If you're a Webmaster whose site receives even a modest amount of traffic, you've no doubt dreamed of the untold riches that lie untapped in your traffic stream. The burning question is: "How can I make the most money possible from my Website traffic?" This article will help you answer that question, as we explore several of the most common and profitable methods that are currently being employed to convert page views into dollars:
*Traditional banner advertising
*Pay-per-click (contextual) banner advertising
*Subscription revenue
*Affiliate and CPA programs
*Text links
We'll finish up with a review of the finer points of online selling.
Traditional Banner Advertising
One of the earliest and most prevalent forms of monetizing site traffic is the ubiquitous online banner. Originally most popular in the 468x60 pixel version, banners are now available in many different sizes and shapes. In fact, the Interactive Advertising Bureau now lists 16 standard ad units in its guidelines. It's not hard to find a site that uses banners: CNN displays a 728x90 banner at the top of the page, eBay uses a 468x60 banner spot at top of listings pages, and AOL displays banners of various sizes throughout the site.
Business Model and Mechanics
The basic business model of the banner is simple: the Website vendor sells page views (impressions) to the advertiser. There are 2 basic banner ad payment models: paying as you go for every thousand impressions delivered, and a flat fee that's charged regardless of the number of visitors who actually see the ad.
Under the pay-as-you-go model, the most common metric is cost-per-thousand (impressions), also known as CPM. Prices will vary depending on targeting, volume, term of commitment, and market forces. Typical CPMs for less targeted inventory can range from $0.25 to $5.00 per thousand impressions. Therefore, a media buyer who wishes to purchase 100,000 impressions at a $5 CPM will sign a contract for $5,000. Targeted impressions are worth much more to an advertiser. If your site attracts car enthusiasts who are an attractive demographic for a local or national car dealership, you can expect to command 10 times the rate of untargeted ad inventory. Typical CPMs for targeted inventory run between $10 to over $100 per thousand impressions.
It's also common for a site to charge a media buyer a flat fee for an advertising spot. Depending on the placement and traffic, the fees can be quite high. For instance, a fixed placement on the home page, in a prominent spot, with a 100% share of voice on a targeted site is quite desirable.
The advantage of running banner advertising on your site is that you may be able to get paid purely on the basis of page views, thereby monetizing all your available inventory. The drawback may be that not everyone is willing to pay simply to be seen: often, advertisers demand a response to the advertising. Media buyers may be looking for a per-click type of payment arrangement.
The main disadvantage of running banners on your site is probably the adoption of maintenance responsibilities for someone else's creative units, and the responsibility for a banner's performance even if the banner is poorly designed, or the advertiser's Website doesn't convert well.
To make real money from banner ads, it's essential that you have a clear idea of how many unique visitors visit your site, and how many page views they generate -- data that any decent Web analytics program will show. You then have a basis on which you can establish realistic expectations of how much money you might earn.
Next, decide where on your site you're going to display advertising banners. I would suggest testing ads both at the top and bottom of your pages -- this is a proven model that has worked well for large publishers. Once you've decided on ad placements, you should set up an ad server to display the banners, and keep track of pages views and click throughs. I would also suggest developing several banners that 'sell' the ad space, which can run when you have excess inventory. The banner might say something like, "See Your Ad Here -- Contact Us to Advertise," and link to your advertising rates page.
Once your ad server is set up, sell! This is a hurdle for many; we'll address it later in this article.
Pay-Per-Click (Contextual) Banner Advertising
With the emergence of Google's AdWords and AdSense programs, the business of pay-per-click banners has exploded. This type of ad unit offers the tantalizing combination of ease-of-use and payouts for each and every click, regardless of whether that visitor converts to sale or not. It's no wonder this unit is so popular with the likes of Slashdot, which shows PPC marketplace links on the right-hand side of the site's main categories and posts, and Go.com, which uses Yahoo! Search Sponsored Results to power its search function. And these are just two among many, many other sites.
Business Model and Mechanics
As the name implies, pay-per-click banners are ad units that pay out each time they're clicked (with obvious fraud prevention engaged to prevent self-enrichment). These ads are sometimes called 'contextual' advertising, as the ad suppliers will often regulate where specific ads are placed, to ensure that they're relevant to the Web page on which they're viewed, and the audience that sees them.
The bounty paid out on each click is usually determined by the value of that click as set by the advertiser. This is a nice way of saying that you really don't know what you're going to earn from any given click until you check the back-end reporting.
Don't neglect checking out alternatives to Google's AdSense program. While Google is large and established, many smaller services actually share more of the advertising revenue with you. For example, bidvertiser.com is one alternative that pays out at a much lower threshold ($10) than Google. Also, if you specialize in Webmaster or Web hosting-related traffic, a new service at Webmaster911 offers much higher revenue sharing than Google currently offers.
Subscription Revenue
Any site that has recurring or frequently refreshed content may be a good candidate for a subscription revenue model. News sites fall into this category, with the Wall Street Journal and CNN offering some form of subscription service for their online content.
Business Model and Mechanics
Subscription-based services migrated from the offline world to the online world. The most common forms of subscriptions were originally used for newspapers or magazines. The end-user of the news or information service typically pays a weekly or monthly recurring service fee (subscription fee) to have full access to the publisher's content. The practical implementation of this model online may work as follows.
A publisher offers additional coverage, or premium content that is only available to subscribers. Under this model, the content is usually in a special password-protected area of the site. A new subscriber may gain access to the content by filling out an online form including (usually) credit card information for billing purposes. Once the credit card transaction has been authorized, the subscriber is emailed a unique and secure password permitting access to the subscription-only content. Typical subscription fees are in the range of $10 per month. For example, CNN charges $12.99 per month for its 'NewsPass,' which permits access to premium streaming video content on the site. The Wall Street Journal currently charges $6.95 per month for access to online content for those not already subscribed to the print edition.
A hybrid of the pure subscription model is simply to charge an increasing fee as access to higher level services increases. This model is common in online forums, where additional charges are levied to access certain forums, or users' signature lines are expanded at higher fee levels.
Affiliate and CPA Programs
Affiliate programs have existed from the infancy of the Internet. Amazon.com was an early adopter, and was able to convince many Webmasters to offer relevant books for sale on the site in exchange for a share of the profits -- today, Amazon has an extensive affiliate program. Affiliate programs have matured considerably since then, and there are now many more options for making money from your site traffic.
Basic Business Model
Affiliate programs essentially work like this: the Website owner (affiliate) offers the merchant's goods for sale on the affiliate Website. When a visitor clicks through the affiliate link, an identification code is associated with the visit (usually via a cookie) and in the event that the visitor takes the appropriate action (visit, conversion to a lead, conversion to a sale) then the affiliate is paid by the merchant. The merchant or affiliate network will also usually provide tools for the affiliate to monitor various metrics, such as the number of visitors sent to a merchant site, the number of clicks or sales generated, and the earnings accumulated.
Affiliate relationships may be established either with each merchant directly, or through an established third-party affiliate network. The two most popular third party affiliate networks are Linkshare and Commission Junction.
Linkshare boasts that it has created the largest network of affiliate partners of any program provider -- over 10 million partnerships -- in addition to becoming the first affiliate network provider to achieve sustained profitability. Linkshare also lays claim to being a pioneer in online affiliate marketing. The Linkshare network is touted by the company as the largest pay for performance affiliate marketing network on the Internet.
Heidi Messer, President and COO of LinkShare Corporation sums up the service this way:
If you are looking to partner with the Internet's top brands, then LinkShare is the affiliate network to join. Find programs for Fortune 500 and other leading companies such as American Express, Avon, Dell, Office Depot, Apple Store, 1-800-Flowers, and more - only at LinkShare. We don't use cookies to track, so you don't have to worry about blocked or disabled cookies. And with our proprietary SynergyAnalytics application, LinkShare affiliates have a wealth of information and reports not available anywhere else to help them optimize their relationships. We're the leaders in the industry, and will continue to pave the way in both service and technology to foster profitable relationships online.
