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Twitter Marketing Explored

2009-08-04T01:28:00.000-07:00

Twitter is growing by leaps and bounds as people begin to appreciate its clean and easy-to-use interface. Twitter, at this point, does not look like one of the many flash-in-the-pan Internet applications that we have seen in times' past.

Twitter's 140 character micro-blogging platform has gained a lot of traction, as individuals and business people have learned to bring together their friends, family and customers under a communications platform that all users find useful.

Mom and dad find it easier to keep up with the lives of their grown children through Twitter. The fact that Twitter allows people to link to other web pages makes Twitter a simple platform to share thoughts, ideas, and links to stories and pictures. Grandma and granddad find it easy to check in on the kids' Twitter account and to maintain daily contact with those across town and elsewhere in the world.

Friends can make plans and share common interests through the Twitter world. One can reply to a message publicly, or if the message is a bit more private, one can send a Direct Message (known as a DM) to anyone who has agreed to follow you also. Through the DM system, lovers can share flirts that no one else can see, but the persons intended to receive the message.

If you let your kids use Twitter, it may be best to set up their Twitter Account Settings to "Protect The Tweets". In the description of this feature, Twitter says, "Only let people whom I approve follow my tweets. If this is checked, you WILL NOT be on the public timeline."

The Public Timeline is the messages/tweets that everyone can see. Anything not on the Public Timeline is private, with restricted access.

Business People Are Working To Tap Into Twitter Marketplace

Twitter was born in March of 2006. But most of us never really heard of it or even understood it, until this last year (2008-2009). A few of the Internet gurus started talking about Twitter in 2008, and as 2009 got underway, more online marketers started talking about the Twitter community on a nearly daily basis.

We have accounts in Twitter that are a couple of years old, but we didn't get involved with Twitter really until about April of 2009. In April of 2009, we had 12 Twitter Followers.

In May 2009, there was not a single online business in the Top 100 of Twitter, but those numbers are starting to change. Through May of 2009, the Top 100 accounts on Twitter were dominated by TV and Movie celebrities, a few media companies such as @cnnbrk, politicians and sports figures.

Most online marketers hadn't given Twitter much thought until "The Great Ashton Kutcher vs CNN Twitter Race" that ended on April 17, 2009 with Ashton (@aplusk) getting the privilege to declare victory. Even now, three months after the end of the race, Ashton is still the champion - Number 1 in the Twitter Follower counts with 2,975,032 Followers. Ashton is followed by @TheEllenShow - 2,610,357; @britneyspears - 2,553,668; @cnnbrk - 2,431,783; and @twitter - 1,930,821.

When the Great Twitter Race was concluded, I did a backlink check on Ashton's @aplusk account. Literally, Ashton had bought a ton of advertising on websites, blogs, forums, etc. Ashton was also getting tons of free press in print and online in the Great Twitter Race.

Of course, we marketers should not feel bad if we are getting on this bandwagon a little late in the game, because @google has only had their account since Jan 09. Google is currently the 23rd biggest Twitter account with 1,244,976 Followers.

A surprise for me was seeing @WholeFoods, an Austin Texas based grocery store, sitting at #38 with 1,094,093 Followers. According to TwitterCounter, Whole Foods had only 322,820 Followers on April 4, 2009. A quick look at the Whole Foods profile indicates that they are using the account to share with their customers: company news, customer support, and available specials.

An honorable mention goes to @kevinrose, celebrity and founder of Digg.com. Kevin Rose is the 40th most popular person on Twitter, with 1,092,920 Followers.

Once you get into the Top 100 List below #40, you finally start to see a few online businesses in the mix. @zappos CEO is #45. @woot is #46. @TechCrunch is a web media site at #55. @dooce is at #60. To see the full Top 100 List, go here: http://twittercounter.com/pages/100

Who Is In Your Target Market and What Do They Want To Know?

As you look around at those people who are successful building their own little communities on Twitter, you will notice that each one gives people what their Followers want.

For example, @cussy is an online marketer, and he has nearly 10,000 Followers. His secret to growth: quotes. He gives his followers some of the best quotes about business and reaching goals of anyone on Twitter. I follow him and Retweet him often.

@dave_carpenter advertises himself as a Success Partner For High Achievers. Dave shares quotes and tips, and he retweets others who give good advice also. More importantly, Dave encourages the people he follows. He has nearly 9,000 Followers at this time.

@MattLevenhagen is a professional marketer. His 13,000 Followers follow because he runs a mix of marketing tips, links to great articles, and retweets for great advice. He even uses his Twitter account to give his customer's support.

@SocialMedia411 is a Social Media expert who offers social media tips, links to social media articles and news. With more than 56,000 Followers, you can bet that the advice given here is worthwhile to its audience.

When you learn to talk to the people most likely to buy from you, you have completed the first and most important step to enable you to develop strong Twitter Marketing habits.

Learn How Others Are Successful With Twitter

As always, when you want to learn to be successful, you should look to those who are already successful and try to reverse-engineer the steps that they used to become successful. Once you have taken the time to study many who have been successful in the way that you want to be successful, you may note that success comes from giving people what they want and doing it in such a way that you provide good value to your customers.

Those who have been successful with Twitter have done so, because they put the needs of their Followers ahead of a personal desire to be boring or silly.

The good news is that other business people have started to find success on Twitter and you can too. When you learn to provide the people in your target market with the information that they need and want, you will have started down the path to building a Twitter Follower list to envy.

About The Author
Trey Pennewell works for thePhantomWriters.com article marketing service. If you write articles and need to distribute your articles to higher value audiences, you owe it to yourself to try The Phantom Writers' services. If you want to learn more about how to develop a large list of Twitter Followers, buy the ebook (under $10) at: twitusers.com Follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/contentmanager

MySpace and Monetize (DoshDosh)

2009-02-12T02:30:00.000-08:00

10 Ways to Make Money with MySpace

make-money-with-myspace.pngHow can I make money with MySpace? Or rather, should you even bother with developing MySpace as another source of online income? As a social network that sees very heavy daily visitor traffic from millions of users, MySpace has been the target of aspiring entrepreneurs, internet marketers and webmasters.

As everyone knows, traffic of all sorts can be transformed into profit through various monetization methods. MySpace is no exception.

A large number of webmasters, marketers and businesses are trying to promote their products on websites on MySpace and the effects can be seen in the large amount of spammy advertisements across the MySpace network.

It would not be inaccurate to say that making money on MySpace is incrementally more difficult now because of market saturation, due to the entry of so many businesses or individuals who are trying to get a piece of the lucrative MySpace pie.

Personally, I’ve always been interested in MySpace marketing and MySpace related websites because of the sheer market size that MySpace commands.

I’m also one of those optimistic enough to believe that it’s still possible to make money with MySpace. In my opinion, one just needs to be skilled at selecting the right monetization method and knowledgeable about the different tactics you can use to market your product or business.

MySpace and Commercial Activity

It is important to know that you can’t promote affiliate programs or commercial services openly on MySpace since its against their Terms of Agreement. This is something to keep in mind before you begin any type of marketing or promotional method.

Point 5 on MySpace’s TOS talks about Non-Commercial Use by Members:

The MySpace Services are for the personal use of Members only and may not be used in connection with any commercial endeavors except those that are specifically endorsed or approved by MySpace.com.

Illegal and/or unauthorized use of the MySpace Services, including collecting usernames and/or email addresses of Members by electronic or other means for the purpose of sending unsolicited email or unauthorized framing of or linking to the MySpace Website is prohibited.

Commercial advertisements, affiliate links, and other forms of solicitation may be removed from Member profiles without notice and may result in termination of Membership privileges. Appropriate legal action will be taken for any illegal or unauthorized use of the MySpace Services.

What this actually means for MySpace marketers is that aggressive and blatant advertising will not work. Everything that you do will have to be somewhat under the radar, especially when it comes to selling products or services.

10 Ways to Make Money from MySpace

I’ve dug around the web and haven’t really found any useful guide to making money with MySpace and so I’ve decided to come up with my own list of methods you can use to earn some extra money from MySpace.

Most of the items on this list came from several webmaster friends who earned a consistent income through the funneling of MySpace traffic to highly relevant websites with various monetization options.

Depending on your personal ethics, some of the methods on the list may not be methods that you will want to pursue. That’s perfectly fine. My aim was just to record down a list of the ways that one can possibly use to make money through MySpace.

Here is the list in full:

1. Bulletin-based Advertising. Mastering this is the first and most fundamental step towards making money with MySpace. Add as many friends as possible (either manually or through automated software) and learn to send out bulletins or comments which drive traffic towards your money-making sites.

Depends on how targeted or aggressive your broadcasting, these methods can be regarded by MySpace and other users as spam.

2. Use Affiliate programs. Direct Myspace traffic to your website which contains your affiliate links or product feeds. I suggest going for Cost Per Action programs which only require the visitor to submit his or her email address or sign up for a free account with any website.

Dating network, free X360 offers or ringtones would generally do well although some affiliate networks may not be too pleased if you primarily get all your affiliate traffic from MySpace alone. Mixing MySpace into your overall affiliate marketing strategy will be more balanced and useful.

3. Start a MySpace Resource site. Your aim is to make money through Adsense and other advertising by driving MySpace traffic to your site.

The main attraction of your site will be the availability of free MySpace resources such as templates, codes, graphics and survey generators etc. Note however, that many webmasters have reported poor click values for MySpace resource sites because of the low paying ads.

4. Create dozens of accounts everyday and sell them to webmasters which are looking to promote their website on MySpace. There is actually demand for multiple Myspace accounts in webmaster and affiliate marketing forums.

5. Offer Advertising Space for webmasters and businesses. This will only work if you have a large number of friends on your MySpace accounts. You can probably charge webmasters a fee for putting up a link to their website or business.

This is usually done through bulletin-style notices that go out to multiple members or mass commenting. Think of it as something similar to an email list.

6. Partner with independent musicians and bands to reach out to their fan base. This will allow you to get some sales for your products if they are highly relevant. I suppose that T-shirts and fashion accessories will do well when they receive personal recommendations from musicians.

7. Create and Sell Myspace scripts or templates. You can either set up your own website to sell these templates or sell them to MySpace Resource websites, who are always looking for new material. Keeping the price competitive is an important factor here.

8. Build a MySpace website around your business. For example, if you are selling shoes, you could build a MySpace page which highlights a specific section of your website (E.G. sports sneakers, vintage shoes) which would appeal to the MySpace market. This will usually get some visitors to your website and may lead to actual sales.

9. Start a Proxy site. Proxies are websites, which allow users to surf websites which may be banned in a specific locality. They are usually monetized by Adsense or other types of contextual based advertising.

Proxies are popular with the MySpace crowd because it allows them to bypass web filters that are set up by the schools or businesses to block Myspace websites. There are a lot of proxies out there and competition for MySpace and other internet users is quite strong.

I suggest getting into the Proxy business only if you really know how to promote your proxy effectively on both MySpace and the search engines.

10. Use MySpace Groups for targeted marketing. Visit the category relevant to your business and carefully drop targeted links to your website, which should contain useful content alongside affiliate programs/Adsense.

A List of MySpace-friendly Websites and Affiliate Programs

Like any other type of market, picking a highly relevant affiliate program or website and promoting it through MySpace is absolutely vital for monetary success.

The MySpace market is made up of mostly teenagers, so choosing products or websites which appeal to their interests would be very useful indeed.

Here is a list of some websites and affiliate programs which will work well with the MySpace crowd.

* Humor and Entertainment websites
* Social Video websites
* Free music and games download sites
* Wallpaper download websites
* MySpace Resource websites
* Free Ringtone download websites/affiliate programs
* Free software/application download websites
* Music related websites
* Dating/Social networking websites
* Online clothing/T-Shirts websites and affiliate programs

Just to point out that I’ve not included any specific MySpace scripts or tools which can automate the profile building or marketing process because there are just far too many of them out there.

If there’s enough interest, I might cover these scripts and the overall marketing/traffic directing process in a separate post. Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

Sample Video about how to make maney on MySpace :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDtVomSkBo4
and
http://revver.com/video/914966/how-to-make-money-with-myspace-marketing/

Twitter to Monetize (Saad Kamal)

2009-01-13T19:02:00.000-08:00

Twitter Monetization: How to Make Money With Twitter

May 9th, 2008 by Saad Kamal

Everyone seems to like twitter these days which is a really cool way of staying in touch with your customers, friends & colleagues. Basically twitter has presented itself as a micro-blogging platform where a user can shout out anything they want to his ‘followers’ within the limit of 140 characters.

I have just started twittering since last month (*yes I’m pretty late starter!) because initially by looking at it for the very first time, I couldn’t find any ‘value’ that it has for my work & my social life. However after reading a convincing post by Aaron Wall, I thought of giving twitter a try. Since then onwards I have been using twitter all day long, just to keep track of some of the leading experts in the Internet & Search Marketing field as well as to have some ‘fun’ with my online buddies.

Anyway the whole point of doing this post is to highlight some of the key monetization elements that an individual can explore using twitter. I assume you have the basic knowledge of what twitter is and how it works, so I will directly deep into some ideas which can make you earn money from your twitter.

Direct Advertisement - If a lot of people are following you in ‘twitter’ or in other words if you have a ‘wide reach’ to a large number of twitter users, you can probably look into direct advertisements for monetization.

Recommendation – You can recommend a particular product or service on behalf of your advertisers & peruse your followers to take an ‘action’.
Promotion – You can help your advertiser to promote a new product or service to your twitter followers.

It works pretty much like niche marketing because, say if you are an Internet Marketer, It is very likely that most of your followers in Twitter are also from the same area which is why they have ‘followed’ you in the first place.

Affiliate Marketing – I was listening to Shoemoney’s podcast yesterday where he talked about how affiliate marketing can actually be blended within Twitter.

Affiliate Links – If you are recommending a Product or a Service to your followers, you can always embed your affiliate link in your tweet. (e.g. Using a service like TinyUrl.com)
Sales Pages – Instead of taking your followers to another website using your affiliate link, you might just want to promote your own product & services and sell them directly via your sales / landing page.

This is an area where every one can really look into. For instance say when one of your followers is asking for suggestion to choose a web host, you can always suggest him the best one from your experience but at the same time use your affiliate link which can earn you some quick cash.

Paid Review– This is pretty much like the direct advertisement, however the only difference would be, instead of blindly suggesting a product or a service to someone, you can actually do some ‘paid reviews’.

Product – You can do a paid review about a particular product (e.g. Internet Marketing software)
Services – You can do a paid review about services that your advertiser offers. (E.g. SEO Services, Web Hosting Services etc.)
People – You can also do a paid review about people. For instance, maybe you can review someone’s web design skills, or you may promote someone’s ‘twitter’ account for instance.

Sponsored Contest– An advertiser may want to run a contest via a popular twitter user to get feedback about his product & services or just to create some brand awareness.

Feedback – Example - “What New features would you like to see in Product X”?
Brand Awareness– Example- “Describe product X in 140 Characters” or “Tell us why you like product X within 140 Characters”. The best answer can be given a cool prize sponsored by the advertiser.

Sponsored Advertisements– There isn’t must difference between this & the direct advertisement. However when I was creating the mind map, this ‘branch’ did somehow pop in, so have decided to include it. I guess the main difference would be that all the tweets which are actually sponsored advertisements can get a predefined prefix which will help your followers to identify them as ads.

Auto Ads – There can be a mechanism or a ‘new’ 3rd party service which can actually help you to distribute or Tweet the “Ads” when you are ‘not’ tweeting or say when you are idle. An ad interval can also be set so that your frequent sponsored ads don’t annoy your followers.
Sponsored Actions– Well this might sound like a weird idea but, I feel that some aggressive marketers might like it. Example – “I Love #Google. Re-tweet this message and WIN yourself a GPhone”. Since a hash-tag is used, all the massages can be tracked using that and a lucky winner can actually be picked from the pool.

Some of you may think that all these ‘monetizing’ options can actually turn twitter into an ‘evil’ place and slowly reduce its value. But let’s face it, if you aren’t fully utilizing all the areas of twitter today, somebody else will – tomorrow. But of course you should set a ‘limit’ on how many ‘such tweets’’ you are going to do on a day, so that your followers still consider you as a valuable contact rather than a commercial junkie.

Banner Ads Vs Text Ads

2008-12-17T00:16:00.000-08:00

Banner Ads Versus Text Ads: And The Winner Is…

(webraydian)

In the early days of the World Wide Web, there would hardly be a debate over the superiority of banner ads. As venture capital poured into this amazing new medium, many entrepreneurs were betting on the easy and successful transfer of ads from the king of advertising, Television to the web.

Banner ads were widely viewed as the right step towards full multimedia video ads being widely used on the net, which were previously running on TV. Several billion dollars worth of losses later, it had not happened and as that bubble burst and with it many dreams that were never to be, experts were forced back to the drawing boards to re-evaluate the role of advertising on the net and especially that of banner ads.

By then text ads had already started making some quiet but huge impact on the web. Finally with the successful launch of the Google Adsense contextual ads, text ads had clearly won their place on the net. But where did that leave banner ads?

Actually Adsense ads have also been responsible for the re-birth of banner ads. It is instructive that the Adsense program also uses banner ads extensively.

It is also crystal clear that banner ads have a lot going for them. The use of color and image can be powerful and should never be underestimated. There has to be a reason why research has clearly shown that using HTML in email advertising has always received a much bigger response than text email. Obviously it has a plenty to do with the fact that HTML enjoys certain visual advantages which banner ads also enjoy over text ads and text mail.

Still it is important to note that text ads tend to do much better than banner ads in situations where they are not targeted very specifically and where they are not relevant to a particular web site audience.

The only place where banner ads begin to compete effectively is where the audience is highly targeted and very relevant to what is being advertised in the banner ad.

Still banner ads have their very important use. Mostly they can be used very effectively to enhance the image of a web based business on the net. Utilizing banner ads are a great web site promotion tool to generate sales and especially as a new business starts to get exposed online to a huge audience.

