Double Journey

So one of the things I definitely plan on doing to help me double this money is to put advertising on this blog. Hopefully that will help close the gap between what I can realistically make and my goals.  Some people, like John Chow, are able to make several thousand dollars a month just in advertising.  I’m not so ambitious as that, but I do hope I can somehow make a little bit of money in this manner.

So to test some stuff out, and because I have more traffic there, I put up my first ad today using Google’s Adsense on my other blog .   I won’t give a day to day account about what happens, but today I earned my very first cent, and it was exactly one cent.  So if I can just put together a few more days like this, I will be about $4.00 closer to my goal of $20,000 by the end of this journey next year.  Hey that’s 0.02%.  Just need to find out how to make the other 99.98% now.

So what is this crazy thing I’m going to do? Like I have said, I’m going to take $20,000 and try and make it $40,000. I’m going to do this all in the span of one year. For the sake of total accuracy, I plan on doing this over 400 days. Why 400 days and not exactly one year? I’m doing this for two reasons. First, I need about a month to set some stuff up anyway and collect my thoughts. Also 400 days means I have to average a nice round $50 a day to meet my goal.

That gives me a deadline of December 18, 2008.

At this point, I’m not sure how I’m going to go about this. That is part of the fun of writing this blog. My initial idea is to venture into something I know about, and that’s the stock market. Getting a double in the market in only one year is hard, very hard. It means I’m probably going to have to take some risk that I normally wouldn’t. Then again, I haven’t been doing so great in the market lately so maybe having a completely different strategy will do me some good. Hopefully, if this blog ever becomes popular enough, I’ll be able to monetize it somehow. So if you want to help me, make sure you come back and read often.

Now to lay down some ground rules.

1. Everything I do must be legal - kind of a no-brainer, but worth calling out explicitly
2. If it’s legal and ethical, it’s fair game - No matter how crazy or stupid something might sound, if it will get me closer to my goal, I’ll look into it
3. To count toward the goal, it must be the money doing the work, not me directly - That is, I can’t count anything I do at my day job toward my goal. It wouldn’t be any fun if I went out and “earned” the money.
4. I have to count any and all expenses I incur along the way against my goal - For example, I had to pay for my domain name and web space for this site. That means I’m already almost $100 in the hole.
5. My living expenses don’t count - If I had to count paying my rent against my goal, I’m not sure I would ever make it out of the hole. So for this experiment, living expenses are not deducted.

If anyone has a brilliant idea, I’m all ears.  At this point, I’m prepared to lose the entire $20,000, so if you have any idea, no matter how crazy, feel free to suggest it.