My Biggest Change For 2012 That You Should Do As Well:

In 2012 I’m going to keep track of my profit every single month and review mid month how I’m doing to ensure I hit my target numbers. What I learned from 2011 was that I don’t do a good job of re-evaluating my goals on a constant basis. In fact, the only time I’d ever look to see how much money I was making was when I had to file my federal estimated quarterly tax payments (once every 3 months). I don’t know if I can attribute it to complacency, but I always had plenty of money left over at the end of the month after paying my bills and reinvesting thousands into other projects like software development and website acquisitions so I never really took the time to track everything very closely so this is how I’m going to do it differently:

I’m Using A Project Management Calendar For 2012

I put up a whiteboard that sits next to one of my monitors with a month by month grid that will help me keep track of when I’m releasing some product, software or even a website (even those completely unrelated to this blog that I don’t really discuss). For example, I’ve had a team working on a really in depth website that I’ve invested nearly $20,000 and several months of my time into that will be launching later this month. It has nothing to do with earning money online etc. and it is targeted at a much larger demographic than I’ve ever tried capturing before but I’m tracking it on the calendar. I haven’t decided if I’ll reveal the website or not but if I do you’ll be among the first to hear about it.

The other purpose of the calendar is for me to see a constant visual representation of where I’m at with my goals for the year. Rather than focusing on arbitrary RSS reader numbers and a few of the other things I targeted in 2011 I’m just going to focus on specifically financial targets.

My Three Primary Specific And Measurable Goals For 2012:

Goal 1: $250,000+ Profit In 2012

Every year my goal is to make more money than I did in the previous year and for that increase to be far greater than what I could ever receive working in a normal day job. So far I’ve been able to do that and I believe if I stick to my schedule and track my various projects very well I should be able to hit $250,000 in profit. I didn’t do a bunch of monthly income reports this year because frankly I was a bit complacent and when I wasn’t being lazy I was too busy taking action and making money rather than putting together lengthy graphs outlining my performance. If you’d like me to go back to monthly income updates perhaps I can do that. I know $250,000 is a big number and when you read that number I might come off as someone you can’t relate to, but I want to remind you that I got my start in this business by working an hour or two every day after work and after getting fired from my day job in 2009 I was already making enough money from my websites to take the plunge and do this full time. So I still know that it’s hard work to build up your business but as long as you’re putting in some time and working towards your own goal of some additional side income or job replacement income you can do it. I’ll do my best to continue to share actionable advice to help you get there.

Goal 2: Buy $100,000+ Worth Of Websites In 2012

I had this goal in 2011 and I fell a little short of it unfortunately, but I still have the capital in my bank account ready to buy the right websites so if you have something earning between $200 – $3,000 profit per month contact me here. In either case, I remain confident that I can hit this goal in 2012 and probably even surpass it if I find a lot of good websites to buy.

Goal 3: Donate At Least $35,000 To Church / Charities

I need to be more regular in my donating / giving so I wanted to tie a specific dollar amount that I’m looking to accomplish. I know it’s kind of odd that I’m including this goal in a blog post as most people are pretty private about what they give to charity, but it’s on my white board so I guess it’s on the blog post lol. Throughout this year I will occasionally release products or software and state in the sales material that (for example) the first $5,000 purchased worth of this software will be going directly to Charity Water. Continuing with charity water as an example, after I would reach that sales figure I’d then make a donation to a Charity Water campaign as well just to prove that I was actually making the donations. You’d have to be pretty evil to say you were going to donate money and not actually do it though.

My Three Pillars Of Business In 2012

I’m going to continue to focus on these three things that I did in 2011, but to not let other opportunities like iPhone applications etc. distract me.

1. Building Websites
2. Buying Websites
3. Software / Information Products

I routinely find pain points while building my business and recognize areas for improvement and I’m going to be doing more awesome software projects in 2012 with the first one up being EasyAzon v2. That plugin is used by well over 1,000 people and the emails I get on a regular basis are really cool. I love helping people save time on a tedious process and make more money at the same time.

