2006 was an interesting time for me as I plunged into Internet Marketing.

Although I didn’t have a clear idea in the beginning, it was very clear that the path of least resistance would be to go with blogging.

In the course of the last 5 months, I’ve had a series of interesting experiences and the questions I’ve dealt with appear to be common with all new bloggers, whether the questions originate from a blog, a forum, a blog network or a social networking site.

Here’s 2006 in retrospective in a FAQ format with money making tips and 7 Reality Checks for bloggers and internet marketers.

• Blogging Reality Check 1: Making Money from Blogging is Evil

I’m not sure of the intent of this often heard objection.

I guess some might have ‘pure/purist intentions’ and expect that blogging is some form of ‘cathartic release’ for heavy/philosophical/ponderous thinking.

I see blogging as a form of personal journalism. And journalists have to eat.

Like it or not, the reason why your newspaper or magazine doesn’t cost $100 a copy is because it’s sponsored by advertisements and the classifieds. Likewise, blogs can be financially self-sustaining through adsense, affiliate marketing and other monetization strategies.

Expecting bloggers to provide free content is akin to expecting musicians to provide music free of charge.

It takes time and resources to produce blog content and there is a measurable value to it.

In a utopian society, writers, artists, musicians would be able to freely practise their craft without fear of finding their next meal. We don’t live in that world yet.

• Blogging Reality Check 2: I Will Make Millions Overnight

On the other extreme, I have spoken to bloggers who expect to make huge sums of money overnight.

It’s unlikely to happen unless you are some sort of celebrity, likely a mega celebrity if you’re planning to bring in the megabucks.

If you are not however, it’s time to face a reality check.

We’ve also heard about products or software that can automatically build blogs by the hundreds every hour, and we’ve also heard about how if each blog earns a dollar each day, you’d be earning thousands of dollars in your sleep.

While you might have some degree of success using these blogging-related “quick buck” schemes, it might not necessarily be sustainable (ie you are ‘de-indexed’ and disappear from the search engine results, or your ‘innovative’ monetization exploit is soon negated.) It then becomes a mad rush for the next “black hat template” or the next automated, broadband-enabled, stealth, power-enhanced, web2.0-enabled, ajax-enhanced, php-powered widget.

Rinse and repeat until it gets disabled by one of the higher power. (see above paragraph)
If you are a serious blogger for which blogging is a long term strategy to help you achieve your goals, here’s what I would advise you to do.

Think of your blog as a business tool. Consider:

• How does it fit in with your adsense or affiliate marketing plan?
• How would you go about establish trust and credibility for your business.
• Who would your strategic partners be.
• How are you building your “me” brand?

• Blogging Reality Check 3: Free Tools and Services

New Internet Marketers ask me this all the time: “What are the free tools we can use besides blogger/blogspot to growing our blogging efforts.”

I’d add to the list of useful tools such as GIMP, PingOat, Squidoo.

What troubles me however, is that some who aspire to earn online income aim to do it only using free tools.

I think you could probably earn $50-$100 per month using free tools, and if you’re good earn maybe $500.

Beyond that could be highly challenging. I guess if you put your mind to it, you could come up with very interesting business models.

For the vast majority of us however, I’d advise counting the value of your time.

Sure you could surf 1,000 websites and gather the same information, or as one participant at the World Internet Summit said to me, I can just google for everything, I don’t need to buy anything (which was weird because he invested in a World Internet Summit ticket…)

To build a sustainable business, you need to value your time.

Is your time worth $5 an hour? $10? $50? $500? $5,000?

If your time is worth more than the cost of the product or service, you’d be foolish not to subscribe or invest in the product.

Even if your time was worth $1 per hour, I couldn’t see how it’d make sense to manually maintain a mailing list of 1,000 and send them emails on a bi-weekly basis.

I use a combination of free and paid tools and you’d generally be able to tell the difference between the two.

If you have the mindset of starting and operating a business, your tools will generate many times their investment for you.

