My Wealth Journey

In my never ending quest to find “the business”, I’ve started to put time in creating a system to receive and distribute leads of all kinds, ranging from mortgage leads, auto loan leads, debt leads, insurance leads and more to come. This isn’t a new idea at all, as there are many big players in the space such as LowerMyBills.

I don’t believe that you have to be the only unique company in the space to make money. Leads are here to stay and as some companies are struggling with high overhead due to the credit crunch, I hope to be in a good position to start making some money.

The key will be to generate the leads. I’m fortunate that I’ve had plenty of experience with SEO and affiliate marketing that I have generated leads before. However, in the past, I would just direct consumers to a 3rd party site and just receive a fee on a per lead basis. However, with my own system and business to distribute the leads, I’ll be able to afford to have spend more per lead and increase volume.

After being expose to the lead industry for a number of years, I’ve found there are a lot of very shady affiliates/lead sellers who will sell you recycle data. As a lead aggregator, one must be careful and avoid these guys like the plague. They will ruin your customers’ experience and your business will get a bad reputation.

Yahoo stock jumped up to over $33 at the time of this posting over news that Microsoft may buy the company. Is it really a good idea for Microsoft? Yahoo’s stock jumped close to 20% already just over the news that it will be bought out. So the purchase price would probably be close to $40 or so a share. Additionally, Yahoo’s P/E earnings is already higher than Google, even though investors are making a big stink about Panama.

I don’t think its a good idea for Microsoft to buy the company outright, maybe setup some kind of partnership instead. The deal would be great for Yahoo investors.

I do wonder what kind of affect this would have on SEO. MSN’s search engine results are more spammy and are a lot easier to get into which does benefit me. It’d be nice to keep their separate algorithm and to keep their brands different.

The mortgage subprime fall out has created a smaller pool of buyers and people who can refinance and has hit my former company. I learned that a few weeks ago half of a department (8 people) was let go. Although you can argue most saw the writing on the wall with the subprime mess, this shows the importance of having multiple streams of income.

I know most of these folks have families and some of them don’t have a working spouse because they stay home and take care of the kids. A job cut like that will definitely hurt them.  If they had other streams of income, (which I hope they do), the cut will give them a little bit of time and save them from financial stress of figuring out where to go next.

Since I’m in IT, I would naturally say, make money online. These folks were from non-IT jobs, but that does not mean they can’t start making money online. A simple blog about a topic they are knowledgeable would be a start for them. They would at the least be able to eventually sell text links and put up affiliate links (even if its just for friends and family).

I have a number of websites that I run where I go with the cheap under $5 a month hosting plans. Most of the time, these hosting companies are small one or two man shops. I’ve had two sets of sites be down for over 5 days because I kept on believing they would eventually fix the issue with their servers. Fortunately, these sites weren’t real money makers for me but they were still profitable so I was losing money in the end.

I finally signed up with another host and moved the sites off the servers that were down. When you choose to go with cheap hosting companies, you do need to check in on your sites every now and then to ensure they are up, especially if you have a pump and dump site as many of you affiliate marketers may have.

You get what you pay for.

I’m planning to meet with my CPA this afternoon to do my taxes for 2006. I’m hoping with a few investment properties and contribution I made to my own 401k Profit Sharing Plan will actually mean I get a refund back. This is a new CPA that I’m using from the past. The last few years I had to pay my share of taxes from my affiliate earnings and was hit hard with the self-employment taxes since I was doing business under a LLC so this year I had a S-Corp formed to help cut back on the self-employment taxes. This sold reduce my taxes by a decent amount.

What do you guys do about people hot linking images off your site? I just noticed that one of my affiliate sites that hardly gets traffic has had its bandwidth used up a little more than normal because of someone from myspace hotlinking the image. I bandwidth is very minimal so I’m not concerned about that.

There is nothing like waking up in the morning and seeing your affiliate marketing earnings doing well the previous day. I use a few affiliate networks so I don’t leave all my eggs in a single basket. When I first started, thats actually what I did. I figured, if I’m making X amount, I’m going to stick to it and didn’t think about diversfying too much. One day, Google’s SERPs jumped and pushed some of the sites from page 1 to nowhere and my earnings were cut in thirds. I’m still trying to recover from that and have since created different sites in different niches. I get more happy when the earnings are more evenly distributed across my sites rather than all from one site even if it means a little bit less revenue.