Overall Feeling About 2012 – It’s Going To Be Awesome

I believe I will easily reach my goals if I stick to my calendar for managing projects and routinely tracking profits every single month. I’m going to focus on continuing to build ever larger assets in 2012 and perhaps I’ll have a few more six figure deals to share with you this year as well.

Have you set goals for yourself in 2012? If so what are they?

Why I Show Off Websites I Own That Make Money

The reason why I share websites that I’ve made money with is because people won’t believe what I say and keep reading my blog unless I show proof. So there’s no better way to show people they should listen to my advice than to show them specific real life examples of websites I’ve made money with. I think after showing everyone how I’ve sold well over a million dollars worth of products for Amazon, sold a website in a deal worth six figures, bought a website and with a little effort turned it into an income stream that may break $1,000 this month (more than quadrupling the monthly earnings from when I bought in in July) people have probably seen enough to know that I’m speaking from actual experience.

I share these examples because it makes for compelling content, builds credibility for me and in turn more people read my blog and participate in the stuff I’m working on (On that topic – can we get some more donations?). But now I’m straying away from the reason why I wrote this blog post in the first place so let me get back to the point:

How I Found Every Website You Own:

I have a subscription to the website WhoRush.com and with a very simple search using my blog as an example I can find the following websites that I own:

There are additional tools that allow you to search by IP address, Google Analytics ID, Google Adsense ID, Whois search etc. as well.

If you tell me a website you own and you have even one website on your server with an Adsense ID I can use that to find every other website you own that uses the same Adsense ID!

Thanks for telling me about that one website you own and are trying to sell on Flippa – now I know every single other website you own, can look through each of them to see how you’re getting traffic from Google using another tool like SEMRush.com and can copy the niches you’re in if it looks like there is enough value there for me to compete.

Now I don’t explicitly seek out people that share their websites to do the above, but there are a lot of savvy people that do. WhoRush and SEMRush are two amazing research tools (I love SEMRush the most though) The point I’m trying to get across is that you should never tell people about your websites that make money. Now some of you might be thinking – ‘Sweet now I can use these tools to go check out all the websites Chris uses to fund his lavish lifestyle’ (joking of course) – well it’s too late to do that because I’ve set up safeguards to prevent this that you can employ to protect yourself as well.

How To Prevent People From Seeing All Of Your Websites:

The only surefire way to prevent people from finding all of your websites is to have doubles of everything:

1. I have two Adsense accounts.

One Adsense account is a personal account and tied to my SSN# and another is for my LLC which is tied to my business. (completely ok for you to do)

I never tell anyone about the websites I own and run under my second Adsense account. I also don’t host any of those websites on the server that this blog is on so there isn’t anyway to find those websites that way either.

2. I have four hosting accounts.

I have two dedicated servers with HostGator and a couple shared hosting accounts for some smaller niche websites I run.

You only really need to have two hosting accounts if you want to protect yourself, but I use a dedicated server for this blog and a few other websites I’m hosting here for stability purposes. I have a second dedicated server for some larger websites I run under my second Adsense ID. In any case, the point being that you don’t want anything that links the websites in one hosting account to a website in another hosting account. So don’t use the same Google Adsense ID, Google Analytics ID etc.

3. I use domain privacy on every domain name I own.

This helps to prevent people from using the Whois tool that can search for your name, address etc. and find you that way as well.

Overall Summary:

There are tons of bloggers in this space talking about their earnings each month from niche websites (without disclosing URL’s) and in less than 5 minutes I can find out every website they own, how much money each one is probably making based on the traffic and keywords I see they rank for and just about everything else about their business. If I can find out this information then you can bet other people can too.

Now because of this added privacy I have to pay an extra few hundred dollars a month for another dedicated server just to prevent some savvy unscrupulous blog visitors that may stop by, read about some of the successes I’ve had and want to find what other things I’m running that are currently successful. So you can save yourself a lot of trouble by simply not telling anyone about your successful websites. I could go into more detail about how to protect yourself but the above tips will help you out quite a bit.