Internet marketing with banner ads or text ads both, have their own qualities that will boost online advertising.

Terry Detty, 42 years old, finds internet marketing his passion. In addition to marketing he enjoys reading, and occasionally gets out for a short walk.
The Key to Successful Internet Marketing; Specialized website promotion techniques and email advertising

Google AdSense Text Ads Versus Banner Ads

(searchenginejournal)

A thread at DigitalPoint forums named do images pay more? discusses whether graphic ads over text ads or more profitable for the publisher. Everyone seems to agree that graphic ads pay the highest cost per click to the publisher, when compared to the text ad equivalent. However, there is argument in the thread, if a graphic ad has a higher or lower click-trhough rate when compared to a text ad.

I have personally heard from some large 3rd party PPC management companies, that they almost always opt to have their clients show image ads on the AdSense content network, when possible. They seemed very confident, based on tracking data, that they had a higher CTR and conversion rate then text ads.

In the thread, some say they have seen their CTR and CPC go up when turning on the image ad option in AdSense. But some members in the thread argue that everyone has “ad blindness” towards banner and graphic ads.

Barry Schwartz is the Editor of Search Engine Roundtable and President of RustyBrick, Inc., a Web services firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales.

Text Links vs. Banner Ads

(amwso)

As an affiliate manager, I'm often asked, "Which convert better: text links or banners?" At first glance, the most obvious answer it text links. Glancing at a report or statistics will reveal that most of the time text links do convert better than banner ads.

However, there's more to the story than just that. I believe it has to do with how text links are used as opposed to banners that contribute greatly to the higher conversion / success rate. Consider for a moment how text links are employed as opposed to banners.

Let's first take a look at how text links are commonly used. The greatest use of text links comes from product data feeds. These product data feeds employ the specific product name as the text link. Of course, any shopper who is looking for a specific product, sees the product name, and then clicks the link will have the highest possible conversion chance. If a visitor knows what they want, and has already made up their mind that they WILL be making a purchase, then closing the sale becomes a far less challenging task. I discussed this a bit further when examining effective affiliate landing pages.

Another common use of text link: they are placed into the body of a webpage. Content is built around the text link. It much easier to built a value proposition, or tell a story when you have content build around a link then it is to tell that same story with just a banner/picture with a short tag line.

In comparison, consider how banners are commonly placed. Either at the top of a web page, or along the sidebar. Experienced web surfers have already trained themselves to know, banners placed in these spots (especially the leaderboard banner across the top of a page) are trying to sell them something, It's quite easy to automatically tune out to those messages.

The common perception: text links lead to information, banners lead to a sale pitch. Now, this is not to say that banner cannot be an effective tool in promotion. Just don't expect to put up a page and slap a bunch of banners up and expect to have any success. Build up some content, tell a story through that content that appeals to your visitors wants.

Marketing Your Online Presence: Banner Ads or Text Links

(barrywise)

In case you didn’t know it, the days of traditional banner advertising on websites with high volume traffic solely for the sake of getting traffic are pretty much over. That’s right, I said it - there’s just no ROI in banner ads. Conversions are low, prices are still inflated, and there is little or no SEO benefit. Most website visitors are just too sensitized as to what an advertisement looks like and click on them with less and less frequency. Sure, there are some modern variations besides the typical 468 x 60 top of page banner, such as dancing animations, small square blog banners, etc., and they do perform a little better. But for the most part people simply don’t like graphic banner ads.

Take, for example, that big obnoxious banner on the right side of this page for ITCN SEO and Web Design. Yeah, you can see it, and maybe you even realize it’s my own company, but you can obviously see that it’s an advertisement and you probably don’t think twice about clicking on it. In fact I know you don’t because I know how many clicks that banner generates. But what if I were blogging about SEO (which I am), and I put an intriguing text link in the middle of my content which said something link “these guys are the best SEO consultants in NJ” (which I just did). Not only are you are more apt to click on it because it’s context-sensitive, but in crawling this site Google sees it as a link with keywords for which I want ITCN.com to rank.

So I think we can safely say the days of text links for the purpose of improving organic search results are here to stay (at least for a while). Google ranks websites for keywords based on the links which point to them; and the weight given to those links is based on the PageRank or authority of the incoming link site.

For example, let’s say your home page has a Google PageRank of 7. If I had a link on your home page with the keyword NJ SEO linking to my site, then I would rank better for the term NJ SEO in Google results. If your home page only had a PageRank of 3, however, it wouldn’t help me as much at all, even if you had thousands visitors a day to your website (which you probably wouldn’t).

Now you could have a graphic banner ad and use some on-page SEO factors such as a title tag in the href code, and keywords in the alt and title tag of the image code - and that does help. But it’s my bet that nothing is going to beat a good old-fashioned text link any day of the week - especially since Google discourages the practice of buying links, and what says you paid for a link better than a standardized ad banner size in a common ad banner placement position?

Recommended Ads Provider

2008-12-16T20:17:00.000-08:00

Top 10 Ads Provider :

Facebook $$$

2008-12-15T22:28:00.000-08:00

How to make money with facebook

(making-money-blogging)

Facebook is an amazing social network and it has gotten even better with the addition of the market place and the applications platform.

Start leveraging Facebook’s awesome social network (Part 1.) to make you some money online with facebook.

Here are a few ideas to get you started making money with facebook.

Sell your old stuff on facebook, or stuff you just don’t want any longer, you know like that tony gazelle thing you bought from the home shopping network that is just sitting there acting as a clothes line. In The Facebook Marketplace.

Facebooks Marketplace is sort of similar to the Craigs List.

Listing items are free, so it doesn’t cost anything to list an item you have for sale. Like it does on eBay.

What makes the Facebook Marketplace really cool is that others can see what you have for sale on your profile.

So, you get lots free advertising for your product/service.

Now if you’re like my girlfriend , she has HUNDREDS of friends. This can become quite a lucrative thing for you.

Keep in mind that Facebook runs on who knows you, so there’s the element of trust that it invokes when someone is viewing your profile.

“Oh look Shane has Mp3 downloads in his Market place, better go check it out”

The way to make money with facebook is to go to click bank and search for something you think your friends might be interested in. I chose. Mp3 downloads Why because all of my friends have an Mp3 player, I am thinking as well about ringtones. I was doing some surfing this am for some good ringtone affiliates. Haven’t found one I’m happy with yet though. But I will and when I do I’ll add that to my facebook market place, and see if it make me some money.

So after you have an item you think your friends might like you just need some sales copy for it.

Remember in large part here it is your friends who are going to be seeing this so you can be very personal with this.

Something maybe like.

Hey guys remember when we were chatting about our ipods and where to get Mp3’s on the cheap? Well I went and looked around for some great Mp3 offers. Because I’m not crazy about the MP3 download service I’m using right now.

Looks like I found one. Feed My Ipods

http://shaners.feedipods.hop.clickbank.net

The price is reasonable and the selection is wicked.

Here’s what they on their site about their Mp3 files:

* Huge Selection of iPod Downloads

* Download Your Favorite iPod Media 24HRS a Day!

* Free and Unlimited iPod Downloads

* Free 24hr Technical Support!

* No Per Download Fees, Ever!

* More than 90 Million Files Available To Download!

* Free Step By Step Video Tutorials For Your iPod!

* Free Burn CDs Software To Burn Your Favorite Media!

* High Quality Digital Files For Your iPod

* #1 Network to Download Music & Movies For iPods!

* Compatible with Windows, Macintosh & AOL

http://shaners.feedipods.hop.clickbank.net
Oh and the link you see there with my name it. It means the refferal comes from me, so I make little something on side.

Let me know if you like the service. I think its great. But I’ll let you decide.

Later shane.

What I did here is not use a redirect for the link, nor did I cloak the hoplink. I left the hoplink naked and told them I make money if they use the service. These are my friends after all, they’re more than likely going to go check out the link. If you want to know how to hide your link. I have a post about that. How to cloak your affiliate links

So thats one way to do it.

Another would be to post that same message on your friends “walls”

This way you can personally sell it to them.

ie: “Gill Look what I dug up while I was looking for some Mp3 player downloads! ”

Sick of the high download fees just to get music, ya me too man, what a freeking rip off, anyways this site http://shaners.feedipods.hop.clickbank.net (copy and paste it in your browser) has a HUGE SELECTION of Free and Unlimited iPod Downloads

Promote your blog on Facebook. If you have a blog that you monetize, use Facebook as another tool to Increase blog traffic. Add a feed from your blog to your Notes section so others can see what you’re writing. If they like what they read, they’ll come to your blog. You can also create a Facebook group dedicated to your blog to help promote it. Get all your friends to join it and all your friends to join it. Pretty soon you’ll have a group from which you can get more readers from and also make money on facebook.

A quick update to this series of posts:

Ive got an e-book to give away by subscribing to my list Facebook profit secrets

In this ebook you ‘ll learn

The Power Of Facebook - From understanding how Facebook works to tapping into its tremendous power to make you money, you will learn everything you need to know to get started using Facebook.

The Importance Of Friends - So many people underestimate the power of Facebook friends for making money! But remember this — they are the single most important thing you must have if you want to make huge profits on Facebook.

Critical Tools For Social Networking - Social networking is entirely different than anything else you’ve ever encountered, so you need to understand the critical tools for making the most of it. You’ll learn about tools such as the inbox, groups, friends, applications, sharing, news feeds, and more.

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5 ways to make money with facebook

(experienced-people)

1. SELL. Develop applications solely for the purpose of selling them to interested parties. Several applications have already been acquired in this fashion; the most recent example is that of Mozes’ purchase of TextMe.

2. DEVELOP. An indirect source of funds: develop applications under contract for third parties. A number of companies have been posting contract jobs over at the Facebook’s developer forums. There exists a large gap in the supply and demand of available Facebook application developers; as a result, finding potential clients to charge reasonable rates should not be a hassle.

3. ADVERTISING. Use advertisements, cross-promotion schemes and affiliate marketing. It is not feasible to use Google Adsense for this since Facebook does not allow JavaScript embedding. Adsense may be embedded through iFrames, which despite being popular among Facebook developers, is against Google’s TOS. Affiliate marketing is a great alternative to advertisements; my own source of income on Facebook is generated through Amazon’s affiliate marketing.

4. MICROPAYMENTS. Sell services within Facebook through micro-payment transactions. PayPal payments made for accessing premium services could potentially yield reasonable income depending on the application’s purpose, size, and prospective users.

5. GET INVESTMENT. If you think you have something big on your hands and lack the funds to scale it, apply for investment through Bay Partners and others who have expressed interest in funding Facebook apps. This would be the likely course of action for a startup with plans to expand globally within and beyond Facebook. source mashable.com

The rest of the make money with facebook series

Part 1 leveraging Facebook’s awesome social network

Part 2 How to make money with facebook

Part 3 How to promote your product or an affiliate program with facebook

Part 4 How To use Face book to get your new blog or website indexed and crawled

Part 5 Use facebook to increase your rss feed

Part 6 make money on facebook and facebook profit secrets e-book give away.

Part 7 make money on facebook and facebook indexing in google

Making money from Facebook

(by a guest writer, March 31st, 2008)

Facebook has quickly become one of the leaders in the Social Networking space and, some predict, will soon overtake MySpace. It gets 150,000 new users a day. Facebook's success provides plenty of opportunities for canny entrepreneurs to profit, this page is going to point you to these. It's a long page but, think, you've just saved $39.99 on an ebook :-)

Face book Applications

It is possible to make millions with Facebook Applications (or "apps"). No, this is not the usual hype you see on the 'net. No, it's not a pitch for an ebook. Or a "marketing secrets" newsletter. We'll shortly describe a real-life example, complete with names and details, of a canny entrepreneur with a simple idea that's been tried and tested to $1,000,000 per week and could work for anyone who has a bit of imagination and a go-get-'em spirit. Prepare for a WOW! moment in a moment.

First, what's a Facebook application and how do you get one? If you aren't already familiar with this, the Facebook Developers' section provides all of the information and tools needed to get going. Quite simply, an app is a program that interacts with the Facebook site and enhances users' experience of Facebook, or provides other functionality. Users add apps to their profile voluntarily and can always "unsubscribe" at any time.

There's even a fund to pay you to get started building apps! And there are several ways to make money from an app, for example:

Money for selling an app: One needs either the skills to develop an application or the money to hire someone to do it. That's the downside. That's the only downside. Once an application acquires a large number of regular users, developers find there is an established market for buying and selling "apps". Try AppMrkt, Appbid, Sitepoint even eBay and several smaller players. Rates range anywhere from $1 to $10 per "active" user (it's not just about signing them up but designing the app to be addictive), but that's a very general rule and many fall outside those prices.

Direct ad sales: There is the option, of course, of direct ad sales. Direct selling on popular applications is definitely an avenue to explore before the exit route "lump sum". It doesn't take a great deal of mental effort or original thinking to come up with the idea of selling ad space. But then it doesn't pay that much either. Rates are pitifully low and ad blindness is high in Facebook; people generally ignore ads.

Money for generating installs: Selling an application and selling ads on it are far from only way of profiting, others are even more profitable. Some of the larger applications charge for installs - pay per click Web 2.0 style! - and a new application can pay established app owners to assist them "acquire customers". This potentially delivers a few hundred thousand user installs of the new app in a matter of days. Rinsed and repeated Pay Per Install can generate a substantial revenue stream.

With all Facebook App monetising methods what's very much the core is the strategy of getting big first before expecting the big bucks... or any bucks at all. And getting big is not the preserve of multi million dollar companies, as we'll explain.

Some say that not all apps are a quick route to millions. There'll be many who claim that apps are impossibly difficult to monetise, particularly as Facebook doesn't allow the insertion of javascript (like the Adsense code) and you can use only those advertising networks and affiliate programs approved by Facebook. We like to think that the real truth is slightly different: Not all app owners have worked out a quick way to reap huge profits from their app. Yet.

So what is the best way of monetising an app?

So what's the killer idea? It involves using a little ingenuity and here's an example of an implementation; an example of a company that made a million a week with a really simple strategy.

Impossible? Not at all.

The idea is best demonstrated by the first three minutes of this youtube video. Watch it. Seriously, watch it! (The speaker has this to say about it on his own site)

Here's a summary for those who can't access that video. Note: Spoiler ahead - look away now if you don't want to know what's in the video.

The video explains how a facebook app associated itself with a popular charity and offered to pay the charity $150 for every 1,000 Facebook users who signed up. Sounds very altruistic till you realise there's a toolbar involved and a CPA - cost per action - program, and the company makes $0.80 -$1.00 per download. 1.5 million people downloaded that toolbar in a week. In a week. That's what? $1000-$150 or $850 per thousand users and 1.275 million dollars in a week.

Here are Jason Bailey's other videos.

Not impressed? Want something even simpler? Here's a completely different angle (again involving CPA): Video 2 showing how driving users to fill in a survey can result in a 5% takeup at $1.00-$1.50 per survey form filled. In this example, a campaign on 100,000 users resulted in 5,500 "responding". At conservative values, that's $5,500 in .... a day! Spot the flaw? Yes, that's gross profit. Driving the 100,000 visitors costs money that the video doesn't mention. However, users can be had for $0.03 each, or less. That takes a big chunk out of the profit but - at $2,500 a day still left - that hands free, self-running, auto-pilot campaign is generating profits at an annualised rate of One Million Dollars.

How can YOU profit from Facebook applications?

What makes for a good Facebook Application? (Image courtesy: O'Reilly RADAR; only part of their report is available free). When the FB platform debuted, the emphasis was on getting a large user base. Since then, the focus has moved to having "active" users, people who engage with the application regularly. Four tips to making your app less of a dice roll and more of a Top App in Facebook:

1. Forget selling. Don't try to sell anything. Think like a social networker. Live in the world, play the game, install other Facebook Apps, get a feel for what FAs get traction and what FAs fall by the wayside. Think about how you can help users enjoy their Facebook experience more.

2. Get inspired. At the end of the day, it's about the explosive idea, about something that will go viral, something that's exciting, infectious, interesting, novel, social, cool, engaging, addictive ... or buy somebody else's idea. Tip: Post some ads/threads in webmaster and developer forums to attract ideas; great developers aren't always great entrepreneurs and they'd be wise to partner with you.

3. Once you've got/bought an idea or bought an application you can do deals with people who have large installed user bases to attract them to try your app, if not RockYou and Slide, there are smaller firms always looking to do deals.

4. Users were finding a large number of invites to apps spammy (and rightly so). Facebook therefore moved to restrict the number of invites people could send and restrict - in a way - the viral spread of an application. So you need to think outside the box. Network with the Facebook developer community. Explore banner exchanges like FBexchange.

At the time of writing, the number of Facebook Applications listed in Facebook's directory is in the tens of thousands. When will yours be there? More importantly, when will yours be making money there?

Lack the killer idea?

No, you don't. You're just waiting for the right one to come along. Get familiar with the system and keep mulling it over when you're online, when you're offline, when you're in the shower. In the meanwhile you can polish your skills developing applications for others and, more importantly, using a range of apps to get a feel for what makes them tick.

If you're a developer yourself, businesses are looking for good app devs. Various job boards - and Facebook itself - also have adverts for developers.

Facebook Marketplace

Selling unwanted items, or even affiliate products in the Facebook Marketplace:

Facebook's marketplace feature is much like Craigslist's, where items are listed and viewed locally. While Craigslist suggests a physical proximity, Facebook's marketplace is a more virtual locality - attracting people of a common interest/group/background rather than a common residence. Visibility of items can also be restricted to a user group.

Listing items in the marketplace is free of charge and as a benefit, other users can also see what you have for sale right from your profile, so you are kind of running two advertisements for the same product. If looking to sell affiliate products on a "wall" , "group", "page" or and elsewhere in FB, Clickbank, Commission Junction and other affiliate middlemen offer a choice of products, as do various independent merchants running their own affiliate programs.

If you wish to leverage the marketplace and have others sell products for you on commission, there are applications around geared to that. Example.