Text Links
In this era of ferociously competitive search engine optimization, competitive online marketing, and the race to appear first in the search engine results, an active market has arisen in the buying and selling of text links.
The beauty of text links from the Website owner's (or seller's) perspective is this: in order to boost search engine placement, the link must go directly to the Web page that's being optimized. There can be no tracking mechanism, or third party ad serving to interrupt the click. Therefore, these links are not scrutinized in the same manner that more conventional advertising is. It's simply not that important how much traffic comes through the link, or whether it's really being noticed by site visitors at all. This means you can have the links tucked away at the very bottom of your pages in a footer, and use a small font. The links can be very unobtrusive to your regular site traffic: as long as your Website meets the buyer's criteria, they will continue to pay for the link. Of course, as the likes of the TopXML and phpbb sites show, text links can be cleverly integrated into a site's design to provide a prominent advertising feature.
So what criteria do buyers look for, and what are they willing to pay? You can check the spot market for text links at sites like http://www.linkadage.com/Auction/XcAuctionPro.asp.
Another benefit of text link selling is that you don't have to really maintain the 'ad' at all. As long as the link is active on the page, you've done your part. This is much less labor and resource intensive than building an ad server into your site, rotating ads, and keeping creatives up-to-date.
Finally, as if it weren't already a great deal, you can have up to 20 text links on a page without suffering any negative consequences in the search engines. So, even if you only sell your links for $25 each (read: cheap) you can still net $500 per month just for letting the links sit there.
A Word on Selling
Let's face it: even the most attractive inventory won't move unless someone gets out there and sells it. That someone may have to be you, if you're an entrepreneur. Many people view selling with disdain, or they hate the rejection that goes hand-in-hand with the selling profession. You've got to get over this in order to be successful in translating your page views into dollars. If you can't do it yourself, then work out a commission-only arrangement with someone who can sell your inventory.
Jean Landry is a sales executive with The Globe and Mail, Canada's National Newspaper, daily offering readers from coast to coast unparalleled national, international and business reporting, analysis and commentary. The Globe and Mail has nearly 1,000,000 readers each weekday and even more on weekends: their online version at globeandmail.com attracts over 2.5 million visitors per month.
Jean offers the following key selling points for Webmasters:
Know your audience. Conduct a user survey and collect research when your visitors sign up for newsletters, pdf's, and registrations. Carefully profile your visitors. You may think you know who your visitors are, but you'll need to prove it to people, especially when HP says they want to buy up 10 million impressions from you for $50,000/month -- they'll most certainly want more than who you think is coming to your site.
Know your competition. Find out what your competitors are charging for their ad space, what ad unit sizes they are offering and what advertisers want. You may keep an eye on your competitors, as well, to determine their inventory churn or rollover. If you go back every 2 to 4 weeks and you see new advertisers all the time, it either means the site has a really aggressive sales person, or that it can't return results for advertisers, so clients are canceling.
Understand the language and understand the benefits and uniqueness of online advertising as an advertising medium. What's a cpm? What's a clickthrough? What does CPA stand for? A few months ago, we interviewed people for an online sales position and candidates couldn't answer those questions. Spend a little less time watching TV and a little more time reading Clickz.com, eMarketer.com, and MarketingFind.com, or check out adglossary.com. Industry knowledge and research can really help you move your inventory and sell online advertising. For example, I bet you didn't know that Internet accounts for about the same % of media time for consumers as TV now -- each accounts for 30% of their media usage time! However only 4% of media budgets are going towards online, while about 25% are going towards TV ...sounds like a pretty good opportunity to reach a huge untapped audience doesn't it?
Be creative! Online advertising is boring and predictable and doomed for failure if all you are going to sell is the standard 468x60 banner at the top of your Web page. Ever heard of banner blindness or banner burnout? It means your visitors tend to ignore the most common or basic forms of advertising online if you don't put some thought into their delivery and placement. You need to think about offering content sponsorships on your site, targeting your ads to geographic regions, day of week delivery, etc. Think strategic and offer strategic advertising solutions. If you have a section of your site dedicated to Web design, why not think of a creative way for a major brand's new Web service to sponsor it with customized buttons, content, or an online custom quote service?
Be aggressive in your sales...but be professional! And remember online advertising is not new, it's not trivial, and it shouldn't be given away for free or always be performance based. Don't be pushed around by arrogant media buyers who think that they can bully you into not paying their balance just because they didn't make 15 sales (not to mention the fact that they never signed a cost per acquisition agreement -- CPA).
Summary
Converting Web traffic into sales revenue takes persistence, experimentation, and great salesmanship. The methods mentioned in this article: Traditional Banner Advertising, Pay-Per-Click (Contextual) Banner Advertising, Subscriptions, Affiliate and CPA Programs, and sales of Text Links are proven models for creating cash from visitors. Select the techniques and models that are a good fit for your Website and personality -- then get started making money! Good luck converting your site traffic into a viable revenue stream.
2007年5月11日星期五
Money Making Hobbies
Which ones can be money making hobbies? A friend made a life-sized cow out of plywood once. He painted it, put it in the yard, and people started asing if he would sell it. He soon had a waiting list of customers for his plywood cows. With a profit of about fifty dollars each, he wasn't getting rich, but isn't making money with your hobby more fun than a job?
Money Making Hobbies - Two Approaches
The first approach is obvious: Look for ways to make money with your existing hobby or hobbies. What do you produce that other people might want? Do you collect dolls? You might produce a newsletter for other doll collectors, or buy and sell doll furniture.
The second approach is to think of all the hobbies you might take up that can generate a second income for you. When I found that I really enjoyed making walking sticks as a hobby, I sold more than a thousand dollars worth one summer. There are probably things you would enjoy doing that can make some money.
Get creative in your thinking. Look at the list of activities or hobbies below, and see if you can think of a way they can be used to make money. Do you like to travel? You might become a tour guide, or write articles for magazines.
Painting ... Crafts of all sorts ... Sewing ... Caring for animals ... Talking ... Playing with computers ... Traveling ... Rock Climbing ... Stamp Collecting ... backpacking
How To Make Money With ANY Hobby
In the past, you could argue that not all hobbies can be money making hobbies. This is no longer true. If you go to my sites, you'll notice the ads. I just copy and paste some code (no selling involved), and make a little bit everytime you click on one. In a matter of days, with almost no money, you can have a website up where you write about your favorite hobby, and collect for the advertising clicks.
About the Author
Steve Gillman has been studying every aspect of money for thirty years. You can find more interesting and useful information on his website; http://www.unusualwaystomakemoney.com/
Money Making Hobbies - Two Approaches
The first approach is obvious: Look for ways to make money with your existing hobby or hobbies. What do you produce that other people might want? Do you collect dolls? You might produce a newsletter for other doll collectors, or buy and sell doll furniture.
The second approach is to think of all the hobbies you might take up that can generate a second income for you. When I found that I really enjoyed making walking sticks as a hobby, I sold more than a thousand dollars worth one summer. There are probably things you would enjoy doing that can make some money.
Get creative in your thinking. Look at the list of activities or hobbies below, and see if you can think of a way they can be used to make money. Do you like to travel? You might become a tour guide, or write articles for magazines.
Painting ... Crafts of all sorts ... Sewing ... Caring for animals ... Talking ... Playing with computers ... Traveling ... Rock Climbing ... Stamp Collecting ... backpacking
How To Make Money With ANY Hobby
In the past, you could argue that not all hobbies can be money making hobbies. This is no longer true. If you go to my sites, you'll notice the ads. I just copy and paste some code (no selling involved), and make a little bit everytime you click on one. In a matter of days, with almost no money, you can have a website up where you write about your favorite hobby, and collect for the advertising clicks.
About the Author
Steve Gillman has been studying every aspect of money for thirty years. You can find more interesting and useful information on his website; http://www.unusualwaystomakemoney.com/
Paid Surveys, How You Can Make Top Dollar!
Paid Surveys Do you know that you no longer have to pay survey sites in order to make a little extra cash. Well, its true, there are a number of survey sites that will allow you to sign up and make money for free. Paid surveys are good for everyone, but they are really good for stay at home mom, college students who are looking for extra cash to pay for tuition or books, and hobbies.
