Blogging has become a tough business, particularly in popular niches like make money online or credit cards.

If you are blogging in a crowded niche, it can seem impossible for your blog to rise above the noise and make an impact. This isn’t necessarily so, and we’ve compiled a list of tips to help you get your blog noticed.

Be persistent

Nothing worthwhile happens overnight. Chris Guillebeau and the Art of Non-Conformity took nearly a year of constant effort to become “an overnight success.” Some blogs take even longer, especially in a popular niche.

If you believe in what you are offering, and honestly want to help people, success will come. It will be tempting to shift gears when things do not work out immediately. Remain committed and disciplined, and don’t slack off.

Focus on the needs of your target audience

Many bloggers make their blogs about themselves. This is fine if your blog exists to chronicle your life to your friends and family (or if you’re Brad Pitt). However, if you intend your blog to appeal to a wider audience, then you need to be quite specific about who you are trying to reach and what their needs are, and make sure that every word you write addresses these needs.

Marketers (and you are a marketer) learn as much about their target market as they can. They know their age, geographical location, gender, household income, educational attainment, and the brand of cereal they prefer. You’ll need to approximate this as best you can for your audience.

A great way to do this is to develop knowledge of your blogging ecosystem – the network of blogs in your niche. Think of it as your neighborhood. If you get to know these bloggers, and comment on their posts and contribute guest posts, you will not only be spreading your name around, but you’ll be learning more about your target audience. Case Western Reserve tells budding bloggers to join blog networks and submit posts to meta-blogs in order to reach more niche readers. Depending on your niche, this might be a great way to get included in weekly roundups or lists of important blogs.

Focus on quality

Probably the best piece of advice I can give is to focus on creating useful, high quality articles, posts, tweets, and paid content. In any crowded niche, there are literally thousands of craptacular blogs populated by keyword-stuffed content and spun posts. Google is constantly working on ways to lower the ranking of these sites, and hopefully, they will one day disappear.

By developing a reputation for quality, you’ll make it more likely that readers will come back, other bloggers will accept guest posts, or post for you, and that you might get mainstream media attention for your blog. You’ll be delivering a solid product that you can be proud of.

You also need to provide the best customer experience possible. Even if you’re not selling anything, it’s important to think of your readers as customers.

• Reply to every comment left on your blog.
• Respond promptly and engagingly to emails and questions.
• Follow readers back to their own blogs and leave comments there.
• Link to other bloggers’ content and share it on social networks.
• Thank your readers profusely and always help them out.
• Offer favors freely and return each one you are granted.

Be different

Seth Godin encourages people to be Purple Cows – extraordinary, unique, game changers – in whatever they do. This philosophy is very important for bloggers. If you follow the same recipe as everyone else, your blog will never be different and never rise above mediocrity.

Come up with something different and people will remember it. If you can couple that with persistence, quality, and a great experience – why, you might just have something, then.

Whatever niche you’re blogging in, try and remember that there’s always room for a better blog in it. Stick to your guns, create quality content, and success will come. Welcome to the world of competitive blogging, we hope to see you around.

If you’re a successful blogger in a competitive niche, we’d love to hear your advice in the comments!

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In part I of my increasing Adsense Revenues series, I covered how to optimise revenues if you are using more than one adsense banner per page.

In Part II, I’m going to explain how DFP helps you maximise revenue from unsold inventory and how this can allow you to run more than 3 Adsense units per page, without breaking Google’s T &Cs.

DFP is a fully fledged ad serving platform that allows you to run multiple creatives with various targeting and pricing mechanisms:

• Pricing: CPM, CPC, CPD and Sponsorship mechanisms are all supported
• Targeting: Creative rotation, frequency capping, geotargeting and custom variables all supported

You can have more than three ad slots enabled  for AdSense on a single page if the following criteria is met:1. The ad slots are not exclusively showing AdSense, and other line items are rotating through the slots.
2. If at any time, you have three slots that exclusively show AdSense, and no other line items are targeting the slots, then it is your responsibility to disable AdSense on your other slots in order to adhere to the AdSense Terms of Service. For example, say you have five ad slots on your page. All of them can be enabled for AdSense IF you have line items targeting the slots.

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Google announced that it was changing some of its search algorithms to reduce the rankings of content farm products.

What Do content Farms Do?

