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How to Use Oddsmonkey to Optimize your Winnings at the 2019 Cheltenham Festival

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With the 2018 Cheltenham Festival only a few weeks away we want to get ourselves as prepared as possible for the event.

I wrote a full article of my tips for the Cheltenham Festival 2018 but I wanted to compliment this with a guide showing how we can use the tools available at Oddsmonkey to really make our lives a lot easier.

If you don’t have a Oddsmonkey account yet, then you really should get one for the 2018 Cheltenham Festival alone, but I’ve also written a full Review of Oddsmonkey in a previous article.

I’ve tried to break down the process that each matched bettor will be going through during the festival and given examples of how the Oddsmonkey software is really going to help you during this period:

Finding Offers at the 2018 Cheltenham Festival

There will be hundreds of offers available with the different bookmakers over the 4 days of the 2018 Cheltenham Festival.

You won’t be able to play all of these offers so you need to focus on playing offers that match your current skill level, your risk tolerance and also the size of your bank.

Luckily the Oddsmonkey team have thought about this and laid all of the offers that are available on a Daily Offer Calendar 

Each of the offers has the following information:

  • Categorisation as Easy, Average or Hard to play
  • Indicator of whether the offer is potential or guaranteed profit
  • Link to discuss this offer on the forums
  • Link to the offer on the bookie’s website

​Understanding the Cheltenham Festival Offers

The next step is to fully understand the terms of each offer and understand how you should approach these offers.

Again, Oddsmonkey have a Horse Racing Guides section, which gives you details of how to play each offer type:

How to Find Close Matches at the 2018 Cheltenham Festival

OK, so you’ve got a good understanding of the offers that you want to play, and you understand how to play them.

The next step is looking for close matches so you can quickly back/lay your bets for minimal qualifying losses.

The Oddsmonkey Racing Matcher really takes the pain out of this process for you:

2017 Cheltenham Festival Racing Matcher

I didn’t have this tool available last year so had to manually compare all of the odds between bookies, whereas in the Oddsmonkey Racing matcher all you have to do is scroll through the races available each day, choose a bookmaker and check if there is an option with a small qualifying loss.

Cheltenham Festival Calculator

If you click on one of the matches then the calculator will show you the back and lay stakes and also provide you with links through to the bookies/exchanges.

This whole process can take less than a minute, which is key when trying to find close matches.

If you prefer to do this more manually you can also use the Oddsmatcher and filter this to show races just at Cheltenham each day to show you all the matches across the bookies.

Use the Eachway Matcher to line your pockets at the 2018 Cheltenham Festival

The Eachway Matcher is going to be another major tool in your arsenal during the festival.​

Cheltenham Eachway Matcher

You can use this in 2 ways:

  • Keep an eye on the tool and use this to place bets which will give you a good profit regardless of the result- Use this to benefit from the extra place races.
  • Click on the ‘Extra Place Only’ filter, and if there is a close match get on this, and hope that the horse comes in that extra place to bring in the big bucks.

How Should I Use my Free Bets from the 2018 Cheltenham Festival

After the festival has finished, you’re going to find yourself with lots of free bets that you will need to use up in a short amount of time.

The general rule of thumb is that you should be looking to extract 80% from your free bet if possible.

The first tool that you can use to find good matches for your free bets is the Oddsmonkey Oddsmatcher

Sort the results by clicking on the ‘SNR %’ column.

The higher the number is here, the better for you, as it shows how much you can extract from your free bet.

Don’t go for a match that is over 100% as this was count as an arb and is likely to get you banned from the bookmaker.

You should be able to use up a lot of your bets using this filter, however, if you want to make sure you can extract 80% of you free bets each time and also stay under the bookies radar then you should read this post, which shows a technique that uses doubles or trebles to extract maximum value from the free bet.

Dutching Extra Place Races

OK, so this is a more advanced technique where you try to capitalise from the extra places that the bookies are offering and relies on you backing every horse in the race and not laying any of them.

Depending on the race, this can lead to big bucks for you and is really worth keeping an eye on the forums to see which races people are advising to look at.