Some of the useful tools which outweigh their investment include:

• Secret Blog Weapon (Blog Optimization)
• Ultimate Affiliate Weapon (Affiliate Marketing)
• Bluehost web hosting
• Autoresponder: Aweber / GetResponse

Once you have these fundamentals in place, you’d find that building your business is much easier.

• Blogging Reality Check 4: It Takes Tough Times

It’s taken 4 months to get to the stage I’m currently at.

Although I’d have preferred to get here within a week of starting up, building a business, blogging-based or otherwise is as much about the process of getting to your goal, as much as merely achieving it.

As you’re building your blogging business you will encounter setbacks, perhaps days in which your visitor numbers or income drop drastically.

Here’s something that people don’t often talk about.

The measure of a mature blogger is not what happens when good times are rolling, but what you do when things go south.

Do you merely throw in the towel? Do you kick your efforts up a notch?

Often the most spectacular successes are built on the backs of the most dismal circumstances.

Look at the rise of Japan after the Second World War, or Apple after an ousted Steve Jobs rejoined and the company’s fortunes turned not once, but numerous times with the launch of the MacIntosh, the iMac and the iPod.

If you’ve watched real life events unfold during 9-11, you’d know that true heroes are forged in the moments of greatest adversity.

A couple of months ago, I blogged about: Are you ready to give up on Internet Marketing?

It’s still relevant now. Perhaps more so.

Some people seek to avoid difficulty and challenges, others actively seek it.

Which are you?

• Blogging Reality Check 5: I Will Make Millions Overnight

Are you an ‘everything under the sun’ blogger?

If you are one of the myriad of blogger who blogs about “internet marketing”, “health and fitness” or “women’s issues”, you could be biting off more than you can chew.

Catchall blogs work best if they’re run by a panel of bloggers (sometimes as many as 10), or by especially prolific bloggers.

If you’re specializing in everything, you’re specializing in nothing.

Finding your niche and entrenching yourself deeply in it means that your position is virtually unassailable.

If you do choose to tackle “internet marketing”, maybe you want to niche it by focusing on “internet marketing for high school students”, “internet marketing for midcareer professionals” or “internet marketing for single mothers”.

The brick and mortar businesses have moved towards speciality stores, rather than general concept stores (with Wal Mart being one of the few exceptions). Likewise, becoming a niche specialist helps you expand from a position of power.

Blogging Reality Check 6: Build A Community

When you’re starting out, you might be working in isolation.

If you’re fortunate, you might be able to tap into a community. By tapping into these resources, you gain significant leverage as you’re expanding your efforts.

“Leverage”, comes in a few flavors. There’s technological leverage that a software or tool can help by automating your efforts. But far more powerful is social leverage or people-oriented leverage.

And social leverage can easily move mountains.

During the launch of Russell Brunson’s Conquer Your Niche Internet Marketing forum, the site’s traffic went off the charts.

Other sites I frequently visit include:

Forums such as:

• Warrior Forum
• Digital Point
• Digital Keiretsu

Blogs such as:

• Shoemoney
• ProBlogger
• PlanetAndrea
• 9rules Blog Network (of which I am a member)

At it’s simplest, I believe build a community is nothing more than making friends, and I appreciate the opportunities to interact with the likes of Ewen Chia, Jo Han Mok, Social Media specialist Michelle MacPhearson, and my buddies Ryan Chua and Rachit Dayal.

Blogging Reality Check 7: Change the World

This is probably the most important step.

Have a focus bigger than yourself.

You don’t necessarily need to choose ‘world peace’, but you want your blogging efforts to mean more than pounding out 300-700 words every 24 hours, inserting a few photos and hitting the publish button.

We need meaning to keep going.

Meaning is the glue that creates our motivation.

We all have 24 hours a day, and we can choose to spend that time focusing on big project, or on small projects.

When you embrace something huge, something weird happens to your thinking too, it expands.

Your world view blows up and suddenly your universe is not just your neighbourhood, or the people in your village, city, state or country.

If you’re seeing and blogging through the eyes of a world citizen, life (business or personal) can only continue to be a rich canvas to blog about.