I am curious though – how many of you knew that tools like this even existed – where people can find basically every website you own very easily? Let me know in the comments below.

Disclaimer: The following was not a paid review post, but I do have a free comped subscription to WhoRush.com and SEMRush.com. I’d gladly pay for SEMRush.com and probably WhoRush.com as well (SEMRush is definitely my favorite though).

Donate Money And Get Something I Make For A Discount At The Same Time

Get One Hour Of Consulting For $150 Donation Here

One Hour Of Consulting: Regularly $197

I’ve been doing consulting through this blog for a while now and while my typical consulting clients are earning several thousand dollars a month and already running full time online businesses, I’ve also helped out some beginners as well. If you donate $150 it’s a great way to give people some clean water and I can help you out with some issues you might be having with your business as well.

Get Niche Profit Course And EasyAzon For $100 Donation Here

Niche Profit Course: Regularly $97

In depth video based training course showing you how I’ve made $90k+ in commissions from Amazon’s affiliate program. When you donate $97 to my Charity Water campaign send me an email with you

EasyAzon: Regularly $47

WordPress plugin used by hundreds of marketers to help them make Amazon affiliate links faster and easier on their WordPress blogs. You can also quickly create Amazon affiliate link images as well.

Get My Soon-To-Be-Released Viral Email List Building WordPress Plugin For $25 Donation here

I’m releasing a viral email list building WordPress plugin later this year. It’s pretty dang awesome and although I won’t be listing it for sale until later this year the software is complete and you can get it now for only $25 donation.

Fourth Option – Just Donate Whatever

Feel free to donate any amount you feel comfortable giving.

Why Am I Offering An Incentive To Donate?

I’m not offering products that I sell at discounted “prices” because I believe you need a reason to give, but perhaps you’ve already donated money recently and with the holidays coming up your budget is stretched. I simply want to help provide an additional incentive for you to give right now and I really want to make sure we can hit the $5,000 goal before the end of the year and these additional incentives are one way I thought it could help.

Do Not Send Me Money

Please donate money directly to my Charity Water birthday campaign page here (don’t send me money). If you’d like one of the above items, simply make a donation (can be made anonymously) and forward the donation email to chris [at] makemoneyontheinternet.com and I’ll make sure you get set up. Because I am not handling any money your donation is also tax deductible as well (double bonus – boo yah!)

Funny Halo Birthday Story

Ten years ago yesterday I had my birthday one day early and my friends from high school came over to play the very first Halo game for the first Xbox on November 15th 2001. Ten years later I would have never guessed that day would be the catalyst that pushed me toward my building my first website (a forum) and earning my first dollar online. Now today just over ten years later, I’m playing the remake of the original Halo (Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary) with a few friends who are going to come over and hang out (funny how things work out). Read my whole Halo story of how that happened here.

Why I Started This Blog With My Extra Free Time After Getting Fired

I built an income that surpassed my $60k a year high stress sales job in the extra hours I put into my business every day when I got home from my regular day job. So I knew that when I got fired I could use some of my new found free time to start a blog sharing my experiences in the hope that people won’t repeat my mistakes trying methods for making money that just don’t work. Some people will try to sell you on the idea that you can make money easily and instantly on the internet – this is not the case. I tried for several years to make money online and it took a lot of failure before things really started to work because I didn’t really know anyone that I could get good advice from.

What I’ve Learned After Getting Fired

I’ve learned that self employment can suck at times, but the freedom and uncapped earning potential is worth the downside. Since last year’s fireversary update I’ve also met dozens more like minded people who build, manage and run websites full time that generally don’t talk about their business success online (I interviewed some of them for an upcoming project). Last year when I wrote this update I hardly knew anyone doing the same thing that I did, but this year I’ve found people that I can relate to and bounce ideas off each other (most of my friends give blank stares when I explain what I do for a living).

