While 5 years certainly sounds like a long time (gessh, I’ll be 25 then) , there’s no reason why you shouldn’t plan that long ahead.

VOASI made a great point the other day about planning ahead.

“The internet isn’t going anywhere and you’ll always need cash. I like to tell people this: 5 years is going to come whether you like it or not. Would you rather have 500 sites in 5 years (100 a year/8 a month) that are generating $600 a day or have a few sites that you gave up on…”

If you follow a plan like that, what you’ll end up seeing is 80% of your revenue coming from 20% of your sites (the 80:20 principle). Based on that logic, let’s say I’m aiming for $100 a day with 10 sites: 2 of your sites will make $80 a day combined, while the other 8 sites will make the remaining $20 each day. You’ll never get to those big per-day earning sites if you stop at the ones that only make you a couple bucks a day (or less).

Keep building. Not for short term gains, but for long term stability.

My cat named Guidey (pronounced Guide-E) is around 15 or 16 years old. He’s gotten a little thin lately and gets sick every once and a while, but that’s understandable for a cat his age. I’ve had my fair share of scares when he goes missing, that maybe he crawled somewhere to die, yet he always manages to be okay.

Why am I telling you this?

Well, there’s a valuable lesson here. That’s why!
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I’ve got to give credit where it is due.

Adam over at VOASI successfully launched his Adsense Niches membership site and sold out within hours! It’s top shelf stuff; I recommend anyone interested to sign up on his waiting list to be notified when openings become available.

Nice work Adam!

Sure, we all do! (so we think)

But Alex Tew put his to use with the Million Dollar Homepage, which as of today has made him more than $1,000,000.

His strategy was to raise some money for college by selling 1 million pixels on his homepage for $1 a piece, with a minimum order of 100 pixels for $100. Advertisers then submit an image meeting those dimensions and provide a link for the image. Once the site was picked up by the press, things really took off for Alex, netting him his goal in only a few months.

This success story brings an interesting point to light: (more…)

This is perhaps the most important advice you’ll ever get for running an online business:

Finish What You Start!

When people are serious about making a living from affiliate programs, they often first learn that a bunch of banner ads on one page isn’t going to cut it.

They begin to wise up and stumble across a good system from a guru to build sites to make money. They give it a try for a few months, but nothing happens. And then they make their biggest mistake - they quit that system and try another, often after purchasing another internet marketing e-book. The new system doesn’t work after a few months, so they try another, and another, and…. you get the idea.

It takes time to build up consistent income, it will rarely, if ever happen over night.

I recommend that you find a system that’s known to be reliable and then stick with it for a year. Yes, a YEAR. You’ll be pleasantly surprised by your results.

Here’s two other great articles on the topic of consistency:
Consistency and Follow-Through
Stop Procrastinating - 10 tips to get yourself blogging

Interesting post over at VOASI by Adam Maywald yesterday.

I’m all for experimentation, which is why I build a variety of sites in different formats.

Well, Adam’s been running a test building custom directory generator sites for the past 2 to 3 months with an uncommon software tool.

With 8 sites and a little over 2 months, his test sites are making $20 a day, considerably more than the average affiliate makes per day.

But as Adam says, “Still, the trick is to get links to these sites to get them crawled.” Many people throw up these types of sites and expect them to garner traffic on their own. Experienced marketers often have better luck with these projects as they have other reputable sites that they can use to link to their other, lower quality sites.

Interesting stuff.

From now on, every week I’m going to attempt to bring you an inspiring story of ordinary people being sucessful with online businesses. Here you won’t find pitches for products to make thousands overnight, but stories of pure sweat equity.

The first story is about an individual named Justin D’Angelo, pictured to the upper-right, whom I read about at CNN Money. (more…)