Again, there is a handy guide that you can read, and also links to a number of spreadsheets to use for this technique.

Tracking Your Progress at the 2018 Cheltenham Festival

OK, this one isn’t provided by Oddsmonkey but is a spreadsheet that I put together based on my experiences last year and should help you to prep each day for the different races and also keep track of your free bets and winnings. Download the Spreadsheet for free here

​

Summary

Whilst you can do all of these different things manually, there is going to be a lot happening during Cheltenham so speed is really important and with the massive selection of tools that Oddsmonkey has to offer then you’d be crazy to miss out if you haven’t got an account yet.

The monthly fee for all of this is £15 and you can sign up hereOf course, if you have an account already, then you’re the clever ones and are going to have an easy time during this years Cheltenham Festival.

Have fun guys!!!

January Update

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It’s been a busy few weeks with the festive season and lots of things to focus on so I wanted to give a bit of an update on where I’ve got to with my plans to become a digital nomad and develop passive income streams.

I’ve got so many projects ongoing at the moment that it’s really hard to focus on one thing and dedicate the time that I need to these projects so I’ve decided to focus on one main thing in the short term, and put my other projects on hold for the moment.

The idea that I want to dedicate more of my time to moving forward is:

eBay Dropshipping

ebay Dropshipping David Vu

If you’re not sure what this then you can read all about it in this article that I wrote recently or you can go and check out David Wu’s course on Udemy

Over the last couple of months I’ve made the following progress:

–          Built out my store to have 500+ products listed

–          Switched to a business account and set up an actual eBay store

–          Hired an experienced eBay lister on Upwork

–          Added my products to SKUgrid.com (an automatic price/stock tracker)

–          Investigated the use of Hydraliser (an semi-automated eBay listing tool)

The great thing about this business model is the more products that I add to the store, the more profits I make and when you get to a certain threshold you can hand this over to a VA to fully automate the process. I completed David Vu’s  VA Training course, which shows you the easy steps to do this.

To be honest the guy that I have found in Bangladesh can list lots of products really quickly, but his attention to detail is terrible and he isn’t very good at optimisation of titles. Still, at 30c per product listing I shouldn’t expect too much.

My store has been going for 6 months now and have 100% feedback with over 100 items now. I haven’t tracked my earnings that well but I think I’ve probably made about £1000 so far over these 6 months.

My plan now, is to really build out the store as much as possible. I will probably upgrade the store to the next level so that listings only cost me 4p in eBay fees.

I’m going to give Hydralister a try out and then expand my store to 1500 items fairly quickly and then have a bit of a pause to gauge how much additional work this will cause me ie customer enquiries, returns etc.

I’m only making about 15% of the sale price on each item, however, if you are selling 10 items a day, that quickly adds up to a decent side income, and definitely something that could sustain you whilst travelling.

Niche Websites

Trying to build out 3 websites (including this one) is just unfeasible from a time perspective. I’m going to keep this one going, but I’m going to leave the other Service based website alone for a while. It’s only got 10 articles on the site, and I have a great plan how I can build this out in the future, but for now I’m leaving it well alone.

The other website that I bought from Human Proof Designs is now live. To be honest they’ve done a good job of setting up the base level content and site, however, there is a lot of work to do to get it up to the standard that I would like. Again, I’ve developed a great content plan for this site, and can’t wait to get building it out in the future. I think for this site in the Sports Niche, I may even try to automate the whole content creation process in the future and use it as a test site.

For www.mylifestyledream.com I have lots of ideas for content again, but I’m just struggling for time. I’ve added some affiliate links for Oddsmonkey, which are bringing in a few bucks each month, but nothing huge at the moment. In the long term matched betting and betting related products look like something worth promoting and fit well with my blog at the moment.

Matched Betting

Matched Betting 2016 Review

I’m still regularly matched betting, which continues to bring in a decent side income and the best thing about this is that all earnings are tax free!!!

My latest favourite thing to do is place No Lay Accumulators. This is a technique where the Oddsmonkey software finds matches for you that have a good chance of coming in. The theory is that you don’t need to lay these bets, and over a longer period of time you will profit from these accumulators.

