Where would you like to be in 5 years? It sounds like a dumb interview question, but it’s relevant in internet marketing (IM) as well as making money online. If your 5 year goal is to make $100 a month, set your sites higher.

The future you see is the future you get. – Robert Allen

What does your future look like in your mind?

Take a break from what you’re doing and consider these questions.

• If you were given $1 million per year for the rest of your life, what would you do?
• If you had everything in life paid for, what would you do?
• If you lived in a monastery and didn’t have access to the internet, what would you spend your time doing?
• What is one thing you could never live without?

For me, those types of questions really make you reflect on what is important. Is money important, sure. Is it the most important thing? Definitely not.

“Too many people spend money they haven’t earned, to buy things they don’t want, to impress people they don’t like.” – Will Smith

What is the goal of you making an income online? Is it to buy a Hummer to impress people you don’t know? Is it to move into a neighborhood so people want to come to your house? If you think about it long term, are those things that are important to you?

“When I was young I thought that money was the most important thing in life; now that I am old I know that it is.” – Oscar Wilde

When you lie on your death bed looking back at your life, will you wish you had spent more time making money? Will you check your bank statements and be happy that your life’s total sum is a dollar figure?

When my life is through, I want to look at my children and grand children and see them smiling. I want my wife to know that I loved her with all of my heart. I want God to say, “Well done, good and faithful servant”. To me, the chief end of man is to glorify God in everything I do.

What do you want to see when you look back on your life? Are you current actions taking you there?

After a long and hard fought losing battle I give up. I will start using Twitter. As I said in my first tweet (tweet still sounds stupid to me) I don’t see the value in giving content to a 3rd party site with no financial return but I’ll see if maybe I can find some. You can follow me if you want to know what I do every day to make money online.

I hang my head in shame.

A few days ago Chris Garrett made a post titled Why I Don’t Check Rankings. Ironically enough, the post is ranked 6 for the term “check rankings”.

Unlike Garrett I check my rankings, at least daily. Why? I’m in this game to make money. There is no other reason I spend a great portion of my day writing and publishing content. As much as I like my readers, I have offline friends and don’t really need online friends. Like you, I’m here to make money, plain and simple.

I don’t care to be famous, I respond to interview questions because I want the links and traffic that come. More links, better rankings. Better rankings, more money. See where I’m going?

Garrett says, “My approach is to write for audiences. I usually have my main audience and also an overlapping audience that I hope to attract with my most recent article.” That is something I understand. My audience is a search engine. I don’t care which search engine it is, I just want them to come to my site, and love it. If they love it and I rank #1 for a niche keyword, then beautiful.

If I can get 30,000 uniques per month in my niche, but can’t make $300 I’m either wasting my time, or building something bigger. Most of the time when I exploit a particular niche and it explodes with social traffic, that traffic is completely a waste. It doesn’t convert, and social visitors don’t click ads.  Traffic isn’t my goal, my goal is where that traffic goes.  Did they click and ad?  Buy a product?  Or did they hit the back button and continue surfing?

Before I go too much further, it’s important to note that Garrett and I obviously have different plans when it comes to building a profitable online presence. I’m not even sure that is his goal, so I don’t want to criticize his methods because his goal may not be the same as mine.  Maybe he blogs for the love of blogging. I blog to give you something to read, with the hope that eventually you’ll convert to an affiliate program, buy something, or at some point become valuable through RSS subscriptions or total readership. To date, that has happened pretty well. I have a full list of ads sold, a few links here and there and a few posts that have earned me some money.

So why do I track my rankings? I want to make money. If I’m ranked #5 for a decent keyword, with some effort I can probably move that ranking up to #1 depending on the quality of the niche. If you have any #1 rankings, you know that the difference in net profit between #1 and #5 is INSANE!

In conclusion, let me tell you a story from about 3 years ago. I was ranked number 10 for a high volume keyword on MSN. Keep in mind, MSN traffic is very low compared to Google. After about 30 days I moved from #10 to #1.