How much can you make?
The amount of money you can earn depends on the paid surveys and the amount of paid surveys you participate in. Some surveys pay $2-$20 per survey and others pay $10-$100 per survey. Some surveys sites make you take a pre survey to see if you qualify for the big survey. For example, if you were to take a number of surveys, you would earn points, and when you accumulate enough points you can convert it to cash. The best way to make good money with paid surveys is to sign up with as many paid surveys as possible. In less than a month you will receive more surveys than you can handle. The more surveys that you participate in, the more paid surveys you will receive.
Why would people pay you for your opinion?
Easy, when a new product is produced, big companies want to know how this product would sell before it hit's the market place. So they put out surveys for you and I to participate in and give our opinion on the product. These companies are willing to pay big money for people's opinions on these products.
What type of surveys are there?
There are all types of paid surveys. The ones that I am familiar with are the surveys on products and TV. ads. I have taken surveys on beer commercials and new television series that are now out in the market place. I even had product such as food sent to my home for me to eat and give an opinion on the taste.
Why take paid surveys?
Because it is at great way to make extra cash and to see what new products are coming to the market place.
How much can you make?
The amount of money you can earn depends on the paid surveys and the amount of paid surveys you participate in. Some surveys pay $2-$20 per survey and others pay $10-$100 per survey. Some surveys sites make you take a pre survey to see if you qualify for the big survey. For example, if you were to take a number of surveys, you would earn points, and when you accumulate enough points you can convert it to cash. The best way to make good money with paid surveys is to sign up with as many paid surveys as possible. In less than a month you will receive more surveys than you can handle. The more surveys that you participate in, the more paid surveys you will receive.
Why would people pay you for your opinion?
Easy, when a new product is produced, big companies want to know how this product would sell before it hit's the market place. So they put out surveys for you and I to participate in and give our opinion on the product. These companies are willing to pay big money for people's opinions on these products.
What type of surveys are there?
There are all types of paid surveys. The ones that I am familiar with are the surveys on products and TV. ads. I have taken surveys on beer commercials and new television series that are now out in the market place. I even had product such as food sent to my home for me to eat and give an opinion on the taste.
Why take paid surveys?
Because it is at great way to make extra cash and to see what new products are coming to the market place.
How To Make Money With Resell Rights
Acquiring resell rights to products can be an easy and inexpensive way to start an Internet business. Basically you are able to purchase a product once and then sell it over and over. Before venturing into buying products with resell rights there are some things you should know.
Resell rights come in many forms and sizes. They can come in large packages with many products bundled together and offered for an almost suspiciously low price. Or they can be offered on a single product for a four-figure sum. There are also different types of rights offered allowing you to do different things.
Basic resell rights only give you the right to sell the product. You cannot claim the product is your own and you do not have permission to offer the resell rights to anyone else. Basic resell rights are usually the cheapest, so it may be easier to make a profit. Check the terms for how much you can charge for the product or if it can be given away, perhaps as a bonus with something else. There may also be conditions for distributing the product from membership and auction sites. If you are buying rights to software make sure you know the product well enough to deal with any troubleshooting enquiries. Some software rights sellers are prepared to deal with enquiries themselves. The product may also come with a web sales page that you can use, but check for any restrictions.
Master resell rights often include a web page with the product. They give you the right to sell the product and you can also pass on this right to your customers. However that is as far as it goes. Your customers cannot give the resell rights for the product to their customers. The best master resell rights packages will include a zip file containing everything you need to put on your download page.
There are two types of resell rights that may be referred to as private label rights. One type is where you are given the resell rights for a finished product and you are also allowed to put your name on the product as the author. This type of product is a ready-to-sell information or software product. You cannot change it other than put your name on it.
The second type of private label rights is also known as source code rights. The product is not a finished ready-to-sell item. Instead it will be the raw source material that you can use to produce a finished item. Programs will be in the source code format; information products will be in a word processor format, like MS Word.
You can change the product in any way you want. You can add your name as author, add more content, omit parts or split it into several products. You may also be able to sell resell rights and even master resell rights. Terms and conditions should be posted, so check them carefully. Most private label rights packages also come with a web page and graphics that you can use for selling.
If you have found a resell rights product that you think you can sell you need to do some basic market research before purchasing. How many people are searching for this type of product? How many competing products are there? Have you seen the product available elsewhere?
If you are going to sell on the internet you need to have access to the following skills. You must be able to edit web pages, create payment links and upload the product and web pages to a server. If you are buying private label rights you must also be able to edit the product. This is especially important if you are buying rights for software.
There are many ways you can sell products on the internet. You can usually set up your own website or add the sales page to your existing site. You could invest in pay per click ads or ezine ads. You could write articles. If you have private label rights to a book you can use some of the content to produce articles or even a free report for viral marketing.
Resell rights offer the advantage of not having to produce your own material. However, you need to be sure the product is good quality and that you have a good marketing plan.
About the Author
Anthony Shaw is the owner and operator of AKS Enterprises, based in Edwardsville, IL. Anthony has been involved with Internet businesses since 1995. Email: ashaw@yourwebbizopp.com
Resell rights come in many forms and sizes. They can come in large packages with many products bundled together and offered for an almost suspiciously low price. Or they can be offered on a single product for a four-figure sum. There are also different types of rights offered allowing you to do different things.
Basic resell rights only give you the right to sell the product. You cannot claim the product is your own and you do not have permission to offer the resell rights to anyone else. Basic resell rights are usually the cheapest, so it may be easier to make a profit. Check the terms for how much you can charge for the product or if it can be given away, perhaps as a bonus with something else. There may also be conditions for distributing the product from membership and auction sites. If you are buying rights to software make sure you know the product well enough to deal with any troubleshooting enquiries. Some software rights sellers are prepared to deal with enquiries themselves. The product may also come with a web sales page that you can use, but check for any restrictions.
Master resell rights often include a web page with the product. They give you the right to sell the product and you can also pass on this right to your customers. However that is as far as it goes. Your customers cannot give the resell rights for the product to their customers. The best master resell rights packages will include a zip file containing everything you need to put on your download page.
There are two types of resell rights that may be referred to as private label rights. One type is where you are given the resell rights for a finished product and you are also allowed to put your name on the product as the author. This type of product is a ready-to-sell information or software product. You cannot change it other than put your name on it.
The second type of private label rights is also known as source code rights. The product is not a finished ready-to-sell item. Instead it will be the raw source material that you can use to produce a finished item. Programs will be in the source code format; information products will be in a word processor format, like MS Word.
You can change the product in any way you want. You can add your name as author, add more content, omit parts or split it into several products. You may also be able to sell resell rights and even master resell rights. Terms and conditions should be posted, so check them carefully. Most private label rights packages also come with a web page and graphics that you can use for selling.
If you have found a resell rights product that you think you can sell you need to do some basic market research before purchasing. How many people are searching for this type of product? How many competing products are there? Have you seen the product available elsewhere?
If you are going to sell on the internet you need to have access to the following skills. You must be able to edit web pages, create payment links and upload the product and web pages to a server. If you are buying private label rights you must also be able to edit the product. This is especially important if you are buying rights for software.
There are many ways you can sell products on the internet. You can usually set up your own website or add the sales page to your existing site. You could invest in pay per click ads or ezine ads. You could write articles. If you have private label rights to a book you can use some of the content to produce articles or even a free report for viral marketing.
Resell rights offer the advantage of not having to produce your own material. However, you need to be sure the product is good quality and that you have a good marketing plan.
About the Author
Anthony Shaw is the owner and operator of AKS Enterprises, based in Edwardsville, IL. Anthony has been involved with Internet businesses since 1995. Email: ashaw@yourwebbizopp.com
Paid Surveys Online - An easy way to make money online?
Paid surveys are being promoted as an easy way to make money online. Some ads promise you up to $250 per hour for taking paid surveys. Are they realistic? Can one really expect to earn that much money from online paid surveys? Let us find out the answers to these questions.
