So many people dream of making a living online that they are prepared to spend lots of $ learning what to do.
It is so easy to find blueprints and ‘proven’ plans and strategies that it’s difficult to know which one to pick – and whether to pay $27, $97, $997, $1997 – or even more for any training.

Anybody wanting to replace an income probably has monthly bills of $2000 or more – so even a high ticket value training course would pay for inteslf by bringing you income a month or two early.

But do any blueprints actually work?
The answer appears to be both yes and no.

Disclaimers are always justified by the explanation that it is impossible to know if any student will bother to take action.
Quite separately, statistics are published suggesting 99% of people trying to make a living online fail to do so.
I’m not sure if that means most people don’t bother to buy training – or the training doesn’t really work?

Do most people have so much money they can waste it on courses and not bother to try to follow them?
Or is it just too hard to do what courses teach?
Or has something changed in the marketplace between blueprint creation and you trying to make it work?
Or don’t the blueprints work very well, if at all.

I’m still slowly reading Mark Anastasi’s Laptop Millionaire book – where he describes how to make money online in lots of different ways.
And he provides examples of real people who have made lots of money using each individual methods.
What quickly becomes apparent is that the examples of people actually making good money have all, without exception, taken a basic blueprint method and added some special ingredient of their own to make it unique and successful.

Now Mark’s book offers training and doesn’t claim to provide a blueprint to success.
I wonder if that’s because real successful working blueprints don’t actually exist?
My personal view is that if one does exist it should be possible for at least 50% of purchasers to be able to follow it and successfully achieve the promised outcome – something I have yet to find.

Instead what seems to happen is that ‘star’ users adapt strategies for themselves and find extraordinary success.
And these stars are promoted impying if you follow the strategy, you can acieive the same results.
For example, at one of Marks’ seminars with around 400 attendees, the message went out that ‘somebody had made $200 overnight’. Great – but 0.25% really isn’t statistically relevant.
To me, far more impressive would have been if 40 people (10%) had made $10, or better still 160 people (40%) had made $2.50!

One problem with making money online is the almost infinite number of possibilities leading to information overload, a lack of focus and attraction to shiny new offers to learn something you don’t know that seems to be yet another essential ingredient for success.

That’s why finding an honest mentor is so important. – to keep youself on track and avoid distractions.
If only that were easy, we would all be internet millionaires by now!

UPDATE I listened in to John Thornhill’s IM Advantage webinar last night.
John offers mentoring to a limited number of people committed to succeeding online – and he mentioned that his success rate is … 100%!

Mark Anastasi has just published a book called ‘The Laptop Millionaire‘
This includes Mark’s story of moving from poverty to financial independance with the guidance of a mentor he calls his Laptop Millionaire

One interesting target needed to replace a typical income is to get 400 clicks a day – to bring in $100 a day.
At first I thought no problem – until I started thinking a bit more about it.
400 clicks would typically cost $400 using Google adwords or $120 buying solo ads (that typically insist on free offers)

Also 400 visitors with 2% clicking on Adsense might typically bring in $4 – so you really need a product of value to sell instead.
Then 8 buyers would bring in about $120 for a $17 digital product (after fees) that you owned or $60 as an affiliate.
Still not a viable business – spending more than you earn.

Long term ‘free’ organic traffic is great – but no way to plan a start-up business at the mercy of Google.

Alternatively, if you have your own list to mail, say twice a week, with a 20% open rate and 5% of those bought making 1% of list members buying you would need a list of 2500 to produce 200 sales a month – or $3000 income from your own $17 product.

Buying clicks from solo ads to create a list typically costs $1 per lead.
So a list of 2500 would cost $2500 and bring in $3000 if you have your own products to sell.
But that’s where things start to get tricky, because you really need 8 new products a month to keep your list interested.

Jason Fladlein suggests creating 1 product, to solve 1 problem in 1 two hour sitting.
Sounds easy – but I have yet to get anywhere close to that goal.
I’m just not happy unless I spend much more time to improve products to meet my own standards.
Nevertheless a ‘job’ creating 8 new products a month to market to your list is quite realistic.

Alternatively, creating one product a week worth $17 suggests a list size of 5,000 is needed for $3000 a month income.
This pushes the time to recover a $5000 investment in list creation out to a couple of months.
Or a list of 20,000 if you are able to create  only one new product a month.
Pushing the time to recover a $20,000 investment in list creation out to over 6 months.

These are still reasonable business plans – and a few years ago they would work with an extremely high degree of confidence.
But nowadays products of extraordinary value sell for a little as $5 – making life a lot tougher – even more so when companies, such as as clickbank charge a fixed $1 fee as well as a % for every sale.
This makes it much tougher to get started and much longer to recover any initial investments.

Experts, like John Thornhill, confirm that most of your online income is likely to come from ‘back-end offers’.
That’s where I still get stuck.
Affiliate back end offers ore OK for your own traffic but don’t help if you want other affiliates to promote your offers.