At #10 position I was making about $5 per day. When I went to the #1 position, I was making over $150 a day (with MSN alone) with that one site. If I wasn’t tracking my keywords (like Chris Garrett), I never would have known that I was within striking distance. When I found out I was ranking in the #10 position for my keyword I immediately went to work and made great money.

So why do I take the time to track my sites? To make some money of course!

Do you take the time to track your keyword rankings?

If you haven’t seen it yet, check out my recent interview with WebProNews.com here.

Give me some feedback, agree? Disagree?

My wife and I have been working on getting our Halloween costumes ready for Wednesday.  We’re going to be fishermen and our 6 month old daughter is going to be a fish.  Her costume is perfect and we just need a few finishing touches for our costumes.

One of the things that many people look for when putting together their halloween costume is contact lenses.  While our costumes don’t really need contacts, costumes like dracula and vampires would be perfectly suited for a set of cheap halloween contacts.  If you’re still deciding on a costume, you should be able to order online and get overnight shipping and have it by Wednesday.  While we were at the Sierra Vista mall yesterday, we noticed how expensive halloween costumes were.  When I checked online, they were much cheaper.

So this is my home office…View it and weep! Jealousy is sure to overwhelm you so back up before the tears ruin your keyboard!

For the record, Dave Pitlyuk tagged/pinged/meme’d me in his post about his home office. It’s a mess right now. I don’t feel as bad after checking out Josh Dorkin’s office!

Full Disclosure: I only responded to Dave’s post because I want a ride in his Viper. Just FYI Dave, if you make it to California, you can get a hotel room, and the Viper can stay in my garage.

I think you’re really going to like the redesigned Brandon-Hopkins.com. Look for it sometime this month hopefully. As I talked about before, I’m focusing on one project a month, and this month is Brandon-Hopkins.com. Next month could be your blog if you’re ready to take it to the next level!

Well, basically Technorati says, “Brandon-Hopkins.com is cool!”  They didn’t use those exact words, but by listing me in the top 18,000 they obviously think I’m cooler that a lot of people.

Thanks Technorati, now maybe someone will buy some advertising and my bank account will think I’m cool too.

As usual, I commit to posting regularly to this blog then I let things slide. It’s in my nature to start a new project then drop that project for something more interesting. Currently it has been some stupid tower defense Shoemoney posted about (stupid because it’s been wasting my time like crazy), Starcraft (the OG of games), and a client website.

I was reading a post Michael Gray wrote about client work and blogging. It’s true, clients don’t want to see you posting new posts to your blog when their deadline is up. That post reminded me about making money online.

There are two distinct methods to making money online. Work for yourself or work for others. Currently I do both. Currently I do a LOT of work for myself and a little work for others. Most of my work for others is website design for my company AfterHim Media.

However, as I said I tend to get distracted from a project very quickly. With that fact in mind, I’m going to try something new this month. I’m going to stay focused on ONE project for the entire month.

I am still in the process of deciding on what project I will take on for next month but it will be a personal project because I don’t have any business projects lined up right now. Currently I’m thinking about trying to linkbait my business cards website or try to get this blog to make some cash.

This blog is pretty easy to monetize because of the traffic that it gets. The business card website is more difficult because linkbaiting for “business cards” isn’t easy. Here you can see my first attempt. I realize that I’m late with the HD-DVD jokes, but sometimes I’m a little slow on the funny bandwagon. Look for a Paris Hilton business card soon. That will be just in time for her taking over Martha Stewart’s jail cell.

So what do you think, should I work on this blog or my business card site in June? Or do you want to hire me instead?

Sorry for the delay in the posting of the “Great Websites, Limited Funds” series.  It will still be coming, I promise.  For now, I’ll be spending time with my wife and 4 day old baby!

Here name is Aubrey Ann and she is the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen!