What took your earnings to the next level?

[83lewishere]

If it is possible to pin point one movement or change you made, what made your earning jump from "nice bit of change" to income replacement?

This is something I think a lot of people are interested in but it never gets mentioned.

[Kay]

It's maybe one of these things that a lot of people don't want to spell out in a public place - unless they're selling a Make Money Online product.

Even so, what works for one won't necessarily work for another. Choose a way that suits you and work on it is the best suggestion I can make.

[grynge]

If it is possible to pin point one movement or change you made, what made your earning jump from "nice bit of change" to income replacement?

This is something I think a lot of people are interested in but it never gets mentioned.

I sat down and wrote a plan on how to get away from relying on other people to build my sites up. I only rely on myself and my network of sites to build my own sites. I control my links, I control the anchors, I control the deeplinks and anyone else linking to me or talking about my sites is purely a bonus and I don't have to wait and pray for people to find them.

[Thomas]

A few things:

- Going full-time
- Working with a partner with a different skill-set to myself
- Focusing on what I'm good at rather than what I think would be most lucrative

[DomainMagnate]

I bought a $9 ebook that explained in details how to take my earnings to the next level, read it, implemented everything and it worked!




Ok, not really, but I don't think I've ever seen anyone say that, so here is first

Lots of learning, planning and goal setting; hard work, outsourcing, hiring, expanding, reinvesting.. and if you persist at anything long enough eventually you get to a point where you are making a decent income out of this.. Then you lose it all in a short period of time, start over again, work even harder and make even more money, learning from failures and applying the recent lessons. I don't think there is any specific thing you can pinpoint here, just a lot of focus and hard work.

For me there were certain specific changes: starting to hire full time employees, networking more, going to events and meeting people in the industry, refocusing my business on certain new directions, making some great sales/purchases etc. But in the end the biggest income increases came as a result of prolonged periods of focused work.

[bustour]

Thank DM ~ Very nice way to put it, and I think might serve as a little motivational mantra for me this next week or two.

...prolonged periods of focused work.

[ScottJ]

Borrowing to grow, using credit cards & loans rather than waiting and re-investing at a more natural pace. After a good bit of practice buying sites and feeling pretty confident about what we wanted & didn't want then we borrowed to grow. A personal loan of £15k means repayment of around £17k - when it comes to websites and their returns that's cheap money, but every time I needed to borrow I always made sure any repayments could be made even if the new site made £0 - the loans I have used from Lloyds are not front loaded interest either strangely so have been able to pay them off very quickly without penalty making the money even cheaper although over the years they must think I have some pretty awesome garden landscaping going on and the money spent on my kitchen - sheesh!

[83lewishere]

Borrowing to grow, using credit cards & loans rather than waiting and re-investing at a more natural pace. After a good bit of practice buying sites and feeling pretty confident about what we wanted & didn't want then we borrowed to grow. A personal loan of £15k means repayment of around £17k - when it comes to websites and their returns that's cheap money, but every time I needed to borrow I always made sure any repayments could be made even if the new site made £0 - the loans I have used from Lloyds are not front loaded interest either strangely so have been able to pay them off very quickly without penalty making the money even cheaper although over the years they must think I have some pretty awesome garden landscaping going on and the money spent on my kitchen - sheesh!

I think reinvesting is definitely the key. You have to get over the mindblock of investing money to make money. This is something I have only recently got over. Sounds easy but its not. You start to earn some good change but you want to keep it 100% profit. You can but it will take a lonnnnng time or a stroke of luck to make the cogs turn over quickly. If you can invest £8 and make £10 every time you should do it as often as you can (simplistic example I know, but hopefully you get what I mean). Whether that money goes into training, investment or advertising. Put aside some of your profit for reinvestment and I would say that is the best investment you can make...

...beside DomainMagnate's $9 ebook which has over $2000 value, reduced to $497, and reduced for one time only for $9 just for forum members.

[Clinton]

An increase in earnings should be viewed, I believe, not in isolation but in conjunction with the risk associated with those earnings.

I'd answer a slightly different question if I may: "What took my business to the next level?"

It was diversifying away from a reliance on Google (serps + adsense + adwords + everything else). It brought me stability, peace of mind and lower risk. I stopped obsessing with my Adsense stats, stopped obsessing with my SEO and actually got productive work done elsewhere.

[sasha45]

For me it was learning PHP (a solid starter language). It changed the way I viewed the entire process and allowed me to stay with the competition vs way behind. Way behind being when a software is released that exploits a certain method (blog comments, forum profiles, facebook, etc) and ruins it's value.

Still have a long way to go before I consider myself an expert in the language but even a decent understanding will seperate you from the masses who wait around for methods to be posted or softwares created. By then it's too late

It was diversifying away from a reliance on Google (serps + adsense + adwords + everything else). It brought me stability, peace of mind and lower risk. I stopped obsessing with my Adsense stats, stopped obsessing with my SEO and actually got productive work done elsewhere.

I'm lacking in this area and have been bitten in the **** a few times because of it. I've slowly begun adding other revenue streams but my current dependance is still on the big G. Nothing worse then waking up and seeing your top earning domains blacklisted.