Over the past 3 months I’ve placed over 65 Accas, and have made £850 from this. Well, it seems to be working at the moment and as it only takes a couple of minutes per Acca, so this is a great use of time.

On top of this I managed to get a payout of £200 from an extra place race where I dutched the whole field using this technique

Through the Oddsmonkey forum I’ve also found a unique way to ensure that you can extract a minimum of 80% (ADD LINK) from each bet using doubles and triples.

On the downside I finally lost my Bet365 account and even worse, they stake restricted me, which means I can’t even use the Eachway matcher on this account any more!!! I think it was because on one Saturday I placed bets on every race of their Channel 4/1 offer, and ended up winning a couple of races.

I’m itching to start learning about Betfair trading as another potential revenue stream that doesn’t rely on having accounts with the scumbag bookies, but am putting this on the backburner again as this requires a huge amount of time to get your head into.

If you’re not sure exactly what matched betting is about then you’ll find most of the answers in my Guide for Beginners

The 4 Day  Working Week is here

So, you’re probably bored of me bleating on about not having enough time, so I’ve decided to do something about this and have requested that I go down to a 4 day working week, so I can focus on setting up these other revenue streams and start to build my business up with more gusto.

Upsizing

The final change that I’ve decided to do is to sell my flat and try to upsize. Now, according to all the advice in the best seller ‘Rich Dad, Poor Dad’, a property is a liability and not an asset as it is constantly costing you money.

However, in this case I slightly disagree. My plan is to upscale to a 2 bedroom flat and take on a bigger mortgage in this period of ridiculously low interest rates, which I will lock in for 5 – 10 years. I plan to be travelling for 3 – 6 months of every year and whilst I am away will be renting out my property. The bigger the place, the bigger the mortgage I need, but the bigger the rental income and profit I will be making, which in my mind, makes this an asset as well!

So, exciting times are ahead, and I’m hoping this extra time is really going to set me on my way and accelerate the growth of these businesses over the next few months, so I can finally quit my job in September and head off into the sunshine!!!

Anyway, enough about me, what about you? If you’ve been killing it online recently, or are having issues getting started then we’d be keen to here from you in the comments below. What are you doing to make money online in 2017?

SECockpit Review : Keyword Research and SEO Heaven

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SECockpit is an SEO and keyword research tool that dreams are made of. I used a 30 day trial of the product recently and this is my full review of SECockpit and it’s killer features.

Because this is a fairly long article we’ve given you 3 choices:​

Read the article:What is SECockpit?​SECockpit Key Features REviewedHow Much Does SECockpit Cost?What Do I need to Use SECockpit?SECockpit Review Summary

Watch the Video:

Try the software:

SECockpit by SwissMadeMarketing

What is SECockpit?​

Keyword Research Evolved

Anyone who is serious about blogging or making money online through websites will be interested in doing a decent amount of keyword research. Without this, you are just guessing at what is popular, valuable and easy to rank for.

There are a number of free tools that you can use to help you source keywords, gauge traffic volumes, find the cost per click and drill into the ranking of any site in the Google listings.

Usually you would use a combination of things like Google Keyword Planner, Mozbar, SEO Quake etc but you need to go through and arduous manual process to get the information that you are looking for, and this can take hours upon hours.

In this review you’ll see that SECockpit takes the pain away from these tasks and automates a lot of this process into a simple to read and easy to use interface, where you can quickly analyse the results and get detailed information on your keywords.

SECockpit Key Features REviewed

gENERATING kEYWORDS

The first cool feature that SECockpit gives you is the ability to generate a list of keywords from your seed keyword and allows you to control some of the inputs.

You start off every keyword search with the following dialogue box:

SECockpit Review Seeding Keywords

Seeding Keywords

  • Countries and languages – Allows you to do a local or global search
  • Google Adwords Synonyms – Will return a large number of results related to your keyword unless you check the ‘Only show ideas closely related’ checkbox, which refines this search.
  • You can choose to include or exclude terms from your search, for example you might want to add words like ‘best’ or ‘review’ to your search
  • Min monthly allows you to set the minimum number of searches that your keywords should have
  • Tag Results – You can use this feature to colour co-ordinate your search results

Analyse Keywords

You will then be taken to a search results page that looks something like this:

SECockpit Review Search Results

SECockpit Search Results Page

Now this is where it gets exciting because there are a huge number of columns that you can add to your search results page, to help you gauge the value of that keyword to you.

