We finally picked out our first dog, and since I never had a dog before I have been spending hours trying to learn as much as I can and buy all the right gear to be a good pet owner.

My girlfriend and I finally signed a new lease so we will be moving early October into our new place. It is a little more expensive and is slightly better than our apartment now, but the great thing is they allow dogs, and in the city its tough to find a place that does.

I decided to set a new goal with making money online. From talking to people it is obvious that having a specific goal, or income figure really helps your brain figure out the most optimal way to get there.

My new goal is to make 5k a month from risidual online income by 2009.

I have been really thinking about what is the quickest most effective way to do this and what I have realized is by creating the 30 sites that I did after leaving my full time employment I have the assets to make it happen, but it will be slightly different from what I hoped.

All of my sites are floating right now and the cream is slowly starting to rise to the top.  One of which has really picked up and generates about 250 dollars from ads and ebay affiliate. My goal now is to replace that income with some legit banner sponcors to total about $1,000 in consistent monthly revenue.

The other four will come from blowing out the rest of the sites that are getting fairly close to breaking through by building some links. And also leave some of my PPC campaigns that have slow trickle profit of about 20 bucks a day per campaign.

Hopefully this blog post will act as a reminder so I do not stray from what I know has to get done.

Even when guys like Aaron Wall take shots at 30DC I did not believe some of the accusations. I have learned a lot from the program, but recently I have gotten something on one of my blogs that has made me question their tactics. The screen shot below will show exactly what I am talking about.

Here is a little background information so you understand exactly how damming this would be. In the training videos 30 DC uses the keyword “vintage electric guitars” to show you how you can market a product by using SEO strategies to gain traffic.

One of the most commonly used and most annoying Black Hat ways to gain SEO ranking is to use comment spam. Basically you create a script that leaves comments on blogs such as this. Usually they are pretty easy to spot because they are poorly written, too general, or irrelevant.

The following comment was found on one of my skin care blogs.

Here I am thinking they are teaching legit techniques, but on the side they are sending out comment spam. The truth is to compete you have to use some shady techniques or else you won’t last in this business.

I am not making the pace I wanted to, so I decided to change my plan up a little and do something that I vowed I would never do.

The decision to outsource was a tough one. I have always been against it for the following reasons.

• Quality of work was not up to par
• It hurt people here by going somewhere else
• Fear of getting ripped off
• Not wanting to loose full control of project

What I slowly started to realize is that outsourcing is a necessary step to compete. During a local affiliate marketing meetup (Meetup202) I finally found a fellow SEO who does pretty much what I am trying to do. One of the best pieces of advice I got was to not be so afraid of outsourcing.

This is how I now think about outsourcing.

• In SEO you are not just competing with the US, you are competing with the whole world, why not use the worlds resources
• The cost of outsourcing is low enough to make the risk of getting ripped off worth it
• The quality of work is not low, the developing world has many professionals who excel in their chosen field
• My time can be better spent thinking of new ideas and working on clients then doing tedious repetitive tasks
• The real competitive advantage is creativity, not knowledge of how to perform tasks

My investment is $2,000 over the next six months, not a small figure. The specific task I am outsourcing is link building. Anyone who does SEO knows how important link building is, and how time consuming it can get. My websites are chock full of good original content, and I feel like this link building is the kindling I need to get things going. Even if my traffic increased a mere 20 times, I should be able to pay for this investment in less than 4 months, and who knows maybe thinks will really pick up and allow me to focus on building web properties full time.