Like most websites, content farms have a main goal, which is to generate revenue, and some do it with advertisements. So a content farm, is a company that employs large numbers of often freelance writers to generate large amounts of textual content which is specifically designed to satisfy algorithms for maximal retrieval by automated search engines.

The articles in content farms often get information from other  sources, which can lead to copyright disputes over copyright infringement. They are written people who are not specialists in the area. On the other hand the advocates of the content farms claim that from a business perspective, it is better to look for some expertise, which can be developed one article at a time. Traditional journalism, they claim is inefficient because stories are chosen by a small group of people that frequently have similar experiences and outlooks. (That in fact is the claim by most conservative commentators, that the mainstream media is too narrowly focused with the same ideas and perspectives.)

Content farms often commission their writers’ work based on analysis of search engine queries that proponents represent as “true market demand”, a feature that traditional journalism lacks.

Google’s Shift

Google launched a big algorithmic improvement to ranking, which will impact just under 12 percent of queries. Google raised the awareness level with this change. Because, according to Google, this update is “designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites–sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites–sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.”

The end result is that splashy articles, that don’t have sufficient content will not appear at the top of the rankings.

Source: PaidContent

PBS

Image: Business Insider

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I’m sure most of you are already jealous just after reading the headline of this story, I know I am and i’m 17. Well first things first his name in Christian Owens from Corby, Northamptonshire, England he is just 16 and made his first million in just two short years. Here’s how he did it.

At the age of 7 he got his first PC, then 3 years later he got himself a Mac and taught himself web design at the age of 10. Then 4 years later in 2008, he started his first company at the age of 14! It was just a simple very Appleish site which he used to sell bundled applications for the Mac OS. He says he was inspired by Apples CEO Steve Jobs, and hence his loyalty to Apple products.

His site, “Mac Bundle Box” sold a package of handy little Mac OS X apps for a discounted price for a limited time. He would contact and negotiate with developers to try and get a discounted deal on their apps. The resulting bundle that he sold would normally retail at around $400, be he was selling it off for a tenth of that price.

What’s more, if enough people bought the package, a new application would get unlocked for all buyers, so this pretty much guaranteed good promotion via word of mouth for him, and led to more and more sales. And to really top it off, he donated a percentage of the sales to charity.

His idea did very well, so well in fact that Mac Bundle Box made $100,000,000 (£700,000) in it’s first two years. So by the age of 16 he was already a millionaire.

But of course as any great entrepreneur is, he wasn’t happy with his success and since then has started up a new venture called Branchr. a pay-per click advertising company which distributes 300 million ads per month on over 17,500 websites, iPhones and Android apps. The company, which claims to deliver “contextual, behavioral, publisher-defined, and geographically” targeted ads in those platforms, has already made $800,000 in its first year and currently employs eight adults one of which is his 43-year-old mother, Alison! Can you imagine being employed by your own son!

So where does he see himself in 10 years? Well he’s not really sure but what he wants to do next is make 100 million pounds with Branchr! Ambitious but he already seems to be on his way there. Branchr is growing strong, and has already bought out another company.

The secret to his success?

There is no magical formula to business, it takes hard work, determination and the drive to do something great.

So there’s something for this teenage generation to live up to.

Source:

SWNS

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The Twitter revolution took off last year with millions of users tweeting their thoughts to the world, the majority of them complete rubbish. I really don’t care that you had cornflakes for breakfast or that your coffee was cold, I’ve a lot more things to worry about in life which are actually important. But Twitter continues to grow, maybe not as fast as it was but it still has millions of users and thats a big audience that you can promote yourself and your products to.

Everybody is trying to get as many followers as they possibly can on Twitter so they can market their product, website or blog. There are countless schemes out there that people try and actually spend money on in order to get a couple of thousand followers on Twitter. Desperate Twitters can spend hours following every random person in the hope that they get some follows back, and yes while this does increase your followers, they’re generally not your target audience.

But there is away to promote yourself on Twitter without having thousands of followers, and whats more you will be promoting yourself to your target audience.

It’s quite simple really just follow these steps:

On the Twitter homepage there is a search bar, it’s also on your twitter profile page.

So for example, say your trying to promote a page you have on a review of “Call Of Duty” or your trying to sell “Call Of Duty” merchandise. Simply type in ” Call Of Duty ” into the search bar ( you can add -http to prevent other links from showing up )

This search will bring up a list of people talking about your chosen topic, so obviously they have some interest in it, therefore they are your target market.

