Part 1 of the AM Mastery Series

Okay, by now, you're bringing in $1K a month from all your forum and blog sites on your own servers. However, because it's still a good idea, a portion of your time is still spent on blogger.com and Google AdSense -- never give up on the free stuff for starter projects. In this business, you need to hedge your bets with multiple strategies.

By now you've probably enrolled in many forums like wickedfire.com and cashtactics.com are getting some great advice and want to keep on moving up the food chain with larger sums of cash each month.

At this point of the game, the cash tactics you'll be focusing on are:

• Better SEO, and preferably the whitehat kind


• Getting more forum volunteers


• Improving content by even paying for it


• Better site and ad analysis


• Better ad networks, even moving into widgets, contests, surveys, and games


• More automation, such as rapidly building forums and blogs through scripts


• More opportunities to move sites out of subdomain incubation projects and into their own domains


• Using more outsource partners for design and SEO advice


• Inventing new forms of compelling content, such as templates for social networking sites (Facebook, MySpaces, WordPress, etc.), screensavers, desktop backgrounds, cellphone ringtones, powerpoint presentations, spreadsheets to run a business, you name it

However, eventually you'll even get opportunities where it costs less to host your own multiple projects on your own servers rather than at some rented shared site. At that point, you might even move into your own small web hosting company to some degree. The key point is to keep an eye on costs. Yes it's good to reinvest somewhat, but you'll want to never over-invest without an eye on the returns, or re-invest before you're ready.