What The Future Holds For This Blog And My Business

I will continue to share advice based on my real life online business experiences rather than speaking in general terms about topics I know nothing about (I’m referring to 95% of the other blogs that discuss blogging, making money online etc). I’ve also been working on some much bigger projects behind the scenes that I’m eager to share with you as well. Some of them are related to this blog but another project is very focused on mainstream use. When I open it up I’d love for you to try it out and be among the first users of this new website. I know that I haven’t described what it will do yet but it’s completely unrelated to earning money online.

Thanks for continuing to read my blog. I’ve got a little less than 19 years to reach my (admittedly silly) goal of buying the Guthrie Castle.

Note: Yes I do realize how stupid some people think I look when I continue to publicly say that I want to buy a castle that costs millions of dollars when I haven’t even made my first million. I still have plenty of time…

Edit 1: I should mention that I wouldn’t actually live in the castle, I’m too cheap and practical to do that. I’d run it as an investment property like the current owners do now. I just want to buy it so that I can say I own a castle named after my ancestors hah hah!

What do you want to learn from me?

I’d love to hear your feedback so that it can help shape what I discuss on this blog. I will see you in the comments below.

Thanks in advance for your feedback

My $26,000 Mistake Of 2011:

I was riding high, had plenty of money in the bank and because of that I decided to pay off $26,000 worth of student loan debt from my wife’s masters degree back in January. Both loans were around $13,000 each and at 8.9% and 7.9% interest rates or something really high like that (interest rates for loans on post graduate programs are way higher).

Why Was This A Mistake?

I gave up liquid cash that I could have used to invest in my business for a sure thing that my wife and I would be paying roughly $300 a month less in student loan payments over the next 10 years. For years I’ve always been told that paying down debt is the right thing to do, but I believe when you’re trying to build your own business this attitude isn’t always the best. I believe I can always make more than a 8.9% return when I’m buying websites or other web based assets and for me to give up $26k so that I could have less debt was incredibly stupid.

Example 1: I buy a website for $25,000 that’s earning $1,000 – $2,000 per month (1x – 2x earnings multiple).

Even on the worst case scenario of a 2x earnings multiple a website I purchase for $25,000 making $1,000 a month without improvements to the monthly income (there always would be) I’d already be coming out ahead an extra $700 a month. Yes there is risk in any investment like websites, but with such a short payback period I believe I still come out behind by deciding to pay down debt instead of investing in my business.

What Do You Think?

I hate to woulda shoulda coulda because I believe that attitude is for losers, but I wanted to share my mistake because I believe I’ve learned a valuable lesson. Now what I’m not advocating is that you should buy that $1,997 course you’ve seen guru’s promoting because you can earn $50k per month by pushing a big red I’m an idiot button instead of paying your credit card bill. But when it comes to investing, if you know you can make something work (in my case – buying websites) then it’s probably a mistake to pay down debt with cash that could be used for investments instead.

Yes I know this blog is about making money on the internet, but what you do with your money offline can have just as big of an impact of how much you can earn offline. I really do want to hear some feedback on paying down debt vs investing so don’t be lazy and read this without commenting.

See you down in the comments.

1. Extra Stress

I have a younger brother and an older brother. My 31 year old older brother has no gray hair and my dad didn’t get gray hair until he was nearly 40. On the other hand, I’m “only” 27 and started getting gray hair as soon almost as soon as I started running my own business. Yes it could be a coincidence but I’m near certain it is from the added stresses of being self employed.

I know a lot of the stress is self enforced, because I feel like if I don’t grow my business by at least 50% year over year that I’m doing something wrong. With these type of growth goals I feel like everything I do has to be successful and because I’m trying so many things unfortunately not every project I’ve worked on has been a success.

