “get it”.

The next problem, once you’ve found a way to consistently make $750 income from spending $500 daily, is figuring out how to spend more.

Ah, yes. Donald Trump may be able to spend 10 million dollars on a real estate deal that will net him a 20% ROI, but can you? Can I?

Not really. First of all, I don’t have a credit line that large, and 2nd of all, no matter how many ads you purchase for a niche market, there are only so many searchers looking for that particular item, and even if all of them clicked on your ad, you could only spend a finite amount.

So then, the trick becomes finding another market. And another. And another. Thereby building the amount of money you’re able to invest in advertising.

If someone told you they’d sell you ten dollar bills for $7, how many would you buy? Answer: as many as he’d let you buy, right?

Once you exhausted his supply, the next step is finding another person to sell his ten dollar bills for $7 or $6, or even $8. Heck, I’d pay $9 for a $10 bill any day of the week, wouldn’t you?

That, my friends, in a nutshell, is what 5 Bucks a Day is all about. It doesn’t mean you have to advertise with Google AdWords to get your income, but it means that bit by bit you find more and more people (figuratively) to sell you their ten dollar bills for a lower price.

Find a new seller every week (a new “project”, I call it), and after enough weeks, you’re doing very well.

5 Bucks a Day. It’s an incredible strategy meant to not only increase your ROI, but to maximize your total returns. You see, if you make $5 for every $10 investment you have a 50% ROI. If you make $500 for every $1000 investment, you still have a 50% ROI.

Which would you rather have? The return on investment doesn’t matter so much in this case as the magnitude of investment.

And yes, it’s even better if your investment is approaching zero, as many Internet marketers with their own products find.

Won’t you join us? Internet marketing really is a marvelous occupation. Nothing is guaranteed, but once you “get it”, it can be addictive.

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When surfing around, I happened over to Jon Leger’s $7 offers site where he has sort of a directory of a ton of neat eBooks created ala his $7 Secrets style.

I actually issued 5 Bucks a Day, Jr. in that format, but never submitted the book to this directory.

It seems someone else did, one of my affiliates, which is totally fine since I chose not to, and my book, with all sales going to this other person, is #1 on the charts of bestsellers.

I really missed an opportunity with this one, didn’t I?

I have to give credit where credit is due, my affiliate saw an opportunity and ran with it, I can tell from my logs of people that have signed up on my email list that there have been 100’s of sales through that affiliate link.  Other affiliates have done better, though.

All the money goes to them, you should check it out, if you purchase 5 Bucks a Day, Jr., it tells inside how to resell it for 100% commissions.

And while I was over at $7 Offers, I saw some really good reading material at around $7 each of course, you should check it out yourself:

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