Today I have got together with a great blogger to share with you how he earns 6 figures not a year but a month! His name is Timothy Sykes and my regular readers will remember his from a interview I did last month.

After brushing up against the monthly-six-figure-income-barrier not once but twice in the last few months (In April, my blog brought in $88,000+… and last December the figure was $83,358…), I wasn’t sure if my miniscule visitor traffic to my website TimoySykes.com (3,000 daily visitors, approximately 1,000 of them unique, mailing list of 13,000) would be enough to support anything larger, and despite my stock-market-crushing performance (I’m up 370%+ in the last 18 months, making me the #1 ranked trader/investor out of 25,000+ on Covestor, the only financial site that actually verifies results) my sole marketing strategy for TIMalerts (real-time trade alerts newsletter) and PennyStocking instructional trading DVDs (teach my trading strategy) was to mention them incessantly, along with my customer testimonials like HERE and HERE, which I know are hugely annoying, but boy do they work.

Bragging aside, how did I just DOUBLE my blog’s monthly earnings from the $80,000 range to$153,450 in May 2009?

Here’s the breakdown:

May 2009: $153,450

$29,968 TIMalerts

$85,514 Instructional DVDs

$25,725 Advertising & Affiliates

$980 An American Hedge Fund

$11,263 Trading Profits

The secret to my success?

An incredible work ethic. No 4-hour workweek for me, more like 100+ hours/week. My business is hitting on all cylinders so I’ve working my butt off to answer each customer’s questions (1+ hours/day), blog 3x/day (2 hours/day), research (2+ hour/day), create daily watchlists (2 hours/day) make stock trades whenever the ideal setups occur (2 hours/day) all while developing new DVDs/websites/applications that will propel my business in the future (3 hours/day).

Central to my success, the very thing on which my entire business is based, my stock trading has been dead on as my account gained 20%+ in May alone, proving some of the critics wrong that I could only make money in bear markets (nope, I excel in bull markets!) and building on the success I’ve had for the past 18 months and decade (yeah, remember my background)

In order to take the fullest advantage of my trading success, I experimented with special DVD product offers and rebates at first, then actually raised prices late in the month once I saw the kind of people who were beginning to trade (some people shouldn’t be trading as it is risky business), which is good ethics and business-wise).

My TIMalerts subscription business was actually pretty flat month-over-month, the only other thing that made this such a breakout month was some lump affiliate payments from my sponsors and advertisers, which is also helped December 2008’s gains.

So, most of you don’t have stock trading blogs/websites, but the things you can learn from my success are:

1. The best thing you can do to grow your business is be a proven expert in your niche…not because your affiliates, partners or friends say so (in email blasts or in affiliate-linked posts), but because your numbers/customer testimonials speak for themselves.

2. Working hard is not necessarily required, but I sleep better at night knowing that I answer each email/question and am totally transparent. Making money feels great, but it feels even better take pride in your work. I run my business the way I wish all businesses were run with the goal of growing and enriching myself by providing useful/valuable content

3. Don’t for one second listen to any failed blogger/web marketer who says making a ton of money online isn’t possible. Just because they’re too inexperienced/ignorant/incompetent to achieve success doesn’t mean those smarter and more determined aren’t loving and capitalizing on the opportunities out there!

4. Follow Michael Dunlops “Make Money Online Blogging eCourse” to learn how to get your blog online and earning your first $1000.

To Your Success In 2009,

Michael Dunlop and Timothy Sykes

I am a stock trader who’s learned that while trading is fun and profitable, it’s far more fulfilling and even more profitable to teach others to profit just the way I have for a decade now. So, in late 2007, I created a publishing company, BullShip Press, LLC to cut through all the BS in the trading world as 90% to 95% of traders lose money and the “gurus” don’t share their trades/track records because they’re mostly frauds. My goal is to get the number of losers down to 60-70%, but it’s a huge undertaking considering the amount of misinformation out there.

To get the goodness out there, I blog, have a have a real-time trade alerts newsletter and sell instructional trading DVDs that teach how I turned $12,415 in Bar Mitzvah gift money into $2 million in 4 years, was the #1 ranked short selling hedge fund manager 2003-2006 (Barclays) and earned 200% last year making me the top ranked trader out of 20,000+ on Covestor.com, a website that verifies trades and investments.

As I detail in my book “An American Hedge Fund”, I closed my fund because due to the popularity of my TV show “Wall Street Warriors”, I was getting hundreds of emails/day from people who wanted to learn more about my strategy because they had dreams of turning their small accounts into millions just like I had.