Such advertisements are usually put up by paid survey database companies like Surveyscout. They charge you for giving access to a database of market research companies, often in the range of $30 to $60. They typically have 400 to 500 survey companies in their database.
Is it worth paying these companies to get access to such a database? Whatever information you get from these companies, you can get for free on the internet on many free online survey sites. Secondly, these survey database companies do not send any surveys by themselves, and you have to join each market research company in their database individually to get any surveys. In addition, most of the survey companies in their databases are good for nothing. Only about 40 to 50 survey companies are really worth joining.
What does this mean? If you are planning to try online surveys, you never have to pay anyone. You can get the list of the best survey companies for free on the internet. You can join them and get started.
Now let us take a closer look at on the rewards offered by paid online surveys. Survey companies can be divided into those which reward you with cash for each survey, those that give you points which can be redeemed for cash, and those which enter you into sweepstakes or prizedraws.
Survey companies that pay cash give $1 to $20 or more per online survey depending on many factors. This group includes many of the best survey sites like American Consumer Opinion Panel, Surveysavvy, Ciao Surveys, Greenfield online(Gozing) and Pinecone Research. You can expect to get 1 to 4 surveys per month from each site.
Surveys that reward you with points let you accumulate reward points which you can later redeem for cash or gifts. Some of the most reputed market research companies like Globaltestmarket, Opinion Outpost, NFO Mysurvey and Lightspeed Research reward you in this way.
Yet other companies enter you into draws for cash or gifts as reward for taking surveys. Although many people don't like this form of reward system, your chances of getting the prize is quite good as the pool to select the prize winners is usually small. Some good survey companies that follow this reward system are Synovate, NPD Research, NOP World (Surveys.com), ECN Research and Nielsen Netratings.
Another important factor which determines how much you can earn from online surveys is your profile, particularly your country. Generally residents of the USA and Canada can expect to make more money from paid surveys, as there are more market research companies operating in these countries. Also they get more frequent surveys. However, participants from other countries can also hope to make some good extra money from paid online surveys.
All said and done, the maximum earnings an average person can expect from doing paid surveys is not more than $200 to $300 per month. This can be a good source of extra income for some people. But the claims that paid surveys can make you rich or replace your real job are largely unfounded. Hence, it is always best to stay with free paid surveys.
About the author:
Shaj M is the owner and webmaster of the free survey resources site http://www.internetpaidsurveys.com/ . The site has separate sections for USA, Canada, UK, Australia and rest of the World, each of which reviews free paid surveys for that particular country. For example, the USA Surveys section features more than 50 free survey companies accepting members form the USA.
Such advertisements are usually put up by paid survey database companies like Surveyscout. They charge you for giving access to a database of market research companies, often in the range of $30 to $60. They typically have 400 to 500 survey companies in their database.
Is it worth paying these companies to get access to such a database? Whatever information you get from these companies, you can get for free on the internet on many free online survey sites. Secondly, these survey database companies do not send any surveys by themselves, and you have to join each market research company in their database individually to get any surveys. In addition, most of the survey companies in their databases are good for nothing. Only about 40 to 50 survey companies are really worth joining.
What does this mean? If you are planning to try online surveys, you never have to pay anyone. You can get the list of the best survey companies for free on the internet. You can join them and get started.
Now let us take a closer look at on the rewards offered by paid online surveys. Survey companies can be divided into those which reward you with cash for each survey, those that give you points which can be redeemed for cash, and those which enter you into sweepstakes or prizedraws.
Survey companies that pay cash give $1 to $20 or more per online survey depending on many factors. This group includes many of the best survey sites like American Consumer Opinion Panel, Surveysavvy, Ciao Surveys, Greenfield online(Gozing) and Pinecone Research. You can expect to get 1 to 4 surveys per month from each site.
Surveys that reward you with points let you accumulate reward points which you can later redeem for cash or gifts. Some of the most reputed market research companies like Globaltestmarket, Opinion Outpost, NFO Mysurvey and Lightspeed Research reward you in this way.
Yet other companies enter you into draws for cash or gifts as reward for taking surveys. Although many people don't like this form of reward system, your chances of getting the prize is quite good as the pool to select the prize winners is usually small. Some good survey companies that follow this reward system are Synovate, NPD Research, NOP World (Surveys.com), ECN Research and Nielsen Netratings.
Another important factor which determines how much you can earn from online surveys is your profile, particularly your country. Generally residents of the USA and Canada can expect to make more money from paid surveys, as there are more market research companies operating in these countries. Also they get more frequent surveys. However, participants from other countries can also hope to make some good extra money from paid online surveys.
All said and done, the maximum earnings an average person can expect from doing paid surveys is not more than $200 to $300 per month. This can be a good source of extra income for some people. But the claims that paid surveys can make you rich or replace your real job are largely unfounded. Hence, it is always best to stay with free paid surveys.
About the author:
Shaj M is the owner and webmaster of the free survey resources site http://www.internetpaidsurveys.com/ . The site has separate sections for USA, Canada, UK, Australia and rest of the World, each of which reviews free paid surveys for that particular country. For example, the USA Surveys section features more than 50 free survey companies accepting members form the USA.
Making Money from Websites - Common Pitfalls of Beginners and How to Avoid Them
Making money online is really easy to do because the entire world is becoming Internet savvy with a preference for shopping online. Because of this fact, you need to make sure you are doing your best to meet the needs of individuals online and increasing the internet traffic coming to your website.
-Free Web Sites
Free web sites can cause major problems for you if you're actually trying to make money with your website. Many people make the mistake of choosing a free web site host to save money, however most of these hosting accounts post advertising on your site, are not reliable, enforce certain restrictions on the size of photos and graphics, and provide limited space. Because of this, it is more difficult for you to design your web pages effectively and also more difficult to reach customers because your website gives the impression that you are not serious about your business.
-Poor Design and Organization
Another pitfall many beginners fall into when it comes to trying to make money from websites is that they do not consider how the design and organization of their website will affect their visitors. If your website is not designed properly and organized accordingly, making it easy for web surfers to find exactly what the want quickly and efficiently, then you will lose traffic and ultimately revenue from lost sales.
-URL
Another situation that many newbies run into when creating a website in order to make money is that they create difficult to spell and remember URL addresses. Unfortunately these website addresses are often times extremely long as well, making it even more difficult to get it right. If you want to make money via a website, make sure you create an easy to remember website URL that is short, sweet, and to the point.
-Website Optimization
Another problem individuals experience when trying to make money with their websites is that they fail to optimize their websites for the search engines and as a result, they do not receive high rankings and miss out on lots of free, targeted traffic because of it. If you want to make money with your website, then you should make sure you optimize your site for the search engines. Different search engines look for different things, so do some research to find out what you need to include on your website for the different search engines and make them happy!
-Free Web Sites
Free web sites can cause major problems for you if you're actually trying to make money with your website. Many people make the mistake of choosing a free web site host to save money, however most of these hosting accounts post advertising on your site, are not reliable, enforce certain restrictions on the size of photos and graphics, and provide limited space. Because of this, it is more difficult for you to design your web pages effectively and also more difficult to reach customers because your website gives the impression that you are not serious about your business.
-Poor Design and Organization
Another pitfall many beginners fall into when it comes to trying to make money from websites is that they do not consider how the design and organization of their website will affect their visitors. If your website is not designed properly and organized accordingly, making it easy for web surfers to find exactly what the want quickly and efficiently, then you will lose traffic and ultimately revenue from lost sales.
-URL
Another situation that many newbies run into when creating a website in order to make money is that they create difficult to spell and remember URL addresses. Unfortunately these website addresses are often times extremely long as well, making it even more difficult to get it right. If you want to make money via a website, make sure you create an easy to remember website URL that is short, sweet, and to the point.
-Website Optimization
Another problem individuals experience when trying to make money with their websites is that they fail to optimize their websites for the search engines and as a result, they do not receive high rankings and miss out on lots of free, targeted traffic because of it. If you want to make money with your website, then you should make sure you optimize your site for the search engines. Different search engines look for different things, so do some research to find out what you need to include on your website for the different search engines and make them happy!