I wont go through every option available in SECockpit, but the key metrics that you have are:

Niche rating – This is a really cool feature, unique to SECockpit that gives you a rating of that keyword based on a simple calculation (Number of monthly searches / Top 1 – 10 Competition Bar). The fuller this bar is, the better for you. This is a great initial indicator, however, you really need to use that as a guide only and interrogate the rest of the data before you decide to try to rank for that keyword or not.

Monthly Searches is your standard measure, which is brought back from Google Keyword Planner

Rank 1 – 10 – this is a really useful measure and tells you how easy it is at a glance to rank in the top 10 for this keyword. The lower the bar, the better in this case. Will look at how this is calculated in a minute, but this feature alone makes SECockpit a great tool to use and in my opinion worth the money.

Domains – Lets you know whether the .net opr .com domain is available for that keyword

Adwords – Here we have the standard CPC value and advertisers competition value, but there’s also a ‘Adsense Value’ column, which multiplies these 2 together to give you a simple gauge. In this section you can also add other columns to see how many ads are displayed in the top, right and bottom section of the search results to give you a clear indication of the strength of the advertising competition for this keyword

Top 10 Sites – Again, this is another great feature where it will display an icon if any of the top 10 results for that keyword have a site which is either: Youtube, Ebay, Ezine, Squidoo, Hub Pages or Amazon. This is another good indicator for you to determine whether there’s any chance of you getting on that Top 10 list for that keyword

Analyse the Competition

Once you’ve found a keyword that you like the look of you’ll probably want to dive into a bit more detail and look at the sites that are ranking for that keyword.

All you need to do is click on the keyword and you’re taken to the following screen:

SECockpit Review Keyword Competitivenes

Keyword Competitivenes

Again, you can find most of this information elsewhere, but this compiles it quickly and neatly into one simple interface.

You’ll see that the SECockpit gurus have even colour coded the results for you so at a glance you can see if it is easy to knock any of those sites off of the top 10 (green being the easiest/lowest value)

The standard measures are all displayed here:

  • MozRank
  • Page Authority
  • Domain Authority
  • Juice Links
  • Total Links
  • Internal Links
  • FB Likes
  • FB Shares

If you scroll down the page as well, you’ll see that it pulls in the info about that keyword from Google Trends.

SE Cockpit Review Google Trends Data

Google Trends Data

Calculate Your Returns

SECockpit Review Conversion Calculator

Conversion Calculator

The final feature that I found really useful in this review was the SECockpit Conversion Calculator.

This simple tool takes the Traffic volume and cost per click for the keyword and allows you to play with a number of other inputs to help you gauge the revenue returns on your keyword, depending on:

  • How well you rank for the keyword
  • How well you convert from your site
  • Whether you are selling a product or earning money through Adwords

Any Other Features

SECokpit - Keyword Research Done Right

There are a load of other features available within SECockpit, but this review is only focusing on the keyword research and analysis functionality.

If you want to find out more hop on over to the SE Cockpit Site​

How Much Does SECockpit Cost?

OK, so the downside to this product is going to be its price, which is going to make it seem unaffordable to a lot of part time / amateurs.

The basic entry package, which limits you to 10 searches a day comes in at $40 a month, which goes all the way up to $120 a month for unlimited use.

However, my honest opinion is that if you are writing a lot of articles, want to have a bit of an edge over your competition and are really trying to push hard to get onto the top 10 results, then this tool really is worth every penny, as it’s going to save you hours and hours of time and if you use it correctly will reward you with more than the monthly fee in sales/commissions on your site.L

Latest Pricing structure:

Secockpit Pricing

What Do I need to Use SECockpit?