Stalicious1 for example is playing COD on the PS3,

Let’s just say I’m selling some PS3 headsets on my site, I simply reply to his tweet with the link to my site

And there you have it, it’s as easy as that, “Stalicious1″ will now see this reply on his twitter page, and so will everyone else who visits his page and the chances are you will get a few clicks and maybe even some sales.

Do this with multiple users, people are more likely to read and pay attention to their @ replies more than private messages that you send them, also everyone else can see their @ replies, giving you even more exposure. Even more you may get some extra followers as well.

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2009 offered a great earning year for online entrepreneurs. Personally, I’ve amassed a heftier bounty from the various web initiatives I side-manage than the migraine-inducing brick and mortar business I also nurture. Not everything did well though. A few forays crashed and burned. Here’s what really worked- and what merely wasted my time.

The Good Stuff

CLICKBANK AFFILIATE MARKETING. With Clickbank’s new system that allows impregnating webpages with dynamically updating ads, my webpages have tripled clickbank income. In the past, Clickbank limited affiliate marketers to static hoplinks that didn’t change. This posed a drawback. Regular visitors eventually got tired of the same static link. Ad blindness ensued. The new Clickbank method remedied this by allowing the publisher to plug in code which changed ads according to content. Clickbank’s ads then greatly resembled Adsense! And with payouts going up to $97 because of 70% commissions… who wouldn’t smile?

EBAY AUCTIONS. I have one powerseller account at auction giant Ebay. In the beginning I sold high priced items like DVD Players and TV sets which I got from local appliance stores. The margins where poor and logistics a nightmare. But when I moved to promoting zero cost, high margin info products such as “How To Manuals”, things looked up. It became an automatic cash machine. I’d sell 10 or 20 such manuals costing $5 to $10 a piece- incurring no COGS! Then later on, I forayed into the branded realm, selling Louis Vuittons and Hermes picked up from pawnshops. A brand new Hermes may cost $10,000. But snap a few pix of a Birkin at a pawnshop- and you can close an ebay deal for $5000 without any initial cash out!

WELLNESS TOOLS. Everyone loves to improve one’s lot in life. That’s the reason I launched various sites that offered wellness tools and self-help books. With products like the Qlink and Binaural CDs, this remained to be a strong earner.

REVIEW SITES. What I love about review sites is that they not only earn affiliate or adsense income, they also send free stuff my way. Build  review sites that hit PR 4 or PR5 and manufacturers throw complimentary items your way for a good review. Right now, my office has all kinds of electronic doodads from Heatseekers to USB vibrators, some never fully utilized.

DIGITAL POINT. DigitalPoint forums is one  monster marketplace that charges nothing for the trade of products- whether intangible or not. I’ve successfully promoted e-products, sold services and found affordable labor from this mega site that caters to SEO Experts, online money makers and the occasional hacker.

FACEBOOK and TWITTER MARKETING. Social networking is all the rage these days. People beyond their teens have made it a habit to check facebook more than twice a day- with the iPhone making it easier to know what’s up with friends and business partners. The explosive popularity of facebook opened a new field of online marketing for me. With over 4000 friends from various circles, I’ve found that dropping an honest comment about some (ahem) affiliate product readily leads to sales (and commissions).

Don’t have that many friends? No sweat! Just join one of several facebook groups. Before you know it, you’ll have hundreds. And more than a handful of them may jut click your wallpost links!

(By the way, Facebook also offers an ad system!)

The Bad Stuff

LINK SELLING. I totally scrapped this revenue model as of 2006 when several sites tanked in PR as a penalty. Still, some of my associates persisted and suffered a great deal when Google deindexed their sites. Stay away from link brokers like Tnx.net or text-link-ads.com . They claim that their link exchange system is undetectable but that is a lie. Search engines easily find their php code, then punish the site accordingly. I should know- one site I had years ago dropped from PR5 to PR1 because of Tnx.net

RIVAL AD NETWORKS. Several ad networks like Tribal Fusion and Kontera made almost zero income acr0ss my network of sites- despite the regular traffic each one received. I no longer recommend implementing these as they detract from stronger money makers like Adsense or Clickbank hoplink units.

