The problem was partly my own and partly the affiliate’s.

I had most of my income coming from one source which is never a good idea, spread your eggs and diversify.

The program was always going to end, the fact is the product had already been sold for the most part, I just negotiated my offer with the affiliate and it got me a small cut of the sales. My ability to send them genuine referrals with this method was limited and they were always going to realise that at some point.

Oddly enough though that was not what killed the program, it was the affiliate undercutting their own partners. If there is an unwritten etiquette of affiliate programs they surely broke it. Even if I send them genuine referrals now there is a good chance the customer will search for and find their offer undercutting me,which means they actually steal back the commission I would otherwise have been paid. They are completely within their rights to do what they have done but it is really really poor form for a company that otherwise seems to do a good job of building community and managing the social media side.

All they have really done is piss off their partners and their program still has the same flaw.

Further, I’ve not received a single payment from them, I don’t expect they will try to avoid paying me as they are well known and respected company but the total owing is quite considerable and I have been waiting months now for payment. Regardless April was a record month thanks to some link sales, May is nowhere near April but still enough to keep me confident.

So I’m back to the drawing board and will start developing some new sites, I’ve got to get this moving if it is to become my main income source.

Re-purposing

Never Ever get rid of anything you publish online, ever. If you decide to shut down a site, fine but take everything you’ve put on it and store it somewhere else, you’ve spent precious time or money on that content, do not throw it away. You may not be able to re-purpose everything but you will come across something eventually and if you’ve let the content go you will really regret it. Even crappy old articles you have no idea what to do with can be used to chuck a link in and submit to an article directory.

Back Up!

You’ll make a stupid mistake or just get unlucky eventually. I accidentally deleted a database for a site that was growing rather quickly, everything was gone. We managed to get some of the content back from Google’s cache but we lost most of it, it took the wind out the project and we ended up letting it go. Back up your sites and everything on your own PC as well. Sadly most of us learn this lesson the hard way.

SEO

When it comes to making money and you’ve chosen an affiliate program/product, after creating the content for your site to help sell it the most important thing you can do is SEO. Your SEO ability is the deciding factor in if you will be successful as an internet marketer, the value of a number one position can’t be underestimated. SEO will promote your website and promotion will improve your SEO, build links. It is boring for most, including me but it works. You should understand what is important in SEO, I think this article does the best job at illustrating that, however if you target long tail keywords the on site stuff can have a bigger effect on your rankings.

The Hump

If you are not one of those lucky few who throw up a site and are off like a rocket when you earn your first Adsense dollar you will like most Internet marketers spend at least a few months, possibly even a year or more struggling and wondering if it is even worth it. If you keep persisting, keep learning and most importantly keep practicing what you learn eventually it will begin to pay off. The hump is the tipping point, you struggle up the hill and eventually you start seeing the gains and income that indicated this is going to work. You’ve reached the hump, making money just becomes a process, it’s no longer such a struggle, the anguish about reaching your goals disappears, now you know what works and what you have to do.

It Takes Money

Yes you can do it for nothing, the question is how long do you want it to take to reach the hump described above. If you join a program that has a formula to follow and at least a support forum. I joined The Keyword Academy and retrospectively it is at that point that things started to move for me. Another I would consider is Wealthy Affiliate. Programs like these have a proven formula and include some of the tools you will need.

Other tools like UAW for article marketing are usually recommended, I don’t have a UAW subscription, for the number of submissions I do the cost is not worth it. Don’t feel like you have to subscribe to these tools, there is a market out there for people like me and you, many people let you send them your submission and they will submit it using their account for a small fee. When this becomes more expensive than the subscription cost sign up and start doing it yourself.

A world of warning, ebook programs suck, I lost count of how many I went through. Real programs offer support in one form or another, IM ebooks are just other IMs trying to make a quick and easy buck off newbies. If it’s free, take it and learn what you can, if you want to buy an ebook that is fine, you’ll probably learn from it, but don’t expect it to fully equip you.

So there are the 5 hardest lessons I’ve learned in IM but it is not all, there is at least one more major thing you need to to learn… next post, Self Responsibility.

Anyway what I wanted to do here was share what I think are some of the best themes and theme makers out there.

Top contenders for the new Voyagner theme are… WP-Genius, WP-MediaMag and Monograph

It is probably in that order too, Genius is slick, I’m liking it more and more and it has great potential. MediaMag has some cool features, I like how it can be used for video, but I’m not so sure about the overall look. Monograph is a cool look but I think it just has too much whitespace for me and will require too much work to get it to do what I want. I’d love to hear what you guys think of these themes, leave a comment with your thoughts.

These days I rarely even consider free themes, there are some great ones out there, premium quality even, if you don’t have the money for a paid theme you can still have a professional looking blog, it will just take a little more searching.

Templatic has an excellent range of themes, if you do any sort of marketing online or build Wordpress sites for clients there are a bunch of themes there that are excellently designed with certain types of sites in mind. I have my eye on a few for sites that need an overhaul, this is the first place I check out when looking for premium themes, love ‘em. WPZoom and Solostream is where my shortlisted themes are from also have a bunch of other high quality themes that are definitely worth a look.