How to Make 20 Dollars Per Day on the Net
A nice goal to reach is the 20 dollar mark. I breached that about six months ago, and let me tell you something: The hardest part is to reach 20 dollars. From there it gets easier every time for a very mysterious reason.
My strategy was to write good content ever since the beginning. If you are wondering, this website is not the one which brought me that glorious revenue - it happened from a history site!
Of course I was just learning back then and each click from that history website brings me around 20 cents - but nevertheless, I learnt that there is no limit to the revenue that one can make online.
From that history website I am making up to $50 every day now. That combined with a couple more websites I have have brought that number to the mid XXX. WOW.
That only happened in one year. Of course you can make it happen too and it's not as hard as it seems. All you need is patience and guts because if you lack either, you're getting nowhere.
Here is how to reach that dreaded $20 mark: (from the beginning)
1. Choose a niche
2. Purchase a domain name (read my previous entry for more info).
3. Write as much as possible.
4. Keep writing.
5. Write even more.
6. Place ADS in ever page.
7. Optimize.
8. Write more.
9. Repeat everything (that's right purchase another domain name).
This will lead you to success believe it or not.
My strategy was to write good content ever since the beginning. If you are wondering, this website is not the one which brought me that glorious revenue - it happened from a history site!
Of course I was just learning back then and each click from that history website brings me around 20 cents - but nevertheless, I learnt that there is no limit to the revenue that one can make online.
From that history website I am making up to $50 every day now. That combined with a couple more websites I have have brought that number to the mid XXX. WOW.
That only happened in one year. Of course you can make it happen too and it's not as hard as it seems. All you need is patience and guts because if you lack either, you're getting nowhere.
Here is how to reach that dreaded $20 mark: (from the beginning)
1. Choose a niche
2. Purchase a domain name (read my previous entry for more info).
3. Write as much as possible.
4. Keep writing.
5. Write even more.
6. Place ADS in ever page.
7. Optimize.
8. Write more.
9. Repeat everything (that's right purchase another domain name).
This will lead you to success believe it or not.
Earn And Make Money Online Today
Ever heard of the Swap Clix Method?
"How would you like to earn an extra $100, $500, or $1000 every week with 15 minutes of your time?"
Im not pulling your leg!
Make money 15 minutes from now!
Discover the secrets of Swap Clix! New methods combine the power of Google's AdWords and AdSense -never seen before!
Are you like me? Trying to make money on the internet but failing at every attempt? I spent all sorts of money on how to make money products, guaranteed income products, MLM marketing. You name it I've been there.
Then one day I had an idea. An amazing idea actually.
I have found a way to create a never ending stream of income. This method has never been released to the public before. Very few, if anyone has implemented this. I have decided to share my idea with you. The only thing I ask is you do not share this information with anyone.
Why am I sharing this information you ask? Well the main reason is I spent so much money on programs that promised me riches. None of them have delivered. I know how you feel, and I want to put an end to it. I guarantee you will make money with my system or I will refund you 100% of your purchase price!
Now before I get to deep into the details let me tell you what this program is NOT.
This is not a promote my affiliate program to make money! This is not a put ads in the newspaper to make money! This is not a stuff envelope scam to make money! This is not a make money with surveys program! This is not a paid to read email program! This is not a paid to click program! This is not like anything you have ever seen!
YOU DO NOT EVEN NEED TO SELL ANYTHING!
"How would you like to earn an extra $100, $500, or $1000 every week with 15 minutes of your time?"
Im not pulling your leg!
Make money 15 minutes from now!
Discover the secrets of Swap Clix! New methods combine the power of Google's AdWords and AdSense -never seen before!
Are you like me? Trying to make money on the internet but failing at every attempt? I spent all sorts of money on how to make money products, guaranteed income products, MLM marketing. You name it I've been there.
Then one day I had an idea. An amazing idea actually.
I have found a way to create a never ending stream of income. This method has never been released to the public before. Very few, if anyone has implemented this. I have decided to share my idea with you. The only thing I ask is you do not share this information with anyone.
Why am I sharing this information you ask? Well the main reason is I spent so much money on programs that promised me riches. None of them have delivered. I know how you feel, and I want to put an end to it. I guarantee you will make money with my system or I will refund you 100% of your purchase price!
Now before I get to deep into the details let me tell you what this program is NOT.
This is not a promote my affiliate program to make money! This is not a put ads in the newspaper to make money! This is not a stuff envelope scam to make money! This is not a make money with surveys program! This is not a paid to read email program! This is not a paid to click program! This is not like anything you have ever seen!
YOU DO NOT EVEN NEED TO SELL ANYTHING!
How to Make Money From Your Blog
StevePavlina.com was launched 19 months ago. 12 months ago it was averaging $4.12/day in income. Now it brings in over $200/day. I didn’t spend a dime on marketing or promotion. In fact, I started this site with just $9 to register the domain name, and everything was bootstrapped from there. Would you like to know how I did it?
This article is seriously long (over 7300 words), but you’re sure to get your money’s worth (hehehe). I’ll even share some specifics. If you don’t have time to read it now, feel free to bookmark it or print it out for later.
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 talks about how to find the right balance between your needs and those 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. What if you don’t 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 would 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. Which 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 exactly what you’re getting into.
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 will 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. Plus I want each article to provide genuine value to my visitors. So 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 decent web savvy to understand.
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 mental processing goes into those 60 seconds. You really just have to learn these ideas once; after that you can apply them fairly 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. But 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 utilize several of them.
Thriving on change
I would say that your greatest risk isn’t so much 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 could 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 very rapidly, and change creates opportunity. It takes some brains to decipher these opportunities and figure out how 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.
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 likely 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 that 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 quickly 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 some kind of 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.
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. 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 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. Use the easy sign-up form at Conservative Cat. Do NOT spam the carnivals with irrelevant material — only submit to the carnivals that are match for your content.
In my early traffic-building days, I would 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 up to a certain level. 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 the 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. I think 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.
I think most mature people understand that it’s reasonable for a blogger to earn income from their 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 would 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 simple donation request in the bottom of my feeds.
If you want to see some actual traffic data, take a look at my 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: VegFamily.com 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 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). My web server is hosted by ServInt.net. What I like about ServInt is that they have a nice 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. In fact, 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 test failed and 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 under and hour and then just wait a month and 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 VegFamily.com, 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 usually 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.
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 do 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 this 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 setup 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.
This article is seriously long (over 7300 words), but you’re sure to get your money’s worth (hehehe). I’ll even share some specifics. If you don’t have time to read it now, feel free to bookmark it or print it out for later.
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 talks about how to find the right balance between your needs and those 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. What if you don’t 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 would 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. Which 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
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 exactly what you’re getting into.
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 will 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. Plus I want each article to provide genuine value to my visitors. So 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 decent web savvy to understand.
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 mental processing goes into those 60 seconds. You really just have to learn these ideas once; after that you can apply them fairly 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. But 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 utilize several of them.
Thriving on change
I would say that your greatest risk isn’t so much 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 could 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 very rapidly, and change creates opportunity. It takes some brains to decipher these opportunities and figure out how 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.
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 likely 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 that 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 quickly 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 some kind of 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.
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. 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 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. Use the easy sign-up form at Conservative Cat. Do NOT spam the carnivals with irrelevant material — only submit to the carnivals that are match for your content.
In my early traffic-building days, I would 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 up to a certain level. 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 the 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. I think 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.
I think most mature people understand that it’s reasonable for a blogger to earn income from their 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 would 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 simple donation request in the bottom of my feeds.
If you want to see some actual traffic data, take a look at my 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: VegFamily.com 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 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). My web server is hosted by ServInt.net. What I like about ServInt is that they have a nice 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. In fact, 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 test failed and 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 under and hour and then just wait a month and 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 VegFamily.com, 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 usually 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.
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 do 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 this 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 setup 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.
Ways to make money on the Internet
First, you need some 'tools'.
