I’ve decided to start a new project with this blog.  A couple of days back, I read the following excerpt from a newsletter from marketingtips.com and it reminded me so much of me that I felt it was time to do things differently.  Here it is:

Dear Derek,

I put up my first website a year ago. And I’m
embarrassed to say it’s making less than $100 per
month. Now, I’m writing to you because I’m very
frustrated with my website’s lack of progress. It’s
pathetic. But that’s not the half of it.

You see, my inbox gets flooded with offers every week
from different Internet marketing gurus. Each one
promising me riches. Each one promising to show me how
to make more money online. And in many cases I took
the bait.

I order their product.

After downloading it, I’ll spend a little time going
through it and then I soon get distracted by something
else.

So the new product I just purchased ends up sitting on
my hard drive, collecting dust. Another $500 down the
drain!

As I look back over the past 12 months, I’ve spent a
small fortune on different products that promise to
teach me the secrets of “making it” online.

Frankly, I’m feeling overwhelmed with information
overload. And what’s worse, I haven’t made a dollar
more.

As if that’s not enough, my wife is pissed off with
me. Look, I don’t blame her. She sees me spending all
this money and doesn’t see me producing any tangible
results.

Bottom line, I’m in a horrible rut and I was hoping
you can point me in the right direction. What advice
do you have?

Jeff Thompson
Dallas, Texas

Does this sound familiar to you?  I’m sure it does for a lot of internet marketers out there.  I know I’ve been guilty of taking up too many projects at one time, trying to juggle everything when I don’t even have 24 hours in a day.  In the end, I end up with a half-baked job out of all of them rather than creating something great out of one.

They say that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and hoping for different results.  Well, I’m going to change what I’ve been doing and do things a little differently to see if I can improve my results.  To ensure that I’m accountable for my actions, I’ve decided to blog about it here.  Consider this series of blog posts my real life case study if you will and let’s see what I can make out of it in one year’s time.

One of my biggest passions in life is writing.  Out of writing stemmed the passion for blogging.  It has also been my dream to make a living out of something I enjoy doing.  After hearing so many success stories from professional bloggers, I am keen to add my name to the growing list.  If I could make a replacement income out of blogging (I’ll take what I used to earn at my last company as my bench mark – which is approximately USD2k/month not including benefits and bonuses), I’ll officially consider myself a professional blogger.

However, this isn’t going to be just another blog about how to make money online.  This is going to be an account of my own personal journey towards becoming a professional blogger.  Do I currently make money online?  Yes, I do.  Is it a replacement income?  No, it is not.  At least, not by the standards of what I used to earn – $2k/month.

Taking a leaf out of John Chow’s book, I’m going to blog about how much I’m currently earning from my blogs.  This is purely to serve a benchmark to for me to work against.  I currently have 12 blogs online, most of which are monetised in one way or another.  In combination, they earn me anywhere between $400-600/month (which is probably about how much a fresh graduate can expect to earn locally, although it isn’t an amount I could possibly live off).  The bulk of my income comes from three of my blogs – two which are pretty much automated and one which requires me to write to in order to make money.

Around about August 2007, I signed up for Yaro Starak’s Blog Mastermind Mentorship Program.  Although I had the best intentions to really work at it to achieve the target income of $5k/month, I ended up like Jeff Thompson – I eventually got distracted and didn’t really get very far.  However, what little I did do (and believe me it was very little) was enough to convince me that Yaro’s mentorship program was the real deal because the bulk of what I earn now is all due to the tips I picked up from Yaro’s course.  So if you’ve just started a blog with the intention of monetising it or you have a blog but aren’t making much money, I really recommend signing up for Yaro’s Blog Mastermind Mentorship Program.

Where I went wrong was that I had too many blogs and I wasn’t prepared to let any of them go while I concentrated on making one of them a success.  At the same time, I allowed myself to get sidetracked by the promises of other programs that would help me make money online.

My plan now is to take the best blog that I currently have – Babylicious – and focus on making it my professional blog.

Where most blogs about making money are case studies on blogs about making money (John Chow, for example), the case study you will read about here on Internet Home Businesses Blog is one about making money from a blog about parenting.  I honestly don’t know where this is headed, but stick with me and we’ll find out.