AMAZON ASSOCIATES. Amazon may be the biggest bookstore in the world, but their affiliate system failed to earn a single dime- after 3 years of deployment. That led me to believe that the affiliate model they propose fails to lend itself well to web publishers like you and I.

Promising New Money Makers

MONEYFISH. Now here’s an odd one that recently came through the door. Moneyfish is something that looks like MLM (in that it comes with several hot info products that can be promoted to downlinks) but isn’t (because it doesn’t follow the traditional downline formula.) The founders refer to it as a $9.95 franchise that grows on automatic pilot. All you do is refer 10 signups then sit back and count checks. Big ones. Moneyfish works by tabulating who else comes in after after you- potentially giving you up to $22,000 a month in earning. What if you can’t find 10 people? No sweat. Any other person who joined PRIOR to you who located beyond ten members isn’t permitted to retain more than ten. The extra goes to you. And that brings cash. So far, things are looking rosy from where I sit. Sure hope Moneyfish doesn’t blow in my face!

EBAY AFFILIATES. Having started on Ebay Affiliates just last year, I’ve seen small but stable revenue growth. If you have a website that lends itself well to ebay’s various products, this one is for you. Simply plug in code and ebay auctions stream live right next to your content. Just because of Ebay Affiliates, I started a fashion blog managed by a full time writer because I wanted ebay’s high margin  branded auctions to entice the occasional visitor. It’s working. Last year saw about $1000 net for the whole year. I do hope to increase that though.

What about you? Has 2009 lined your coffers?

Here’s a toast to 2010!

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Google, in my book, implements the best possible ad system for both publishers and advertisers.  The company’s  ad units are catchy, concise, and without need for extra compulsion, actually inspires clicks.

Clicks mean revenue. Revenue creates incentive for web publishers like you and me. It is one reason that many sites go all out implementing adsense, with a typical blog page flaunting three ad units and 2 link units. Google definitely made waves and became the favorite of many. It’s no wonder that now, Clickbank shadowed the popular adsense format.

In the past, clickbank affiliate links afforded only one mode of implementation, that is, planting a static link on a webpage pointing at a clickbank endorsed product. It wasn’t fancy, but it got the job done. A well made review page impregnated with such links easily led to purchases that channeled commissions.

Now, clickbank allows publishers to place automatic code that updates in real time along thematic content. This lets the publisher clickbank  plug code the same way he plugs adsense code- and sit back for commissions.

Here’s what the new clickbank hoplinks look like:

Notice how it mimics the adsense ad units? Not only are the ads fully customizable, they constantly change depending on the current products on clickbank’s rosters.

I’ve implemented the clickbank ads on several sites (after confirming with Google that they don’t violate Adsense TOS) and am happy to report that these ads inspire a lot of hops- to the tune of almost 300 hops a day on just one site! If hops paid a dollar a piece, that would be a lot of money. Too bad clickbank isn’t pay per click though. Commissions are pay per action.

You must be wondering about the bottomline. Does it make publishers money? I’ll leave you to discover. Go experiment! You may just be delighted.

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I joined Twitter fairly late, but in the last six months I’ve managed to accumulate nearly 4000 followers.  I’ve tried promoting a few affiliate programs via my tweets and I can’t really say they’ve been successful.  However, this week I’m testing a new way to monetise my twitter following; sponsored tweets.  I joined Ad.ly earlier this week, an ‘in-stream’ advertising service that injects a maximum of one tweet per day featuring advertising.  Twitter users get to set their price and advertisers then can purchase those slots.

I’ve set my price at a fairly low $20 as I want to see what sponsored tweets come through.  Even at this price though, one sponsored tweet a day would bring in over $600 of revenue which is great for a service that only took me 2 mins to setup.  There’s also a referral program for users, where users get paid 12% of the income that their referrals make.  There’s even a challenge on at the moment where the person who refers the most ad.ly users between November 16th and December 13th win a free 13′ Macbook Pro.

The current ad.ly Race leaderboard is below:

I think Ad.ly have made a mistake by displaying the leaderboard as it’s dominated by the usual suspects like John Chow and Jeremy Schoemaker, so normal bloggers like you and I have no chance of winning.  However, maybe ad.ly have intentionally done this as they know that mega bloggers like these guys can refer more users than the rest of us put together and displaying the leaderboard will help encourage the rivalry between the big guys.