Open FREE Internet banking accounts to spend and receive payment online.
Disposable FREE email addresses.
An 'always online' connection to the Internet.
A dedicated credit card for the Internet.
Second, you need some income.
AlienTrust v3.0 Manual surf 25 sites daily to earn 10% daily for 13 days ( less 4% charge ).
$8 e-gold Ad-buy units to upgrade and advertise a page like this one. Free members can earn about $8 in a month by daily surfing and then use their earnings to upgrade.
Black Gold Surf is an autosurf program earning 12% of your $5+ stake daily for 12 days. So after 12 days you can withdraw your stake money plus 44% profit as long as you view 12 advertising pages daily that load automatically. Takes about 5 minutes a day. Deposits in e-gold in $5 increments and you need to upgrade before you surf, otherwise you have to wait till the next day. I buy upgrades every 6 days (max allowed $2,000) and so make 44% profit every 6 days. The site has been running since December 05 and has over 7,000 active members (22Feb06) growing by over 300 a day.
Vasco Investments - running since Dec05 and paying 1.8% to 3% per working day or about 45% to 86% compounded daily per month, depending on the amount deposited. Deposits start at $10 e-gold up to six figures. Withdrawals are on a daily basis and paid back into your e-gold account in minutes but usually within 12 hours. As of 22Feb06 there are 25,421 investors. proof of a test withdrawl
High Yield Investment Programs - HYIP, paying 20%+ interest after 1 to 4 days. So invest, say, $1,000 and collect $1,200 days later. Or do a 'rolling buy' and invest $250 each day for four days, repeat every fifth day and collect $50 profit each day thereafter on the same $1,000.
Minimum buy is $1 to $10 to prove to yourself it works before committing a real investment.
It is prudent to spread your money over many HYIP sites and spread the risk.
Class Act Clicks - A site run by Brian and Jessi, so will be honest and good. A great PTS ( paid to search ), PTC ( paid to click ), PTR ( paid to read ) and PTP ( paid to promote ) program and with a payout threshold of $9. Points also convert to cash which is a pleasant change. I have been paid twice by random payouts as well - that is, a payment into my PayPal account without even asking for payment! Great!
Here is a tutorial on how to make a valid search . It will take longer than the 10-40 seconds shown to finish loading three pages but if the advertiser doesn't get paid, he wont send the links in the future.
ItPaysToLearn is fun. Apart from earning from reading ' V-mails', by visiting sites and taking up offers, you have to get enough points each month answering quiz questions to get paid. You are then able to sell your points. I enjoy using this program and this is another program that really does pay. Sadly, some don't. I upgrade to gold level and so do well, but you can still earn several dollars a month as a free member.
Real-Cashs - another PTS program with a $2 minimum payout a month and paid very quickly.
Trickle income like this builds up a bank balance and gives you confidence.
Higher Payouts.
Normally I avoid very high payout programs where it sometimes takes a year to reach the minimum by which time the site may have vanished!
Rpoints
Aimed at UK/Euro surfers comparing prices of goods. You can buy almost anything at the best retail price and then get an added discount with Rpoints. Go to the page called 'recurring' where comparing prices with Kelkoo and others earns about 2p to 6p a click up to a max of about £1 a day. Ultra-cautious about awarding points, Rpoints take a week or more to check, then credit, your points and then a month or more to validate them before you can cash in. A good forum explains all this. But, once the ball is rolling and you're clicking every day, the cash rolls into PayPal at 100 points (£1) minimum a time and in £sterling too so you can have dollar and sterling PayPal accounts to save on exchange rates.
You WILL get paid with these programs; about $35 a month for just these PTC/PTS programs and there are dozens more to choose from. Join up, add to your favourites or put an icon on your desktop by dragging on a links page for each program and visit the sites at intervals through the day and earn a bit each time. It soon adds up.
TIPS -
1. Right click on the log-in page for each program and save a shortcut link to your desktop, or, Add to your Favourites in a new folder, named Daily, for instance. Much easier to remember your daily earning sites by double clicking on the icons or links.
2. Write the address and log-in details for each site in the back of your diary. It is easy to forget your user name and password and you can continue to earn money on another pc when away from home.
3. Get into the habit of regular visits. Most sites will cancel your account if you don't make use of it and any money earned will be lost.
Third, make a web site of your own and get advertisers on it.
The final group of earning programs can be placed on your own web site.
First you need a website with content interesting enough to attract visitors.
Think of a subject that you know a lot about - you, your family, your job, your hobby - whatever it is, focus on it and provide detailed information; facts, figures. Try to make your web site the definitive source of information on your chosen subject.
With a web site designed you need a domain name and a hosting service. It is like an address to the house where your web site lives. I use Easily to buy my domain names and Cirtex to host them, both companies give excellent service and support.
Promote your website using the points earned from working the autosurf, PTS, PTR and PTC you joined above in section two.
Once you have a web site with solid content you have a 'product' to sell. Many of the top programs will not accept you as an affiliate unless you have a web site of substance.
A convenient place to start is TradeDoubler . where you can join up for free to any of dozens of schemes under one 'roof' . All affiliate schemes have a minimum payout limit of around $50 so grouping schemes together as with TradeDoubler . [aimed at European web sites] and Commission Junction [aimed at North America but covering the world] means that you can get a cheque earlier.
Lots of companies would love you to join them as an affiliate and will pay you a commission when your visitors buy some of their products. It makes sense to join up with companies compatible with your site. Amazon sell a lot more than just books now and pay 5% to 7.5% commission by targeting specific books with a link from your site.
Bravenet has a lot of free goodies to add to your web site to attract more visitors and can help in setting up and hosting a web site. They also offer 50mb of free space on their servers to store your password protected back-up files and sensitive data.
The star ad payer is Google Adsense (see ads above and right). They pay for clicks and pay very well and cleverly match their ads to the content of your page and the nationality of the surfer. They are choosey about the sites that can join and demand a reasonable standard of content. Click on the button to sign up...
Slide or Glide In ads are the latest medium and build income fast from your web site. I use GlideNetwork. The small ad windows load onto your page for 15 seconds and then automatically disappear. Rates vary but they pay for CPC and CPM with a payout limit of >$5.00 to Paypal. Not affected by popup killers as yet so impressions are good.
Pop-up windows are better selling tools than banners and PopupTraffic.com will pay you $3 to $4/1000 impressions depending on whether the popup is in front, behind or on exit or all three for $11/1000, the choice is yours. This is the best you will get on the net and they pay monthly without fail. Popup killer browsers will reduce your income but they have introduced a new 'layer' glide in ad when meeting a popup blocker that pays $3 cpm. A busy site will still earn more than the $25 minimum for a cheque to be sent each month.
Remember, these are all free to join; you have no outgoings (apart from HYIP's) other than your normal internet connection which you have anyway. To be perfectly frank, the only downside to these deals is that it takes up your time to organise the links, and your browser and/or web site will run a bit slower while advertising banners load.
The Internet is fast changing - please let us know if a good deal comes along or if you find a crooked deal; contact and we will check it out and give it an unbiased opinion.
Open FREE Internet banking accounts to spend and receive payment online.
Disposable FREE email addresses.
An 'always online' connection to the Internet.
A dedicated credit card for the Internet.
Second, you need some income.
AlienTrust v3.0 Manual surf 25 sites daily to earn 10% daily for 13 days ( less 4% charge ).
$8 e-gold Ad-buy units to upgrade and advertise a page like this one. Free members can earn about $8 in a month by daily surfing and then use their earnings to upgrade.
Black Gold Surf is an autosurf program earning 12% of your $5+ stake daily for 12 days. So after 12 days you can withdraw your stake money plus 44% profit as long as you view 12 advertising pages daily that load automatically. Takes about 5 minutes a day. Deposits in e-gold in $5 increments and you need to upgrade before you surf, otherwise you have to wait till the next day. I buy upgrades every 6 days (max allowed $2,000) and so make 44% profit every 6 days. The site has been running since December 05 and has over 7,000 active members (22Feb06) growing by over 300 a day.