To use SECockpit you will need:

  • Google Adwords Keyword Planner Account
  • Paypal Account
  • SECockpit Login
  • Basic Understanding of Keyword Research

SECockpit Review Summary

SECockpit is an essential tool for any budding SEO enthusiast, blogger or anyone trying to make money online and monetize their website.

It has a number of cool features which help you to generate and analyse keywords and gain an understanding of how easy it will be to rank for those keywords and what your potential revenue will be.

Because it’s cloud based, SECockpit is incredibly fast and it also means you don’t need to install anything on your computer.

Features:

Ease of Use:

Price:

SECockpit Keyword Research Tool

Interesting Ways to Make Money Online

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Quick NavigationBlogging / Website MonetisationSocial Trading 2016 ReviewMatched Betting 2016 RevieweBay DroppshippingWhat Did I Achieve in 2016?How Will I Make Money Online in 2017?

I can’t believe it, but it’s been almost a year since I started this blog so I thought it would be a good time to look back and see what I have achieved, what I haven’t achieved and whether it was possible to make money online in 2016.

I’m also going to be fully transparent about my earnings from this year, just as a benchmark for the future.

My intention last year as described in my first article was to dedicate my time across 3 ways to make money online:

In this post we’ll look at each of these in turn as well as my latest business venture with eBay Dropshipping

Blogging / Website Monetisation

Website Monetisation 2016

Well I came into this as a complete newbie and a year later, I’ve got 2 websites up and running and have learnt an incredible deal about internet marketing, SEO and how you can make money through websites online.

I always knew that you could make money through advertising if you had a successful site, but wasn’t sure about the details of:

  • How you make a site successful
  • What a successful site looks like
  • How you make money through a successful site

I’m no expert but I think I’ve got a much clearer picture of all 3 of these things now, and after a year of learning, I need to start applying this knowledge to my sites.

In my mind the answers to these 3 questions are:

  • Through keyword research, great content creation and link building
  • High quality interesting content, generating over £1k of income per month with growth potential
  • Pay per Click (Adsense), Affiliate Revenue (Amazon), Building e mail lists

Content Creation

From the information that I have digested I’ve learned that making money in this way is a lot more complicated than it was a few years ago, where you could just throw up a website that focused on long tail keywords, create some product reviews, generate some links from a Private Blog Network and you’d be in the money.

Now, the focus is much more on providing great content that is actually useful and solves people’s problems rather than just promoting products.

There’s been a shift in thinking from creating niche websites to building broader authority sites that you grow with time, and as they grow in size they have the potential to bring in much bigger revenue streams.

This shift largely came after a couple of Google updates, that basically wiped out the traffic of a lot of the niche sites.

Your typical site such as ‘bestpaintbrushes.com’ that was made up of review articles and was stuffed with affiliate links would have got one of Google’s ‘Thin Content Penalties’, which effectively removed it from the search listings as part of Googles purge on poor content.

The key now seems to be really finding a niche that you can develop and grow over time, and put systems in place so that others can do a lot of the more labour intensive work for you.

This includes outsourcing things like content creation, link building and formatting of blog posts to free up your precious time.

Website Monetisation 2016 Summary

It’s been great learning so much, but I really need to put this in practice. The main issue here has been time.

I’ve had so much going on that trying to write, publish and promote articles is something that I’ve had to neglect and hence I’ve made no money at all from this idea this year.

I think I’ve got a solid base to move forward, next year and with a bit of luck I’ll have more time to dedicate to this next year as it’s definitely something I want to pursue.

Money Made this Year:

£0

Earning Potential:

Passive Rating:

….Read more about my year Learning Internet Marketing

Social Trading 2016 Review

eToro Best Traders

I’d never heard of Social Trading before I stumbled across an article on it and thought that it looked like an interesting idea.

I’ve got a bit of experience with investing in the stock market, but Social Trading seems like a novel way of investing your money.

I’ve done a full review of my year here but if you haven’t heard of it before, social trading or copy trading as it’s also known, is where you invest in traders and make the exact same trades that they do, in proportion to the amount you invest.

