Ever feel like you could make more money if you just had more time! That’s how I feel every day. December was tough with the holidays and long hours at my day job but I still managed to accomplish a few things.
Business Finances – I figured out my books for the business for 2007, happy to say it was a profit! One crazy thing, I just got my annual performance increase at my day job and my business earnings for 2007 were more than three times the amount of the increase. I can’t wait to get rid of this job so I can spend all my time growing my business! I still need to pay my estimated taxes for Q4 2007, due here in a week or so.
Affiliate Relationships – One of the things that Amit recommended was to build a good relationship with your affiliate manager. So I called up my affiliate manager at Never Blue Ads and had a productive first phone call. I got some insight into which campaigns to promote in my niche. One of the things she mentioned was that the Earnings Per Click numbers you see as you’re browsing campaigns factor in all different types of marketing, Web/Email/Search. When I told her my niche and that I was going to be promoting offers with Pay Per Click she gave me EPC numbers that were just from PPC traffic.
Pay Per Click Campaign – I used the techiques I learned from Amit’s Super Affilate Accelerator course to setup, upload, and launch an Adwords campaign for one of the offers my affiliate manager pointed out. I’m monitoring its progress now and will tweak as needed.
Information Products – I completed my first information product, Easy eBay Business. I’ve been working at it off and on for a while now so it was nice to get it finished. I haven’t begun promoting it yet, I’ll probably use an Adwords campaign once I have time to build one.
I also started exploring a partnership for an information product with one of my online buddies who is a subject matter expert in the niche. He’s going to write a free report to give away, I’ll build a landing page and create an Adwords campaign and we’ll see how much demand there is.
One of my business advisors and friends recently finished an information product that should see demand sky rocket due to a new government policy. I spent some time on some content promoting their product and will likely set up an Adwords campaign there as well.
Time Management – I got my FreshBooks account back up and running again. I set it up at the beginning of the year but didn’t use it much. My only New Year’s resolution at this point is to make better use of my time since I tend to try and work on too many things at once. I’m tracking everything in FreshBooks now and every two weeks or so I’ll go over how I’m spending my time.
I tried out Mechanical Turk to outsource some basic tasks to help get content on a new site for a niche I’ve been wanting to move into for some time. I listed the same task on both Mechanical Turk and eLance and so far the bids on Mechanical Turk have been much more reasonable and in line with the scope of the job.
Next Month – Not bad I guess for a busy month at work and the with holidays. I’m going to continue to balance my multitude of project for January, then revaluate with some numbers from FreshBooks at the end of the month to see which projects to put on hold and which to pursue.