2. Lack Of Social Interaction

I used to work in a sales job and really enjoyed the people I worked with. We’d take occasional breaks to play Foosball, go out to lunch and occasionally hang out after work. Now the only people I communicate with are over the phone or on Skype. I believe this lack of social interaction is partly why I’m pushing myself so hard to grow my business because I’d actually like to have an office with several employees that I could go to each day. I never minded the office life, I just hated having stupid leaders telling me what to do only because they’d been with the company for 10 years.

3. Paycheck Varies Every Month

This is a double edged sword, obviously my paychecks are larger than when I was working my full time day job but it’s still stressful to have huge swings in the money I’m earning. I had a massive “pay check” in November when I sold one of my websites for six figures but then of course my monthly income took a hit so although I received a huge cash influx I had to think about which other projects I needed to start working on.

4. No Set Hours

I can be lazy from time to time, and this was true both before and after I was working on my online business full time. In fact, some of my friends would argue that the only reason why I worked so hard on my business was so that when I succeeded I could work less (lol). Having a day job is easy because you know that from 9 to 5 you’re in work mode and busy earning a pay check. Now that I work for myself I don’t have any set hours. I will occasionally work 12 – 16 hours in a single day and only get up a couple times to eat food. Sometimes I will also feel compelled to work on weekends for a few hours a day. On the other hand, I don’t have anyone cracking a whip at me so I will work shorter hours on occasion because I can.

5. Most New Businesses Fail

Making it through my first year of self employment was a big confidence booster, but the fact remains that most businesses fail over the long run (see small business facts here). Businesses like mine that technically don’t have “employee’s” (I use contractors) fail at a rate three times higher than other businesses do. I feel confident that my business will be around for years unless it’s acquired, but the odds truly are stacked against you as a self employed individual.

6. Deciding What To Work On

I make money in a variety of different ways, but I’m at the stage in my business where even though I enjoy solid base hits like selling a website for six figures I also want to hit a grand slam and work on something where I can exit for several million dollars (preferably with enough to buy the Guthrie Castle before my 20 year deadline). The toughest thing for me to do is to decide what to work on to help me achieve my financial goals, set new challenges and enjoy doing it all at the same time.

7. People Saying “Get A Real Job”

The worst part about being self employed is the fact that all of my friends and family that know what I do for a living think I don’t have a real job. Because I don’t have a real job I must always be able drive people to the air port and perform other menial tasks right? Any other self employed person will agree that this is one of the most annoying aspects of being self employed.

Self Employment Is Still Better Than The Alternative:

Even with all of these negative drawbacks I still wouldn’t have it any other way. The same freedom that causes me stress is what makes working for myself so much more enjoyable and challenging than anything I did in any of my past jobs. I’m a huge fan of this life style and building online businesses. In the coming weeks I’ll be changing several things about my blog to make it even better for people looking to succeed at building their own online business. In the mean time, feel free to read my suggestions on how to quit your day job. Just remember, that being self employed isn’t always awesome.

Stay tuned…

My Goals For 2011:

1. Earn 50% more than I did last year which was over $150,000+ (2010 Income Report)
2. Spend at least $100,000 or more on buying websites
3. Automate more of my business by hiring at least two more full time employees
4. Hit 10,000+ RSS readers for my blog (currently at 4,632)
5. Complete the P90X workout program

I have a clear focus in mind for my business in 2011. I’ve already had numerous website sales over the past few years and most recently had my first six figure deal. So moving forward in this year I’m going to continue buying more websites (if you’re looking to sell your website(s) at a reasonable price contact me here). Last year I was earning well into the six figure income mark and one of the beauties of being self employed is that your income earning potential is uncapped. So in 2011 I plan to give myself a 50% raise and continue earning six figures. I have to continue working really hard if I am to accomplish my goal of buying the Guthrie Castle.

Finally, I am determined to get into shape this year. Sitting in a chair all day at home has it’s benefits but it also has it’s downsides with one of those being a lack of physical activity. So I’ve ordered P90x and will be starting in a few days to get in shape.

What are your goals for 2011? Have you even set any yet?