Off course I have to also mention the big boys at WooThemes; the current theme on Voyagner is one of theirs and they have some really great work, Gazette being one of my favourites but I was disappointed when I discovered hidden code in their themes. I’ll continue to use their themes if they suit my needs but they aren’t my first choice. I was inspired to use the current theme after seeing the beautifuly modified version on Income Diary, but now I’m looking for something that will suit the changes coming my blog’s way.

I stumbled across NewWPThemes.com which has very good collection of slick looking free themes that I think are perfect for giving niche sites like those I am currently building a much better look. They might not be quite as SEO friendly as far as coding goes but I think the visual improvement is worth it. Many of them are just rehashes of the same theme but I’m giving them a thumbs up. Also check out IsoTherm for a unique and very customisable free magazine theme, this was another one I considered, check out this review.

To get your hands on some premium themes on the cheap you can’t go past ElegantThemes, for $20 you get access to all the themes for a year including new releases. The eNews theme was an early candidate for the new Voyagner theme but just has more whitespace than I am looking for in this case.

The final option is a custom theme, it is becoming more appealing to me but I need to grow my site/s considerably to really make it worthwhile. The theme that gives the nearest functionality and is probably easiest to be modified into a completely custom theme is Thesis, you can even get themes for this theme, they seem to call them skins though, it’s a bit weird but there are some really good ones availible.

I think I’ve pretty much decided on WP-Genius but I will let it stew for a little while, it is a theme that is well suited to my future plans for Voyagner. If you are looking for a new theme or thinking of starting a blog then these sources are highly recommended so get searching

Well it’s about time for an update, I’m going to focus on what I’ve been learning mostly.

I made my first submission to UAW (Unique Article Wizard), it has so far taken the page form the end of page 3 to midway up page 2 in the SERPS for the main target keyword, keyword cousins are now around the same. I need to give it more time to really see how effective it will be, but my first thoughts come in a formula: link qaulity/number of links/cost of UAW=little value. That meaning mostly that I think the link quality is too low to be worth subscribing to UAW ($67mth), for this submission I just paid someone else $4 to use their account. Really though I should reserve judgement until Google finished doing its thing and the rankings settle. On the plus side it has resulted in a couple of sales, although they don’t amount to much.

I’ve been using article rewriting software to to help me out further. I think me tactic with this to start with will be to write an article for Ezine, rewrite it using the software and take 10-15 rewrites from that to submit to other article directories that give quality backlinks. It is also becoming evident that I’m going to have to work more on blogroll links and similar exchanges. I hate this method but they are good links and that is the most important thing. I’m also finding certain directories or groups run by the search engines like Yahoo groups are good places to get links.

I’ve started 3 new niche sites, testing out hubpages and done a bit of spying. Let me tell you, unless you are really hardcore about hiding your sites it isn’t difficult for someone to uncover them if they want to, pseudonyms and private registrations or not.

I’ve also found a solid place for outsourcing content creation which I’ll be calling on more and more regularly, this will allow me to focus on finding more niches, getting a site up quickly and creating a bunch of properties

In other news I’ve just found out today that my application on a new apartment was successful, this means it will be a busy two weeks for me as I have to move in ASAP before I leave for 3 weeks traveling in Cambodia and Thailand starting on the 18th. The move is finacially motivated, this smaller/cheaper apartment will really help me out but there will be an inital loss in breaking my lease.

About Me

I’m 25 and from Australia, last year I took a 3 month sabbatical from my job to travel in Southeast Asia. The day I returned I bought and started reading a book I spotted in the airport the day I left, yes it was the famous 4 Hour Workweek by Tim Ferris. I’d just had the best experience of my life and I come home and read a book telling me I can live that lifestyle full time. It was a recipe that completely changed how I wanted to live my life.

I don’t remember how but I guess while doing some research I came across some sites like Digital Nomads and NuNomad. I knew this would be my future.

My Sites

I’ve been blogging off and on for a few years now. My main site is Voyagner.com, it’s my travel and lifestyle design blog. For now I’m keeping my other sites to myself but it’s no huge secret, they are generally travel related. I’ll likely reveal some later, if you really want to know, well, there are ways.

My Goals

• To be earning $1000 a month by the end of September 2010.
• Move to somewhere in Southeast Asia to start with, Thailand, Cambodia, Indonesia and Philippines are top of the list.
• Utilize systems and outsourcing to ensure this requires as little time to maintain as possible.

The ultimate goal is freedom, to travel and live abroad and to get involved in something bigger than just making money and sipping cocktails on the beach, not that I won’t be doing plenty of that too.

My Plan

I’m working on 10 initial sites, some extremely niche, some that can start small but have room for a lot of expansion. Generally initial monetization will be with Adsense but Links and Affiliates will be used in some instances as well. The basics of IM are, well, very basic. To start with…

• 10 Sites with 5 keyword targeted posts on each.
• 5 Articles with backlinks submitted to article directories.
• 1 UAW submission for each site.

I’m a member of TKA and these tasks are the basics of building sites using the method laid out there, once that is done we’ll look at how they perform and do some more advanced monetization and development.

That’s it for now, there will be no posting schedule on this blog, maybe I will start one later on. For now I just hope that those people who know my goals will follow and those who are interested in this concept will as well.