What Now?

So, having lost money, what are my next steps? Well, first I have to explain to my wife where the $25 went. Piece of cake, right? "Don't worry, honey, I just gave some off the wall website some free publicity at our expense." Next, I try again. I lower my cost per click bids, and even deactivate a couple of the campaigns. I let the active ones run all night, then check the progress in the morning. To my amazement, I made one sell!! My commission totaled $20.03. Since I spent $15 on clicks last night, I am now behind about $20.00.

No Money, Of Course

So I took about 2 weeks to research some online marketing programs. I signed up with Clickbank and chose a few digital products to start promoting. My next stop was Google Adwords. After setting up an account, I created a few ads and activated them. Within about an hour I had around 50 "clicks". These clicks cost on average about $0.50 per click. Do the math...that's 25 bucks. I didn't get a single sale.

This was very frustrating, considering that most of the products advertised 1:14 conversions. So, now I'm starting off losing money!!

How To Make Money!!! (Yeah, right)

For as long as I can remember, I wanted to be rich. I'm not talking about comfortable... I mean filthy, stinking rich. The older I get, the more transparent that dream has become. In its place, feelings of dread and anxiety accompany the coming of each new month. How will we pay rent? Are we going to have to skimp on groceries? How do we pay back the loan we just took out?

I think I'm getting ahead of myself... I believe introductions are in order. My name is Ryan and I am a 29 year old married father of two. I am a full-time student, which is the cause of the money troubles. I recently graduated with a Bachelor's of Biology, and am currently working on my MBA. I recently took the MCAT and scored a 32 O. My long-term goal is to go to medical school and become a pediatrician.

How do I have time to blog? Easy, the kids are asleep! In this blog, I will document my many online endeavors to make money. It should be a fairly painful process, since I am pretty sure I will have to invest some money in order to make a profit.

This is a learning process for me, and I am very willing to share my findings with anyone else looking for some online profit. I began my search at Yahoo, mainly because that's currently my home page. Upon running one search on "how to make money online", a seemingly endless sea of exclamation points and "sure-fire" get-rich-quick schemes barraged my senses. Realizing that all of the results looked similair, I decided to go to the next page of results. I started seeing more review pages than offer pages; these pages appeared to be someone who was kind enough to host an entire website dedicated to saving me money!! The sincere wording, initial negative description of the product, and overall amateur feel of the review site gave me a false sense of safety. Could this person really be trying to help me??

As I conducted more research, I discovered something called affiliate marketing. This is probably what everyone who blogs has in mind these days. It occurred to me that this "reviewer" was working for the very website he was "reviewing". (I know, I know, it's so obvious, now.) With a little creative thinking, he was able to feign an initial feel of caution at the beginning of his review. He asked himself the very questions I had asked about the product. He then appeared to go through the same learning process. By the end of the review, he had magically concluded that the product under review was worth the money spent. He then conveniently included a link for me to try the product for myself....