Some argue that Facebook won't replace eBay or Craigslist as a trading platform. I disagree but, thought: What if you had something that would be of interest mainly to Facebook users rather than the general public in eBay? What if you had something you could target better in Facebook than elsewhere? Capitalise on Facebook's unique advantages over the others. Get in now, at the beginning. If it does become huge you could become the Facebook equivalent of the eBay pioneer traders who hoovered up millions of dollars just by getting in early and before the competition.

Links:

Marketplace Help

100 tools and tips to tap the Facebook userbase - an excellent collection of many great (and some not so great) articles on Facebook.

How to sell yourself on the Facebook Marketplace

Operating a delivery service

...Or advertising an existing business. Facebook was originally built as a meeting place for college students, and because of this their service is still widely used around college campuses. College students love nothing more than delivery, if you post a service that you can offer in your local area, add your phone number and offer delivery, you may just have a very lucrative business. Keep in mind this doesn't have to be a traditional food delivery business, you could deliver beer and cigarettes, or party supplies, or even offer to run around town and pick up whatever they need and deliver it to them.

You don't have to restrict the service to students, of course. The demographic targeting that Facebook allows is a very powerful tool, particularly as you can fine-tune not just on location but on sex, age, education level, employment and various other criteria.

Using the third party applications designed to make money:

If you are an expert in a particular subject you can sell phone consultancy services where people pay you for your time on the phone talking to them. Install an application like EtherT (homepage) in your profile and you can even set your own rates! Sell your expertise, whatever it happens to be in. Nintendo games? Installing Microsoft Exchange Server? Rustling up a delicious Thai Green Curry? Javascript programming? Potty training a baby? Ripping a DVD? Everyone is an expert in something, why not help someone on the phone, share your knowledge and get paid for it?

There are applications out there to facilitate the acceptance of donations. Get rewarded for all that good karma you've been handing out.

Providing a proxy service:

Many schools and offices block users from accessing social networking sites like Facebook. Providing a proxy service allowing users to bypass these blocks can generate a lot of traffic and (expensive) bandwidth but can be offset with advertisements and the sale of premium proxy services.

Wordtracker, a popular keyword research tool, shows that "proxy" was the most searched for word in conjunction with Facebook. There are a lot of people looking for "Facebook proxies".

We've got a whole section on proxies coming to this site soon. It covers everything from the creation of proxy sites, to getting cheap bandwidth, to the difficult task of successfully monetising proxies.

Finding a new job on Facebook:

OK, not a money making idea per se, but maybe the new job will make you more than the old one did. Many companies are now accepting resumes from interested employees on the Facebook platform. The best place to get started looking for work is in the Facebook Marketplace under the jobs category. There are usually many companies actively recruiting and some even conduct interviews right there on Facebook.

Some of the positions are for work from home jobs.

Advertising on Facebook:

It's amazing how many professional marketers are unaware of Facebook's potential for marketing. Very few other places have so many people you can target so efficiently. Want just men aged 30-35? Or women who studied at UCLA in 2001? Or under 30s who work for IBM? No problem. Whatever you're selling the chances are that you can use Facebook advertising to enormous gain.

Why not explore advertising within applications? Or Facebook social ads? And using Groups to engage with your customers and get your advertising message across.

Facebook and other social networks, with their huge user base, are decimating ad revenue for local papers and magazines (example). Why bother with aggregators of local classifieds when you can demographically target directly within Facebook? It's a no-brainer. There are big bets riding on Facebook advertising being a major player. Microsoft invested a quarter of a billion dollars and the redoubtable CNET has some very convincing arguments why FB is going to take a big chuck out of Adwords et al.

Free ads: Halfway down this page is a list of ways you can get free advertising on Facebook (and here's another nice one). Many involve spending time and building yourself some reputation within Facebook. However, companies are finding they can outsource this work or hire someone to do it in-house.

Other notable places talking about profiting from Facebook:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4

24 ways to market inside Facebook

Even if you don't have an established product and fulfillment network it may be worth starting one now, one that is targeted to this new medium and capitalising on its strengths. And do it while ads are still relatively cheap (Facebook's secret rate card) and while the competitors are still tweaking their Adwords campaigns!

A perfect product would be the rootgear example here -

Facebook beacon, a program where other sites like eBay allow Facebook users to "share" their purchases and other interactions with their FB friends, promises even more possibilities for the smart advertiser.

You could use Facebook to drive traffic in many different ways, it could even serve as a means of Search Engine Optimisation. Here are 5 ways small businesses and small websites can benefit from Facebook.

Conclusion

Making money in Facebook takes a different mindset and we hope we've set you on the right track. It's not as easy as falling off a chair but it isn't rocket science, either. It's about the idea, about tapping into the community spirit, and making it not look like an ad.

One somewhat frivolous way of ascertaining how profitable a business idea is likely to be is by counting the ebooks out there promoting it. :-)

All the best of luck with Facebook. This isn't a blog but we'll publish comments below. Tell us what you think by clicking the link in the grey box.

Facebook Profits Reprint Rights
For a Limited time you can get Resale Rights to "Facebook Profits", and keep 100% of the profits from all your sales! Sell only 2 copies of this great new e-book and you will already be in the profit zone!

9 Facebook Applications To Make You Money
(mashable)

Did you know you can sell things on your Facebook profile? Well, you can with the help of a couple handy applications. Whether it be your own music if you’re a musician, a shirt you designed, or old junk you have laying around, there’s probably an application out there that can help you earn some extra dough.

CafePress - Pretty much everyone has heard of CafePress, and with this Facebook app you can start selling whatever you have on your store via your profile.

e3buy Auction - Works with the e3buy auction site so you can add auctions to your profile as well as open a store.

eBay - From the best known of the online auction houses, highlight anything you’re selling on eBay to your friends on Facebook.

FlameTunes - Are you a musician? Want to sell your own music on your profile? This is the application for you.

Garage Sale - In association with Buy.com, Garage Sale allows you to sell your items to your friends, like that box of old books, your bike, etc.

Lemonade - Works just like it’s parent site, Lemonade.com. Pick items you like from a selection of sites, add the widget to your profile, make a commission on anything that sells.

Music Blaster - An application that works with BlastMyMusic. Promote small musical acts and earn a 5% commission on sales of their music.

My Merch Store - Create your products with Zazzle and then you can sell them on their website as well as via your Facebook profile.

Shopit - Got some spare CDs you need to dump? Regretting that HD DVD player you bought? Create a simple store and sell off your items to your friends via this store application.

Make Money on Facebook Techniques
Learn the secrets that Facebook does not want you to know about. The sheer size of Facebook alone can make you a fortune. If you are not already making money from Facebook, then you are missing a huge opportunity

Google AdSense

2008-12-15T22:02:00.000-08:00

Make Money With Google AdSense (2createawebsite)

Anyone who owns or is thinking about creating a website would be crazy to ignore this.

I am happy to say that making money with your site, no matter the topic, has become easier than it's ever been before - and it's 100% legitimate.

If AdSense had been available in 2000, I would have NEVER shut down my soap opera fan site that received 200 hits per day. I would have been able to earn money from that traffic and probably turned a small profit.

What is AdSense?

Google.com earns most of its revenue by allowing other website owners to advertise on their search result pages. All this is managed through a program they call AdWords.

Now you can earn a share of the revenue that Google earns from AdWords by placing these same text ads on your site. In other words, you're helping Google advertise and they pay you a percentage of what they earn.

This program is called AdSense.

Every website owner should be involved in this. It's just too good of an opportunity to pass up. Even if your site is just for information purposes, you can still participate and make decent money with AdSense -- or at least enough to fund your website.

So if you are one of those people that don't like the idea of paying for a site, this is an excellent way to earn your money back and then some.

Even if you earned as little as $10 in a month, it would more than likely cover some or all of the costs for your web site. Perhaps you are simply looking for ways to add additional revenue to your website, then it's perfect for that situation too.

This program is getting so popular, people are creating websites just to display the ads and profit from Google's AdSense alone.

I don't usually like to use the term "easy money" because there really is no such thing. You still have to create your own website and learn how to bring in traffic in order to make good money with this program.

I certainly don't want to make it sound like you get something for doing absolutely nothing. There's no such thing.

However, I've got to say that AdSense is probably the closest you'll ever come to fast money on the Internet -- especially if you already have a website that gets a good amount of traffic.

What's even better...the program is completely free. You can also use it on multiple websites and there is no limit to the amount you can earn.

How AdSense Works

Don't like to read a lot of text? Watch my 4-minute video on how AdSense works.

And now for the text version of how AdSense works...

If you go to Google.com and do a search for almost any keyword phrase, you'll notice some "Sponsored Links" that appear on the right side of the screen that are relevant to the keywords you just searched for.

Website owners pay Google to display these ads and are charged a predetermined amount every time their ad gets clicked by a web surfer. With the AdSense program, you will display these same text ads on your site just like Google and get paid for it as well.

All you do is copy and paste some provided HTML code into your pages and Voila! the ads will show up. Every time an ad is clicked on your site, you will receive a certain percentage of what Google receives from the advertiser.

Once your account reaches $100, you'll receive a check in the mail.

"Is Google Crazy?"

I know what you're probably thinking...

"What's the catch here? Why would Google just give away money advertisers are paying them?"

The answer...

Because Google is very smart.

Now that I understand how AdSense works, I can see that it's a win-win situation for everyone involved, and the bottom line benefits Google. Let me explain...

Since the advertiser's ads are now being displayed on more web sites all over the internet (instead of just Google's site), they are getting much more exposure. More exposure means more clicks and even more traffic for their site over a shorter period of time.

This is good news for Google because the more traffic the advertisers receive, the faster their advertising funds are used up.

Remember, they get charged every time their site gets a visit; and of course, it is Google's hope that they'll continue to keep funneling more money into their account for more ad exposure.

What an ingenious way for Google to increase the amount of money they earn from advertisers while building loyalty with website owners (like us) who are now getting paid to help them advertise.

Of course, I'd expect nothing less from the most popular search engine on the web. :)

My Personal AdSense Story

I have been receiving monthly checks from Google since 2003, and I've read numerous success stories of websites earning 5 digit incomes per month with AdSense.

Now, I will admit, a 5-digit commission in a single month is probably not the norm for most participants.

I promote AdSense on three of my websites and my checks have been as high as $4,500.

The more information you have, the greater chance you have of attracting free search engine traffic. That's why it's so very important you choose a topic you have an interest in so you can keep building and building.

My checks weren't always that large. I think my first month's earnings in 2003 totaled less than $20. However, I kept getting more and more search engine traffic by adding more content and the checks slowly began to increase. I had no idea it would grow to anything like this.

COPYCATS BEWARE!

I read an article about a lazy person that copied someone else's content word for word and pasted on their own site. They tried to join AdSense and they were rejected for unauthentic content. I don't know how Google found out their site was a duplicate of someone else's but they did.

Not to mention, the search engines are now ignoring pages with duplicate content. So all the thieves out there that are too lazy to come up with their own content are now finding that they cannot get their site ranked in Google, Yahoo and MSN simply because they've copied someone else's work.

It's not worth the risk. Not to mention, it's illegal to republish someone else's work without permission. That's why you should choose a topic you know a lot about or at least have a great interest in.

There's no reason to copy off someone else's site. Be original. Laziness always comes to bite you in the long-run.

"How Much Can I Earn With AdSense?"

Google does not disclose exactly how much you'll earn per ad that is clicked.

The commission you receive per click depends on how much advertisers are paying Google for the particular ad. You will earn a share of that amount. I've heard of earnings anywhere from 2 cents to $15 per click.

So it is logical to believe that keyword phrases like debt free, employment, make money, mp3, sex, etc. will earn you more per click since these are highly competitive keywords that are searched for quite a bit on the web.

Advertisers generally pay more for popular terms because they are searched for more.

Even though Google will not reveal how much you are earning for each ad that is clicked from your site, you can still login to your account at any time and see the total amount of revenue you've generated that day, week, month, year, etc.

For example, if you see that you've made $12.60 today from 9 clicks then you can calculate that your average click-thru commission was $1.40 per click. That's as detailed as their stats will get. Also remember, that's only an average. You won't know how much each specific ad brought in.

The amount you'll earn also depends largely on the amount of targeted traffic you receive to your own site, how well the ads match your audience's interests, the placement of the ads on your pages, and of course the amount you receive per click.

Ideally, you should create a site on a topic you know a lot about. That way you'll have a much easier time creating a generous amount of content on that subject.

How Google Matches the Ads to Your Site's Content

One of the main reasons this program is so successful is because the ads that are displayed closely match the content of your website. This increases the chances that someone will click on the ads.

Here's how Google accomplishes the content match...

"...We go beyond simple keyword matching to understand the context and content of web pages. Based on an algorithm that includes such factors as keyword analysis, word frequency, font size, and the overall link structure of the web, we know what a page is about, and can precisely match Google ads to each page."

So let's say you have an information website about yoga. Once you join AdSense and paste their ad code into your site, Google's technology will determine the topic of the pages by scanning for keyword repeats, page title, etc.

If successful, you will see ads that relate to yoga displayed on your web pages. Of course, the more related the ads are to your site's content, the better the click-thru.

Keep in mind, the ads may not be an exact match because it depends on the ads inside Google's database. So instead of seeing yoga ads, you may see more generic ads like exercise, healthy eating, etc. This is not a bad thing because these are topics your visitors will likely be interested in as well.

Why I Believe AdSense Works So Well

For years, website owners have tried to make money from their sites by putting up banner ads in hopes of visitors clicking them. The problem with banner ads is that the Internet audience is so immune to them, people do not click on them anymore.

When's the last time you clicked a banner ad?

...Exactly!

Second, in order for the web site owner to earn money from that banner ad, usually the web surfer that clicks has to purchase something. With AdSense, your visitors just have to click the ads. They don't have to purchase a single thing.

Third, most people that use banner ads do not do a good job of matching the ads to the website's content so the click thru percentages are dismal.

With Google's AdSense, not only are you displaying text ads, (which tend to receive a much higher click-thru rate than banner ads), but you are displaying contextual ads that match your website's content....thanks to Google's advanced technology.

Lots of times people think the ads are part of your site's content so they click because the information is relevant to your site. Whereas with banner ads, they often have little relevance and people tend to ignore them no matter how much they flash and fly across the page.

Creating Your Website for AdSense

Before you even begin your site, make sure you've come up with a topic that you feel you know plenty about. That way it will be easiest to write a lot of content.

The more content you have, the better chance you have getting accepted into the program. Also, the more content, the greater the earning potential. AdSense is nothing but a numbers game. If you want to make a lot of money, prepare to write a lot of content.

Now let's talk about building your website. There are two ways you can approach this:

1) Do it Yourself (DIY) from scratch

2) Use Site Build It! (SBI!)

The Do It Yourself Method

I've actually used both methods for building my site and there are advantages and disadvantages to both.

If you use the DIY method, you will have to go and register a domain name (yoursite.com) and then sign up for a web host and build your pages. You can either learn HTML or buy some kind of web editor like Microsoft FrontPage to build your pages. That's the method I used to build this site.

Averaging between $7 and $15 per month, the DIY method is usually the most cost friendly of the two but you are mostly on your own in terms of learning how to create your web pages and adding the AdSense code to your site.

Web hosts are generally there to house your site. They don't specialize in helping you market and optimize your site for the search engines to help you get traffic. So don't expect a lot from them in terms of helping you market your site.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. I had to learn how to build this site on my own and it wasn't very difficult.

I bought Microsoft FrontPage and in about a day or two my site was up and running. So if you don't mind learning, it's definitely doable. In fact, most people use the DIY method to build their websites. The 2nd method below is fairly new in comparison.

Use Site Build It! - A Web Host Made for AdSense

This is a revolutionary web host like no other. I use it for my site, flat-stomach-exercises.com, and after only 11 months the site was earning over $700 per month for AdSense alone.

Two years after launch, the total monthly earnings shot up to $2,000 to $2,500.

Today, the site continues to earn money from AdSense yet I have no products to sell. I'm simply offering information on a topic I know a lot about and SBI showed me how to rank high in the search engines for various keyword phrases. Over 90% of traffic comes from the free search engines.

The reason SBI is different from the other do-it-yourself hosts is that first it provides all the web page building and marketing help all in one place. Your domain registration, web hosting and marketing help come with the price..

Super Easy Web Page Builder

Creating your pages is as simple as entering text into form fields and using the user-friendly editor to add text, create links, add pictures and more. No software is needed to install or download. You simply select a template you want to use and your site is built in seconds...literally.

I took a screenshot of the SBI! interface...

Free Guides

What's even better is that you will have access to tons of free guides that show you how to optimize your site for the popular search engines so you can get as much free traffic as possible.

Remember, without traffic, you won't make any money with AdSense. That's why having a host like SBI is so important. Keep in mind, a regular DIY host does NOT help you with search engine rankings and traffic.

Brainstorming Tool

Site Build It also comes with a powerful brainstorming tool. So for all of you sitting there wondering about a topic, this tool literally scours the net and helps you decide on the best topic by showing demand and supply (i.e. number of sites on X topic and roughly how feasible it will be to bring in traffic for that particular subject). It is amazing.

The creator of Site Build It even built a micro site that describes how to maximize your AdSense earnings. And since Site Build It's main goal is to show you how to build income through content...it's almost as if AdSense was designed specifically for a web host like SBI.

See the SiteSell AdSense site here.

I highly recommend using SBI -- especially if you plan on building a site specifically to earn money from AdSense. It is the kind of host that stands for everything AdSense is about -- rewarding website owners for building an abundance of useful content.

Even though the two companies are not related, it really is the perfect marriage between a great concept like AdSense and a web host that is dedicated to showing you how to make money by simply providing information.

Successful SBI Websites

Be sure to also take a peek at all the successful SBI websites created by mostly beginners who have never created a site before. Every site listed on this page is in the top 3% in terms of amount of traffic received on the web - thanks to the SBI search engine help.