I’ve been managing two forums for the past 4 months and we’ve come to a decision point.

Should we continue with two parallel forums, both focused on Internet Marketing?

It was after quite a bit of reflection that I’ve decided to take down the WhoIsAndrewWee forum and to focus on building up the Digital Keiretsu (DK) Internet Marketing forum.

A couple of pull factors:

• Easy Upgrade Path

The DK forum based on vBulletin gives great functions via it’s modular/plug-in architecture.

My friend and fellow Internet Marketer, TofuMonkey, spent many hours hacking the WhoIsAndrewWee forum code to add new functions like the embedding of video clips.

However, it kinda worked, but wasn’t what we expected.

On the other hand, DK’s vBulletin (vB) code was much easier to handle, especially with the help of Forum Guru Ryan Chua.

I’m able to embed videos easily and vB natively supports many functions via it’s architecture.

In fact, Ryan has tweaked the DK forum and it looks quite different from stock vB forums.

• Rich Media Content

It’s just a matter of time before blogging goes way beyond text to encompass photos, images, audio, video and enhanced interactivity.

Two words: Viral Video.

Hence, the focus on adding DK’s video resources.

Check out: Digital Keiretsu’s video clips

I especially like Judson Laipply’s “Evolution of Dance” and the “Hugs Campaign” videos.

Viral videos are already generating massive amounts of traffic and you can expect them to be more pervasive especially as powerful video editing computers and software becomes more common.

Want to see the face of the future?

Check out: Digital Keiretsu’s video clips

Adam’s known for helping my buddy, millionaire entrepreneur Adam Khoo, launch his Secrets of Self-Made Millionaires product.

Take a look at this:

Adam Wong clocked $9,000 in 2 weeks through his internet marketing efforts. Although I believe it’s a revenue figure, the net profit would be close to that because it’s Adam Khoo’s digital product at: Secrets of Self-Made Millionaires.

I was talking to Adam Wong the other night and he was asking about traffic generation strategies.

I believe traffic hasn’t been difficult to generate provided you have a traffic plan.

Jo Han and Ewen gave a great presentation at their Unstoppable Traffic workshop a couple of weeks ago and will be releasing a DVD set soon, but in the meantime, I’ll be doing a short series.

Traffic generation is, unfortunately, related to Search Engine Optimization. I don’t particularly like spending inordinate amounts of time figure out the optimal keywords, staring at keyword lists and spending all day insert meta and other HTML tags into my blog post. So I’ll cover the organic aspects of traffic generation.

• Onsite Traffic Generation:

Blogging, hands down, is a great platform to begin with, compared to creating a static website.

Between Blogger/Blogspot and WordPress, I hear that Google just loves Blogspot and gives preferential positioning to blogger blogs in the SERPs (search engine results pages) (Though no one has exactly come out to say this publicly.). It probably helps that Google owns Blogspot.

I like WordPress though, because the plugins such as Popularity Contest, help level the playing field and give your blog a level of functionality and benefits that Blogspot blogs lack.

I plan to author a series on essential WordPress plugins that I’m using that should be in every WordPress bloggers arsenal.

If you are looking at profit-oriented blogging, be sure to check out SecretBlogWeapon.com for this amazing tool by blogger Gobala Krishnan. It incorporates a niche research guide, SEO optimization specifically for blogs and traffic generators.

• Offsite Traffic Generation:

By targeting blogs and forums in your target niche (such Internet Marketing, golf, dog grooming, wedding planning), you can go outside of your blog and prospect for high targeted and relevant prospects.

For the Internet Marketing niche, I head to:

Blogs:

• Jeremy “Shoemoney” Schoemaker (Shoemoney.com)
• Darren Rowse (ProBlogger.net)
• Derek Gehl (Internet Marketing Center)
• Super Affiliate Ewen Chia (SecretAffiliateWeapon is a great resource)

Forums:

• DigitalPoint (forums.digitalpoint.com)
• Internet Marketing Singapore
• Conquer Your Niche
• And my own DigitalKeiretsu forum

My belief is that if you provide original content (even in a blog comment!) which:

• provides value to the reader
• deepens the conversation
• provides resources to relevant posts or websites

You will be viewed as a good contributor.

As you demonstrate your knowledge and competence, you can expect visitors to your site.

Traffic generation is simple, isn’t it?

I’d be searching for a good CPA (cost per action) network for quite some time and the ones I’d be using, didn’t prove to be too effective for me.

In about 4 months of promotion, I’d racked up a mighty $0.94.

You can tell I was really enthused about doing promotion for that network, till I’d read Shoemoney’s (AKA the Ringtone King) blog about his results with Azoogle and that got me all fired up again.

One of my DKers who’s still in high school launched his site and has generated decent Azoogle income within 3 days with minimal promotion.

I sat up.

I applied to Azoogle, got them to prioritize my approval and they did it on the spot.

Now that’s service!

Intrigued?

Here’re some background from the Azoogle website:

—

AzoogleAds is a performance-based online advertising network that delivers both amazing results for its Advertisers and easy to manage and highly profitable revenue stream for its Publishers.

Since 2000, online marketers have depended on the AzoogleAds Network to deliver targeted and untargeted customers from a variety of websites, search portals, newsletters and contextual Publishers. AzoogleAds manages this marketplace of online of Publishers eager to generate revenue by promoting products and Advertisers wishing to acquire new customers.

—

Publishers (blog and website owners) will probably be concerned with the following:

• Maximize revenue generated with your ad inventory
• Guaranteed HIGHEST payouts
• Rock solid net 15 payments
• Quick and easy implementation so you can start generating revenue quickly
• Fanatical client support
• Superior technology tracking

—

Are they big?

Consider this:

• The AzoogleAds Network is comprised of over 14,000 quality websites and Publishers
• Our network reaches approximately 75% of Internet users
• We have access to billions of performance-based impressions a month
• We have over a hundred top tier advertising partners, many from Fortune 1000 and Fortune 500 companies

What I like best is that when I called customer support, I wasn’t channel to a interactive voice response system, or had to bang on my phone buttons to get transferred. The phone was answered within 3 rings and I got to speak to a pleasant lady who approved my account within 5 minutes. Now that’s service!

So what’s up with WhoIsAndrewWee.com, PlanetAndrea and Azoogle Ad?

So to spearhead this new initiative, I’m setting up an Azoogle thread in my DigitalKeiretsu forum and giving new strategies to accelerate your CPA campaigns.

I’ll also be collating content from Shoemoney’s blog/radio show and other content sources I’ve recently gained access to.
In short, we’ll going long on our collaboration with Azoogle Ads.

If you’re like to join up, here’s the link:

–> Azoogle Ads Publisher Information and Sign up

I posted a thread in my DigitalKeiretsu.com forum: DigitalKeiretsu.com strategy training for Internet Money Secrets announcing a workshop which would bring together 4 Internet Marketing specialists.

If it worked out, I would continue to organise a series of Internet marketing-related training for the DigitalKeiretsu group.

This is a series of workshops intended to help increase the level of skill incompetency of the DigitalKeiretsu members who have a wide range of skill levels from beginner to intermediate.

I’m glad I did.

Last night’s session was a smashing success!

Alief (AliefHamdani.com) talking to Angie and Chi. Should a Body Combat Instructor be caught eating junk food on camera? Hmm…

Besides myself the other trainers were:

• Rachit Dayal
• Garry Lee
• Ryan Chua

Topics that were covered included:

• traffic generation
• forum strategies
• a comprehensive overview of pay per click advertising
• the Internet Marketing mindset

Here’re some highlights from my presentation on the Five Approaches to Internet marketing:

• Head vs Heart: Does your communication content mainly from the head (intellectual, factual) or from the heart (emotional, sentimental). Does this work for your audience? Would a blend between the two approaches be even more effective?
• Grow a business versus short-term profits: are you in Internet marketing for the long haul and are you willing to take a loss if it means being able to retain a customer or would you rather take a profit and potentially lose a customer?
• Problem-based or solution based (This could be the most critical towards your Internet marketing success): Do you constantly seen obstacles in your path and does that the get you disheartened? Or do you merely see challenges to be overcome on a path to growth and profit?

