Ed Miller's Blog

Over the last year, I have come across dozens and dozens of affiliate programs. Most offer programs to find you whats hot so you can make thousands and thousands of dollars per month. They run videos showing they’re living in some warm climate and will show you how you can get rich quick. They pretty much are get rich quick schemes. I’ve seen them range in price form $27 to $1,800. I have tried a couple of the less inexpensive ones and am ashamed to say have not made one single dime. The fact is only the top 1% of affiliate marketers make enough to make a living.

Can you make some money with affiliate marketing? Absolutely. However, please do not get mixed up with one of these programs that promise you instant riches. They simply are not going to get you the promises they make. I’ve discussed in a previous post a gentleman named Skip McGrath. Skip is one of the most honest people promoting online business products that I have come across. I have purchased several of his ebooks in the past and recently purchased one to work on affiliate marketing. The book is called How to Make Money Blogging from Home. Skip does not make any get rich promises in the book. I’m working on this program right know and will update you in future posts my progress. I think this will provide me with another stream of income in addition to my eBay business.

Okay, so I was doing pretty well selling on eBay. However, I wanted to expand my eBay business and also find other streams of income from online business. I was looking for information on affiliate marketing. I did some extensive searching and came across a gentleman name Jim Cockrum. I did some research on him and could not find anything negative. He has a website called Creative Internet Strategies. The website covers eBay Business, Affiliate Marketing, Article Writing, etc. There is a forum for sharing information and asking questions. The greatest thing I found was there is a bonus page where many of Mr. Cockrum’s colleagues offer online business ideas and information mostly at no additional costs. There is a newsletter you can sign up for on this webpage so you are always getting up to date information. Earlier I talked about scams and people you should run away from. If you are struggling with your online business or looking for ideas or other streams of income, I highly recommend Creative Internet Strategies. I use this website and have found many great ideas for my own online business.

I see promises like this weekly online or coming into my email. These offers are other known as “The Next Get Rich Quick” scheme.  You can even start earning $152,000 a month in the next three months. I must tell you again, run as fast as you can!!! The truth is you can make some great income with an online business and quite possibly have a full time income. However, it will take a ton of work and it isn’t going to take weeks or months. It likely will take years. If it was this easy, wouldn’t everyone be doing it and wouldn’t we all be already rich.

I actually tried a software program that set up a website for me everyday and was supposed to start generating immediate affiliate income. It only took me a few clicks to set up each site and all I had to do was sit back and collect the riches!!! The best part was these sites were guaranteed to shoot right to the top of the search engines.  Guess what, I couldn’t find the sites in any search engine!!! I didn’t collect one single penny in affiliate income from these sites. Fortunately, I was able to get a refund on my investment.

The bottom line is an online business is going to take time. Stay away from the get rich quick schemes. Find an honest mentor and be prepared to educate yourself and for some gold old fashioned hard work.

If you are starting an eBay business or online business and looking for help, be careful. This is another area where you can lose some money. I hooked up with one company that gave you a website and reportedly was going to send me 800 visitors a month. Well I paid a good chunk a money and found their servers were so sloooooow. Sure I received the visitors they promised, but guess what, stats showed they spent about 15 seconds waiting for the page to load and then were gone. Help! Then, the company would not give me money back so I reported them to the Online BBB. I was able to recover half my money in a settlement.

There are lot of people out there asking for big chunks of money upfront to help you some way with your online business. Stay away!!! There are too many scams out there. The good news is there is help out there from reputable individuals. One source I used when I started was Skip McGraths Online Sellers Resource. Skip has been around a long time and is an honest online entreprenuer. His site offers many products for an online business especially in regard to eBay. Also, you can find some free infromaton. If you’re a newbie or even been working on an online business for a while, you can’t go wrong by checking out Skip McGrath.

Okay, I was out $3,000 after trying to broker event tickets online. I refer to it as the “ticket scandal.” of 2007 It sure was a failure, but I had to make that money back. Ebay looked like an appealing place to do that. I started looking for things to sell. Living in Wisconsin, their is a ton of Packer merchandise floating around. I looked for stuff on sale or heavily disounted. Sold a few things just to get my feet wet on Ebay. Brett Favre retired a couple times, I sold newspapers with the headlines, and bought some extra Sports Illustrated with Favre on the cover. It was a hot item and made a few bucks. However that was a short term item.

I needed more stuff to sell. I didn’t have a lot of time to run around searching for items to sell. I turned to drop shipping. I found suppliers with items to sell. I sell their item on Ebay, collect payment, and notify my supplier where to ship it. It took me a while to find some good drop shippers, but I am doing very well now.

I did make up the MY $3,000 from the ticket scandal and am still selling on Ebay today. I am a Top Rated Powerseller. Check out Ebay user id jetfast07.

I started my online business about four years ago. I wanted some extra income to help put my kids through college, do some home repairs, and if I really did well do some traveling.

I like sports and had a brilliant idea to make money by being a ticket broker. I started purchasing tickets and then sold the tickets on Ebay, Stubhub and a few other ticket sites. Unfortunately, I had no experience as a ticket broker and payed the price.  I bought a ton of tickets and had a great inventory. I had a few early sales and thought I was going make some easy money. Then as some of the other event dates approached I either got stuck with some tickets or had to sell at extremely low prices.  I ended up taking a beating and was done selling event tickets in about six months. My net loss was about $3,000. Ouch!!!!!

Now I was in a position I needed to make that money back. The heck with making money, I justed wanted to get that $3,000 back. I’ll cover that in my next post.

Hello, I am Ed and want to welcome you to my blog. I’m sure your first question is what is the blog about? I’m here to share my experience as an online entrepreneur. I will share some of my success, failures and what I am currently working on.  Please sign up for my newsletter that will let you know when my blog is updated and to receive other great information. Stay Tuned!!!