Karlonia's profile Karl Erfurt / 38 / Member since November 2007 / Last seen 4 hours ago
My name is Karl Erfurt, administrator of Karlonia.com, a libertarian Internet marketing blog that is dedicated to increasing the personal and economic freedom of all individuals while educating the general public about a variety of topics. My quest as an Internet entrepreneur began in May 2004 when I joined a program called Paid Surveys Online, which is a home based business directory that assists members with paid survey companies and other work-at-home opportunities. Since that time, I have managed to earn a small but consistent income by completing surveys and testing various products for the market research companies that sponsor the surveys.
Through Paid Surveys Online, I was also introduced to the world of paid-to-read email programs, usually abbreviated PTR. These programs allowed members to earn small amounts of money by reading email advertisements that have been paid for by people hoping to gain an audience for their products or websites. Because PTR involved clicking on lots of ads, I soon discovered many more kinds of programs, including traffic exchanges.
It was with the paid autosurf types of traffic exchanges that I first experienced the wonderful thrill of making significant amounts of money exclusively through Internet advertising. The PTR programs served as a kind of training ground for me because it was here that I learned how to write advertisements for the PTR and autosurf programs in order to collect referrals and increase my income. Text link ads, which could be purchased for very low prices at most PTR sites, proved to be particularly successful until about one year ago when the paid autosurf industry began to seriously decline due to a number of factors that would take up too much space to fully discuss here.
At this point, I was forced to change tactics and began looking into other types of Internet business opportunities, including affiliate programs, article writing, and website development. By 2006, I finally joined Clickbank as an affiliate, purchased the domain BestPaidSurveySite.com, and set up a landing page for Top-Dollars.com, a home based business program similar to Paid Surveys Online. I began to promote both the landing page and the affiliate page in a few traffic exchanges but did not have much success, as I had not discovered the ideas of splash pages or list building at this point.
After a few months, I noticed that with a little tweaking, this landing page managed to rank fairly high in the search engines, even reaching #1 in some cases, for some of the domain-specific keywords even though it was essentially just a one-page sales letter. This actually brought in a few sales, and although the money was not really enough to brag about, it got me interested in SEO (search engine optimization) principles and the possibility of developing a real content-based site. Such a website could serve both Internet opportunists and the libertarian community as a source of useful news and information while providing me with a source of long-term revenue that would allow me to survive without being dependent on “the next big thing”. After a fair amount of research, I finally figured out how to install a Wordpress blog and set up camp at Karlonia.com, a domain that I had established back in 2005 as my own “kingdom” that could eventually be passed on to my successors.
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- Published a new blog post: India Travel: The Lakshadweep Islands1 day ago
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