It’s very exciting to see your thoughts and ideas embraced and posted by one of the leaders in making money online.  DoshDosh is an authoritative, well thought out blog about making online.  Recently, DoshDosh made a post entitled The Best Way to Make Money Online: Participate in Dosh Dosh’s Group Survey challenging their readers to tell the best ways we have found to make money online.  I chose to participate in this group survey myself.  DoshDosh then posted a follow up article entitled 63 Constructive Opinions on the Best Way to Make Money Online.  This post highlighted all of the great responses and gave links back to our websites.

 Check out #28!!

Getting a mention on a blog like this, and a link is a very positive experience.  Thanks DoshDosh for letting us all participate!

I am sure you all are waiting on baited breath to find out how much my blog made last month during my first 20 days of blogging. I hope you all are well prepared for the shocking news to follow . . .

Seanology.com made $0 last month!

Well, this means I can only go up, right? Anyways, the purpose of this blog isn’t really to make money in and of itself, it is highlight techniques and give tips to winning in the Adsense and affiliate marketing game.

To give you a little update on some of the case studies that I have presented forward, I did make a little money (and October is shaping up to increase as well). First off, I have highlighted my Tiger Army case study in Part 1 and Part 2. As you may recall, I bought the site for $10 and redesigned it. Well, in September I made $1.67 from Adsense! This is a small success

In my other experiment, I added a search box to one of my sites to try and get a few extra dollars a month. I installed that on September 24th and it earned me $2.04 for the 6 days it was running.

I know you are all gasping for air at my riches Actually, I make a fair share of money on a bunch of sites I haven’t mentioned yet, but these are the ones I have highlighted and have shared so far. Continue to read the blog to learn more of my stories!

All it takes is one big break to make a website extremely popular. How would a mention of your website on Oprah sound? Sounds pretty good to me considering Oprah’s popularity and the size of her audience! Well, it wouldn’t exactly be my site that was mentioned, but a site I designed.

This scenario almost played out. One of my website design clients contacted me about a good friend of hers that was trying to secure a spot on the Oprah show as an expert panelist. She was very excited and needed a website put together fast that explained her theories and services as a a nationally certified professional counselor and educator. Hence, Managing the Monkey Mind was born.

I quickly worked withmy client as she communicated back and forth with the producers. I got her site up and running in a couple of days and she was extremely pleased with the speed and the design. She also agreed to let me link to my sites in the footer of her website which was great!

As it turns out she was not able to be on the expert panel for this show, but she did get the chance to be in the audience. The show airs today, so all of you Oprah fans need to tune in! There is also a chance that she can participate as an audience member in the After the Show segment as well.

So that is the story of my near brush with fame! Can you imagine how many people would have went to the website if Oprah endorsed it? How many hits would that have equated to for me? What would I have done with this traffic? Would I have made a special page for Oprah viewers? Who knows, it’s nice to dream!

One of my Adsense sites has suddenly stopped producing This site was consistently on the front page of MSN for a very popular search term. It appears that they have drastically changed their algorithm which results in very different sites attaining these top search engine placements.

Has anyone else experienced this? Any idea what the new algorithm takes into account? To most of you this is a non-issue as your site is optimized for Google, but I have had great success in MSN and found it easier to attain higher rankings. I guess those days are gone! This is a great lesson in remembering to diversify and not obtain all of your traffic from one source.

As I posted a few days ago, I am starting to take some steps to learning the affiliate marketing game inside and out. What I have started doing is promoting ClickBank products using Adwords ( ). Currently, I am not using a landing page and simply sending traffic directly to the vendors sales page until I get some landing pages set up.

I have read numerous accounts that this method is not as effective as using landing pages, but I will stick with it for now in hopes to turn a profit.

By using this method I have come across a hurdle. That being tracking which keywords are sending traffic and converting to sales. I had learned of a manual method using what is called the TID (tracking ID) parameter. This can be effective, but is very time consuming to set up a new URL for each keyword. Plus the TID is only 8 characters long.

In my searches of trying to make this easier, I came across a wonderful free tool from WLMCamp which will generate these URL’s for you dynamically. I downloaded and am using this tool today and am very happy with the time it saves!

Read more about this free tool.

One of the new programs on the market that I have decided to try out is AuctionAds. As I explained in my previous post, AuctionAds is a way to dynamically show eBay listings on your site.

Well, I implemented it on 3 or 4 sites and quickly learned that it was only going to perform on one site. This program is not for every type of site, but if you find the right one it is worth implementing.

In my first month I earned $55.96!

Ok, that is a little skewed since they game me $25 just for signing up So really I earned $30.96 I am very pleased with that result and may try it out on some other sites. Anyone else out there using it with results?

I am proud to say that today marks day 20 of consecutive posts on my blog. In my initial post, I vowed to make 20 daily posts in a row with the theory that if you do something continuously for 20 days, it becomes habit. This would be an example of forming a good habit.

Sticking to your goals creates a snowball effect, once you reach one small milestone the next goal suddenly seems more attainable. All of a sudden, this blog feels like something i am motivated to continue and pursue.

Thank you for following my journal up to this point. I can’t promise that I will post everyday forever, but I will do my best to provide you with useful information I have learned along the way as often as possible.

Thanks again!

In a follow up to my post Quick Tip to Increase Your Adsense Earnings, I went ahead and implemented an Adsense search box on my best performing Adsense site. Since I put it in an area near the bottom, the only people that would be using it is probably ready to leave the site anyway, so why not get a click or two from them?

So how is it performing? Take a look at the screenshot and you will see:

Since I have put it on, I am averaging $.27 per day. I know it’s not a lot, but I’ll take an extra $8.10 per month for a simple 5 minute change any day!

Here are my favorite keyword tools to use when starting any online campaign. There are also some great paid tools, but I will cover them in a later post. For now, enjoy these:

Free Keyword Tools

Google Keyword Tool
The Google keyword tool is great because it is free. It shows you historical trends on selected keywords over the last 12 months. It also has the ability to analyze a particular site or page and tell you what the best keyword combination would be. You can also get estimated costs per click when using Adwords.

Overture Keyword Selector Tool
This is the original keyword research tool. It does provide lots of valuable information and variations on the term you provide, however it is so widely used that it makes it hard to use as an advantage over your competition.

Digital Point Keyword Tool
This tool uses both Overture data as well as free Wordtracker data and compares them side by side for you.

Microsoft Labs Keyword Forecast Tool
This tool displays trends on a particular keyword as well as shows you demographics on who is searching for these words.

Keyword Map
An interesting tool to use to see how keywords are related

SEO Company Keyword Tool
A simple interface to show you search queries volume and related information

SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool
Quite possibly the most comprehensive free tool available. Try it out and you will see!

Do you have any other suggestions for free keyword tools? If so, please leave your favorites in a comment

Yesterday I decided to start a campaign promoting a product from Clickbank. Clickbank is an affiliate network that specialized in digital products such as e-books and software downloads.

If done right, you can make a lot of money marketing these products. BUT, it’s not easy! You have to learn the in’s and out’s which can take months. I have been reading and reading and decided it was time to take action.

I basically followed the plan laid out in Google Profits. This is a great comprehensive step by step guide as to how to use Adwords to drive traffic to a Clickbank product. The great part of this system is that you don’t need a website to start. So basically, anyone can do this. But like anything else it takes patience and time to become successful.

My plan is to try out 3-5 products until I find one that is working for me. I picked one yesterday and started promoting it. I got some great keywords and a good click through, but did not get a sale I have concluded based on my campaign that this product is not converting.

I ended up spending $29.72 and received 172 clicks with no conversions. Tomorrow, I will move on to another product! Typically 6-8 out of 10 will not be profitable, but once you find the profitable one it can be very lucrative. Stay tuned for more updates!