This is just little notes for those of you interested. My Friday ramblings!
Approaching $10K!
This month of April bodes well for the $10K mark that you will see posted. I’ve already done estimates for this target, indicating that I will pass the mark by the end of April. Stay tuned for the income report (it won’t be spectacular, but more than enough to take us over the barrier).
It’s been quite a trek to reach the target. But I’ve managed to earn that $10K and I’ve managed to learn a great deal about the what’s and wherefore’s of making money online and offline.
Anyway, that’s for April 30th.
Affiliate Earnings
My friend, Steve, who runs a website and education agency here in Taipei, was telling me that affiliate marketing is where he’s headed. This is quite a wake-up call for me. In fact, I have been doing a little affiliate stuff for a while through venerable deals, such as Amazon, webhosting deals, and so on. You’ll notice that there are a few affiliate deals on this website, including TTZ media ads, MillionaireMate, etc.
These affiliate earnings just don’t generate much but I’m always surprised by how much Amazon brings in. I generated $95.81in sales (it’s not so much in actual earnings) since the beginning of the year. Not bad. It’s a little encouragement for me, because affiliate marketing always seems so hard.
Blog Carnivals
Other projects in the works include the next installment of the Carnival of Making REAL Money. It’s been quite a dog this time, with over 120 submissions (much junk!) and 81 verified. I had to eliminate dozens of entries for the simplest of reasons including:
- multiple submissions from the same blog/author;
- articles with no commenting function;
- articles with closed comments;
- articles that are reposted from article directories;
- articles that I can’t understand, don’t make sense, are crap or irrelevant.
It’s amazing how many people think that Blog Carnival is just a receptacle for their spam. It’s also amazing to see how people just do not bother to read the individual Blog Carnival’s criteria. It’s also quite shocking that someone (and there quite a few!) who keep resubmitting the same (junk) articles each issue (and never seem to wonder why it’s not published!)…
But to those other great article writers who submit each issue, I must say thank you AGAIN! Just check out the carnival to see who they are!
Credit Card Debt
I usually give a credit card report and the past few months I’ve made slightly costly mistakes. This month, though, I only had three transactions to report: NT$2000 for the regular life insurance payment, NT$2018 that we paid for a meal in a restaurant in late March. I’m a sucker for Indian food ever since I worked as a waiter in a well-known Indian restaurant in Edinburgh called Kalpna. The restaurant in Taipei’s Tienmou is a fairly recent addition to the local Indian Food scene which has been improving markedly in the last few years.
The last was a license for a JumpBox installation of WordPress. This is called a virtual appliance. The appliance installs a full Apache server with MYSQL on a Linux base. On top of that, you get an install of WordPress as well. It works well, I find. I had to pay for a license to be able to access the FTP side of things. And when I deployed it at school, it just worked out of the box, and across all the computers. So it was well worth the fee of $49.99.
Total credit card fees were about NT$5,555 with no penalties or credit card charges either! Nice!
Splurging…
Well, it would have been nice, but to celebrate the $10K mark, I finally bought a new 19″LCD monitor from ViewSonic… It wasn’t particularly expensive, nor was it an impulse buy. I really would like to have two such monitors (one for each pc) so that I can be a little more productive on my blog by running two screens at once.
I’ve also been buying a few CDs, which added to my ‘splurge’… so I thought I’d leave you with a couple of the YouTube Videos
And the theme music from Grey’s Anatomy, which is a song I love,
and this song by Snow Patrol…
Have a great weekend! 😀