Find out why I think SBI! is best for AdSense.

How to Join AdSense

In late 2008, Google tightened up their acceptance policies. According to an email I received from someone who was trying to join the program, you now must meet the following criteria before you are accepted...

- Your website must be your own top-level domain (www.domain.com and not domain.com/mysite). That means you can't just sign up with a free blogger or free web hosting account and get approved for AdSense.

- Your domain name must have been registered and active for at least 6 months before you apply

- The registration information that you provide during the AdSense registration must match your domain name registration information

- Your website must contain a substantial amount of original content

Once you meet the above criteria, go to http://adsense.google.com to apply.

When you are accepted, simply copy and paste the provided HTML code into any page that you'd like to show the ads. If you've done a good job of defining the content on your web pages, the ads that show should be relevant to the content of your page...increasing the chances of click-thrus by your visitors.

You can either display the ads vertically along side the page like Google does or in a banner-like formation horizontally across your pages. The placement is up to you. You can even customize the colors to match your site's theme.

If Your Site Is Rejected by Google...

If you receive that email from Google stating that your site has not been accepted, the first thing you should remember is that as an AdSense member, you become a partner and are representing Google, Inc.

They have to make sure the websites that display these ads are up to par or they could run the risk of losing advertisers. Imagine if you were paying Google to display your ad and you found it showing up on a poorly developed, junky website.

Of course, if your site is rejected, it doesn't mean it is poorly developed. There may be other reasons:

1) Is your site an "About Me" page?

Google does not usually accept these kinds of personal sites because most of them do not have a specific topic or theme. They are usually just random facts about the website owner or their hobbies, pictures, etc.

It would be difficult for Google's technology to display targeted ads on these kinds of pages because the topics vary from subject to subject.

They are looking for "themed" sites that contain a generous amount of information on a specific topic. It could be anything from sewing tips to sports. Just make sure there is an obvious theme with adequate information.

2) Is your site organized?

Be sure your site has a neat and clean navigation that's easy to follow. Also ensure all the links work and that there are no typos. Keep the colors to a minimum and make sure each page has a consistent layout.

3) How many pages are on your site?

Even though Google doesn't specify a page number requirement, many believe they are looking for web sites with a certain amount of content. Again, it's not likely a two-page site will get accepted. Try to strive for at least 15 pages.

4) Is your content solid?

Don't just submit a website with a bunch of links to other sites. Be sure you have a themed/niche site with enough original content of your own.

5) Is your site an exact carbon copy of someone else's?

Some believe Google can find out if your site is original or not. Don't risk it and steal from someone else. It will come back to haunt you.

If you're stuck, write a few articles of your own and then go to sites like www.articlecity.com and sprinkle a few of their articles around your site to beef it up.

6) Be sure to read their program policy and procedures carefully and make sure your site hasn't violated any of the terms.

Tips on Succeeding With AdSense

Here are some tips for achieving success with AdSense.

1. Create a website with your (YourSite.com). Don't try to use a free web host because your site will likely have banners and pop-ups and get rejected because it looks unprofessional. Not to mention, a free web host will give you a website address like this:

http://thefreewebhost.com/yoursite/member1234/home.html

instead of...

http://www.yoursite.com

Thanks to the policies implemented in late 2008, AdSense no longer accepts sites created on free domains anyway. So may as well register your own domain.

2. If you don't know web programming or have no desire to learn it, get a beginner's design editor like Dreamweaver (what I use) or CoffeeCup. You can publish your content directly to the web from the software.

Keep in mind you can't use the software alone. You must have a web host that will allow you to publish your site to the Internet. (More on web hosting in a sec.)

3. If the main goal of your site is to make money with AdSense, be sure to choose a topic that you know a lot about so you can write lots and lots of content.

4. Get traffic. Once your site is up and running you'll need to learn how to get your site listed in the major search engines.

Getting into Google is completely free and can bring in hundreds or even thousands of visitors per day. All you have to do is submit your site to them and wait patiently while Google ads it to the index. It can take a few months. Patience is key with Google. Then do the same with Yahoo, MSN, etc.

Read up on how the search engines rank pages here.

And while you're waiting it's important you build up as much unique content around your theme as possible. Google loves large sites with useful content centered around a specific theme.

Don't create a hodgepodge site with topics on everything under the sun. Stay focused and make sure your site has an obvious theme.

5. Partner up with other related sites and participate in link swaps. This means that you place a link to another person's site on your own site and they do the same for you in return. This is a great way to get even more free traffic.

Why Most People Fail With AdSense

I want you to succeed with AdSense, but unfortunately the majority of the people that join never see much money at all. Watch my video below so you can avoid common pitfalls made by many new Webmasters.

AdSense Revenue Exposed
Make Sense of Google AdSense ? and make money! It is a great ebook describing how the google adsense can be used effectively. It gives detailed procedures and steps of making money from adsense.

425 Adsense Ready Websites with Money Making Guide with Adse...
Step by Step Guide to Make Money with Adsense, How a Canada Based Doctor Earned last year 27 millions with Adense and Affiliate Programs.

How do I get started making money with Google AdSense? (askdavetaylor)

You're not alone in being interested in the terrific Google AdSense program. Leveraging its powerful page analysis system, Google's AdSense program automatically matches the best possible advertisements with the content on your Web page, making the ads magically quite relevant to your content.

Behind the scenes, it works like this: an advertiser goes to the Google AdWords system, signs up, and creates one or more advertisements that they want to pay to have appear either on Google's search result pages or on "content pages". Those content pages are Web sites run by individuals and organizations that include AdSense, which is the "consume" side of this equation.

What makes this more interesting is that advertisers don't pay to have their adverts show up on either Google or separate content sites, but instead pay when the ads are clicked by customers, what we call "pay per click" or PPC. A percentage of the amount that the company pays Google for displaying the ad is then shared with the AdSense-enabled web site owner.

If, say, the advertiser pays $1.00 for a visitor to their site through AdWords, then Google will pay a percentage of that amount (the exactly amount has not been stated by the company) to you, perhaps $0.20, perhaps more.

I realize that $0.20 doesn't sound like much money, but if you have a few hundred visitors a week, and some percentage of them click on these adverts, you could easily make $20-$50 or much (much!) more from your site each week, without having to do any work other than add the special AdSense code to the pages in the first place.

It's simple, easy to accomplish, you never have to negotiate (or even talk) with advertisers, you don't have to bill anyone at all, and every month or two you'll get a nice little check from Google corporate. Nice!

So let's talk about the exact steps required to actually get going with the AdSense program. First and foremost, you need to sign up for the AdSense program, which you can do by clicking in the cheery button:

Note that when you sign up, you'll need to specify a Web site or weblog that you plan on incorporating AdSense: not every site is approved, however, so make sure yours has valuable and unique content and a design that doesn't include too many advertisements.

Once you're approved, it's time to log in and configure your new AdSense advertisement to include on your site!

When you first log in, you'll see the following navigational bar:

Click on "AdSense for Content" and you'll be ready to configure your ad. Now, don't worry: configuration is pretty easy and kinda fun too, you get to pick colors, sizes, and much more.

Once you've clicked on the "AdSense for Content" tab, your next step will be to decide what type of advertisements you want Google to serve up on your own pages:

I suggest you start out with a text "Ad unit", as shown here: the other type of content adverts are less generally useful, less flexible, and typically also have a much lower payout, according to the grapevine. When you are ready, note that you can learn more about the different formats by clicking on any of the last three lines in that view.

The next section of your task is to specify the format and layout of your AdSense ad, and there are a rather amazing number of different size and format options. Google has a helpful AdSense Ad Format Reference Page that's worth a quick peek.

Here at Ask Dave Taylor, I use a Leaderboard (728x90) on the top of the home page and a Large Rectangle (336x280) on this very page. Your layout will inevitably be different and you might choose a different layout entirely. Further, you are allowed to have up to three different ad units on a given page, so you can experiment with them one atop the other, adjacent to each other, or interspersed with your content. Just try to remember that if there's no content, there's no page. :-)

Now that you've picked an ad layout size (and yes, you can change it at any time too) it's time to have the most fun: changing the color scheme of the ad itself. My handy tip: use a border color that's the same as the background color of your page (as I do on this page) so that it's less overt that the ads are actually advertisements. It helps people not gloss over them and, hopefully, click on the ads a bit more frequently.

The built-in color schemes are nice too, of course, if you want to use them, but just as with the sizes, I strongly recommend that you experiment with different color schemes and see if you get a better percentage of clickthrus and greater revenue. Perhaps every Sunday night you can change to another color scheme and then track week-by-week what works best?

The next step is to specify an alternate Ad URL or color, and a specific channel for your ad:

The idea behind alternate ads is that sometimes no advertisers have bid on advertising for the keywords, leading Google to a pickle: what to display? By default, it instead displays public service ads (PSAs), but if you want to create an HTML snippet that produces the same size content, you can use that instead, or, you can simply have a solid box in the color of your choice that blends into the design of your site.

I am a much stronger supporter of channels, however. Channels let you organize your AdSense results by Web site (if you have more than one site) or by areas of your site. On this site, for example, I have a channel for "home page leaderboard" and another for "large rectangle" so I can compare how each format is doing, rather than just guessing in the aggregate. It's much easier to start correctly than to retrofit this sort of thing, so take the time and set up a basic channel or two to begin categorizing your results.

Finally, you've made all the settings you need and it's time to grab the HTML snippet that'll generate the ad block on your own site!

Your specifics will be a bit different from what you see in this screen shot, but the code will generally look identical. Just select all the text in the box, then use Edit --> Copy to get that code into your copy/paste buffer.

Now open up a page where you'd like to include the AdSense code, or a template if you're working with something like a weblog system, and paste in the new code by using Edit --> Paste.

Save your template and rebuild your site, or, if it's just a page, save the page back onto the server and bring it up in your web browser. That's it!

Important Warning: do not click on your ads!

I think one of the most common mistakes that new AdSense participants make is to click on an advert or three to "make a quick buck". Sounds good in theory, but you'll end up kicked out of the AdSense program if you click on ads shown on your own pages, which is not a good strategy for earning money!

Anyway, that's the basic set of steps. Don't delay and don't wait for tomorrow: pop back up to the beginning of this article to sign up for AdSense, then go through these steps and you can start turning your cost center of a Web site into a revenue generation system, modest or otherwise!

and who knows, maybe you'll see one of my own advertisements on your site!

One final tip: If you're serious about increasing your AdSense earnings, you might want to consider buying a copy of my friend Joel Comm's AdSense Secrets. It's jam-packed with great advice and ideas about maximizing your clickthru rate and traffic.

ADSENSE - Huge $$$$ Earning Opportunity
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Make Money With Google Adsense (howtomakemoneywithgoogleadsense)

You are at the right place to learn about how to make money with Google Adsense?

The purpose of creating this website was to give you all the right and related information about making money with Adsense. Here you will learn to make money with adsense.

In today's internet world everyone is looking to make money online. Some knows this and some has heard it but does not know how to do it. Some knows that Google Adsense is one of the source of making money but don't know how to practically do it and earn money with adsense.

Let me clear one more thing here that many people type ad sense instead of adsense. The correct word is "adsense" and not "ad sense"

Well Let me tell you their are various affiliates and advertisers are their on the internet but no advertising programme is as powerful and succesful as Google Adsense. Infact Anyone can make money with adsense. Read further to know how one can really make good money with Google Adsense.

Google Adsense is an easiest and fastest way for any web site to make money by displaying relevant, text or image ads by Google Adwords (Google's own advertisement programme) and receiving share for pay per click by advertisers on Google. Its way better in comparison to other advertising programme or affiliates as it display's very relevant advertising on your site and your visitors would be looking for similar kind of advertises, hence the chances of clicking this Adsense advertise increases.

I am not discouraging any other advertising programmers but Google Adsense is by far most trusted and good way of making money online.

How Google Does It? And What is His Benefit?

Google Adwords is Google's advertising programme where websites owners advertise their site and pay for this cause. Let me explain this thing to you. When you search Google.com for any keyword, you see some "Sponsored Links" which appear at the right hand side of the screen, which is, related to the keyword you searching for. Advertisers pay a predetermined amount to Google for every time their ad gets clicked. Now Google gives you opportunity to display these advertise on your site and earn share of revenue from it.

This is Google Adsense.

No Matter what your site, blog, portal, forum is all about, you can make money with Google Adsense by displaying their ads.

Now what’s the benefit of Google in doing so?

Why Google is taking money from their advertisers and paying this to you? What is his benefit in it?

Let us answer this here....

Google is smart, since their ads are published on more sites on internet (apart from just Google search engine) they will get more exposure and Google Adwords advertisers fund will be used fast. As Google charges them every time they get clicked or get page impression on your site. So you are helping Google to share the revenue, which is coming from their Adwords advertisers.

Which Category You Fall In For Building Adsense Site For Income?

When you decide to make Adsense Empire you fall in these major categories.

Make 50 sites and earn 2$ each day from them.
Make 2 Websites and make 50$ from each one per day.
Or you have an existing site and target Adsense ads on it.

In most of the cases, people end up in between. Maintaining 50 sites raises content, marketing, and management issues. And 2 sites don’t do well because of lack of information about search engine marketing, market trends etc. Existing site holders dont know how to mix these ads with their content.

Now you have to make your mind that in which direction you want to go.

Which Type Of Site Can Be Made For Generating Adsense Profit?

Once you have decided to make a website or multiple websites, now decide what information or subject will it cater to. A niche or a general one.

We will advice you to go for a niche website, as this will give you more targeted ads from Adsense, and you should write a good content for it, which will help you in many ways.

If you have an existing site please see how to get started with Adsense.

Newbeis, Find a niche on which you will enjoy to write, never know this niche makes you the unique one in the lot. Just make sure using Google Adwords tool, that this niche is going to give some related Advertisements from Google AdSense that you can get good Click Trough Rates.

Why Google Adsense Is Reliable?

What is really good about Google is:-

It is simple to sign up, create your account, post the ads and let them work.
Their ads matches with your content, hence visitors are attracted towards them. As they are text ads and have appealing and punching lines so they have more chances of hit.
Google Adwords advertisers database have almost all the categories of businesses no matter how unique your content is you will have related ads on your site. If in case Google unable to provide you targeted ads they will provide you option to display a default ad of your choice.
Google does all the relationship acts with you after you sign up; you don't have to worry about maintaining advertiser relationship.
Google Adsense team ensures that no inappropriate ads display on your pages.
Google gives you tips to improve your earnings.
It also helps you with his analytics details that how many visits were there on your page or ad.
It is well known and for all. Whether you are new or old. Famous or not famous
Google Adsense team is there to help you in any situation. They have their own discussion forum where you can post your questions, and get answers in less then hour or so.
You don’t have to chase advertisers; they come to you..
Ongoing ads, they will never dry up.
Ads automatically adjust with your page content.
And the brand with whom you are advertising “Google”. Name does matter, isn’t it?

No other Advertising programme is as successful as Adsense.

How To Get Started With Google Adsense & Make Adsense Account?

Just don't make a site for Adsense sake. Now when you sign up, you have to show Google Adsense your website, weblog on which you will paste Adsense ads. Google Adsense team will visit your site or weblog, if they find copied content, too many advertisements, your site hosted on free hosting services, copied design or anything unethical on your site, they will not approve your Adsense account. So try to be original, and write good content and don't do any unethical term to violate search engine or Adsense team to remove you.
If you get approved you will receive one email from Adsense team that your site is approved and now you can post Adsense ads on your site or blog.
Once you get approved you can post from many Adsense code available in Google Adsense. There are many products to choose from.
- a) Adsense For Content: These types of ads display ads that are targeted to your site's unique content.
- b) Adsense For Search: This types of ads allows you to provide Google or your site search to your site visitors, and if by searching from your site visitor goes to Google and click on any pondered links you get paid for it.
- c) Referral Ads: This ad is being given to you when you reach certain amount in your Adsense account.

This adsense video will help you as an adsense tutorial and tell you how to adsense.

How To Get Traffic on your site For More Adsense Profits?

If you want to earn profit from your site through adsense, you have to get traffic to your site. From the following points you can get good number of traffic without investing a great deal of money.

Always keep in mind that the traffic cannot be generated overnight, and you have to give your time to your site.

We are going to tell you the best practices in the Search Marketing World to build long term traffic to your site.

On page Optimization
Make your site search engine friendly (don’t over rule search engine rules)
Submit site to search engines.
Submit your site to major and important directories
Link popularity – Oneway and Reciprocal links – Avoid Link Farms
Write Articles and submit your articles to article directory
Email Marketing
Auto responder marketing
Blog Marketing
RSS Feeds
Create Forums And Massage Boards
Social Media Optimization – Book Mark, Tell a friend, Digg News
Give Something to your customer (for example - ebook, software etc.)
Get your customers reviews - Start poll on your site
Get paid visitors – Arbitrage, PPC, Adwords
Always refresh your contents

Some more Important Points to be looked on;

Look at your keywords, which you have targeted, are they really useful and traffic driven keywords? Check it in different keywords tools like Google Adwords, inventory overture etc.
Bring more traffic and gain search engine rankings by building some good one way links to your site.
Increase your click through (CTR) rate with best ads. According to me the ads in your content (336×280 large rectangle) has the highest paying ad group. Skyscraper ads (728 Leader Board) also do well in you right site navigation. Try to focus one topic at one page so you will get relevant ads and your CTR will increase.
Monitor your ads group. See which ad is doing well for you. Change the position of your ads till you get satisfied CTR.
Add more keyword rich pages to your sites, which will increase the traffic as well as your earning through Google Adsense. Write content with high CTR pages so that you get higher rates even clicks rate are low. You can see Adwords Keyword Tool for high CTR keywords.
Keep Your Google Adsense at the top of your page and mix it with layout so the link's aren't recognize as ad's but hyperlink to other pages on your site. Make sure the links are relevant to your site. It has more chances to click and Adsense profit will increase.
If you are using adsense on Login protected pages, you can tell Adsense to crawl your content using their Site Authentication Feature.

