Tomorrow at 5.15pm is the deadline for applications to the CAO (the organisation which processes college/uni applications here in Ireland).

So today i’ve submitted my application and chosen the course i want to do. I can always change it in June as a window opens for a month however it’s very rare i’ll make a decision and change it.

Last year, i picked the same course as i chose this year, in the same college. However i chose to take a year out. Partly to educate myself in this web business but partly to travel a bit and save a bit of cash.

I’m not looking forward to it… I fear it will be a bit of a waste as i’ll be studying things i already know inside out. It’s a 1 hour drive daily up to the college, and a 1 hour trip home. A minimum 3 year course, possibly 4. By that stage, i should be in a position to give up my day job and live off my internet earnings, so i’ll be without the pressure of weekend work, early mornings, late nights etc… that’s some comfort.

However studying things i’m already fluent in isn’t exactly challenging.. i love to be challenged. I like the work and the rewards at the end of it. At the minute, i’ve invested 6 months in learning about search engines, websites, marketing etc… i should be able to pull in $100/month now, with assets in the form of websites worth over $3000.

In order to avoid college and make this a fultime job, i’ll need to get creative and back one or two of my golden ideas. I’ve already secured $100/month with small niche sites… with a unique, big site… i feel i could be set up for life.

So over the next 6 months, i’ll really have to put the foot down. If i’m happy with my earnings come september, and can live off them, i’ll defer my college course for another year.

Just 9 days ago I posted about how i was almost there with $100 in adsense ($96.07)

Now, my current adsense revenue is $118.70, which equates to $22.63 in less than 9 days. So my predicted $20/week is bang on at the minute. I’m on course to earn $80/month every month from now on using just adsense.

With my expansion into text-link-ads, hopefully i’ll hit the $100/month mark and beyond. $100/month is a nice round figure. It starts to get serious. If i can steadily increase traffic and create a few more sites, who knows – i could be hitting $200/month and so on…

It’s all a far cry from my $0.20 every 3 days in the beginning But now that i’ve got this far, i’m determined to work even harder…

As i’ve banned myself from buying sites and hiring people to work on the internet for a few weeks, all I can do now is buy a few domain names.

I want to re-build my savings and get that stability and safety back. So i’m now searching and searching for the killer domain name… a domain name i can vision becoming a household name. I’m working on THE social networking site, which will fill a massive niche – a niche which people wouldn’t even think exists.

my gut instinct domain name is difficult to beat. It’s available as a .com, .net, .co.uk, every extension possible a 2 word domain, makes sense and is catchy. I’m fighting with myself whether to give into the 5/6 character domain name with the compulsary ‘r’ or ‘oo’ stuck at the end of it.

My target market isn’t the playful teen web 2.0 market so i’m thinking – no, be bold and go with the original domain.

Ultimately i can’t make the decision as i’m in this with 7 other people, but it’s my baby so I have a big say in what happens. This idea could potentially hack it with the big boys – bebo, myspace, facebook.. it has the class, the unique selling points… i just need to get everything right from the word ‘go’.

JPEGr is starting to go viral now… it requires very little promotion from me and i’m starting to get traffic from all sorts of forums around the world.

People like it’s simplicity and style… so much so that i’ve run into to copyright violation issues…

Someone has cloned the script and used JPEGr‘s name and style under a different domain. I’ve emailed the person and site in question politely asking that they remove all of JPEGr‘s material from their site or i’ll be forced into taking further action.

I’ve saved screenshot’s, stats and backlinks all using JPEGr material so the said site won’t have a leg to stand on should it refuse to delete it’s material.

I’d love to name and shame the site and owner, but will resist the temptation as it will give the site free publicity and backlinks.

Im getting worried about my earnings or rather the lack of them..

I’m relying on adsense alone at the minute which isn’t stable and is traffic based, lets face it. The likes of JPEGr and mygadgetinfo are both big sites with decent pagerank and fairly high alexa ranking. Adsense isn’t delivering for me on those sites, well not to my satisfaction. I believe they can earn more.

So i’ve joined text-link-ads and am going to test the water with mygadgetinfo. I’ll let you guys know how that goes… If it’s a success, i’ll put them on JPEGr.
It would be nice to have 2 sources of income from my sites. The more the merrier.