When it comes to working online, often one of the hardest things to do, particularly for those with low patience thresholds is to wait for that very first payment to arrive in your account or your letterbox etc.

Depending on what is you do to earn online, be it affiliate marketing etc most programs you  deal with have a minimum payout threshold some may also have certain terms or conditions you need to meet first; then too comes the payment method, depending on where you live it may take even longer to receive your actual money.

The good thing though, is that generally once you’ve reached payment the first time, the next and subsequent payments start to come quicker.

When it comes to receiving your income for your chosen earning method you need to make sure you understand all that is involved and that you have filled out any required information etc so that your payment can be sent as quickly and easily as possible.

For example: Google Adsense, have a $100 minimum payout which can seem to take forever to reach (at least initially) then of course once you reach it the chosen month you won’t actually receive any money until the end of the following month as they need to verify etc. Depending on where you live you can receive a cheque payment or they will directly deposit into your bank account - just remember that you won’t receive your money until the second month after you’ve reached the payout level.

Another affiliate program that many use that has a different set of terms is Clickbank. While you do get to set your payout level (minimum is $10) you need to meet certain criteria before you will be paid the first time: that is you need five sales to different credit card numbers (this does not include paypal) once you have those initial sales, once you’ve reached your payout level they send cheques every two weeks - of course again depending on where you live this may take an extra couple of weeks before you receive your cheque.

As mentioned each program will have their own set of terms, conditions and information requirements so make sure you read and understand everything, and fill out any required information before you reach your first payout level.

Another thing to remember is that these payments are often in $US dollars so there will also be some sort of exchange rate difference depending on your location and using  clickbank as an example: Because I’m in Australia it actually costs me money to bank an American cheque (Approx $10) and can take up to 20 odd days before the bank will clear the cheque into your account.

Having said all that and with the need for patience aside, once you set up these forms of income streams you are earning an ongoing, usually increasing, residual income so once the payments finally start they’ll just keep on coming

One of the first stages of the Million Dollar Blueprint program is to set up your very first niche site. This section is divided up into many different lessons each with their own video step by step guide. The good thing about these lessons being in video format is that we can follow along with each step. By simply pausing the video at various stages we can carry out what we were just shown and then go back to the video.

When it comes to setting up a niche site, particularly your first one, it is highly recommended that you choose something you’re passionate about. There’s a couple of very good reasons for this: the first being that if it’s something you are truly interested in it’s no chore at all to come up with some decent and informative content, the second and most important for those wanting to earn online with their site is that being something your interested in you’re generally more willing to put the time and effort required into setting it up properly in the first place so you can start earning from it.

Having said that, I have in the past already set up a couple of web sites (fanfic and World Of Dogs) but now that the new instructions are up and for the purposes of this blog I will be starting a brand new niche site from scratch and documenting it all as I go along; success and if necessary failure too.

The very first step to setting up an income earning web site is deciding exactly what your niche is. The video covers such things as discovering whether your chosen niche is going to be profitable based on things like search results, related keywords, whether there is enough income earning potential through affiliate programs etc (clickbank, adsense etc) along with some little tricks to finding more information on your chosen topic and related keywords, something I may never have known if I wasn’t a member of the Million Dollar Blueprint – you really do learn something new every day.

Once you’ve chosen your niche it’s time to start researching your keywords and key phrases – this is covered in lesson two and I’ll post about that and the video within the coming days.

As you continue to build your blog and start on new blogs or web sites you’ll find yourself adding a variety of links to your pages. Whenever possible these links are going to be done using anchor text - anchor text is when you use your chosen keywords as the clickable text for your link.

If you’re adding a link to a blog post it’s simply a matter of typing in your chosen keywords, hilighting those words and clicking the link button on the toolbar just below where you’ve put your posts title (a closed chain link) for example if I wanted to link to one of my other blogs I would write in my keywords: work from home and then link them  - work from home that is now a link using my chosen anchor (keyword) text.

Many web site creators use a similar format to add links (NVU for example) but if you don’t have that option you will need to know how to create your own anchor text using the correct format - don’t worry - it’s really easy.

Using the same phrase above you would put the surrounding code in eg.

Make sure you enclose the full url (starting with http:// within opening and closing ” )

When it comes to adding links to the sidebar of your blog - again there are a couple of ways you can do this and WordPress makes it really easy

The first is via the Blogroll (or links depending on which version of WordPress you use)  simply go to the dashboard, click on blogroll and add in your chosen links and text - these will then be added to your text widget in your sidebar.

If your sidebar doesn’t use widgets (like the theme we use for the Million Dollar Blueprint) you simply need to go into your sidebar.php file and add your links in using the above anchor text format.