Vasco Investments - running since Dec05 and paying 1.8% to 3% per working day or about 45% to 86% compounded daily per month, depending on the amount deposited. Deposits start at $10 e-gold up to six figures. Withdrawals are on a daily basis and paid back into your e-gold account in minutes but usually within 12 hours. As of 22Feb06 there are 25,421 investors. proof of a test withdrawl
High Yield Investment Programs - HYIP, paying 20%+ interest after 1 to 4 days. So invest, say, $1,000 and collect $1,200 days later. Or do a 'rolling buy' and invest $250 each day for four days, repeat every fifth day and collect $50 profit each day thereafter on the same $1,000.
Minimum buy is $1 to $10 to prove to yourself it works before committing a real investment.
It is prudent to spread your money over many HYIP sites and spread the risk.
Class Act Clicks - A site run by Brian and Jessi, so will be honest and good. A great PTS ( paid to search ), PTC ( paid to click ), PTR ( paid to read ) and PTP ( paid to promote ) program and with a payout threshold of $9. Points also convert to cash which is a pleasant change. I have been paid twice by random payouts as well - that is, a payment into my PayPal account without even asking for payment! Great!
Here is a tutorial on how to make a valid search . It will take longer than the 10-40 seconds shown to finish loading three pages but if the advertiser doesn't get paid, he wont send the links in the future.
ItPaysToLearn is fun. Apart from earning from reading ' V-mails', by visiting sites and taking up offers, you have to get enough points each month answering quiz questions to get paid. You are then able to sell your points. I enjoy using this program and this is another program that really does pay. Sadly, some don't. I upgrade to gold level and so do well, but you can still earn several dollars a month as a free member.
Real-Cashs - another PTS program with a $2 minimum payout a month and paid very quickly.
Trickle income like this builds up a bank balance and gives you confidence.
Higher Payouts.
Normally I avoid very high payout programs where it sometimes takes a year to reach the minimum by which time the site may have vanished!
Rpoints
Aimed at UK/Euro surfers comparing prices of goods. You can buy almost anything at the best retail price and then get an added discount with Rpoints. Go to the page called 'recurring' where comparing prices with Kelkoo and others earns about 2p to 6p a click up to a max of about £1 a day. Ultra-cautious about awarding points, Rpoints take a week or more to check, then credit, your points and then a month or more to validate them before you can cash in. A good forum explains all this. But, once the ball is rolling and you're clicking every day, the cash rolls into PayPal at 100 points (£1) minimum a time and in £sterling too so you can have dollar and sterling PayPal accounts to save on exchange rates.
You WILL get paid with these programs; about $35 a month for just these PTC/PTS programs and there are dozens more to choose from. Join up, add to your favourites or put an icon on your desktop by dragging on a links page for each program and visit the sites at intervals through the day and earn a bit each time. It soon adds up.
TIPS -
1. Right click on the log-in page for each program and save a shortcut link to your desktop, or, Add to your Favourites in a new folder, named Daily, for instance. Much easier to remember your daily earning sites by double clicking on the icons or links.
2. Write the address and log-in details for each site in the back of your diary. It is easy to forget your user name and password and you can continue to earn money on another pc when away from home.
3. Get into the habit of regular visits. Most sites will cancel your account if you don't make use of it and any money earned will be lost.
Third, make a web site of your own and get advertisers on it.
The final group of earning programs can be placed on your own web site.
First you need a website with content interesting enough to attract visitors.
Think of a subject that you know a lot about - you, your family, your job, your hobby - whatever it is, focus on it and provide detailed information; facts, figures. Try to make your web site the definitive source of information on your chosen subject.
With a web site designed you need a domain name and a hosting service. It is like an address to the house where your web site lives. I use Easily to buy my domain names and Cirtex to host them, both companies give excellent service and support.
Promote your website using the points earned from working the autosurf, PTS, PTR and PTC you joined above in section two.
Once you have a web site with solid content you have a 'product' to sell. Many of the top programs will not accept you as an affiliate unless you have a web site of substance.
A convenient place to start is TradeDoubler . where you can join up for free to any of dozens of schemes under one 'roof' . All affiliate schemes have a minimum payout limit of around $50 so grouping schemes together as with TradeDoubler . [aimed at European web sites] and Commission Junction [aimed at North America but covering the world] means that you can get a cheque earlier.
Lots of companies would love you to join them as an affiliate and will pay you a commission when your visitors buy some of their products. It makes sense to join up with companies compatible with your site. Amazon sell a lot more than just books now and pay 5% to 7.5% commission by targeting specific books with a link from your site.
Bravenet has a lot of free goodies to add to your web site to attract more visitors and can help in setting up and hosting a web site. They also offer 50mb of free space on their servers to store your password protected back-up files and sensitive data.
The star ad payer is Google Adsense (see ads above and right). They pay for clicks and pay very well and cleverly match their ads to the content of your page and the nationality of the surfer. They are choosey about the sites that can join and demand a reasonable standard of content. Click on the button to sign up...
Slide or Glide In ads are the latest medium and build income fast from your web site. I use GlideNetwork. The small ad windows load onto your page for 15 seconds and then automatically disappear. Rates vary but they pay for CPC and CPM with a payout limit of >$5.00 to Paypal. Not affected by popup killers as yet so impressions are good.
Pop-up windows are better selling tools than banners and PopupTraffic.com will pay you $3 to $4/1000 impressions depending on whether the popup is in front, behind or on exit or all three for $11/1000, the choice is yours. This is the best you will get on the net and they pay monthly without fail. Popup killer browsers will reduce your income but they have introduced a new 'layer' glide in ad when meeting a popup blocker that pays $3 cpm. A busy site will still earn more than the $25 minimum for a cheque to be sent each month.
Remember, these are all free to join; you have no outgoings (apart from HYIP's) other than your normal internet connection which you have anyway. To be perfectly frank, the only downside to these deals is that it takes up your time to organise the links, and your browser and/or web site will run a bit slower while advertising banners load.
The Internet is fast changing - please let us know if a good deal comes along or if you find a crooked deal; contact and we will check it out and give it an unbiased opinion.
Working With Affiliate Programs
Everywhere you look you see affiliate program offers for every product or service that you can think of. Some have fully automated systems that sell high volumes of hard products all over the world. In case you don't know, "hard" products are those that you can touch...unlike an ebook ordownloadable web template. Many affiliate programs have several thousand affiliates and one or two of the bigger companies have over one million affiliates.What are the advantages of joining an affiliate program?They provide a ready-made business. This is a very big plus for those people who want to earn some kind of living off the Internet but lack the knowledge or inclination to set up a business by themselves.Commissions and rewards are generally good, and the more established programs offer a real chance of advancement to higher and better-paid levels.Other affiliates are usually on hand to offer practical support.What are the limitations?You are restricted in your promotional activities due to the fact that you do not actually own the affiliate site they give you. You won't be able to put such things as banners, images, links, meta tags, etc. onto your page.The URL of your affiliate page is often either too long or contains such awkward things as question marks, which many Search Engines will not index.Any promotional ads or articles have probably already been used by thousands of other people and consequently may have lost its impact, making it more difficult to achieve sales or referrals.
If the program you have joined has not yet established itself (or in some cases even if it has), then you may encounter problems with payments owed to you not being honored. You also run the risk of low quality products or sub-standard statistics that do not accurately record how many referrals or sales you have made.You may be required to purchase a minimum quantity of the product on a regular basis before you start to qualify for commissions or even before you can become an affiliate.You may not get the technical or affiliate support you might expect from the company. This may be due to inadequate staffing, or the company's negligence.