Below are some adsense tutorial & adsense tips articles related to contructing a site/blog, gaining traffic and then make money with adsense through it.

Find A Best Paying Adsense Keyword

Find how to find a best paying adsense keyword (according to adwords) to make your site on it.

How to register a good domain name for your site for adsense.

Host Your Website – Free Website Host

Find out how to get good and cheap hosting service for your adsense rich site to host.

Make A Website - How To Construct A Website For Adsense

Learn to construct a adsense website.

Do W3C Validation Of Your Code

Learn do to W3c validation of your html code.

Increase Website Traffic – Free Website Traffic

Learn How To Make Money From Blogging

How To Make Money From Your Blog - How To Make Money Blogging

See what are various methods of incresing traffic to your site so that your adsense revenue will increase.

Do Website Search Engine Optimization

Learn search engine optimization for gaining search engine traffic.

Built Link Popularity - Linking Strategy – Website Linking

See various methods of lik buuilding to boost your Search engine Rankings.

How To Submit Website To Search Engine - Search Engine Submission

Learn to submit your site to search engines.

How To Submit To Directories

Learn directory submissions to gain traffic and search engine rankings.

How To Do Articles Submissions For Traffic

Learn article submissions to gain rankings in search engine and traffic.

How To Know Alternatives Of Adsense

Know what else advertising options are available with or without Adsense

How To Find Related Adsense Resources

Find out related adsense resources here.

Google Adsense package
get the google package for only ?29. This package will help you increase your adsense revenue. it comes with google site map and adsense empire and the bonus "16000 Adsense ready Websites" all this is valued at ?300 but i am selling it for ?

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Pay Per Click Provider

2008-12-01T18:55:00.000-08:00

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. . Lets Internet make money itself for us . . .

2008-12-01T18:36:00.000-08:00

Five Ways to Drive Traffic to your Blog

When you blog for money you need to create your own content (and lots of it!), implement advertisement programs like Google AdSense and WidgetBucks, and last but not least – you need traffic.

In our offline lives we dread it, but online we embrace it. I want to give you 5 ways to start driving traffic to your blog today. With a little time and patience, you will slowly start to increase your viewer ship.

1. Post comments on other blogs.

Blogs are everywhere – there’s certainly not a shortage of them. You should have no problem finding other bloggers in your niche that are popular and interesting. Bookmark those that you like, follow their topics daily, and if you find something that sparks your interest – comment.

Become a participating voice in the community. The more interesting your comments are, the more likely your peers will follow you to your blog. And who knows – you might stand out among the crowd and be recognized by the author, which can spin off into better opportunities.

2. Register with blog networks like: Technorati, BlogCatalog, and MyBlogLog

It’s important that you get your blog out there for others to see. You can start the process by submitting to search engines, but that’s just the beginning. Technorati, BlogCatalog, and MyBlogLog are just a few of the high profile blog networks on the web. Register with them, network with other people in your releated area, and get your word out.

When you register with these services remember a couple of things:

1.) Create a detailed profile. Let people know a little bit about you and draw them in. Without that personal interaction people may flee quickly.

2.) Tag your blog properly. Tags are very important – they’re usually one or two word descriptions of your blog. So for example my blog would fall under categories like: Money, Business, and Finance. Dig around the specific service and look for popular tags and try to use those for your blog. It allows people who are interested in these topics to easily find your site.

3. Register with several forums.

Do a Google search for forums that are related to your niche and register. Try to be an active voice in the community. People will flock to you if you’re interesting. Not only that but it allows you to find out what others are doing and what makes them appealing.

When you register with a forum, make sure to fill out the profile, similar to the blogging services. And equally as important – make a signature that is a direct link to your blog. Your signature is shown in every post that you make – helping you gain visibility. This is all the more reason to create thought provoking discussions.

4. Social Bookmarking and Article Submission.

Social networking, bookmarking, and article submissions are all the rage today – don’t let it pass you by. Some of the major networks include delicious, Furl, and of course, Digg. These sites will allow you to tag, bookmark, and submit articles that you think are interesting. What’s more interesting than your own work? People should know about it so go spread the word.

5. StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon really falls into tip #2, but I decided to break it away from the pack because it provides quicker results. Like the rest of the social networking sites, you create a profile and network with others. But what makes StumbleUpon so darn unique, is that you can “stumble” thousands of sites that you’re interested in by the click of a button. So what does that mean for you? Well, you can stumble your own site. By doing this you get into the Stumble rotation, and any people that you network with can stumble across it as well.

In my experience StumbleUpon can bring great surges of traffic for short periods of time. Due to the nature of the service, you’re likely to get overlooked more than not; however, those that do stop – tend to stay. And if they like the site, they can rate it and review it for all the friends in their network to see. Are you getting the picture here? Your viewer ship has the potential to explode!

As with most things in life, there’s no silver bullet for getting traffic. It takes a lot of research, careful planning, networking, patience, and time. If you have what it takes and start using my recommendations, you will definitely start to see an increase. Hopefully that increase in traffic will help you blog for money.

How to make money from your blog

2008-12-01T18:16:00.000-08:00

How to make money from your blog

Many of the people who write blogs today simply want to share their opinion on something. But then there are the business-minded folks, who have found a way to use blogs, or Web logs, to bring in a little extra cash too.

I recently wrote a column detailing

how to get a blog up and running to boost your small business.

If you're interested in taking it further — blogging for bucks, if you will — here are five strategies that could turn your blog into a moneymaker.

1. Sell advertising

This is likely the most common means of leveraging a blog to generate income. If yours happens to become a well-known blog, or one that is well-received in a particular niche, it's always possible to sell ad space on your own. For lesser-known blogs, services such as Google's AdSense or BlogAds enable bloggers to establish ad programs.AdSense's —

which lets you select several ads that are consistent with the content of your blog — pays you based on how many readers click on the ads for further information. Even better, it's free. BlogAds, on the other hand, hooks bloggers up with would-be advertisers and levies a commission in return for any

ad placements that result. "The nice thing, too, is that the ads are relatively unobtrusive," says Scott Allen, co-author of "The Virtual Handshake: Opening Doors and Closing Deals Online."

2. Help sell others' products

Here is another click-through opportunity. Affiliate programs enable your blog to serve as a conduit between readers and online sites offering various goods and services. One popular choice is Amazon.com. If, for instance, you offer book reviews or even just mention a book in passing in your blog, an affiliate program provides a means for your readers to click directly from your blog to Amazon to obtain further information about the book. If they break out the checkbook or charge card, you get paid as well.

3. Solicit contributions

Not every blog-related income opportunity involves hawking goods or services. As Blanche DuBois did in "A Streetcar Named Desire," consider relying on the kindness of strangers. Ask for contributions. If, for instance, your small-business blog supports a cause or issue in some fashion — say you repeatedly mention tax reform, health care or some other topic

you can always ask for reader support.Even if you've attracted a group of regular followers who simply enjoy reading what you have to say, they may be willing to underwrite their loyalty with a little financial help. Programs such as PayPal make it easy to establish a simple on-site contribution collection

button. "There are lots of worthy 'cause' blogs that would qualify for donations from grateful members of the blog community," says Las Vegas communications consultant Ned Barnett.

4. Market your services in your blog

Many people associate blogs exclusively with a cyberspace-based soapbox — a place to shout your opinions and little more than that. Granted, blogs are an ideal venue to share your thoughts with others, but don't overlook their capacity to generate new business as well. When appropriate,

work in references to what you do and, in turn, what you may be able to offer any would-be client or customer who may be reading your blog. That can spread your opinion and your business moxie at the same time."Instead of short commentaries that begin a dialogue with readers, as many blogs do, I write the equivalent of journal articles that demonstrate my abilities, strategies and perspectives on specific issues," Barnett says. "When it resonates, it means money. Since starting this approach, I have generated three new paying clients and brought in about $10,000 on revenue — directly attributable to specific blogs."

5. Use a blog to deepen your existing customer relationships
Nor does any marketing material inserted in blog content have to be limited to bringing in completely new business. By using a blog to regularly communicate with existing clients as well as other readers, you

can take advantage of the opportunity to fully inform them about everything your business does. That may expand your readers' understanding of the full scope of your products or services."My blog has helped existing clients determine the range of my skills and services," says Ted Demopoulos of Demopoulos Associates, a Durham, N.H. consulting and training concern. "One client who had only used me for training in the past was surprised at my range of expertise and is now using me for a consulting project. Another who only used me on technical projects is now considering me for a more business-oriented project."

Make Money Blogging (Pavlina's)

2008-12-01T18:15:00.000-08:00

Make Money Blogging

Do you want to make money blogging? If you do - you’re not alone. More and more bloggers are finding that blogging is a profitable medium. Whether it be to earn a few extra dollars a week to feed their coffee habit, or making enough money to stop them having to get a part time job to get through college, or whether they’ve got it to a point where they are able to make a full time living from their blogging - there are tens of thousands of bloggers making money from blogging.

In this page I want to share some information for beginners on making money from their blogs.

I will start by sharing my own top Money Making Methods (updated regularly) but below that point you to some great resources and teaching on how to increase your income from blogging.

What follows is a quick summary of my main income streams from blogging. Before you read it though - keep in mind that every blog is unique in how it can make money. Some of the following income streams will work on some blogs a lot better than others - the key is to experiment with as many as possible and see what works best for you.

The following income streams (from a number of blogs) have helped me to earn a six figure income each year for the last three years from blogging. I’ve ranked them from highest to lowest.

I hope you find it useful to see the mix and variety of ways that I earn a living from blogging.

1. AdSense

Despite not using it here at ProBlogger any more (here’s why) I continue to use AdSense with amazing effect on my other blogs. I have them all set to show image and text based ads and find that 250×300 pixel ads work best (usually with a blended design). I don’t have much luck with their ‘referrals’ program but their normal ads work a treat and continue to be the biggest earner for me.

2. Chitika

Chitka continues to be a great performer for me on my blogs. They work best on product related blogs although their recent announcement of their Premium ad unit is exciting as they now offer ads with a non product focus that I’m hearing great conversions on (I have one reader who is getting $28 CPM on this ad unit).Chitika offers a range of ad units that I experiment with. I find their eMiniMalls work best and that Related Product Units are also good. Their Shoplincs product isn’t performing as well as it once did for me - mainly because I’ve been promoting it less and have driven less traffic to it. Over the time I’ve been using Chitika they’ve now earned me over a quarter of a million dollars - I can’t recommend them enough!

3. Private Ad Sales/Sponsorships

Private ad sales directly to advertisers have continued to grow over the last few months and as a result they’re now my third highest income stream. I expect them to overtake both Chitika and AdSense in the coming months. This includes ad sales of the 125 x 125 ads here at ProBlogger as well as a campaign or two at Digital Photography School.

4. Amazon Associates

Amazon’s affiliate program has been one of my big movers in the last 12 months. I used to make a few odd dollars from it - however in recent times it has become a significant earner for me (as I’ve shared previously). This quarter it grew even more than previously as a result

of continued growth of DPS where I recommend books, software and cameras.

5. Miscellaneous Affiliate Programs

I run a variety of affiliate programs on my blogs - most of which bring in smaller amounts of money that don’t really justify a category of their own. These include - - Digital Photography Secrets (a camera technique series), Pro Photo Secrets (a gre

at photoshop product) , Yaro’s Blog Mastermind Mentoring Program (about to open the doors again), SEO Book (Aaron’s legendary resource) and the excellent Teaching Sells course (which just continues to grow in what it offers to it’s members in terms of content).

The great thing about many of these programs is that they are of such high quality that they sell themselves and I am being emailed from readers who sign up to them thanking me for the recommendation!

6. Shopzilla

As I wrote recently - Shopzilla has really impressed me with how it’s performed over the last few weeks. It’s actually doing well enough to debut in this list at #6. The ads

are similar to Chitika but the click values have been higher for me to this point. They don’t offer quite as many options as Chitika does in terms of types of ads but for a new ad network there’s definitely promising signs. I’m looking forward to seeing how they continue to develop!

7. ProBlogger Job Boards

The job boards here at ProBlogger continue to grow each month in the number of advertisements that are being bought. This enabled me to invest most of the money that they’d earned a while back into getting a new back end for the boards and to redesign them. It hit me today that the boards are now bringing in around $1000 a month in revenue which is pretty nice considering that they are so low maintenance to run. They also offer a service to readers and add value to the overall blog.

The only problem that I face with

the job boards is that there are so many bloggers looking for work that the demand for jobs far exceeds the supply. On the good side of things is that advertisers are reporting getting amazing quality of applications.

8. WidgetBucks

Another newcomer to this list is WidgetBucks - another ad network that ProBlogger readers will be familiar with.

WidgetBucks is similar to Chitika and Shopzilla in many respects and works well on product related sites. It does best on sites with US traffic (the reason I’ve not used it as much as I get a lot of international traffic) so if you have a product related site with a US audience it’d be a no brainer to try out WidgetBucks. I’m hoping they’ll continue to expand their offerings in terms of ad types and visitor location.

Disclaimer - WidgetBucks are an advertiser on ProBlogger

8. BidVertiser

Make money with affiliate program that pays you for every click
You get paid for every visitor that clicks on an ad. Our goal is to enable you to make as much as possible from your advertising space, by letting advertisers bid on your ad space. We pay monthly, either

by check, or instantly through PayPal with a minimum of only $10

Always have the highest bidders displayed on your website
BidVertiser will always display the highest bidders on your site, assuring the maximum revenue possible at any given time.

Have your bidding steadily improved over time
You will see a constant improvement in your bidding over time, as both your visitors and our advertisers will be exposed to the opportunity of bidding against each other on your ad space.

Customize the layout of your ads
BidVertiser gives you a simple point-and-click tool to help you customize the layout of the ads to fit your site's look and feel, in order to retain the high quality of your website.

Block any unwanted ad
BidVertiser enables you to filter-out any unwanted ads. Prior to your own filtering, each ad has to be pre-approved by our editorial team. This mechanism gives you a peace of mind with regards to the ads displayed on your website.

Generate detailed reports to monitor your ads performance
Use the Publisher Center to generate detailed online reports to monitor your ads performance, including the number of page impre.

9. Miscellaneous Advertising Programs

I also play with a number of other ad networks. Some I run as tests to see if I should review them here - and some are just advertising that run in the background on some of my smaller blogs. These include ShoppingAds, Feedburner RSS ads, Vizu (a poll advertising system), Kontera and Bidvertiser. Together these don’t add up to major earnings for me - not because they are not good, but because I don’t use them heavily (a blog can only run so many ads on it).

I think that that covers most of it although it’s worth mentioning that last time I did this list I also included TextLinkAds which used to be every bloggers favorite way to make money blogging by selling text links. I’ve stopped using them due to Google cracking down on them (read more about this here) but it’s worth noting that many bloggers still use them successfully - I advise to proceed with caution. Disclaimer - TLA are an advertiser on ProBlogger

Useful Resources for Bloggers Wanting to Make Money Blogging

A lot has been written on the topic of making money online from blogs. There is a lot of wonderful information out there - but also a lot of hype and sometimes dangerous information.

Below are a number of articles that I’ve written exploring some of the different ways that bloggers make money.

Subscribe to My RSS Feed - everything that I know about making money from blogging is here on ProBlogger in my archives. I don’t hold back information and write about what I’m learning as I learn it. To get future updates subscribe to my RSS feed or add your email address below to get daily updates via email.

Make Money off Your Blog (Washingtonpost's)

2008-12-01T18:12:00.000-08:00

Make Money off Your Blog

LET GOOGLE WORK FOR YOU. Selling ad space might be the oldest way to make a buck, and with Google's free AdSense service (www.google.com/adsense), it's way too easy. AdSense allows bloggers to display up to three content-specific "ad units" (boxes that can hold up to four ads each) per page. "If you're writing about sports cars, they'll be ads about sports cars," says Biz Stone, Blogger senior specialist at Google. Each time a visitor clicks these ads, you get paid. Google doesn't disclose its exact share of the revenue, but a personalized report page lets you track your own earnings. Earn at least $100 and Google sends you a check.

PLAY AD-SALES EXEC. If you want more control over the ads on your blog, hit www.blogads.com. BlogAds lets you join its database free and set your own ad prices. Companies (including media bigs such as Paramount Pictures and Random House) then search for suitable blogs and purchase ad space for a set period -- say, one month. In contrast to the way AdSense works, your earnings don't depend on whether a reader clicks the ad. All you have to do is give 20 percent of your net revenue to Mr. BlogAd, and you keep the rest. Perhaps best of all, you can indulge your megalomaniacal tendencies by approving or declining potential ads at will.

BE THE MIDDLEMAN. Many companies run "affiliate" programs: Post an ad provided by Amazon.com or Lands' End, for example, and receive a small commission every time your readers click that ad, go to the company's Web site and end up buying a book or splurging on a down parka. Referral fees -- the cash you get from these transactions -- vary (you can earn as much as 10 percent per sale from Amazon). LinkShare (www.linkshare.com) claims to run the Internet's biggest "affiliate marketing network," with more than 600 companies on its roster of advertisers. Another service, Commission Junction (www.cj.com), runs programs for eBay and Expedia.com, among others.

PASS THE CUP. If you're toiling away to maintain a blog that people enjoy, why not ask your guests to show a little monetary appreciation? The online payment service PayPal (www.paypal.com) lets you add a donation button to your blog. You can opt to receive money in U.S. dollars, Canadian dollars, Japanese yen, pounds sterling or euros. When visitors give money, PayPal sends you an e-mail to let you know. Amazon's Honor System (www.amazon.com/honorsystem) and BitPass (www.bitpass.com) offer similar donation options.