For me personally - even if I have a blogroll/links widget I don’t always add my links that way. Sometimes when it comes to a blogroll they can end up taking up half the page as they grow longer and longer - if you start adding in all your links to your own sites you create you may find the same thing. Instead what I do is add my links to a scroll bar, you can see an example of this on my work from home blog - using a scroll bar allows you to add as many links as you want but  they will only take up a pre-determined amount of space - to see the others you need to scroll.

To do this you simply use this code:

 Replacing yoururl with your chosen link and your link name with your chosen anchor text - you can continue to add as many links as you want within the opening and closing tags. This then can be either copied and then pasted into your sidebar.php file or into a blank text widget if your blog is widget ready

Now that you have your new blog set theme activated and you’ve changed your footer.php file you will also want to activate the suggested plugins and change your sidebar to suit your needs.

Within the software section of the Million Dollar Blueprint instructions you’ll see a zip file for your SEO plugins, there is also a video that shows how to upload those plugins to your blog.

As you begin to build more blogs you’ll will often come across other useful plugins but those in the zip file are very useful and well worth activating in every blog.

Here’s another plugin video guide as a refresher:

You’ll also need to change your sidebar to be similar to mine. With regards to the Million Dollar Blueprint theme we are going to keep it as uncluttered as possible to make it easy for other members to find what they need, and only add things that are appropriate to the program.

I’ve added a feedburner subscription button to mine (top right) this allows those in my team and others to subscribe to this blog so they can be informed easily of any updates. You’ll need to sign up for feedburner first and then burn your new feed. From there you can just follow the instructions for anything else you want to use within the service - as a side note I use bloglines as my feedreader but there are many others available.

Also to the right of screen you see a section title My Projects, these are some of my other sites and blogs etc that I have set up using the program so you can see examples of the things we learn, as you build your online business you will do the same.

The pages section covers pages you will set up within your own blog, the affiliate page covers all the affiliate programs we join as part of the program, those in my team will join from this page and then set their own page up the same way - replacing my urls with their own. I have also set up a traffic page for those times when you want to promote in a traffic exchange as well as a short about me page.

When you edit your sidebar.php file you do it in much the same way as when you edited the footer - decide where you want each piece of information to go and paste in your chosen code or urls etc (I will add a new post soon showing how to add your links within a scroll bar to save on room etc)

As you write your posts on this blog - and these posts will cover things you’re learning within the program along with any success or failures, a form of journal describing your experiences with the program etc you will put those posts into your chosen category headings and they too will show in the sidbar.

Now that you have the behind the scenes look of your blog set-up you’re ready to change the outside.

Within the software download section of the Million Dollar Blueprint instructions you will see a zip file title NZPCS blog theme, you need to download this to your computer. Once you’ve downloaded and unzipped it you’re ready to upload it to your blog.

Within the instructions there is a video showing how to upload themes/plugins via ftp. If you don’t have an ftp program already you’ll need to download one - there’s plenty of free ftp programs available I personally use Coffeecup but for the most part they all work the same and look pretty similar.

Once you’re ready you need to upload the entire contents of the work from home blog theme folder to your blog’s directory eg http://work-from-home.yourdomain/wp-admin/wp-content/themes

Once done you need to go to your blog dashboard/presentation and you’ll see the theme within that page - click on it and it will now be activated

If you view your site now you’ll see that it’s the new work from home theme (the same as this one)Now that you have the theme installed you need to make some changes - the first of these is in your footer.php file. If you’re already signed up for adsense you need to put your publisher id in. If you’re not signed up for adsense you can remove the code entirely or place something else there.

Open your theme editor tab (under presentation) to the right of the screen you will see a list of files. Open footer.php and scroll until you see the desired section.

Whenever you’re changing (adding/deleting etc) code from any of these files I always suggest you copy and paste the contents into notepad first so you have the original on standby if anything goes wrong (remember too you can always upload the file again via ftp if something drastic goes wrong.

Once you have new work from home blog ready to go. That is you’ve set up your sub-domain and installed a WordPress blog, if you’ve yet to undertake this step there are some video guides within the instruction site and you can also refer to the previous post on this blog (Setting Up Your WordPress Blog) once you have your blog up and running make sure you have a good look around the dashboard there are a few things you’ll want to change to make your blog much more beneficial and useful to you and your readers.

These changes include changing your permalink structure (your permalinks are your blog urls - as standard the default setting is eg http://working-from-home.vjad.net/?p=123
while this is useful you can make it much more search engine friendly by going to the permalink tab under the options menu, clicking the custom button and changing it to  /%category%/%postname% this then makes your blog url look something like this: http://working-from-home.vjad.net/work-from-home-blog/making-changes-in-your-wordpress-dashboard

you’ll see it is now my blog url/category/title of my post.

