Elbow Grease
My First HostGator Commission
Today I finally received, my first HostGator commission. It’s actually my first earning online and the $50 I made isn’t that shabby 
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- PayPal HostGator Transaction
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- HostGator Commissions
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- HostGator Commission Pay-outs
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- Email from PayPal
This all started 3 months ago. My friend was massing around with affiliate marketing and showed me what great payouts HostGator has. So I made an affiliate account. I knew I’ll use it once, but wasn’t planning on it yet.
I’m also a member of Aardvark, a Q&A network. Have been for quite a while now. A year, maybe more. So I was just doing my own thing when a MSN window pops up. It was a question from Aardvark and this is what happened – http://vark.com/t/2ac765. I know my marketing techniques aren’t the best but it worked here. The guy liked what I said and bought the hosting. And so I made my commission.
HostGator has a bit of a confusing payout schema. According to When and How Often Will I Be Paid section of their Affiliate FAQ, one is eligible to get paid 60 days after the commission was made. That’s 2 months. I made mine on April 7th so I was all good on the June 7th. This means that I should have gotten paid last week, but I wasn’t. No really sure why. But that really doesn’t matter now
This money will probably go towards buying my own hosting as I’m currently leeching of of my roommate’s. It’s a shame HostGator doesn’t have any shared Windows hosting plans as I need it to host my ASP.NET MVC websites. Although they did have beta testings late 2009. I wonder whatever happened with that…
All in all I am extremely happy about my first few bucks earned online
The 30 Day Challenge
Making money online. There’s been a lot of buzz about this lately. Well at least in the circles I live in. I knew this was possible, but until about a year a go I thought there were only a few people actually able to make enough to live of of it. I’m a programmer and I’ve been using web since ’98. Google did not exist yet back then. Well Wikipedia says it lunched that year, but no one actually knew about it or used it. You either knew the web address or tried typing in www.something.com or tried using this a bit awkward search engine call AltaVista. But as I was still young, we mostly spent our time on IRC. Even though I was using the Internet very early on, I never knew how big this making-money-online scene was. Well until about a year ago.
This is when I started noticing ads for courses that teach people how to do it. I did a bit of research and found affiliate marketing and article marketing and SEO and writing blogs about specific topic and all these other techniques being used to get people to buy your products or someone else’s products where you would get a commission. This was a very exciting time for me so I started doing a bit more research. But then came a problem. I found so many websites and videos and all this other sources of information that my head just went nuts. There was too much information out there to take it all in. And people providing this info were also very vague with it. They just gave you a bit and then wanted you to buy their course. Well I’m a student, I don’t have much money and I’d rather spent the little I have on a beer, because I know what I’m getting there.
So there I was confused as ever and ready to give up. But then, surfing YouTube about internet marketing one day, I saw this funny looking Aussie fellow. He was talking about teaching people earn money online, yadi yadi ya. Another one of those, I thought. But I’m a sucker for English accents so I watched a bit longer and it got interesting. Most people name their price at least one in the first half of their video, but there was no mention of any payments here. So I clicked on link in the description – www.thirtydaychallenge.com. A big 30 Day Challenge logo, but still no dollar signs. I entered my name and my email and ended up on the training section of the page. And there they were – all these videos about how to earn your first buck online. And it was all free. That was about 2 months ago. I watch the first few videos, but got stuck searching for a niche and there were also my exams for college. So I said I’ll put it off ’till summer and then face it head on.
Well the summer is here and I’m ready to rumble. The thing that makes 30DC (30 Day Challenge) different from all the other I’ve encountered is that they do it fresh every year. They film new videos and update their techniques. They used to do this in August. So my plan was to go through 2009 videos first and when August comes I’ll be ready with lots of questions and ideas and I won’t be the biggest newbie, so it’ll be easier to follow.
But Ed Dale (the funny looking Aussie guy from the video) changed things around a lot this year. First he dropped the 30 Day part from the name. So now it’s just called The Challenge. But this wasn’t just the name change. The Challenge isn’t a thirty day thing anymore. There will be 7 modules and one pre-challenge module. Each of these modules will take 7 days and between individual modules there will be 7 days off. Ed says each part will take only 30 minutes to watch the video and then take action. I’m a bit skeptic about that, but we’ll see. So 8 modules x 7 parts in a module x 30 minutes per part gives us only 28 hours of work. Well hell, I though, I have a lot more time than that – I’ll give it a go.
The first pre-challenge video was up yesterday. It’s about UStream. As I’ve done preseason for the 2009 30DC and even more so because I’m a computer geek, I already know about this. So I’ll watch pre-challenge just to see what’s new, but the part I’m really looking forward to at the moment is Module 1. Can’t wait.