Overall I think Ad.ly is a good idea, although I’m reserving my judgement until I see the first ads.  If they prove to be totally irrelevant then I will probably leave.

Have you displayed Ad.ly ads in your twitter stream?  what was your experience?  Do you think services like Ad.ly will further decrease the value of twitter as a good medium to communicate?

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Online buyers are smart. Before purchasing something new, a vast majority go online and search the product first. Let’s say I’m interested in “AffiliateCraze”, what I’d do is to google “AffiliateCraze Scam” or “AffiliateCraze Review”. The results then largely influence my buying decision. Is the review good? Then I may decide to part with my money. Are the feedback posts bad? Then I look for an alternative.

It is precisely of this buying habit of many that you and I can make money online. How? Simple. Write a review page. A 500 word review with affiliate links to the product in question can lead to commission sales for you.

Writing a review page is no mean feat. In order to actually be seen on Google and to convince people to buy from that page, you may need to jump hoops. The following techniques have worked for my review pages:

Use The Tradename in Your Keywords, Title, Body and Meta. The product is called ForexRebellion, therefore you should include that very term in your Title, Meta, Body, etc. If you don’t, people won’t find you on google search results. Don’t be cute and use alternate words. If your title says “Forex Systems Review”, people won’t find you when looking for “ForexRebellion”

Include Pros and Cons. A glowing report looks biased. You must make it appear that you used the product and found things to your liking and dislike. That lends credibility.

Give Bonuses. Here’s the kicker. Inform your site visitors that you will give them valuable bonuses worth at least 3X the value of the product you reviewed- if they buy. That alone should convince people to salivate and even purchase immediately after reading.

Do you like reviewing products for friends? That means you’re an opinion leader.If that’s you, why not monetize it.

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It is a rare day when I actually read promotional email. But I was glad I read one last Thursday. Now, I don’t know if the ad copy was that good or I was simply looking for another approach to bolster my affiliate marketing, but I actually followed the link and ended up on the webpage of an intriguing tool for affiliate marketing. Called HotKeyWordSpy, the software promised the user  a boatload of tricks to dominate online business.

Hotkeywordspy isn’t your normal keyword spying tool like Goodkeywords or Keywords Elite. Like Goodkeywords, Hotkeywords spy provides very thorough data mining for keywords, related phrases, PPC cost and competition. But that’s where the similarity ends. The affiliate marketer can broaden his attack vector  by using the other functions of Hotkeywordspy like:

Hot Clickbank Products- Clicking this tool launches an algorithm  that searches for the best selling clickbank products. Promote these products with the recommended keywords and you can expect better conversions.

Hot Keywords- Clicking this tool mines google for the most searched keywords and it also returns the PPC cost of each. You’ll love this function if you earn from adsense.

Hot Amazon Products- Love Amazon? I love amazon too- especially when I know which of their products sell the most. The Hot Amazon products function locates the best sellers that can help you increase the bottomline.

Hot Ebay products- As with the amazon tool, the ebay function seeks out the ebay products that experience great buying velocity. A must if you want to promote ebay products through their affiliate system.

Hot twitter terms- And finally, the twitter function lets you discover what’s flying on twitter, and how you can exploit it.

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Just over 2 years ago Google did a massive page rank update where they reduced the page rank of sites that were selling links.  My site was one of the sites that felt the full might of Google’s wrath, dropping Page rank 6 to 3; it had taken me two years to move from PR 0 to 6 and less than 24 hours to drop to PR3.  My Google traffic didn’t seem to suffer though, so I didn’t rush out and cancel all my link adverts like some sites did.

However, in recent months my revenue from text link adverts had dwindled to a much smaller proportion of my overall revenue so I decided it was time to remove them altogether as the amount of income I was receiving just wasn’t worth the risk of antagonising google further and potentially getting completely delisted.  So, just over two months ago in September I removed my text link ads and informed Google via their webmaster tools that I had done so, requesting that they reconsider my site.

Google definitely responded to my request; within 24 hours my page rank had increased from 3 to 4 after being stuck at 3 for 2 years, and in last week’s page rank update I went up another notch to PR5.  Hopefully Google will restore my PR6 at the next update if I stay away from the paid links.  I don’t know how big the google PR team is, but I’m amazed that they turned around my reconsideration so quickly.  If you do find yourself falling foul of google at any point, you should definitely drop them a line as they do respond to reconsideration requests.