This means that you don’t necessarily need to know too much about markets, commodities and forex trading as you can leave that to the experts, but rather you invest in traders based on their performance and other indicators such as their attitude to risk and the maximum amounts they’ve lost in a single day or week.

There are a number of sites out there but I’ve been using eToro as it’s got a really great user interface and is easy to start to use.

They have a virtual portfolio that you can use to start with where you can invest virtual money in your traders before you throw your hard earned cash at it.

I do quite like the Fantasy Football nature of this idea and it makes trading a lot more accessible to people who wouldn’t otherwise be interested, however, I can see how people could get carried away and lose a lot of money as well.

On an initial glance you can see a lot of the traders reporting really high yields, however, when you drill into their stats you soon find that a lot of these investors have lost big at some point as well.I invested $2500 at the start of the year and am probably going to make a maximum of $100 at the end of the year, which isn’t a great deal, however, at least I haven’t lost anything.

Social Trading 2016 Summary

Realistically, I don’t think this is a great money making scheme and out of everything I’ve tried this year it feels a bit like you are investing more out of hope than judgement, so probably isn’t something that I’ll pursue in the future.

By the same token I didn’t spend much time on this after my initial research into the shortlist of traders.

Money Made this Year:

<  £500

Earning Potential:

Passive Rating:

….Find out more about Social Trading in my Beginner’s Guide

Matched Betting 2016 Review

Matched Betting 2016 Review

This time last year, I’d barely heard of matched betting and thought that this was either some kind of scam or was a gateway into gambling.

I’d read lots about people reportedly making thousands each month from this, so thought I’d give it a go, and a year later I can say that it really does work, and IT’S NOT GAMBLING​!

​The process is quite simple and is built on the principle that bookmakers are giving away lots of free offers, and by placing bets on both results happening you can extract a certain percentage of that bet as your profit.

For example, Betfair have a sign up offer where if you bet £10 they will give you £30 in free bets, so if you select your bets well at the bookmaker and the betting exchange you’ll be able to extract about £25 out of that total bet. I explain this in more detail in my Matched Betting Beginners Guide.

​There are heaps of accounts that you can sign up to and make up to £1500 just by working through these accounts, but then you get to the next level…. reloads.

​For every given day there are 10 – 20 different offers available across the different bookmakers, that you can keep earning money from. For example today, there is an offer with Ladbrokes where if you bet £20 pre-match they will give you a free £10 in-play bet. The trick is to keep repeating these offers and you’ll be suprised how much it adds up at the end of the month.

On top of this, you can then extract money from accumulator bets using either Accumulator Generator or Oddsmonkey’s Acca Matcher Tool.

If this wasn’t enough for you, then you can go a step further and make money from the horse racing offers and things such as the Oddsmonkey Eachway Matcher which will guarantee you returns from races, regardless of the results.

Matched Betting 2016 Summary

Not only have I made money through matched betting this year, but I’ve actually enjoyed doing it. There is nothing more rewarding than getting money for free and as long as you are careful and gradual learn what you are doing this is a great way to earn a little extra money.

The only downside is that it can start to become a bit time consuming, but overall if you’re looking for a bit of extra pocket money, then matched betting is a great choice for you.

Money Made this Year:

£3500

Earning Potential:

Passive Rating:

….Read more about my Year in Matched Betting

eBay Dropshipping

ebay Dropshipping David Vu

When surfing the web and looking into ways to make money online, you come across a lot of rubbish and a lot of people claiming their idea will make you a fortune. In most cases, if it sounds too good to be true, then it usually is.

However, every now and then you come across something that might just have potential and in my mind, as long as you’re not investing a lot of time or money into that stream to test if it works or not, then some times its worth a shot.

… so that’s how I got into eBay dropshipping.​

I’ve been listening to a podcast called Travel Like a Boss​ (which is awesome by the way) and on one of his episodes he talks to an entrepreneur called David Vu who offers the following course on UdemyeBay Drop Shipping with No Inventory Guide

His course teaches you the basic principles of dropshipping​ and how you can list a product on eBay, and when someone buys the product from you, you buy it from someone else (at a cheaper price) and they send it to the person who bought it from you. 

