Devil Works

Back here I wrote about my retirement project status saying it had slowed down, well it’s continuing slowly, life has been getting in the way a little, and I’m easily distracted while I’m online.
So far it’s like this:

1 site fully effective (ie all text link ads sold)
3 sites have gained a PR rank of 2 in the last Google update and will be listed on TLA shortly
1 site (this one) awaiting a PR rank of some sort before I add to TLA

2 sites that I’ve recently started and will need more work and a google PR update before I bother submitting them to TLA

93 more sites that I need to create

One of the things that is slowing me down is the Wordpress CMS I am using to create these sites. It seems that every second week an update is being issued that is critical for security reasons. If I get to the stage where I have 100 sites I don’t want to be updating the software on them every two weeks.

I’ve got a couple of options, Wordpress have a multi user version that I can upload but as far as I can see it means that all my sites would have to be on a subdomain. I have a domain I can use for this but I’m not sure if I have the tech skills to maintain the software as it isn’t as well supported as the standard wordpress version.

The other option I haven’t fully thought out is paying someone to write a script that will update all the sites, though this also might be a pain and I could be better off paying someone to help me maintain the multi user version.

Work on my retirement project has been slowed lately.

I’ve been busy with lots of different things and I’m probably going to be like that right up until Christmas (when I have about six weeks away from my day job)

So far I have

1 site fully effective (ie all text link ads sold)

1 site needs a new template then I will submit it to TLA

2 sites needing a few more posts and backlinks before I can submit them to TLA

94 more sites that I need to create

From that you can see it’s going to take me quite a while, but I’m not in it for the fast buck and I’ve set myself some rewards for achieving milestones.

My first one is that when my income hit’s $500 a month I can take an extra four weeks annual leave via a payroll deduction.

When it hit’s $5000 a month consistently for six months I can take a year off my day job.

I need to think of some more rewards in between $500 and $5000 to motivate myself, but I’m thinking some new toys and probably a little bit of travel wouldn’t go astray either.

Since my reality moment last week I have been working with renewed enthusiasm on my retirement project.

I also worked out that a site making me $90 a month is the equivilant of having $20,000 invested in a conservative bank account.

So on my todo list is to create 99 more blogs that make me atleast $90 a month. I’ve decided that at the moment I’ll throw my energy into creating 10 blogs just to prove the concept.

I’m going to also use adsense and one other affiliate PPC that I’ve heard good stories about.

So far I have one site fully effective, I’ve got two other blogs that I’ve started in the last few months that will be ready to apply to TLA shortly. I’ve started another one from scratch, and I have a handful more that I started over 12 months ago that I lost interest in. I’ll modernise these and get some fresh articles in them before I apply list them on TLA.

It’s a long way to go, but I’ve got the big picture in mind

Today I approved another ad at Text Link Ads which brought up my monthly income for the one site I run it on to around $90. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but later as I sitting at my desk doing my day job I had a thought, that $90 a month is around $1000 year.

Now $1000 isn’t a huge amount of money, I need a lot more than that in a year to live on, but then I thought about how I actually made that money.

About 18 months ago I started a blog about my credit card woes, mainly to make a little cash, but also to garner some interweb community support in my battle of material wants versus a life of credit card debt. It’s not a huge site, around 100 pages I think, and it might get 50 uniques on a good day. These days I make a short post on it about once a month.
About six months ago I read about this site called Text Link Ads which sells links for your site and shares the money with you. I was making stuff all with Adsense so I thought I would give it a try. All I had to do was put a bit of code into my site template and away it goes.
Once or twice a month I would get an email saying that I had a new ad to approve for my site. At the moment I’ve sold 7 out of a possible 8 links which is delivering about 90$ a month to my paypal account.

So what’s the point of this story your asking ?

Well it’s the oldest money making system in the world, find something that works and multiply it.
At the moment I have one site making $90 a month for probably 10 minutes of work each month. Now what if I was to have 100 sites making $90 a month, that would bring me close to $100,000 a year working around 20 hours a month.

My biggest problem will be my attention span, I’ve started on a dozen different ideas over the last 12 months but never stuck with any of them for various different reasons. So this time I need to set realistic goals and stick to them.

Update: I just found out that my concept isn’t unique. Work Boxers has an article on it here.