SELL SCHWAG. Don't dig ads? Uncomfortable asking for handouts? Then create your own blog-branded gear at CafePress.com, which offers more than 50 products begging for your unique logo. Choose from standard fare such as T-shirts and coffee cups, or, if Grandma doesn't read your blog, opt for sexy thong underwear (ooh la la). You get to sell each product at whatever price your entrepreneurial heart desires. CafePress gets back the original base price ($13.99 for T-shirts, $10.99 for mugs); you keep the markup. Just add your online store's link to your blog, and all that's left to do is wait for CafePress to send you a monthly check. See? It's practically like your real job. Mike Peed

Want to know how to do something? Send your questions to howto@washpost.com.

How to Find Money Making Blog Ideas (ProBlogger's)

2008-12-01T18:08:00.000-08:00

How to Find Money Making Blog Ideas

1. Observe - I am an information junkie. I watch too much TV, read too many books (I never make it to the end though), spend way too much time on the internet, squander hours in the news agents flicking through magazines, spend more time at cafes watching people than eating food and am a sucker for any article, website or conversation that is about ‘trends or predictions‘.

If you want to create a blog that is going to be read by as many people as possible you must be in touch with where as many people are at (or will be at). What are they eating, drinking, doing with spare time, watching on TV, thinking about, lusting after, obsessing about etc. Don’t only observe what others are doing - take a look at your own life, look at your spending paterns, TV watching habits, interests and passions and you might just find a great topic in your own life! I also find that stimulating myself with new sights, sounds, tastes, places, people can also help get the creative juices flowing. Keep a journal (I use a whiteboard and a spreadsheet) of your observations which you can come back to later.

2. Predict - I’ve written about this before but it is a lesson worth repeating. Think ahead. Ask yourself the question - ‘what will people be searching on the internet for next week, next month or next year?’ This is connected to your observe task. As you read the paper/internet/magazine - keep an eye open for upcoming product developments, events, trends etc. If you see one start writing about it. It isn’t really a mind blowing suggestion - but I’m amazed at how many bloggers begin blogging about movies and events the day they start rather than two weeks before when the search engines have time to pick them up and index their posts.

So look ahead, write your predictions and hunches about what people will be searching for in your journal and better still start writing some posts (or even start a new blog) on those topics to test how they do in the Search Engines. Be as specific with your posts as possible - for example last year in the lead up to the final show of American Idol 3 I wrote a post titled American Idol 3 Winner. The day the winner was announced guess who was (and still is) number 1 on Google for that term. It was a good day and showed me the power of thinking ahead.

More and more people are finding ways to make money from blogging but few pro bloggers are making their money from their personal, general themed blogs. In most cases it takes a blog either with a tight niche or fresh idea to make it big in the blogosphere - but how do you find those ideas? Before reading on you might like to read Part 1 of this series.

3. Dream - Most mornings you can find me at a local cafe for at least for 30 - 60 minutes. The reasons I go there are numerous. For one coffee is an essential ingredient in me thinking creatively (that should almost be a point in and of itself) but secondly I do it to intentionally get out of my ‘Blog HQ’ (my office) and into a different space. I usually leave my laptop at the office and just take a pen and my journal and use the time to dream.

You see I find it easy to fill my head up with wonderful information, observations, predictions and knowledge but unless I put time aside to dream about how blogging could fit with the information I’m gathering the dots may never be joined. Get out that journal again and add to your list of potential topics - what would you love to write about? What would be an outrageous topic to blog on? What type of person would you like to write a blog for? Think outside the box you’ve been living in - open your mind and come up with as many creative ideas as possible. Nothing is too stupid - not until the next stage anyway.

4. Strategize - Get your journal full of Observations, Predictions and Dreams and start doing a bit of realistic thinking on the ideas you’ve got. Ask yourself a few grounding questions and put aside your ‘anything is possible’ attitude for a while (anything IS possible, but sometimes it worth being realistic about the barriers to success). Here are some questions to ask:

• What (how many) other sites/blogs are covering this topic already? Can I compete?

• Is there a niche within the niche that these other sites are not covering that I could concentrate upon?

• How many people are currently searching for this topic (or will be)?

• Who are searching for information on this topic?

• How might I monetize this blog?

• How much would ads pay for this topic using contextual advertising?

• What affiliate programs might work well with this topic?

• Do I have the expertise to cover this topic?

• Do I have the time (and energy) to adequately cover this topic? Will I have enough time and energy in 6 months time?

• Do I know anyone else who might be better at writing this blog that I could partner with?

• Would it be a better idea to submit this topic to an established blog network than to do it on my own?

• Could I generate enough content to comprehensively cover the topic? What sources would I use?

Of course there are many more questions you could and should ask yourself going into a new blog. Don’t get bogged down in strategy but be realistic about it.

How to Build a Successful Online Business (Pavlina's)

2008-12-01T18:06:00.000-08:00

How to Build a Successful Online Business

Why an online business?

In the age of the Internet, I think almost everyone should have an online business… if only for the growth experience. It doesn’t cost much to start one, but it will teach you so much. Perhaps the greatest benefit is that you’ll learn you do have something of value to share with the world, something that can generate income for you for the rest of your life.

In a way I’m jealous of the teenagers and 20-somethings who are growing up so Internet savvy. Any of them could start their own online businesses and get ahead financially at a young age. I would have loved to have been doing this in high school or college. It’s terrific that some people are becoming millionaires at such a young age, but I think the real success stories come from those who find a way to generate just a few thousand dollars per month, enough to cover their expenses.

My kids are only 4 and 7 years old, but I’m already thinking about how I might help them start their own websites soon. My daughter is very artistic, so who knows? Imagine if by the time she becomes an adult, she already has a steady stream of cashflow from websites she created during her teen years.

Building traffic

Running an online business is deceptively simple. Look at my web site, for example. The structure isn’t very complicated. It’s mostly just a lot of content and a lot of ads. But it consistently generates a nice five-figure monthly income. Anyone can do it, right?

Unfortunately, not everyone can do this. People try and fail all the time. The success stories get a lot of attention, but there are orders of magnitude more failures.

The key factor in building a successful online business is traffic. If you can’t build sufficient traffic, you won’t be able to generate much, if any, income. And unfortunately most people are really bad at building traffic. They apply completely inept strategies that don’t work, and they usually give up within a few months after starting.

Building traffic is not remotely easy for most people. This problem isn’t unique to the web though. You see it in every field. Some authors sell millions of books, while the average book doesn’t even sell 5,000 copies. Lots of people can write a book, but relatively few know how to sell a book. Lots of people can create a web site or blog these days, but few know how to attract large amounts of traffic.

If you can successfully build lots of traffic, it’s fairly easy to generate income from it. You also have time to figure it out. If you can grow your traffic, you can maintain your traffic, and that gives you time to figure out how to monetize the traffic.

In the past I’ve written articles trying to teach people how to build successful online businesses, including How to Make Money From Your Blog and How to Build a High-Traffic Website. Those were long, detailed articles, and both have become extremely popular in the blogosphere. I didn’t charge any money for this content — it’s all free. Those articles inspired a lot of people (hundreds that I know of) to enthusiastically start their own websites. Some of those people are doing quite well now, but most that I’ve been aware of have failed miserably.

Why most people fail

Why did most people fail? I think the reason was that the whole process of running an online business is just too complicated for most people. There are lots of ways to screw it up. It pained me to visit some of those sites and notice a dozen glaring mistakes within the first few seconds — blogs that didn’t enable permalinks, cutesy headlines with no keywords in them, bad choice of topics, page titles that still used the WordPress default format, hideously suboptimal ad layouts, hidden or missing contact info, etc. Any one of those mistakes could cripple a site’s results. More than one is a practically a death sentence. Such mistakes cause problems both for human visitors and search engines.

But at the same time, there were teenagers humming along just fine, generating four figures in monthly income after working on their sites for 6-12 months. They didn’t necessarily get everything right, but they were Internet savvy enough to fix the big problems early.

What bothered me most about this was that people were too often failing because of the technology. Many of them had great ideas and very good content. It was a shame to read some of their articles and think to myself, This is great stuff… too bad no one will ever see it.

The cruel and unfair part of online business is that if you aren’t very Internet savvy, you’ll make mistakes on the technical side that you’re totally oblivious to. You may get the content side right, but the technology will bite you and cripple your results.

In my “How to Make Money From Your Blog” Article, I did correctly identify this problem and suggested that 99 out of 100 people would fail because of it. But it’s still a pretty unfair situation. There are people who can write great content who really deserve to be getting a lot of readers, but because they don’t understand permalinks, RSS feeds, pinging, or other technologies, they’re doomed before they start.

Once I saw this happening, I basically decided I’d better shut up about encouraging people to run an online business. People kept asking me for new articles on the subject, but I didn’t think it was a good idea. I was concerned I’d be doing more harm than good.

A new solution

Recently I came across a vastly superior solution to this problem — a way for people to build a successful online business that doesn’t require them to become technology gurus.

What I recommend is a service called Site Build It! – it’s an all-in-one solution for creating and building an online business. You pay an annual fee for the service, and they provide you with all the tools you need to build an income-generating web site. They host the site for you, they help you register your domain name, and they provide integrated tools like point-and-click page generators, built-in blogging, form builders, RSS feeds, and lots more. Many of these details will be handled for you, so you don’t have to worry about them.

You still create your own content, and you use their tools (or your own familiar tools) to create a site based on your unique ideas. You focus on the content side. They help you with the technical implementation side.

I don’t recommend this solution for everyone. If you’ve already built a successful website that generates thousands of dollars a month for you, you won’t need this. I don’t need it myself. But if you’re one of those people that have been held back by the technical complexity, then this is definitely something you should look at. This is the kind of solution I’d recommend in a heartbeat for my non-programmer friends who want to get something going online but quickly become lost in a sea of jargon.

There’s a lot to explain about this service and why I think it’s a great idea for most people interested in building a successful online business. So I wrote a whole separate article about that here:

Build Your Own Successful Online Business

That article is my personal impression of the Site Build It! service, and it contains many links to their site for more info. The most important link is their 30-minute video tour. If you have even a slight interest in running an online business, it will be worth your time to watch it. It starts out mostly motivational, but it becomes more educational as it goes along. Even if you’re not interested in their service, I think you’ll get something out of it. I especially liked the segment on monetization strategies.

If you’re interested, just be aware that it will take some time for you to look into this service and decide if it’s right for you. The Site Build It! site has a lot of detailed information on it. In my article I’ll provide you with some ideas for where to get started to find the most critical pages. If you really like to do your homework before making a decision like this, you’ll find no shortage of detail.

An extra benefit for those who already have successful web sites

Site Build It! also has one of the most generous affiliate programs on the Internet. Some of their affiliates earn more than $10,000 per month. I recently became an affiliate myself after seeing what a great service this will be for people. If you’re looking for new income sources for your web site, just read the last section of Build Your Own Successful Online Business, which will explain why this affiliate program is so strong.

Running an online business can be a wonderful growth experience, and the income and freedom it can provide is certainly nice too. People really shouldn’t be deprived of this opportunity for technical reasons. The self-publishing power of blogging technology has gotten us partway there, but it’s only one piece to the puzzle. I encourage you to take a good look at Site Build It!, since I think you’ll find that their system fills in the remaining gaps, putting online business success within reach of most people.

This is by no means a get-rich-quick program. You’ll still need to put in the time and energy to create quality content for your web site, but at least you won’t have to worry as much about the technical side.

How to Make Money From Your Blog (Pavlina's)

2008-12-01T18:00:00.000-08:00

Do you actually want to monetize your blog?

Some people have strong personal feelings with respect to making money from their blogs. If you think commercializing your blog is evil, immoral, unethical, uncool, lame, greedy, obnoxious, or anything along those lines, then don’t commercialize it.

If you have mixed feelings about monetizing your blog, then sort out those feelings first. If you think monetizing your site is wonderful, fine. If you think it’s evil, fine. But make up your mind before you seriously consider starting down this path. If you want to succeed, you must be congruent. Generating income from your blog is challenging enough — you don’t want to be dealing with self-sabotage at the same time. It should feel genuinely good to earn income from your blog — you should be driven by a healthy ambition to succeed. If your blog provides genuine value, you fully deserve to earn income from it. If, however, you find yourself full of doubts over whether this is the right path for you, you might find this article helpful: How Selfish Are You? It’s about balancing your needs with the needs of others.

If you do decide to generate income from your blog, then don’t be shy about it. If you’re going to put up ads, then really put up ads. Don’t just stick a puny little ad square in a remote corner somewhere. If you’re going to request donations, then really request donations. Don’t put up a barely visible “Donate” link and pray for the best. If you’re going to sell products, then really sell them. Create or acquire the best quality products you can, and give your visitors compelling reasons to buy. If you’re going to do this, then fully commit to it. Don’t take a half-assed approach. Either be full-assed or no-assed.

You can reasonably expect that when you begin commercializing a free site, some people will complain, depending on how you do it. I launched this site in October 2004, and I began putting Google Adsense ads on the site in February 2005. There were some complaints, but I expected that — it was really no big deal. Less than 1 in 5,000 visitors actually sent me negative feedback. Most people who sent feedback were surprisingly supportive. Most of the complaints died off within a few weeks, and the site began generating income almost immediately, although it was pretty low — a whopping $53 the first month. If you’d like to see some month-by-month specifics, I posted my 2005 Adsense revenue figures earlier this year. Adsense is still my single best source of revenue for this site, although it’s certainly not my only source. More on that later…

Can you make a decent income online?

Yes, absolutely. At the very least, a high five-figure annual income is certainly an attainable goal for an individual working full-time from home. I’m making a healthy income from StevePavlina.com, and the site is only 19 months old… barely a toddler. If you have a day job, it will take longer to generate a livable income, but it can still be done part-time if you’re willing to devote a lot of your spare time to it. I’ve always done it full-time.

Can most people do it?

No, they can’t. I hope it doesn’t shock you to see a personal development web site use the dreaded C-word. But I happen to agree with those who say that 99% of people who try to generate serious income from their blogs will fail. The tagline for this site is “Personal Development for Smart People.” And unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your outlook), smart people are a minority on this planet. So while most people can’t make a living this way, I would say that most smart people can. How do you know whether or not you qualify as smart? Here’s a good rule of thumb: If you have to ask the question, you aren’t.

If that last paragraph doesn’t flood my inbox with flames, I don’t know what will. OK, actually I do.

This kind of 99-1 ratio isn’t unique to blogging though. You’ll see it in any field with relatively low barriers to entry. What percentage of wannabe actors, musicians, or athletes ever make enough money from their passions to support themselves? It doesn’t take much effort to start a blog these days — almost anyone can do it. Talent counts for something, and the talent that matters in blogging is intelligence. But that just gets you in the door. You need to specifically apply your intelligence to one particular talent. And the best words I can think of to describe that particular talent are: web savvy.

If you are very web savvy, or if you can learn to become very web savvy, then you have an excellent shot of making enough money from your blog to cover all your living expenses… and then some. But if becoming truly web savvy is more than your gray matter can handle, then I’ll offer this advice: Don’t quit your day job.

Web savvy

What do I mean by web savvy? You don’t need to be a programmer, but you need a decent functional understanding of a variety of web technologies. What technologies are “key” will depend on the nature of your blog and your means of monetization. But generally speaking I’d list these elements as significant:

blog publishing software
HTML/CSS
blog comments (and comment spam)
RSS/syndication
feed aggregators
pings
trackbacks
full vs. partial feeds
blog carnivals (for kick-starting your blog’s traffic)
search engines
search engine optimization (SEO)
page rank
social bookmarking
tagging
contextual advertising
affiliate programs
traffic statistics
email

Optional: podcasting, instant messaging, PHP or other web scripting languages.

I’m sure I missed a few due to familiarity blindness. If scanning such a list makes your head spin, I wouldn’t recommend trying to make a full-time living from blogging just yet. Certainly you can still blog, but you’ll be at a serious disadvantage compared to someone who’s more web savvy, so don’t expect to achieve stellar results until you expand your knowledge base.

If you want to sell downloadable products such as ebooks, then you can add e-commerce, SSL, digital delivery, fraud prevention, and online databases to the list. Again, you don’t need to be a programmer; you just need a basic understanding of these technologies. Even if you hire someone else to handle the low-level implementation, it’s important to know what you’re getting into. You need to be able to trust your strategic decisions, and you won’t be able to do that if you’re a General who doesn’t know what a gun is.

A lack of understanding is a major cause of failure in the realm of online income generation. For example, if you’re clueless about search engine optimization (SEO), you’ll probably cripple your search engine rankings compared to someone who understands SEO well. But you can’t consider each technology in isolation. You need to understand the connections and trade-offs between them. Monetizing a blog is a balancing act. You may need to balance the needs of yourself, your visitors, search engines, those who link to you, social bookmarking sites, advertisers, affiliate programs, and others. Seemingly minor decisions like what to title a web page are significant. In coming up with the title of this article, I have to take all of these potential viewers into consideration. I want a title that is attractive to human visitors, drives reasonable search engine traffic, yields relevant contextual ads, fits the theme of the site, and encourages linking and social bookmarking. And most importantly I want each article to provide genuine value to my visitors. I do my best to create titles for my articles that balance these various needs. Often that means abandoning cutesy or clever titles in favor of direct and comprehensible ones. It’s little skills like these that help drive sustainable traffic growth month after month. Missing out on just this one skill is enough to cripple your traffic. And there are dozens of these types of skills that require web savvy to understand, respect, and apply.

This sort of knowledge is what separates the 1% from the 99%. Both groups may work just as hard, but the 1% is getting much better results for their efforts. It normally doesn’t take me more than 60 seconds to title an article, but a lot of experience goes into those 60 seconds. You really just have to learn these ideas once; after that you can apply them routinely.

Whenever you come across a significant web technology you don’t understand, look it up on Google or Wikipedia, and dive into it long enough to acquire a basic understanding of it. To make money from blogging it’s important to be something of a jack of all trades. Maybe you’ve heard the expression, “A jack of all trades is a master of none.” That may be true, but you don’t need to master any of these technologies — you just have to be good enough to use them. It’s the difference between being able to drive a car vs. becoming an auto mechanic. Strive to achieve functional knowledge, and then move on to something else. Even though I’m an experienced programmer, I don’t know how many web technologies actually work. I don’t really care. I can still use them to generate results. In the time it would take me to fully understand one new technology, I can achieve sufficient functional knowledge to apply several of them.