Sounds complicated? Well it isn’t and the best thing about it is that you get to keep a healthy mark-up on each product and you never have to worry about stocking products yourself.​

eBay Dropshipping Summary

I’ve been doing this for a couple of months now, and yes, this really works and after you have done the hard work to set up all of your products in eBay, it becomes fairly passive.

​The only work you need to do on an ongoing basis is processing your orders, responding to any queries, and making sure you can always purchase a product somewhere if someone purchases it from you.

The model is simple… the more products you list, the more sales you make, the more money you earn, and you don’t need to invest a penny up front.

Money Made this Year:

£500

Earning Potential:

Passive Rating:

….Read my detailed eBay Dropshipping Review

What Did I Achieve in 2016?

Overall 2016, has been an amazing year and I’ve learned soooo much, and discovered so many things that are both interesting and are potential ways that you can make money online without necessarily being tied to a specific location, or needing to slave away for 8 hours a day.

​I feel that I’ve put the groundwork in this year, for some of the ideas that I want to focus on in this next year and the more that I have learned, the more options and business models that I have discovered that have been proven to work, and are attainable if you just put in the hours to start with. 

If anything, the hardest thing that I’ve struggled with this year is having the time to dedicate to the different streams of interest, especially as I have a demanding full time job to attend to as well.​

I guess the main thing that people care about is how much money I made this passed year. It’s not a huge sum at all, but it’s given me money to invest and build on next year and is a great starting point….. drumroll please……

£

How Will I Make Money Online in 2017?

I had planned to take 3 months out in February so I could focus on these business ideas, but my work has declined this request, so inste​ad I’ve requested to go down to 4 days a week. This is probably the safest option in the short term, until I can get these ideas fully off of the ground.

I’m swamped with ideas at the moment and there are soooo many things that I want to get working on, that it is driving me crazy, however, my shortlist is:

eBay Dropshipping – Build my store up to 1500 products and employ a Virtual Assistant to work on the product listings to build the store even further and automate the processes. Once this is set up this should give me a steady stream of income, which will allow me to work on other things.

Focus on Niche Sites – I have 1 Adsense site that I have already built and written 10 articles for and since neglected, that I really want to dedicate time to and see if I can start to get this to rank. I also have 1 site that I have bought from Human Proof Designs which they are currently building and will need some of my time to market.If all goes well with this, then I’ve got another great niche that I want to get into

Amazon FBA – This has been pretty much the buzz and excitement of the year, with many people making a great source of income by whitelabelling their own products from China and selling them via Amazon, who also hold your stock and manage all of your distribution. Could have huge potential, but requires a bit of up front investment and research.

Drop Shipping Store – I’ve heard a lot about setting up a dropshipping store with Shopify and would really like to take the Drop Ship Lifestyle course at some point. Again, this one will consume a lot of time, however, I really like the idea and am interested in learning more about this business model, especially as more and more business is going online!

A Year Learning Website Monetisation

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I remember that I read somewhere that it would be easy to set up a travel blog and make money from it, which kind of got me started on this whole adventure in the first place.

​So over this last year, I’ve been furiously looking into what it takes to monetise a website or a blog and the different strategies you can employ to create an ongoing stream of revenue.

3 Things I learned about Website Monetisation in 2016

I was really keen to find out how that’s possible and whether I could do the same thing, so here are the key things I’ve learned this year

Keyword Research Is Key

Keyword Research

If you’re going to start a blog or a website then you have to remember that this is a huge investment of your time, so you really need to get an idea of whether this is going to make you any money at all before you head off writing content.

The first thing that you’re going to need to do is to research a niche.

I’ve written about this in detail before, but they key is finding a niche that:

• You’re interested in

• Has low competition and high volume keywords

• Is a broad enough niche that you can potentially expand this into an authority site in the long term

Get any of these things wrong and you’re going to end up with a blog that is going to be nothing but hard work giving you very little in return.

For any website venture that you’re about to start on I would recommend that you invest up to a month in planning the growth of your website.

