I figure it's high time I do a bit of bragging about how far I've come since I started on this Internet marketing journey back in July.  I've actually come a long way, and I'm starting to make a bit of money regularly.  It's a trickle, but it is a steady trickle and it's growing.

A few days ago I got an email that said someone bought through my 1and1 affiliate link (I'm guessing a domain) and I earned $2.50.  Then a few days later, 1and1 just automatically made a payment to my PayPal account.  That qualifies as my first actual affiliate sale in a while, and I hope there will be more.  1and1 is kind of a side product I promote.

A few weeks ago I got into networking more via Facebook and as a result I got myself a gig guest blogging on a site that's been going for about a year--a more established site than my own.  The blog owner and I hit it off immediately and he was ready to open up his blog to guest bloggers.  Plus, the names of our sites are similar.  His is Internet Marketing 101 while mine is Online Marketing 101.  I'm considering returning the favor but am a little too swamped to get into it right now.

I also made another sale through my Facebook networking.  I'm involved in the silver business and because of the cash only nature of it, I tend to handle my customer purchases manually and it was no different with the sale I made to my new friend on Facebook, so not entirely Internet marketing.  Still, a sale is a sale and I find it terrific that someone I just met trusted me enough to deposit nearly $100.00 into my bank account.

I've learned about and started promoting some unbelievable free and lucrative network marketing style opportunities.  See my previous blog post.  I am becoming more and more convinced that these free opportunities are only going to get better and will become a very important part of the future of both network and Internet marketing.

The one I've been promoting for some time now, the one that proved to me that Internet marketing can really work, Varolo, is starting to make me some money--a bit more each week.  Yes it's a trickle, but it's growing.  I actually prefer a trickle that I can count on each week than a phantom sale here and there.  I get several new referrals to Varolo each week, plus some of my referrals are getting referrals of their own.  It's growing.

As for Twitter, I probably get about five to ten new followers a day.  Twitter seems to be very good about organically promoting people as I've gained followers just by following other people right from the beginning.  However that has really stepped up since I started the guest blogging gig.  I haven't seen any particular direct benefit to that yet.  However it's fun to have over 100 followers and counting.

I'm not doing too bad on StreetArticles either.  Once I figured out they're serious about completely original content (after having five articles rejected in short order), I very quickly snatched up some of those rather broad keywords just for fun and have seven live articles now.  I sit down and write a few at a time when I get a few minutes.

Probably the best of all is that before I started out on Wealthy Affiliate I already owned a business which I ran largely offline but I did have a website.  Anyway, because of my training here on WA I learned a lot about what I could do with that website and finally made the decision to pull the plug on Joomla and move it lock, stock, and barrel to WordPress, and I got a better developer to do the job.  I know perfectly well how to build a simple website on WordPress, but this one does have some more complicated features that I have very little interest in learning to do myself at this point, so I use a developer in this case.

In any case, the move should be complete in about a week and then I'm going to go crazy applying my Internet marketing skills to promoting the heck out of my local biz while growing the model into something franchiseable nationwide.  It's essentially going to be a lot of local SEO both for myself and some of the local businesses I'm working with.  More details to follow as it develops, but this is probably the most exciting development of all for me.

Am I getting rich off Internet marketing?  Not yet.  Am I successful?  You bet!