Have you had a similar experience with Google?  Did your page rank go up as well last week?

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Last week, my associates in the BPO asked me to give a keynote speech at an upcoming entrepreneur’s summit. I asked them what the topic had to be and they replied “Oh, anything about making money online. People are tired of small scale food kiosks and salons. You’ve been at it for years- so share the knowledge!” That intrigued me and I acceded on the spot. I promised to give it my best.

Now most people think of blogging and earning through adsense when “online money making” is mentioned. I didn’t want to repeat what everyone knew, so I decided to reveal a relatively new method of generating cash thru the web: via social networks. This method is unsaturated and can provide an avenue for wealth building.

On opening day, I arrived at the seminar (but to my chagrin, the program stated: Keynote speech by Joseph R. Plazo on blogging for profits) and set up my presentation. It was too late to have them change “blogging for profits” to “social network monetization.

I proceeded with the step-by-step method to living off social networks like facebook:

1) First, create affiliate accounts that pay big commissions. Clickbank, commission junction and other webhosting companies offer such rewards programs. Payout often goes up to 75% in profits.

2) Create an account at twitter, myspace, friendster and facebook.

3) Once in, join various social network groups. In facebook, one such group is the Mobwars. Another is Mafia wars. Once you join, it is easy to gain up to 5000 friends from the normal circle of 500 to 1000 the average facebooker maintains. The extra 4000 friends become your target market.

4) Using teasers, write one liners once or twice a week on your social networking shoutout like : “Hmmm… this AFFLINK looks like a curious way to get my hair back.. lemee see” or “Gods! I didn’t know I could get ripped abs this way with AFFLINK… and it only took 2 weeks!”

5) By interspersing the “advertising” with real posts about what you had for lunch or how the date last night went, your profile looks genuine. Real. People click because your ‘impartial one line review’ carries more weight than whole page review sites proliferating the web.

I then proceeded to proof of concept by flashing on screen several commission checks resultant of such campaign. One initiative that drew a lot of attention was an online moneymaking system I promoted that taught affiliate marketing through twitter itself.  At first the room went silent. Then one fellow loudly retorted “That’s more than my monthly income! To think I’ve been using FB to find dates only!” The crowd laughed and never had I faced a Q&A section that lasted more than my speech. Looks like there’s going to be a lot of friendster marketers now!

Are you prepared to make cash off your “friends?”

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This site has been in existence since 2005 and since around 2007 I’ve used it and other sites like Windows 7 News to make money online.  This has gone so well that October 09 I’ve been working full-time online, leaving behind a good traditional job.  So far, it’s gone well and I’m enjoying the extra freedom I have everyday to work when I went on things that interest me the most.

One of the areas I’ve focussed on over the last couple of weeks is trying to improve the level of monitisation of my existing traffic by trying out new ad networks and making ad pitches directly to companies.  Increasing the number of networks and advertisers I’m working with has required me to use a ad management service to schedule and serve my campaigns, as I now have more ad networks and campaigns than I do have slots.  The first ad server that I used was the free OpenX service, but this week I’ve switched to the free Google Ad Manager service.  If you use more than one ad network or serve more than one type of ad on your site e.g. Adsense & affiliate banners, or Adsense & tribal fusion or Adsense & direct ads then my guide will help you increase the amount you make per ad slot on your site and allow you to work with multiple partners at once.

I believe that all websites that feature advertising will be able to increase their income if they use Google Ad Manager, and I’m going to go into as much detail as I can to share what I have done as I think these will probably be the most important tips I will ever share on making money online.  By using Google Ad Manager I’ve managed to increase my eCPMs by over 30% in under a week.

Optimising Ad Slots

Google Ad Manager allows you to create code to insert on your site wherever you are displaying an ad, so that you can then use Google Ad Manager to control which banners are displayed in that Ad Slot.  Once the code is inserted, Google Ad Manager will then track the number of page views of that Ad Slot as well as the CTR.  For each Ad Slot, multiple campaigns, or Orders, can be targeted and Google Ad Manager will aim to serve the best performing ad in terms of revenue for each Ad Slot, subject to any conditions you might have set such as geotargeting (e.g. only show this Order if the pageview is from the UK), or frequency capping (e.g. only show ad x times per day) or show ad min/max xx times per day.

