the journey to $10000 continues

Inflation is when you pay fifteen dollars for the ten-dollar haircut you used to get for five dollars when you had hair. ~Sam Ewing

Money earned since last update: $0.39 (48% increase week-on-week)
Money earned to date: $0.81

I have been spending the past week researching on the exciting ways of making money online and i can tell you that it takes tremendous effort to do so. Its side effects include late nights, swollen eyeballs, sleeping on the way to work and on the way home, neglecting the girlfriend and tv, basically a lot of good stuff.

I've approached my research in a few ways for now.

• I've been googling certain keywords and filtering off the results to the information that you want.

• I also surfed across forums for articles, resources and tips. Its been a wild goose chase following link after link reading and reading and clicking everywhere.

• I've been reading blog after blog about online marketing, affiliate marketing, content writing, search engine optimization etc. Despite doing e-marketing for a career, the need to find a niche in affiliate marketing makes it very different. I embrace the challenge as its really something i believe will expand my knowledge in the field.

I am proud to say though that the past week's research has been very fruitful and I am more convinced that I would be able to get on with it within the next month. Due to the vast amount of information i've found, I realised that the ability to digest information and articles and judge the reliability of the info is very important at this point or be doomed to information paralysis. I'm glad that my past career experiences (as a designer doing print design, multimedia design, web developer with several blue chip companies as clients and current career as e-commerce marketeer) helped me tremendously in putting the pieces of the puzzle together.

To reward myself today, I gave my girlfriend and I a buffet dinner treat at a highly rated hotel in town. We agreed that the cold dish and dessert sections were awesome and the number of plates (40 in total!) the waiters had to take off were testament to how much we ate. It was a nice way to redeem myself too and it worked very well. I managed to get myself back into her good books.

So for now, these are some actions that i shall take away and start working on.

• Start drawing mind maps of what niche topic to approach and its potential

• Expand the mind map and add in the networking channels

• Understand more on affiliate marketing tools

US$10,000 - A humble beginning

The only reason a great many American families don't own an elephant is that they have never been offered an elephant for a dollar down and easy weekly payments. ~Mad Magazine

Money earned to date: $0.42

I'm not gonna brag about how rich I am or how much money I've made. To be honest, there is nothing to brag about. I'm as broke as a gumball machine in Siberia. Not looking down on Siberians or anything like that but you get the picture. They're resilient people, i can't even endure air-conditioning without freezing myself over.

I don't make much from my day job and i don't save much either. Added to the fact that the place I'm living in has so much to indulge in; gadgets and gizmos, wining and dining, movies, girls (and the late-night beer due to the lack of them), it all adds up to the visuals of the New Poor. What is the New Poor? Guys like us belong to the new poor. We earn money, but we don't save it. We spend it on necessities that end up not really necessary. We don't fall into the income bracket that enjoys benefits and subsidies, and yet we have so much bills to pay that losing our jobs will put us in a disastrous situation. Sounds familiar? Maybe we have something in common.

So you might be wondering if this is another of those get rich quick websites that bang on the "Fake it till you make it" drums. Its not. I have no exact idea on how to make US$10,000 online. Notice that i wrote "no exact idea". There are a couple of loose ideas floating around in my untidy head that i need to sort out. But its all within the likes of the following:

Ways I am going to hit the US$10,000 target

1. Identify a theme. Identify a target audience. Create a website with attractive content that is link-worthy, genuinely and honestly enlightening or refreshing.
2. Encourage collaboration, discussions and sharing based on that attractive content.
3. Identify merchandise that can be sold, which is related to these content. Judge from responses of these discussions and collaborations on how far these merchandise can be sold.
4. You have content, you have traffic, you have merchandise. Time to bank on these to pull off another source of income: Affiliate marketing.
5. Monitor traffic, discussions and trends to see how far the whole money game can go.

These actions might change course or need to be refined along the way. Thats fine, because all action plans require monitoring to ensure targets are hit.

If you are interested in what i'm doing, stay tuned.

Meanwhile, I am going to put a counter at the top of my page to state how much I have earned thus far. I don't know how far this is gonna take me, but at least we all learn how to get there.