Earn $300 in 20 Days – Case Study Day 1-3

I recently joined the private tutoring program by Codrut Turcanu on a recommendation I saw on Caroline Middlebrook’s blog.

The idea of the program is to make $300 in 20 days with affiliate marketing and this post plus a set of posts to follow are going to be my case study about my progress. I admit that despite having cracked the Squidoo code about 5 month ago by setting up a couple of lenses using the bum marketing method and getting them ranked high in the search engines within 1 week and managing to earn affiliate income within 1 month, it really didn’t evolve into much.

Yes, I did earn a couple of decent bucks, but to make this the sort of permanent income, I would have to build 100s of lenses to make a good enough difference and to be honest, I simply don’t have the time and the energy to keep up with this task.

There has got to be an easier way than that!

So when I saw the recommendation by Caroline, I thought, why not. The program only costs $ 49 and I had spent money worse in the past. Since I really need to get better in earning affiliate income I am planning to follow through with this course step by step as we get to see the tutorials and report back here on what is happening.

Targets:

The tasks for the first few days (day 1-3) are pretty straight forward or so it seems.

• pick a sub niche
• pick two affiliate programs within that niche

Initially this seems like an an easy enough task, but I would be wrong to assume that I could get away with this quickly and you will see soon enough why.

Challenges:

I’ve managed to hit my first hurdle smack on. Choosing a niche topic to build a niche on really is much harder than I first thought. Sure, Codrut provides us with a pre-fab list of 50 niches to make life easier, but somehow I wish he hadn’t.

Because now I’m facing the task of having to choose from the list and it makes the task a lot harder because of all the choices.

What I struggle most with is the question of shall I go with the “make money niche” or not? Much is being said on the Internet by many in regards to this and to be honest, it has only served to confuse me further in the past and right now.

First there is the optimist within me saying ” but you do have a ton of experience and knowledge about the make money niche, isn’t that worth something? Not to forget my passion for the industry. So what stops me from going at it with full force?

And the pessimist counters “forget it, the niche is already saturated and there are plenty of guru’s who make a ton of money with these niche affiliate products. So who the heck would buy from me anyway? Surely I cannot compete with them?

Well, if we look at those inner dialogues they both carry tremendous value and they are both right in their own sense.

Which brings me back to square one. So what I did next really helped me to put light onto the matter and that was to go and ask my network buddies from Maki’s Network.

I got a huge amount of responses and all were more or like similar to my two inner dialogue voices. But despite this similarity, they were explained in greater detail and drilled down to a more segmented view point by the individuals and I started to understand what could be right for me.

Achievements:

I managed to achieve two things so far:

1. I feel confident about choosing the right niche now
2. I learned that I should forget about market saturation and competition and just go with what I really want and love.

Codrut said that to choose the right niche we should only choose of what we can easy talk and write about. So guess what, I’m game enough to go after the “make money online niche” for this case study!

You might call me crazy, or stupid but I’m simply giving this a real go with the help of someone who earns good money as an affiliate marketer. If I don’t try properly, then I will never know and should this niche not be the right one for me after all (if I don’t make a cent) I would have at least learned some valuable information.

I also know that doing my research properly with diligence will be half of the success in whether I will make any sales. So tomorrow I’m planing to spend a good few hours finalizing my niche and then hunting for the two perfect affiliate programs.

Ideas/Plans:

From the 50 niches on Codrut’s list I have finally singled out 4 of which I feel confident and passionate enough to further drill down. By tomorrow night I will have the right one picked and that is the one I will run with.

I’m hoping that this niche will allow me to build on after the 20 day tutoring program has finished. If I should be as fortunate enough to have picked a winner, this niche will be used to build a brand new blog with its own domain and then build from there.

Disclaimer: as you probably understand, I cannot share sensitive information that Codrut teaches in his program. So any tricks I shall learn during the course cannot be revealed to you because the course is after all a paid one. If you feel like you need to know more after reading my case study, then you can always sign up for the challenge yourself before it is sold out.

Monika

Also read my atomic blogging review.