Last December you posted that your blog earned $83,358, could you give us a break down on how you accomplished this?

Sure, as I wrote in my blog post detailing the income much of it was due to holiday DVD sales and lump sum affiliate payments, so here’s the breakdown:

$20,229 TIMalerts

$27,688 Instructional DVDs

$29,407 Advertising & Affiliates

$2,084 An American Hedge Fund

$3,950 Trading Profits

What advice would you give a new blogger trying to make money from their blog?

Prove that you’re expert advice/blog is valuable by creating solid word of mouth with free content at first and then showing off all the testimonials from happy readers to seduce even more readers into purchasing your premium product/s, whether they be in the form of a newsletter, DVDs, affiliate products, etc. DO NOT FOCUS SOLELY ON ADS!

I’m actually in the process of creating a how to make money form blogging instructional DVD with a ton of proven experts, contact me if you’re interested in staying updated!

You are now currently living the Internet Lifestyle, what does the Internet Lifestyle mean to you?

It means I’m gonna work my butt off to take advantage of the power of social networks and all sorts of cool new technologies to build a profitable, and more importantly, helpful business. Work hard play hard as having an internet-based business allows me to travel extensively, while also working so already in 2009, I’ve visited nearly half a dozen countries seeing amazing sites, meeting exciting people and having a great time!

I understand that at 18 years old you took $12,415 Bar Mitzvah Gift Money and turned it into $1.65 million using the stock market, what was the biggest lesson learnt from this?

There are times when you must be aggressive in trading, investing and business because the environment is ripe for massive gains….at all other times, be as frugal, cynical and conservative as possible.

Tell us about how you went from Young Stock market Prodigy to one of the highest paid bloggers?

I worked my butt off for a year proving that my investment strategy and my teachings were valuable….then I added in a ton of marketing to get the goodness out there because nobody else in business is going to help me as much as I can help myself.

The stock market niche is particularly easy to excel in since 90%+ of traders lose money, 70%+ of “professional” money managers fail to beat the S&P 500 each year and 99% of people selling investment wisdom don’t share their track record and trades/investments because a.) they’re not as good as they claim b.) they’re total frauds and c.) they’re cowards because industry regulations prevent them from sharing performance (it’s pathetic, imagine a baseball player unwilling to tell you his batting average!)

Seriously, brutal honesty is a revolutionary concept in finance, I wish more joke-of-an-industry-finance people will see the success its brought me and be inspired to do the same as i’m far from the best, just the first!

What would you say the benefits of having a blog over a traditional website or forum?

It’s interactive, real-time, data-minable…it’s not even a debate, you need to market your knowledge every day and better understand/stay in contact with your customers and blogs help you achieve both.

Static websites are soooo 2004 and older, forums are ugly and inefficient unless we’re talking about them being based off Twitter like StockTwits is (I’m an investor)

You are known as the authority blog in the Stock Market niche. What advice would you give a new webmasters to dominating their niche?

Nah, I’m just the authority on penny stocks, gimme a few years until I takeover the entire market….but my advice is to never sell out for the money and promote crap products/probable scams, sketchy-type stuff. Your readers’ trust is everything and you gotta have some self respect! Search out other quality people in your niche and related ones and figure out ways to partner and cross-market each other’s blogs/products.

What advice would you give to people just starting out with an online business?

Prepare to work harder than you ever imagined—this ain’t the 4- Hour Workweek, this world is constantly changing so you must learn about new technologies and trends, ignore most of them, not be afraid of making mistakes, try everything to gain greater exposure, more sales, more testimonials and definitely take on partners who you can trust.

If you could go back in a time machine to the time when you were just getting started, what advice would you give yourself regarding making money online?

I would say reinvest more of the profits into marketing and accounting. For the first several months, I didn’t know if this was going to be a sustainable business so I was scared and selfish, but now I realize I gotta keep putting some $ back into the biz to help more organized and targeted.

What is the best advice you have ever been given?

Don’t invest in anyone who hasn’t been scarred at least once…losses and mistakes help you learn and grow infinitely more than gains just make you cockier and more susceptible to making mistakes.

Thanks very much for the interview, Have you any plans (personal or business) that you can share with us about your future plans / goals / lifetime goals?

Stay tuned for more instructional DVDs, not just for penny stocks and short selling, but general stock market strategies, options trading, and as I already mentioned, blog marketing. The goal is to get as much good information out there in many different formats. And while that’s a nice goal, I’m also going to make sure all my DVDs and experts prove their expert status and regularly converse with our customers! So feel free to visit http://www.timothysykes.com/contact and ask me anything!