A few days ago, I announced joining Mark Hayward on his Make Money Online challenge with the goal of creating myself a muse business to free me from having to work to being able to do what I want.

Now it’s time to share my first actions.

1. Affiliate marketing on this blog

Affiliate sales is something I have experimented a bit with on this blog. Some of you have already bought one of the books sold through this blog, and throughout the past months I have made a grand total of USD 34.80 and GBP 5.60.

I have made a few mistakes, it seems.

First of all, I used to promote only How to be a Rockstar Freelancer on my RSS feed and on the blog front page. Because of that, Lea Woodward’s X Marks The Spot was left with much less attention. It’s actually almost a miracle that two people have bought the book through my affiliate link (at the bottom of this single blog post).

Today, I’m doing a few important changes:

Add a new book: I have strict rules on what I decide to advertise on my blog. You are my friends, and I don’t want to fool you into buying something that I wouldn’t buy myself, just to get money. That’s why I don’t have traditional ads, only the selected few affiliate links.

Last week, I found a new book I thought you would love, Todoodlist. It’s about paperless productivity, and replacing all the fancy gadgets with something that really works, paper. Check it out!

Give all books equal placement: As you can already see, I have changed my blog front page to include all the books I’m featuring instead of just one, and I’m in the middle of updating the RSS feed footer. This way I won’t be hiding my suggested books from my readers anymore.

All of my affiliate links are now located and customized to fit in the space just above the post. The problem with this approach is that if at some point I want to add a new product, I’ll have to do some squeezing as I’m already running out of space.

But the banners look cool, don’t they?

Buy some AdWords to drive traffic to my Rockstar Freelancer landing page. This is my first experiment with AdWords, so I don’t know how it will turn out. But to learn, I have to try it out.

2. Affiliate marketing outside the blog

By now you are probably thinking that my money making efforts won’t be that big after all. You’re right - but that’s true only regarding this blog.

Honesly, I don’t think of my blog as a big source of income in this challenge.

Money isn’t a big motivator for my blog so sure, I’ll try some light monetization ideas on it to get started, but then move my selling efforts out of here. After all, you don’t come here to buy, you come here to hear my ideas and chat with like-minded, insanely interested people, right?

My second batch of affiliate sales will happen outside this blog.

I am currently in the middle of finding three products to sell on an affiliate basis. These products will be picked from three different categories so that by comparing their sales (or non-sales) figures I can see what people are interested in buying. This will be useful information for picking my first own product to sell. (As you see, this is all new for me, so there will be a lot of experimentation and trying out things. Some misses and hopefully also some hits.)

Once I have chosen the products, it will be time to sell. My plan is to test run products rather than selling methods, so I’ll sell each product in a similar way:

1. Create a sales page: I’ll start with a simple sales page that contains a personal explanation on why the product is worth getting, what benefits it gives to the buyer, and how safe it is to buy the product. Some client testimonies will serve to make the product more approachable.
2. Buy some AdWords to lead people to the sales page. I’m planning to use three different wordings to experiment a bit and learn what kind of sales messages work and what doesn’t.
3. Run the campaign for two weeks, then see initial results.

I will let you know when my sales pages are up so you can go and check them out to give me feedback. But don’t worry, I’m not expecting you to buy (you can, if you want to, but I’m counting on my ads).

Also, as I mentioned, this is a new frontier to me, so if you have experience and want to give your input to my experiments, please leave a comment!

What do you think?

So, this is how I plan to start the experiment: through affiliate marketing.

The next experiments are already knocking on the door: niche sites and building my own product. But I can’t do everything at once, so I’ll first get these things rolling, and only then talk more about my other plans.

The number one thought going through my head right now is why I didn’t do all of this already six months ago. But close second is the excitement: I can’t wait to see what happens!

What do you think? Is there something on the list I should reconsider, or do you have tips on how to best do the things I am planning here? I would love to hear your feedback!

And if all of this is something you too want to achieve some day, why not make today that some day and join the challenge. I’m sure Mark would love it!