A Change of Direction and a Grand Plan for my Internet Earnings

In the past few months I have been following a journey to making money online. So far my earnings have been fairly modest, but I have ambitions to increase this substantially. My recent purchase of One Week Marketing has forced me to re-evaluate what I am doing and thinking whether I am actually using my time effectively. And it is time that has been a particular limiting factor in me earning more money. This had led me to adopt the mantra:

Don't Work Harder, Work Smarter!

These are my current sources of online income:

Surveys
Ebay
Paid to Click
Paid Blog Posts
Blogrolled
Cashback Shopping
Scour
Adsense
Bukisa
Squidoo
Zlio
Today.com
Affiliate income


The purchase of One Week Marketing has shown me what is possible with Internet Marketing, so I have decided that a change of emphasis is needed. I am intending to switch my focus to Internet Marketing following the One Week Marketing method which focuses on making use of free methods such as Squidoo for promoting your affiliate links.

I am intending to focus primarily on a few niches with a view to setting up my own sites at some point in the future with opt-ins. My theory is that I can use the campaigns that I launch now to link in to my own sites when I get to that stage.

In order to make sure I am using my time effectively I need to look at what I am doing and how it contributes to my plan. I am making One Week Marketing the focus of my efforts at the moment, so the majority of what I do needs to feed into this. Therefore any articles I write should link to my OWM campaigns, and if I write these articles for HubPages, Bukisa, Associated Content, etc., then I also have the potential to earn from these articles.

Surveys have formed a large part of my money making efforts. I am currently receiving between 15 to 20 survey invitations per day!! If I were to complete all of these then this would take me around 5 to 6 hours! I have decided to scale back my activities with surveys gradually, concentrating firstly on those that are close to payout. Once I have reached payout with all of them then I will stick with 3 or 4 panels and ditch the rest.

I have decided to ditch most of the paid to click sites - frankly, life is too short to spend my time clicking on ads for pennies. The only one I am keeping for the moment is Hits 4 Pay as I am not that far of the $25 payout. I have resigned myself to the fact that I will never the small amount of cash I have accumulated with the others.

Likewise with cashback shopping - I used to diligently visit these sites and click on those advertisers that would give you pennies for visiting their site. Again, I have resigned myself to the fact that I will never see this money, as it is really not a good use of my time.

Despite the fact that I have made only £0.80 so far with my Zlio shops I am sticking with them for now. I have some ideas for promoting them which I want to try out in the near future. If these don't pay off then I will let them go as well.

I am disappointed that Today.com have changed their rules so that I now receive $2 per 1000 visitors to my Today.com blog. They have now allowed some other options for making money, such as some limited affiliate opportunities. If this was the focus of my activities then I probably could make some money from it if I really put my mind to it. However, it isn't. I have decided just to put up some occasional posts, just to keep it ticking over.

There is Ebay of course - I keep finding stuff around the house to sell so it makes sense to continue with this.

There we are, that's the plan. Any thoughts anyone on how use time effectively when making money online?