Internet Marketing traffic specialist Garry Lee speaks to Shikin and Liz Tan.

It was a good idea to cap the workshop size to 12 participants because we had a great level of interaction and many of the participants got a lot of one-on-one time with the trainers.

As Internet marketers we’re often working in isolation, and I plan to continue conducting a series of workshops to enhance the sense of community and build skills and strategies for the DigitalKeiretsu members.

Here’s to the next session!

Left to right: Andrew Wee, Rachit Dayal, Garry Lee, Ryan Chua

For those who’re interested, some of the presentations were taped and will be available at a later date.

I met up with the DigitalKeiretsu.com (DK) team at about 6pm for dinner.

This was before Stuart’s presentation at the Internet Marketing Singapore subscribers meeting.

Here’re the folks who showed up:

Back row: Ming Chern (Tofumonkey), Marilyn Tan, Angie Rosales, Bee Heng, Mike Ng, Alex Sin, Peter Yew

Front row: Alief, John, Zand, Wai Leong, Risson.

I like to have networking sessions because they’re critical to our success as Internet Marketers.

What happens during these sessions?

Besides enjoying good food, we:

• Share challenges that we’re experiencing: it’s likely a peer may have encountered this issue and been able to resolve it successfully.
• Gain new ideas and strategies: Some members of the group may have developed competencies in areas such as traffic generation or transaction conversion. This is a good opportunity to pick their brains.
• Getting personal: Cyberspace is a void, and all your HTML and PHP disappears into an electronic void. Meeting in person helps you put a face to a nickname/ID that you see online. Besides, it can be lonely as an Internet Marketer.
• Joint Ventures: my favourite. Being able to match two experts in different areas can bring out interesting products and partnerships. And depending on the size of the group you might even have four or even six people in the team. This can lead to some truly awesome products and services which arise out of the blend.

Speaking of partnerships, one of the reasons why I’ve been doing the recent list building exercise is to build up the network of resources we have on hand. If you haven’t joined yet, this is your chance to.

(If you haven’t already heard, the $99 Internet Marketing giveway includes a couple of reports on Internet Marketing, blogging and affiliate marketing, and Robert Allen’s including a book sent free to your home or office, anywhere in the world. You can’t beat that)

Do you know someone who’s a successful blogger?

Maybe like Shoemoney? Take a look at this picture, he’s holding a cheque from Google for $132,994.97 for the month of September 2005.

Maybe a succesful forum owner like my friend Ryan Chua who owns BMW-sg.com, a forum for BMW owners and lovers (I’m assuming they love the car, not so much the owners. But then again)

Imagine this, you’re already pulling in a lucrative income from your chosen Internet Marketing method. What will it take to bring you to the next (even higher) level?

Some Internet Marketers have set up networks consisting of blogs and websites.

The blog pulls in the traffic and ranks high on the SERPs (search engine results pages).

However, what I don’t like about blogs is that it’s difficult to categorize information.

Sure you might have a one or two layer categorization, but it’s rudimentary at best.

It can’t compare to a CMS (content management system) like Joomla, or a well-structured website.

So adopting a multi-platform approach, an enterprising Internet Marketer can create a blog to draw traffic and redirect it to the website, which has information organized in a neat, easy to find manner.

However, just imagine the possibilities if you were able to create an Internet Marketing eco-system in which you could also feed auction sites, information directories, link directories, affiliate marketing sales pages and other types of internet marketing platforms into the mix.

Would that explode your internet marketing income, possibly even into the hundred of thousands per month range?

As I was working out the details, it looks like my $20,000 a month by March 2007 goal, just seems too darn conservative.

This idea of quantum leverage had been one of the basis of why I set up DigitalKeiretsu.com (The front end is intentionally left blank for now, so don’t bother commenting about that. It’s what’s in the back end that counts. )

Membership is still open for the time being (we’re at about 40 now).

For more information, you can look here: Get into the Keiretsu.