Thriving on change

Your greatest risk isn’t that you’ll make mistakes that will cost you. Your greatest risk is that you’ll miss opportunities. You need an entrepreneurial mindset, not an employee mindset. Don’t be too concerned with the risk of loss — be more concerned with the risk of missed gains. It’s what you don’t know and what you don’t do that will hurt you the worst. Blogging is cheap. Your expenses and financial risk should be minimal. Your real concern should be missing opportunities that would have made you money very easily. You need to develop antennae that can listen out for new opportunities. I highly recommend subscribing to Darren Rowse’s Problogger blog — Darren is great at uncovering new income-generating opportunities for bloggers.

The blogosphere changes rapidly, and change creates opportunity. It takes some brains to decipher these opportunities and to take advantage of them before they disappear. If you hesitate to capitalize on something new and exciting, you may simply miss out. Many opportunities are temporary. And every day you don’t implement them, you’re losing money you could have earned. And you’re also missing opportunities to build traffic, grow your audience, and benefit more people.

I used to get annoyed by the rapid rate of change of web technologies. It’s even more rapid than what I saw when I worked in the computer gaming industry. And the rate of change is accelerating. Almost every week now I learn about some fascinating new web service or idea that could potentially lead to big changes down the road. Making sense of them is a full-time job in itself. But I learned to love this insane pace. If I’m confused then everyone else is probably confused too. And people who only do this part-time will be very confused. If they aren’t confused, then they aren’t keeping up. So if I can be just a little bit faster and understand these technologies just a little bit sooner, then I can capitalize on some serious opportunities before the barriers to entry become too high. Even though confusion is uncomfortable, it’s really a good thing for a web entrepreneur. This is what creates the space for a college student to earn $1,000,000 online in just a few months with a clever idea. Remember this isn’t a zero-sum game. Don’t let someone else’s success make you feel diminished or jealous. Let it inspire you instead.

What’s your overall income-generation strategy?

I don’t want to insult anyone, but most people are utterly clueless when it comes to generating income from their blogs. They slap things together haphazardly with no rhyme or reason and hope to generate lots of money. While I’m a strong advocate of the ready-fire-aim approach, that strategy does require that you eventually aim. Ready-fire-fire-fire-fire will just create a mess.

Take a moment to articulate a basic income-generating strategy for your site. If you aren’t good at strategy, then just come up with a general philosophy for how you’re going to generate income. You don’t need a full business plan, just a description of how you plan to get from $0 per month to whatever your income goal is. An initial target goal I used when I first started this site was $3000 per month. It’s a somewhat arbitrary figure, but I knew if I could reach $3000 per month, I could certainly push it higher, and $3000 is enough income that it’s going to make a meaningful difference in my finances. I reached that level 15 months after launching the site (in December 2005). And since then it’s continued to increase nicely. Blogging income is actually quite easy to maintain. It’s a lot more secure than a regular job. No one can fire me, and if one source of income dries up, I can always add new ones. We’ll address multiple streams of income soon…

Are you going to generate income from advertising, affiliate commissions, product sales, donations, or something else? Maybe you want a combination of these things. However you decide to generate income, put your basic strategy down in writing. I took 15 minutes to create a half-page summary of my monetization strategy. I only update it about once a year and review it once a month. This isn’t difficult, but it helps me stay focused on where I’m headed. It also allows me to say no to opportunities that are inconsistent with my plan.

Refer to your monetization strategy (or philosophy) when you need to make design decisions for your web site. Although you may have multiple streams of income, decide which type of income will be your primary source, and design your site around that. Do you need to funnel people towards an order form, or will you place ads all over the site? Different monetization strategies suggest different design approaches. Think about what specific action you want your visitors to eventually take that will generate income for you, and design your site accordingly.

When devising your income strategy, feel free to cheat. Don’t re-invent the wheel. Copy someone else’s strategy that you’re convinced would work for you too. Do NOT copy anyone’s content or site layout (that’s copyright infringement), but take note of how they’re making money. I decided to monetize this site with advertising and affiliate income after researching how various successful bloggers generated income. Later I added donations as well. This is an effective combo.

Traffic, traffic, traffic

Assuming you feel qualified to take on the challenge of generating income from blogging (and I haven’t scared you away yet), the three most important things you need to monetize your blog are traffic, traffic, and traffic.

Just to throw out some figures, last month (April 2006), this site received over 1.1 million visitors and over 2.4 million page views. That’s almost triple what it was just six months ago.

Why is traffic so important? Because for most methods of online income generation, your income is a function of traffic. If you double your traffic, you’ll probably double your income (assuming your visitor demographics remain fairly consistent). You can screw almost everything else up, but if you can generate serious traffic, it’s really hard to fail. With sufficient traffic the realistic worst case is that you’ll eventually be able to monetize your web site via trial and error (as long as you keep those visitors coming).

When I first launched this blog, I knew that traffic building was going to be my biggest challenge. All of my plans hinged on my ability to build traffic. If I couldn’t build traffic, it was going to be very difficult to succeed. So I didn’t even try to monetize my site for the first several months. I just focused on traffic building. Even after 19 months, traffic building is still the most important part of my monetization plan. For my current traffic levels, I know I’m undermonetizing my site, but that’s OK. Right now it’s more important to me to keep growing the site, and I’m optimizing the income generation as I go along.

Traffic is the primary fuel of online income generation. More visitors means more ad clicks, more product sales, more affiliate sales, more donations, more consulting leads, and more of whatever else that generates income for you. And it also means you’re helping more and more people.

With respect to traffic, you should know that in many respects, the rich do get richer. High traffic leads to even more traffic-building opportunities that just aren’t accessible for low-traffic sites. On average at least 20 bloggers add new links to my site every day, my articles can easily surge to the top of social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, and I’m getting more frequent requests for radio interviews. Earlier this year I was featured in USA Today and in Self Magazine, which collectively have millions of readers. Journalists are finding me by doing Google searches on topics I’ve written about. These opportunities were not available to me when I was first starting out. Popular sites have a serious advantage. The more traffic you have, the more you can attract.

If you’re intelligent and web savvy, you should also be able to eventually build a high-traffic web site. And you’ll be able to leverage that traffic to build even more traffic.

How to build traffic

Now if traffic is so crucial, how do you build it up to significant levels if you’re starting from rock bottom?

I’ve already written a lengthy article on this topic, so I’ll refer you there: How to Build a High Traffic Web Site (or Blog). If you don’t have time to read it now, feel free to bookmark it or print it out for later. That article covers my general philosophy of traffic-building, which centers on creating content that provides genuine value to your visitors. No games or gimmicks.

There is one other important traffic-building tip I’ll provide here though.

Blog Carnivals. Take full advantage of blog carnivals when you’re just starting out (click the previous link and read the FAQ there to learn what carnivals are if you don’t already know). Periodically submit your best blog posts to the appropriate carnivals for your niche. Carnivals are easy ways to get links and traffic, and best of all, they’re free. Submitting only takes minutes if you use a multi-carnvival submission form. Do NOT spam the carnivals with irrelevant material — only submit to the carnivals that are a match for your content.

In my early traffic-building days, I’d do carnivals submissions once a week, and it helped a great deal in going from nothing to about 50,000 visitors per month. You still have to produce great content, but carnivals give you a free shot at marketing your unknown blog. Free marketing is precisely the kind of opportunity you don’t want to miss. Carnivals are like an open-mic night at a comedy club — they give amateurs a chance to show off their stuff. I still submit to certain carnivals every once in a while, but now my traffic is so high that relatively speaking, they don’t make much difference anymore. Just to increase my traffic by 1% in a month, I need 11,000 new visitors, and even the best carnivals don’t push that much traffic. But you can pick up dozens or even hundreds of new subscribers from each round of carnival submissions, so it’s a great place to start. Plus it’s very easy.

If your traffic isn’t growing month after month, does it mean you’re doing something wrong? Most likely you aren’t doing enough things right. Again, making mistakes is not the issue. Missing opportunities is.

Will putting ads on your site hurt your traffic?

Here’s a common fear I hear from people who are considering monetizing their web sites:

Putting ads on my site will cripple my traffic. The ads will drive people away, and they’ll never come back.

Well, in my experience this is absolutely, positively, and otherwise completely and totally… FALSE. It’s just not true. Guess what happened to my traffic when I put ads on my site. Nothing. Guess what happened to my traffic when I put up more ads and donation links. Nothing. I could detect no net effect on my traffic whatsoever. Traffic continued increasing at the same rate it did before there were ads on my site. In fact, it might have even helped me a little, since some bloggers actually linked to my site just to point out that they didn’t like my ad layout. I’ll leave it up to you to form your own theories about this. It’s probably because there’s so much advertising online already that even though some people will complain when a free site puts up ads, if they value the content, they’ll still come back, regardless of what they say publicly.

Most mature people understand it’s reasonable for a blogger to earn income from his/her work. I think I’m lucky in that my audience tends to be very mature — immature people generally aren’t interested in personal development. To create an article like this takes serious effort, not to mention the hard-earned experience that’s required to write it. This article alone took me over 15 hours of writing and editing. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to earn an income from such work. If you get no value from it, you don’t pay anything. What could be more fair than that? The more income this blog generates, the more I can put into it. For example, I used some of the income to buy podcasting equipment and added a podcast to the site. I’ve recorded 13 episodes so far. The podcasts are all ad-free. I’m also planning to add some additional services to this site in the years ahead. More income = better service.

At the time of this writing, my site is very ad-heavy. Some people point this out to me as if I’m not aware of it: “You know, Steve. Your web site seems to contain an awful lot of ads.” Of course I’m aware of it. I’m the one who put the ads there. There’s a reason I have this configuration of ads. They’re effective! People keep clicking on them. If they weren’t effective, I’d remove them right away and try something else.

I do avoid putting up ads that I personally find annoying when I see them on other sites, including pop-ups and interstitials (stuff that flies across your screen). Even though they’d make me more money, in my opinion they degrade the visitor experience too much.

I also provide two ad-free outlets, so if you really don’t like ads, you can actually read my content without ads. First, I provide a full-text RSS feed, and at least for now it’s ad-free. I do, however, include a donation request in the bottom of my feeds.

If you want to see some actual traffic data, take a look at the 2005 traffic growth chart. I first put ads on the site in February 2005, and although the chart doesn’t cover pre-February traffic growth, the growth rate was very similar before then. For an independent source, you can also look at my traffic chart on Alexa. You can select different Range options to go further back in time.

Multiple streams of income

You don’t need to put all your eggs in one basket. Think multiple streams of income. On this site I actually have six different streams of income. Can you count them all? Here’s a list:

Google Adsense ads (pay per click and pay per impression advertising)
Donations (via PayPal or snail mail — yes, some people do mail a check)
Text Link Ads (sold for a fixed amount per month)
Chitika eMiniMalls ads (pay per click)
Affiliate programs like Amazon and LinkShare (commission on products sold, mostly books)
Advertising sold to individual advertisers (three-month campaigns or longer)

Note: If you’re reading this article a while after its original publication date, then this list is likely to change. I frequently experiment with different streams.

Adsense is my biggest single source of income, but some of the others do pretty well too. Every stream generates more than $100/month.

My second biggest income stream is actually donations. My average donation is about $10, and I’ve received a number of $100 donations too. It only took me about an hour to set this up via PayPal. So even if your content is free like mine, give your visitors a means to voluntarily contribute if they wish. It’s win-win. I’m very grateful for the visitor support. It’s a nice form of feedback too, since I notice that certain articles produced a surge in donations — this tells me I’m hitting the mark and giving people genuine value.

These aren’t my only streams of income though. I’ve been earning income online since 1995. With my computer games business, I have direct sales, royalty income, some advertising income, affiliate income, and donations (from the free articles). And if you throw in my wife’s streams of income, it gets really ridiculous: advertising, direct book sales, book sales through distributors, web consulting, affiliate income, more Adsense income, and probably a few sources I forgot. Suffice it to say we receive a lot of paychecks. Some of them are small, but they add up. It’s also extremely low risk — if one source of income dries up, we just expand existing sources or create new ones. I encourage you to think of your blog as a potential outlet for multiple streams of income too.

Automated income

With the exception of #6, all of these income sources are fully automated. I don’t have to do anything to maintain them except deposit checks, and in most cases I don’t even have to do that because the money is automatically deposited to my bank account.

I love automated income. With this blog I currently have no sales, no employees, no products, no inventory, no credit card processing, no fraud, and no customers. And yet I’m still able to generate a reasonable (and growing) income.

Why get a regular job and trade your time for money when you can let technology do all that work for you? Imagine how it would feel to wake up each morning, go to your computer, and check how much money you made while you were sleeping. It’s a really nice situation to be in.

Blogging software and hardware

I use WordPress for this blog, and I highly recommend it. Wordpress has lots of features and a solid interface. And you can’t beat its price — free.

The rest of this site is custom-coded HTML, CSS, PHP, and MySQL. I’m a programmer, so I coded it all myself. I could have just as easily used an existing template, but I wanted a simple straightforward design for this site, and I wanted the look of the blog to match the rest of the site. Plus I use PHP and MySQL to do some creative things outside the blog, like the Million Dollar Experiment.

I don’t recommend using a hosted service like Blogger if you want to seriously monetize your blog. You don’t get enough control. If you don’t have your own URL, you’re tying yourself to a service you don’t own and building up someone else’s asset. You want to build page rank and links for your own URL, not someone else’s. Plus you want sufficient control over the layout and design of your site, so you can jump on any opportunities that require low-level changes. If you use a hosted blog, you’re at the mercy of the hosting service, and that puts the future of any income streams you create with them at risk. It’s a bit more work up front to self-host, but it’s less risky in the long run.

Web hosting is cheap, and there are plenty of good hosts to choose from. I recommend Pair.com for a starter hosting account. They aren’t the cheapest, but they’re very reliable and have decent support. I know many online businesses that host with them, and my wife refers most of her clients there.

As your traffic grows you may need to upgrade to a dedicated server or a virtual private server (VPS). This web site is hosted by ServInt. I’ve hosted this site with them since day one, and they’ve been a truly awesome host. What I like most about them is that they have a smooth upgrade path as my traffic keeps growing. I’ve gone through several upgrades with them already, and all have been seamless. The nice thing about having your own server is that you can put as many sites on it as the server can handle. I have several sites running on my server, and it doesn’t cost me any additional hosting fees to add another site.

Comments or no comments

When I began this blog, I started out with comments enabled. As traffic grew, so did the level of commenting. Some days there were more than 100 comments. I noticed I was spending more and more time managing comments, and I began to question whether it was worth the effort. It became clear that with continued traffic growth, I was going to have to change my approach or die in comment hell. The personal development topics I write about can easily generate lots of questions and discussion. Just imagine how many follow-up questions an article like this could generate. With tens of thousands of readers, it would be insane. Also, nuking comment spam was chewing up more and more of my time as well.

But after looking through my stats, I soon realized that only a tiny fraction of visitors ever look at comments at all, and an even smaller fraction ever post a comment (well below 1% of total visitors). That made my decision a lot easier, and in October 2005, I turned blog comments off. In retrospect that was one of my best decisions. I wish I had done it sooner.

If you’d like to read the full details of how I came to this decision, I’ve written about it previously: Blog Comments and More on Blog Comments.

Do you need comments to build traffic? Obviously not. Just like when I put up ads, I saw no decline in traffic when I turned off comments. In fact, I think it actually helped me. Although I turned off comments, I kept trackbacks enabled, so I started getting more trackbacks. If people wanted to publicly comment on something I’d written, they had to do so on their own blogs and post a link. So turning off comments didn’t kill the discussion — it just took it off site. The volume of trackbacks is far more reasonable, and I can easily keep up with it. I even pop onto other people’s sites and post comments now and then, but I don’t feel obligated to participate because the discussion isn’t on my own site.

I realize people have very strong feelings about blog comments and community building. Many people hold the opinion that a blog without comments just isn’t a blog. Personally I think that’s utter nonsense — the data just doesn’t support it. The vast majority of blog readers neither read nor post comments. Only a very tiny and very vocal group even care about comments. Some bloggers say that having comments helps build traffic, but I saw no evidence of that. In fact, I think it’s just the opposite. Managing comments detracts from writing new posts, and it’s far better to get a trackback and a link from someone else’s blog vs. a comment on your own blog. As long-term readers of my blog know, when faced with ambiguity, my preference is to try both alternatives and compare real results with real results. After doing that my conclusion is this: No comment.

Now if you want to support comments for non-traffic-building reasons like socializing or making new contacts, I say go for it. Just don’t assume that comments are necessary or even helpful in building traffic unless you directly test this assumption yourself.

Build a complete web site, not just a blog

Don’t limit your web site to just a blog. Feel free to build it out. Although most of my traffic goes straight to this blog, there’s a whole site built around it. For example, the home page of this site presents an overview of all the sections of the site, including the blog, article section, audio content, etc. A lot of people still don’t know what a blog is, so if your whole site is your blog, those people may be a little confused.

Testing and optimization

In the beginning you won’t know which potential streams of income will work best for you. So try everything that’s reasonable for you. If you learn about a new potential income stream, test it for a month or two, and measure the results for yourself. Feel free to cut streams that just aren’t working for you, and put more effort into optimizing those streams that show real promise.

A few months ago, I signed up for an account with Text Link Ads. It took about 20 minutes. They sell small text ads on my site, split the revenue with me 50-50, and deposit my earnings directly into my PayPal account. This month I’ll make around $600 from them, possibly more if they sell some new ads during the month. And it’s totally passive. If I never tried this, I’d miss out on this easy extra income.