The time and effort I spend creating new products or the value I think they are worth means very little.
All that really matters is the value customers put on my products.
That’s why I am planning to create shareware versions of my software so people can try before they buy.
This means I’ll need to wait much longer before any income arrives but hopefully the unit price will be higher when users understand the real value of each product.

About 3 years ago, when I was starting my online business full time,  I attended one of Mark Anastasi‘s webinars.
There were lots of great speakers who were even better salesmen.

Mark Vurnum gave a presentation explaining that he had over 6000 websites each bringing in up to $5 a day from passive automated income. This income figure got talked down to $2 per site a day then $1 per site per day after I spent £2000 = about $4000 at that time to purchase his system, tools and training.

The basic idea was to purchase batches of 5 domains in niches selected using the tools provided then use auto-created-content to keep each wordpress blog updated to get and keep the sites ranked and earn money from Adsense.

Teething trouble with the tools was a constant problem for many others using this system but my technical expertise allowed me to overcome these issues. I was able to set up 5 or 10 new blogs a day until I had about 450 when things started going badly wrong.
Traffic to sites was building up (but income was still dripping in cents at a time rather than $) when the automatic content creation tool crashed.
Mark quickly produced an updated version of the tool – but this needed to be reinstalled manually on every site.
Even flat out it took me an average of 15 minutes per site to update – making 112 hours or over 3 weeks of hard slogging boring repetitive ‘WORK’

Unfortunately the new tool didn’t cure the problem and stopped working within a month – which was extremely frustrating.

Expenditure:

• $4000 for system, tools and training
• $3000 for domains
• 600 hours hard work setting up and maintaining the sites ($6000 at minimum wage)

Income: Less than $100

Then the system simply died – until a year later Mark offered an updated automated income system.
Never one to give up I purchased another 20 new domains but the new system failed to produce any traffic or income making another $200 loss for domain names.

Moving on I paid $1000 to purchase Greg Jacobs WP Mage system for creating auto-content for blogs.
These were much more professional tools that seemed to promise better results.
Greg suggested purchasing separate shared hosting accounts for each 20 domains used.
In total I purchased another 100 domains monetized using Adsense, Amazon and Commission Junction.

Results started to look promising and I estimate that my costs were being repaid from income within about 2 months.
This also produced significant enough results to allow meaningful split testing.
My biggest earner was as an affiiliate for lastminute.com through commission junction.

Then disaster. The very month my income started reaching $200 a day, I received a spam email from Trade Doubler saying great news – they were taking over the affiliate account of lastminute.com from Commission Junction.
For me this was terrible news. It meant editing the affiliate links in over 50 websites containing tens of thousands of pages.
To make matters worse, Trade Doublers terms meant payments were made to affiliates an extra month later.

I received no prior notice from Commission Junction that they had lost the lastminute.com account – their view was that they simply provided a market place and anybody could join or leave whenever they pleased.
Lastminute.com didn’t bother to notify affiliates either – a sorry state of affairs.
It was lucky I found Trade Doublers’ email amongst my spam – probably there because they suddenly mailed thousands of affiliate account owners they had never contacted before.

Almost two years on, I had to smile when an email from Trade Doublers arrived last week advising they would be losing their account with lastminute.com from the middle of this month.
That just shows, what goes around comes around!
Don’t expect things to improve – just change how you do business yourself.

Back to a couple of years ago when at the same time, several servers where my accounts WP Mage sites were hosted got hacked and the sites shut down for over a month.
Traffic and income from 60 sites never recovered.
A little later, Greg Jacobs had his servers hacked and needed to rebuild all of his sites and tools.
To this day, I have been unable to use his most useful tool providing detailed statistics for domain names.

All in all an enormous shock that forced me to re-evaluate what I was trying to do online.
The biggest problem was attempting to work with systems that were totally outside my control.

Since my foray into micro-niches, I have been on webinars with guru’s I trust suggesting that income per site is typically closer to $0.22 per site per day than $1

This means about $80 income per year at a cost of about $15 for a domain and hosting – assuming you avoid falling foul of Google.
At 10 minutes per week mainting each site, this works out at $7.80 for each hour worked – hardly enough to support the dream life painted by most guru’s selling online products.

What did I decide to do?
Well, for almost 2 years now I have been creating software products for internet marketers – aids to automate real online work that I actually use myself almost daily.
Now I have products that I own suitable for affiliates to market to help automate my income.

I have also drastically reduced the number of domains down to about 50 and duplicated key files and documents on more than one hosting account.
For example, I use a dummy add-on domain that contains all of my links to Aweber thank you pages, affiliate forwarding links and other key files. Nameservers need to be changed to each hosting account one at a time to initially set up the add-on domains, but then it’s very easy to FTP upload and save all the files on multiple servers.

Any problem with one hosting account going down means I remain in control being able to change the location of every link and file by simply changing the nameservers to a working hosting account.

In summary, I have found working with micro-niches to produce ‘automated’ income to be a mugs game – always at the mercy of others – especially Google.

Instead it’s far more productive to create your own products of value – something most guru’s spend most of their time working on.

Every thing I do is with the aim of keeping me in control of my business instead of being at the mercy of other able to destroy it on a whim.