Within the Software section of the instruction site you will find a text file titled Ping List For Blogs - download this and then copy all the urls and paste into the update section of your blog - options/writing scroll down to the bottom. The ping list alerts those services that you have updated your blog.

There are other things you’ll do over time, and there’s other options etc you can change within your dashboard but those two I find are a good idea to change as soon as possible.

Before you can set up your new work from home blog as part of the Million Dollar Blueprint program you need to arrange for your domain and hosting. There is a section covering this in the instruction site, and you’ll see mention of choosing a generic domain name, or acronym etc; simply put a reason for this suggestion is so that you aren’t limited when it comes to subdomains etc for example if you chose golf-tips.com as a domain name - having a subdomain of dogs really makes no sense (dogs.golf-tips.com).

Once you have your domain and hosting arranged and your DNS has transferred - you can find more information about Domain Name Servers through your hosting or domain provider you’re ready to set up your initial work from home blog.

Creating Your Subdomain

Before you set up your new blog you need to create a new subdomain (eg work-from-home.yourdomainname)

You can do this via your control panel (cPanel) of your hosting company. Click on the subdomain tab in your control panel and you will see you can create a new subdomain from here - in the blank tab (alongside your domain name) type in work-from-home (remember when creating new subdomains or folders to not have a blank space between any words: use - or _ ) once you have your new subdomain created you’re ready to start your blog
In the beginning, particularly if you’re new to WordPress, you may want to set your blog up via Fantastico (you’ll also find this in your cPanel) click on Fantastico and then to the left of your page under blogs - click on WordPress - from there you want new installation and just follow along with the instructions - remember though - you want to install this in your work-from-home subdomain so make sure that is selected - There is an extensive video in the instruction site that covers using Fantastico to set up your WordPress Blog - you can follow along with that (and pause the video as you do each step)

There are other ways to install WordPress blogs and I’ll cover those in a later post.

Once you have your blog installed, before going any further, log into your dashboard and have a look around - familiarise yourself with the tabs (presentation, options, plugins etc) as you’ll be using those often as you build and maintain your blog. If for some reason you don’t have your login url - just type in your blogs address and add wp-admin eg http://work-from-home.yourdomainname/wp-admin entering on this will take you to your log in page

For many of us when we join a work from home opportunity we often want to get stuck into things as quickly as possible so we race through the steps without really reading or understanding things properly, while you may have some success by doing it this way, you’re much better off taking your time and making sure you understand all that’s involved. There’s nothing worse than reaching a certain point and realising you can’t go any further because you missed something important.

When you first join the Million Dollar Blueprint you’ll receive your link and password to the instruction site. I urge you to make sure you have a look at all that is involved before starting from the beginning and working your way through the steps and videos etc. Each of theses stages has been set out in an easy to follow step by step series where one stage flows naturally into the next.

You will receive a first contact email from your mentor where you can make arrangements so you’re both available should help be needed - I use Skype (an instant messenger/chat program). You will also want to ensure you sign up for the forum - there’s a separate page in the instruction site that covers this (along with the support desk) the forum is not only there to provide any further help it’s also a great way to meet others in the program who are all working toward the same goal. As one of the Admins for the forum and support desk I, along with Dee Dee and Justin, check in regularly to see if we can offer any further assistance.

When you’re ready the first thing you’re going to need to do is arrange for your own domain and web hosting, there is a section in the instruction site that covers this. Once your domain and hosting is arranged you’re ready to take the next step. Setting up your first blog similar to this one.

Welcome to my brand new blog. I’ve created this blog so I can both explain in detail each step of what I’m learning as I follow the instructions and video guides provided within the Million Dollar Blueprint program as well as sharing other information and advice to those I mentor through the program.

While you will find other information related to the NZPCS Million Dollar Blueprint program on my work from home blog it will be this blog I use to cover all aspects of the new program.

Once you’ve joined the program you’ll see a variety of sections/categories each of which covers a different area and goes into detail on what we do and learn as we begin building our online business.

Each member of the program will set up a blog similar to this; as you can see it’s fairly basic to the right of screen you’ll see a page that cover the free affiliate programs we join as well as a page where we can promote products etc in traffic exchanges if desired. There are video guides within the program that show you how to set up your own blogs (similar to this one, or as you move along with the program using different themes and plugins etc)

The Million Dollar Blueprint teaches a variety things when it comes to earning online in many different ways; not only will you receive written instructions it also has an extensive list of video guides, each new member will be assigned a mentor who will be available through email or Skype one on one chats etc along with a forum and support desk. You will also find in the sidebar some examples of the many different income earning possibilities as I build my own projects through following along with the program.

As always if you have any questions or comments please let me know.