• Create a keyword matrix and identify long tail keywords that you will target initially and higher volume keywords that you might want to target in the future

• Consider how your site is going to generate revenue. Are you going to be using Adsense, Amazon Affiliates or other affiliate programmes to earn your bucks?

• Check out the competition in your niche and look at how you could potentially improve what they have created

• Think about how much time your website will take to manage in the future and whether this could be outsourced. The worse thing is that if your site becomes really popular and you have set up systems where you need to be involved in all parts of the business, then the more popular it gets, the more of your time it will use

You can’t Take Shortcuts

Unfortunately, there are no real shortcuts that you can take to building up a successful website.

I’ve read a lot about Grey and Black Hat SEO tricks such as using Private Blog Networks, however, whilst these might get you success in the short term, in the longer term you’re likely to get banned from Google, and ruin your business.

If something looks too good to be true like a gig on Fiverr promising 50 top quality links for $5, then you know it’s going to be dodgy so steer clear.

Yes, there is nothing for it, but hard work and putting in the hours initially.

You’re going to need to write a lot of your content to develop your own voice, manage your own website and then most importantly learn how to market your website and generate traffic, all of which can be hugely time-consuming.

On top of this, you can’t expect instant results as your new website will go into Google’s sandbox and won’t start ranking for 3 – 6 months anyway.

Content is King and Links Are the Queen

Content Is King

The days where you could just throw up an article of a few hundred words for niche keywords and expect to rank easily are long gone.

Now you’ll need to put a lot more work and thought into this.

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The content that you generate will need to be:

• Unique (Either a fresh idea or a vast improvement on existing content)

• Interesting (Needs to be made shareable)

• In-depth (Minimum of 1000 words per article)

• Answer a question / Solve a problem

The digital landscape is now so crammed full of content for every conceivable subject, you’ll even find in depth 2000+ word reviews of toilet seats, so you have to make sure your content sticks out somehow.

Once you’ve written this killer content, the hardest part is generating links to this content, which seems to be the biggest single factor in 2016 for ranking your content.

There are plenty of strategies all over the internet on how to do this, but once again, this will just consume a lot of your time.

What Did I Achieve?

On a positive note I have to say that I achieved a great deal in this sphere over the last year:

• I set up 2 websites, www.mylifestyledream.com and a niche website

• I have learned a good understanding of SEO and different tactics

• I’ve learned a lot about internet marketing

• I’ve learned about affiliate marketing and the different tactics that people use to monetize websites

Overall I’ve got a great foundation now in both my knowledge and my websites to build on over the next year.

I haven’t been able to focus as much of my time as I wanted to on the niche website, but plan to switch focus back on to this next year.

Low Light of the Year

I think I’ve found a great niche with low competition keywords, however, it’s not the most exciting niche and is quite hard to write articles for.

I’ve written about 8 so far, however, have kind of lost heart a little bit, because even though some of the keywords that I am targeting are sub 20 Keyword Competitiveness, I still don’t rank in the top 100 for these keywords, which I find really bizarre.

I think the answer to this problem, is that I just need to put in more work, build out more articles and start my link building activities then the site should start to grow in traffic.

Highlight of the Year

The best thing for me with building out these sites has to be the amount that I have learned about SEO.

I find this dark art really interesting and is definitely something that I want to learn more about and spend more time perfecting in the future.

How much Time did I spend?

With a full time job in front of a computer screen, I’ve also needed to research and practice these 3 ways to make money online as well as write about them, all of which takes a huge amount of time.

In reality I’ve needed to just focus on one thing at a time, or free up more time, which I intend to do next year.

How much Money Did I make?

A big fat £0

In fact, by the time I take hosting and themes and domain names into account I’ve probably invested about £150 so far.

However, I feel that I’ve put in a lot of the groundwork with which to monetize these sites in the future.

Was It Worth the Effort?

Yes, absolutely. I feel that I’ve started a new path that I’m interested in and could potentially reap rewards in the future.

Out of all the things I’ve looked at this is most likely to be the idea that comes closest to giving me real passive income in the future.

Martinos Digital Ltd - Dyne Road, London, England