Other people in your downline do nothing to promote the program.At least four of the above limitations can be overcome with a little time and effort. You could, for example, come up with fresher ads to promote the program (provided this is allowed).If the company supplies the email addresses of people in your downline, then you could offer to help the less active members. Very often these people are passive not because they are lazy or apathetic but merely because they don't know HOW to promote effectively! your guidance could mean the difference between no sales or referrals and healthy downlines and residual incomes.As regards promoting your actual page, here are a couple of little tricks that should overcome a number of restrictions:Cloak your Affiliate URL to stop hijackers Affiliate Masker While this will not help you to get listed on the major Search Engines, it will make your web page easier for prospects to remember and type into their browser's address bar.Go to your affiliate page. Place your mouse pointer anywhere on the page and right click once. In the drop-down box choose "View Source". This will display the HTML for the page. Save this to your hard drive as a HTML document using the "Save As" function. Upload the page to your web site.If you don't have a web site then get some free web space from one of these:http://www.tripod.com/http://www.fortunecity.com/http://www.hypermart.net/http://www.coolchat.com/http://www.crosswinds.net/http://www.htmlpublishing.com/http://www.freehomepages.com/http://www.pageproducer.com/Submit your 'new' page to the Search Engines. You are also now able to place banner codes, links, images, testimonials, in fact anything you want onto these pages, because you are in control of the HTML. A word of caution, though. Don't change the actual HTML of your original affiliate page. Just put the other stuff, like banners etc, around it. Making this "mirror page" of your affiliate page willdramatically improve your advertising options.
If the program you have joined has not yet established itself (or in some cases even if it has), then you may encounter problems with payments owed to you not being honored. You also run the risk of low quality products or sub-standard statistics that do not accurately record how many referrals or sales you have made.You may be required to purchase a minimum quantity of the product on a regular basis before you start to qualify for commissions or even before you can become an affiliate.You may not get the technical or affiliate support you might expect from the company. This may be due to inadequate staffing, or the company's negligence.
Other people in your downline do nothing to promote the program.At least four of the above limitations can be overcome with a little time and effort. You could, for example, come up with fresher ads to promote the program (provided this is allowed).If the company supplies the email addresses of people in your downline, then you could offer to help the less active members. Very often these people are passive not because they are lazy or apathetic but merely because they don't know HOW to promote effectively! your guidance could mean the difference between no sales or referrals and healthy downlines and residual incomes.As regards promoting your actual page, here are a couple of little tricks that should overcome a number of restrictions:Cloak your Affiliate URL to stop hijackers Affiliate Masker While this will not help you to get listed on the major Search Engines, it will make your web page easier for prospects to remember and type into their browser's address bar.Go to your affiliate page. Place your mouse pointer anywhere on the page and right click once. In the drop-down box choose "View Source". This will display the HTML for the page. Save this to your hard drive as a HTML document using the "Save As" function. Upload the page to your web site.If you don't have a web site then get some free web space from one of these:http://www.tripod.com/http://www.fortunecity.com/http://www.hypermart.net/http://www.coolchat.com/http://www.crosswinds.net/http://www.htmlpublishing.com/http://www.freehomepages.com/http://www.pageproducer.com/Submit your 'new' page to the Search Engines. You are also now able to place banner codes, links, images, testimonials, in fact anything you want onto these pages, because you are in control of the HTML. A word of caution, though. Don't change the actual HTML of your original affiliate page. Just put the other stuff, like banners etc, around it. Making this "mirror page" of your affiliate page willdramatically improve your advertising options.
How To Make Money From The Internet
A guide to the easiest ways of how to make money from the internet armed with a computer and a bank account.
Ways to Get Money from the Internet
The basic way to get money from the Internet is to promote products via ads. These ads are placed on your own website or on someone elses such as a search engine in the form of sponsored ads.
The product might be your own product or someone elses where you participate as an affiliate and receive commissions on sales.
How Much Money Could You Make from the Internet ?
With your own product you would make a profit on each sale based on your sale price minus the cost of materials, shipping and other expenses.
Own Product Example
You market an eBook priced at $49 for download from your website and use a 3rd party payment provider such as ClickBank.
Each month you have 1,000 visitors to your website and a sales conversion rate of 5% so your revenue is $2,450 per month.
Now consider expenses like web hosting at $10 per month and credit-card processing fees of 8% giving costs of $206 per month.
So, in this example your profits are $2,234 monthly.
Affiliate Marketing Example
You have a website about fishing where you review equipment and have product links carrying your affiliate tracking code.
Your website gets 10,000 visitors a month and 10% click on a product link. 10% of these people purchase an average of $100 of merchandise. You get paid 5% commission.
So 1000 people click and 100 buy a product and you are paid 5% of $10,000 in commission.
You only have web hosting costs of $10 per month to deduct.
This nets you $490 per month profit.
Own Product or Affiliate Marketing ?
From the above examples it is clear which is the most profitable approach to take. However, you may struggle to develop your own product, yet you can immediately access 1000's of other people's products via the affiliate marketing route.
The affiliate commission on eBooks is generally far higher than physical goods so you can make good money marketing other people's eBook products rather than developing your own.
For physical products, successful affiliate marketers generally create sites that recommend the products such as sport's equipment. If the price of the products is high, you can make good money.
How to Make as Much Money as Possible
Which ever route is taken you need to balance the following factors for maximum profits:
Maximize Visitors
The more people that see your ads, the more will click and buy. Some ways to maximize visitors are:
Add more content and pages to your website
Optimize your website for search engines
Get more links to your website
Advertise your URL in Google adwords and pay per click search engines
Advertise your URL offline in classified ads
Maximize Click-throughs
Pre-sell products with reviews, articles and related information then provide links in easy to find places.
Maximize Profit
Adjust the selling price to balance sales volumes at the point where maximum profit is produced.
Minimize costs by reducing shipping costs and administration costs. One of the best ways to do this is to market digital products such as software and e-Books that don't require physical shipping.
Maximize commission. Look for large commission percentages and high conversion rates in affiliate partnerships.
Ways to Get Money from the Internet
The basic way to get money from the Internet is to promote products via ads. These ads are placed on your own website or on someone elses such as a search engine in the form of sponsored ads.
The product might be your own product or someone elses where you participate as an affiliate and receive commissions on sales.
How Much Money Could You Make from the Internet ?
With your own product you would make a profit on each sale based on your sale price minus the cost of materials, shipping and other expenses.
Own Product Example
You market an eBook priced at $49 for download from your website and use a 3rd party payment provider such as ClickBank.
Each month you have 1,000 visitors to your website and a sales conversion rate of 5% so your revenue is $2,450 per month.
Now consider expenses like web hosting at $10 per month and credit-card processing fees of 8% giving costs of $206 per month.
So, in this example your profits are $2,234 monthly.
Affiliate Marketing Example
You have a website about fishing where you review equipment and have product links carrying your affiliate tracking code.
Your website gets 10,000 visitors a month and 10% click on a product link. 10% of these people purchase an average of $100 of merchandise. You get paid 5% commission.
So 1000 people click and 100 buy a product and you are paid 5% of $10,000 in commission.
You only have web hosting costs of $10 per month to deduct.
This nets you $490 per month profit.
Own Product or Affiliate Marketing ?
From the above examples it is clear which is the most profitable approach to take. However, you may struggle to develop your own product, yet you can immediately access 1000's of other people's products via the affiliate marketing route.
The affiliate commission on eBooks is generally far higher than physical goods so you can make good money marketing other people's eBook products rather than developing your own.
For physical products, successful affiliate marketers generally create sites that recommend the products such as sport's equipment. If the price of the products is high, you can make good money.
How to Make as Much Money as Possible
Which ever route is taken you need to balance the following factors for maximum profits:
Maximize Visitors
The more people that see your ads, the more will click and buy. Some ways to maximize visitors are:
Add more content and pages to your website
Optimize your website for search engines
Get more links to your website
Advertise your URL in Google adwords and pay per click search engines
Advertise your URL offline in classified ads
Maximize Click-throughs
Pre-sell products with reviews, articles and related information then provide links in easy to find places.
Maximize Profit
Adjust the selling price to balance sales volumes at the point where maximum profit is produced.
Minimize costs by reducing shipping costs and administration costs. One of the best ways to do this is to market digital products such as software and e-Books that don't require physical shipping.
Maximize commission. Look for large commission percentages and high conversion rates in affiliate partnerships.
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