For many months I’ve been tweaking the Adsense ads on this site. I tried different colors, sizes, layouts, etc. I continue to experiment now and then, but I have a hard time beating the current layout. It works very well for me. Adsense doesn’t allow publishers to reveal specific CPM and CTR data, but mine are definitely above par. They started out in the gutter though. You can easily double or triple your Adsense revenue by converting a poor layout into a better one. This is the main reason why during my first year of income, my traffic grew at 20% per month, but my income grew at 50% per month. Frequent testing and optimization had a major positive impact. Many of my tests failed, and some even made my income go down, but I’m glad I did all that testing. If I didn’t then my Adsense income would only be a fraction of what it is now.

It’s cheap to experiment. Every new advertising or affiliate service I’ve tried so far has been free to sign up. Often I can add a new income stream in less than an hour and then wait a month to see how it does. If it flops then at least I learned something. If it does well, wonderful. As a blogger who wants to generate income, you should always be experimenting with new income streams. If you haven’t tried anything new in six months, you’re almost certainly missing some golden opportunities. Every blog is different, so you need to test things for yourself to see what works for you. Failure is impossible here — you either succeed, or you learn something.

Pick your niche, but make sure it isn’t too small

Pick a niche for your blog where you have some significant expertise, but make sure it’s a big enough niche that you can build significant traffic. My wife runs a popular vegan web site. She does pretty well within her niche, but it’s just not a very big niche. On the other hand, my topic of personal development has much broader appeal. Potentially anyone can be interested in improving themselves, and I have the flexibility to write about topics like productivity, self-discipline, relationships, spirituality, health, and more. It’s all relevant to personal development.

Pick a niche that you’re passionate about. I’ve written 400+ articles so far, and I still feel like I’m just getting started. I’m not feeling burnt out at all. I chose to build a personal development site because I’m very knowledgeable, experienced, and passionate about this subject. I couldn’t imagine a better topic for me to write about.

Don’t pick a niche just because you think it will make you money. I see many bloggers try to do that, and it’s almost invariably a recipe for failure. Think about what you love most, and then find a way to make your topic appealing to a massive global audience. Consider what will provide genuine value to your visitors. It’s all about what you can give.

A broad enough topic creates more potential advertising partners. If I keep writing on the same subtopic over and over, I may exhaust the supply of advertisers and hit an income ceiling. But by writing on many different topics under the same umbrella, I widen the field of potential advertisers. And I expand the appeal of my site at the same time.

Make it clear to your visitors what your blog/site is about. Often I visit a blog with a clever title and tagline that reveals nothing about the site’s contents. In that case I generally assume it’s just a personal journal and move on. I love to be clever too, but I’ve found that clarity yields better results than cleverness.

Posting frequency and length

Bloggers have different opinions about the right posting length and frequency. Some bloggers say it’s best to write short (250-750 word) entries and post 20x per week or more. I’ve seen that strategy work for some, but I decided to do pretty much the opposite. I usually aim for about 3-5 posts per week, but my posts are much longer (typically 1000-2000 words, sometimes longer than 5000 words, including the monster you’re reading right now). That’s because rather than throwing out lots of short tips, I prefer to write more exhaustive, in-depth articles. I find that deeper articles are better at generating links and referrals and building traffic. It’s true that fewer people will take the time to read them, but those that do will enjoy some serious take-away value. I don’t believe in creating disposable content just to increase page views and ad impressions. If I’m not truly helping my visitors, I’m wasting their time.

Expenses

Blogging is dirt cheap.

I don’t spend money on advertising or promotion, so my marketing expenses are nil. Essentially my content is my marketing. If you like this article, you’ll probably find many more gems in the archives.

My only real expenses for this site are the hosting (I currently pay $149/month for the web server and bandwidth) and the domain name renewal ($9/year). Nearly all of the income this site generates is profit. This trickles down to my personal income, so of course it’s subject to income tax. But the actual business expenses are minimal.

The reason I pay so much for hosting is simply due to my traffic. If my traffic were much lower, I could run this site on a cheap shared hosting account. A database-driven blog can be a real resource hog at high traffic levels. The same goes for online forums. As traffic continues to increase, my hosting bill will go up too, but it will still be a tiny fraction of total income.

Perks

Depending on the nature of your blog, you may be able to enjoy some nice perks as your traffic grows. Almost every week I get free personal development books in the mail (for potential review on this site). Sometimes the author will send it directly; other times the publisher will ship me a batch of books. I also receive CDs, DVDs, and other personal development products. It’s hard to keep up sometimes (I have a queue of about two dozen books right now), but I am a voracious consumer of such products, so I do plow through them as fast as I can. When something strikes me as worthy of mention, I do indeed write up a review to share it with my visitors. I have very high standards though, so I review less than 10% of what I receive. I’ve read over 700 books in this field and listened to dozens of audio programs, so I’m pretty good at filtering out the fluff. As I’m sure you can imagine, there’s a great deal of self-help fluff out there.

My criteria for reviewing a product on this site is that it has to be original, compelling, and profound. If it doesn’t meet these criteria, I don’t review it, even if there’s a generous affiliate program. I’m not going to risk abusing my relationship with my visitors just to make a quick buck. Making money is not my main motivation for running this site. My main motivation is to grow and to help others grow, so that always comes first.

Your blog can also gain you access to certain events. A high-traffic blog becomes a potential media outlet, so you can actually think of yourself as a member of the press, which indeed you are. In a few days, my wife and I will be attending a three-day seminar via a free press pass. The regular price for these tickets is $500 per person. I’ll be posting a full review of the seminar next week. I’ve been to this particular seminar in 2004, so I already have high expectations for it. Dr. Wayne Dyer will be the keynote speaker.

I’m also using the popularity of this blog to set up interviews with people I’ve always wanted to learn more about. This is beautifully win-win because it creates value for me, my audience, and the person being interviewed. Recently I posted an exclusive interview with multi-millionaire Marc Allen as well as a review of his latest book, and I’m lining up other interviews as well. It isn’t hard to convince someone to do an interview in exchange for so much free exposure.

Motivation

I don’t think you’ll get very far if money is your #1 motivation for blogging. You have to be driven by something much deeper. Money is just frosting. It’s the cake underneath that matters. My cake is that I absolutely love personal development – not the phony “fast and easy” junk you see on infomercials, but real growth that makes us better human beings. That’s my passion. Pouring money on top of it just adds more fuel to the fire, but the fire is still there with or without the money.

What’s your passion? What would you blog about if you were already set for life?

Blogging lifestyle

Perhaps the best part of generating income from blogging is the freedom it brings. I work from home and set my own hours. I write whenever I’m inspired to write (which for me is quite often). Plus I get to spend my time doing what I love most — working on personal growth and helping others do the same. There’s nothing I’d rather do than this.

Perhaps it’s true that 99 out of 100 people can’t make a decent living from blogging yet. But maybe you’re among the 1 in 100 who can.

On the other hand, I can offer you a good alternative to recommend if you don’t have the technical skills to build a high-traffic, income-generating blog. Check out Build Your Own Successful Online Business for details.

Profitize using PPC with Affiliate

2008-12-01T17:54:00.000-08:00

Profitize using PPC with Affiliate

PPC is one of the four basic types of Search Engines. PPC is also one of the most cost-effective ways of targeted internet advertising. According to Forbes magazine, PPC or Pay Per Click, accounts to 2 billion dollars a year and is expected to increase to around 8 billion dollars by the year 2008.

How do you make money by using PPC into your affiliate marketing business?

Most affiliate programs only pay when a sale is made or a lead delivered after a visitor has clickthrough your site. Your earnings will not always be the same as they will be dependent on the web site content and the traffic market.

The reason why you should incorporate PPC into your affiliate marketing program is that earnings are easier to make than in any other kind of affiliate program not using PPC. This way, you will be making profit based from the clickthroughs that your visitor will make on the advertiser’s site.

PPC can be very resourceful of your website. With PPC Search Engines incorporated into your affiliate program, you will be able to profit from the visitor’s who are not interested in your products or services.

This kind of affiliate program is also an easy way for you to generate some more additional revenues. PPC is not only a source of generating easy profits; it can also help you promote your own site. Most of the programs allow the commissions received to be spent for advertising with them instantly and with no minimum earning requirement. This is one of the more effective ways to exchange your raw visitors for targeted surfers who has more tendencies to purchase your products and services.

What will happen if you when you integrate PPC into your affiliate program?

PPC usually have ready-to-use affiliate tools that can be easily integrated into your website. The most common tools are search boxes, banners, text links and some 404-error pages. Most search engines utilize custom solutions and can provide you with a white-label affiliate program. This enables you, using only a few lines of code, to integrate remotely-hosted co-branded search engine into your website.

The key benefits ?

Not only more money generated but also some extra money on the side. Plus a lifetime commissions once you have referred some webmaster friends to the engine.

Think about it. Where can you get all these benefits while already generating some income for your site? Knowing some of the more useful tools you can use for your affiliate program is not a waste of time. They are rather a means of earning within an earning.

Best know more about how you can use PPC search engines into your affiliate program than miss out on a great opportunity to earn more profits.

Get Monitize Your Traffic Today

2008-12-01T17:50:00.000-08:00

Get Monitize Your Traffic Today

It is common knowledge that without traffic we have no business. Like any business, without any customers you don’t get sales. Traffic represents all the people that gets a chance to see what you have to offer. The more people who see your products the more people there would be to buy them.

Nobody puts up an E-commerce site that doesn’t expect profit. We have a startup capital that needs to be regained. With a consistent traffic, we at least have a fighting chance to achieve that probability. Monetizing your traffic would optimize your chances of making the best out of it.

Making Money out of your Traffic

The best and most proven method of making a profit out of your traffic is using advertising. The internet generates hundreds of thousands upon hundred of thousands of traffic everyday. Most of them are searching for something. While some are just looking for information there is also a good percentage that is looking for something that they need.

The internet has proven to be a very reliable source in finding what was deemed to be a very unsearchable product. The internet has made the world a smaller place; you can advertise a product from the depths of Istanbul and still find a buyer from the center of Philadelphia.

Generating traffic is not an easy task. You have to contend with a great number of sites to generate a good number of traffic flow. But if done successfullythis could open up a Pandora’s Box of possibilities. One of the benefits is monetizing your traffic flow.

So, to get to the core of it the more traffic you generate the more likely you are considered as a desirable, desirable, in a sense that a good traffic flowing site is easily convertible to profit. Basically traffic equals profit. Advertising is the name of the game; with the good advertising scheme you can use your traffic flow to your advantage.

When you have good traffic you have a good number of potential customers, customers that are willing to pour money into your coffers. Other than that these are also traffic that can be redirected to sponsored links that are willing to pay you for a sizeable portion of the traffic that you have generated.

This scheme is called Pay-per-click? With every click a visitor of your site makes on an advertised link you will be paid. The more traffic you generate and the more clicks that happens would spell to more profits.

Affiliate Programs

Another method of monetizing your traffic are affiliate programs. You can link up with other tried and tested sites and online companies and monetize your traffic by having a percentage of sales generated by traffic coming from your site.

The basic idea is, traffic generated from your site will go to another site that can offer a product that you do not carry. Many programs can keep track and make records of transactions that was made possible because of site linkage.

When purchases are made by customers that was led by your site to their site you get a percentage of that sale. Affiliate programs would give you the benefit of monetizing your traffic without the actual need of carrying or promoting a certain product.

There are so many ways and methods to monetize your traffic. All it takes is a bit of hard work and the desire to successfully launch a profit-earning site. The internet is a veritable source of information, many tips and guides are offered everywhere in how to monetize your traffic and make your site a good profit earner.

Make Money from BLOG ? Why Not

2008-12-01T17:47:00.000-08:00

social search

Blogging for Dollars

How do bloggers make money?

By Michael AggerPosted Wednesday, Oct. 1, 2008, at 6:28 PM ET

Professional bloggers face pressure to produce quantity over qualityLast week, the blog search engine Technorati released its 2008 State of the Blogosphere report with the slightly menacing promise to "deliver even deeper insights into the blogging mind." Bloggers create 900,000 blog posts a day worldwide, and some of them are actually making money. Blogs with 100,000 or more unique visitors a month earn an average of $75,000 annually—though that figure is skewed by the small percentage of blogs that make more than $200,000 a year. The estimates from a 2007 Business Week article are older but juicier: The LOLcat empire rakes in $5,600 per month; Overheard in New York gets $8,100 per month; and Perez Hilton, gossip king, scoops up $111,000 per month.

With this kind of cash sloshing around, one wonders: What does it take to live the dream—to write what I know, and then watch the money flow?

From the perspective of someone who doesn't blog, blogging seems attractive. Bloggers such as Jason Kottke ($5,300/month) and the Fug girls ($6,240/month) pursue what naturally interests them without many constraints on length or style. While those two are genuine stars of the blogging world, there are plenty of smaller, personal blogs that bring in decent change with the Amazon Associates program (you receive a referral fee if someone buys a book, CD, etc. via a link from your blog) and search ads from Google. (The big G analyzes your site and places relevant ads; you get paid if people click on them.) Google-ad profiteering is an entire universe in and of itself—one blogger by the name of Shoemoney became famous (well, Digg-famous) when he posted a picture of himself with a check from Google for $132,994.97 for one month of clicks.

Blogs with decent traffic and a voice are also getting snapped up by blog-ad networks, which in turn package them as niche audiences to advertisers. On Blogads, advertisers can choose the "Blogs for Dudes!" hive or the "Jewish Republican Channel." Federated Media groups blogs into subjects such as "Parenting" and "News 2.0"; there is also a boutique network for blogs that don't want to cover themselves with ads called The Deck. These networks present blogs as "grassroots intellectual economy" and describe their audiences as loyal, engaged, and likely to see ads as not just ads, but useful bits of information. This may be a comfort to squeamish indie bloggers since it hints that putting ads on your site is not selling out but helping out.

While monetizing your blog may be easier than ever, all of this comes with an ever-present hammer: the need to drive traffic. This month, the writer/blogger/productivity thinker Merlin Mann opened a window onto his angst with an anniversary post. Mann is best-known as the creator of the Hipster PDA (index cards clipped together by a binder clip)* and his Inbox Zero talk (turn your e-mail into actions). In a post titled "Four Years," Mann sketches out how his site, 43 Folders, grew from a personal dumping ground for his "mental sausage" into a full-featured destination for productivity nerds and life-hackers. In 2005, he experienced a key transition:

At some point that year, 43f became the surreal and unexpected circus tent under which my family began drawing an increasing amount of its income. This was weird, but it was also exactly as gratifying as it sounds. Which is to say, "very." But, my small measure of something like success did not go unnoticed. In fact, the popularity of small blogs like 43 Folders contributed to the arrival of a gentrifying wagon train of carpetbaggers, speculators, and confidence men, all eager to pan the web's glistening riverbed for easy gold. And, brother, did these guys love to post and post and post.

Mann's problem was especially acute. His income was partially dependent on advertising, and ads are sold on a cost-per-impression basis. That is, the more traffic you have, the more ads you can sell (and also the more chances that someone will click on one of the Google ads or affiliate links on your site). But a site that teaches you how to streamline your tasks and free your time yet constantly shovels new posts, lists, and information at you is oxymoronic—and also kind of moronic.

Mann could have overlooked this contradiction, but he chose instead to live his advice. Declaring an end to "productivity pr0n," Mann has promised fewer, better posts and rolled out a new mission statement: "43 Folders is Merlin Mann's website about finding the time and attention to do your best creative work." The further irony here is that Mann's less-is-more strategy may prove to be more profitable. The usability guru Jakob Nielsen has long recommended that experts "write articles, not blog postings," with the idea that demonstrating expertise is the best way to distinguish yourself from Internet amateurs and ultimately persuade someone to pay you for your insights. In Mann's case, that might mean less ad revenue but more speaking engagements.

Once a blog hobbyist goes pro, he or she faces a daily pressure to churn out new material. In the wrong mind, that can lead to top-10 lists, recycled ideas, half-baked notions, lots of viral videos, and a general increase in information pollution. Is there any way out of this scenario? In 2005, Jason Kottke announced that he had quit his job to blog full-time and asked his readers to become "micropatrons" at a suggested rate of $30. He received $39,900 from 1,450 people but abandoned the experiment after a year. Kottke is vague about the reasons why he swore off micropatronage, but he suggests that he was worried that people wouldn't donate year after year. In order to build a bigger audience and potential new donors, he would have had to do some of the cheesy things to drive traffic (i.e., "Top Five Best" posts) and/or become a cult of personality (overshare, start flame wars, social network relentlessly). These days, he accepts ads as part of the Deck network.

The bloggers at the vanguard of the post-quality-vs.-post-quantity debate are those who work for Nick Denton's Gawker media. This year, Denton introduced a new pay system that gave his bloggers a base salary and also paid them a quarterly bonus based upon the amount of page views their items receive. Or to oversimplify, they were being paid by popularity. (To follow the complicated ins and outs of the "blogonomics" of the Gawker pay structure, read Felix Salmon's Portfolio blog.) The memo explains the decision as an effort to reward and encourage more original, scoopy items, but, as Denton's writers and ex-writers quickly pointed out, there's not an obvious correlation between quality and page views. Despite a few exceptions, such as the Tom Cruise Scientology video, no one can predict a Web hit.

Do we get the blogs we deserve? We vote by click, after all. Perhaps we shouldn't look at all those top 10 lists and Britney Spears photos. Successful blogs, such as Zen Habits, tend to balance the more fast-food type posts with longer, more complex ideas that will presumably keep readers coming back—although there are plenty of people who make a living posting dubious crap. Perhaps the escape route out of a hit-driven blogosphere is all of our newfound "friends." The Internet has always been very good at counting page views but not so great at assigning value to what's actually in those pages. Facebook, FriendFeed, StumbleUpon, and the sharing feature of Google Reader have their annoying, nudgy aspects, but they allow us to rely on one another to sort out what is interesting and worthy. Put it on a T-shirt: Friends Don't Let Friends Read Bad Content.

The Beginning

2008-11-30T23:52:00.000-08:00

Lets Start to Collect the CENT