For each slot you can also choose to serve a Google Adsense banner if Google Ad Manager thinks it can serve a Google Adsense banner that will deliver a higher eCPM than your own CPM banners and campaigns.  The best way to illustrate the benefits of this is through an example.

Example 1

Site 1 has 1x 160×600, 1x728x90 and 1x 300×250 banner slots.  Imagine the site has 3 campaigns, 1,000 page views per day, 500 visitors per day and 50% US traffic:

1. Campaign 1: Ad Network paying an average CPM of $1 for all 3 sizes
2. Campaign 2: Ad Network paying an average CPM of $1.5 for 300×250 banners but capped at 1 view per visitor/day
3. Campaign 3: Ad Network paying an average CPM of $2 for 728×90 banners but only for US traffic

With Google Ad Manager you could do the following:

1. Create 3 Ad Slots (160×600, 728×90, 300×250) and add the HTML to your website
2. Add Campaign 1 and target it to all Ad Slots : Ad Slot 1 160×600, Ad Slot 2 728×90 and Ad Slot 3 300×250
3. Add Campaign 2 and target it to Ad Slot 3 only and add the freq cap of 1 view per day
4. Add Campaign 3 and target it to Ad Slot 2 only and target it to only US traffic

Once completed Google Ad Manager will do the following:

1. Ad Slot 1: serve campaign 1 1000 times = $1 in total revenue
2. Ad slot 2: serve Campaign 3 for the 50% of traffic that is US based=500 views x $2CPM=$1 revenue, and serve Campaign 1 for the 50% of traffic that is not US based=500 views x $1CPM=$0.5 revenue.  $1.5 total revenue
3. Ad slot 3: Average pageviews per visitor is 2, so it will serve Campaign 2for the first view per visitor=500 views x $1.5CPM=$0.75 revenue, and serve Campaign 1 for the other 500 views=500 views x $1CPM=$0.5. $1.25 total revenue

Total Revenue:  $3.75

Without Google Ad Manager it would have been impossible to serve campaign 2 as nothing would be shown for the 2nd page view, and similarly Campaign 3 couldn’t be shown as nothing would be shown to non US network.  Hence only Campaign 1 could be safely used, so total revenue would be 1,000 views x $1CPM = $3 i.e using Google Ad Manager would have increased total revenue by $0.75 or 25%.

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Does your dayjob deserve killing? I know many who’d gladly commit the murder. I don’t blame them either. Dayjobs can be tyrannical- robbing you of the best eight hours of the day. For what? Measly pay. Toxic colleagues. Infuriating clients. And monstrous bosses.

It’s easy to kill your dayjob and one method I recommend is via Affiliate Marketing. This technique has made mega millionaires and still continues to do so.

I know what you’re thinking. “Been there, tried that. Crashed and Burned.”

The problem is that affiliate marketing doesn’t work. The problem is that you implemented it poorly. Let me guide you now to the quick ways I do affiliate marketing- and reap the results.

STEP 1 Use Adwords keywords tool to create a simple keyword list in an industry you’re passionate about. If a lot of people are into these keywords, you have a potential hot market. Jot those relevant keywords down then and then run them in the actual google search engine. You’ve hit gold when there are 10,000 to 50,000 results. That means there’s growing interest in this segment. Narrow down your choices to these.

STEP 2 Look for affiliates running “review pages” on products that come up when your narrowed keywords are chosen. Run the whois tool on these affiliate pages. If they’ve been in  existence over three months, that means the attack on this niche is sustainable. Who, after all, will maintain a campaign on losing products? This lets you further narrow down the attack vector.

STEP 3 Visit clickbank and find products which are related to the keywords you selected. Opt for products that have a gravity of 10 to 80… not more than that. This means you have a potentially good product that can be successfully marketed using those keywords.

STEP 4 Create articles on articlebase.com that contain enticing information which ultimately point to the affiliate products you selected. Don’t bother with ezinearticles. This site no longer allows you to do affiliate marketing. Since Articlebase has very high page rank, your articles will appear on relevant search results if you impregnate the keywords into your title and body.

And that’s it! This method alone will help you generate sustainable income of up to $500 with about 3 to 5 articles running. If you want to increase your chances all the more, I recommend creating your articles into short PDF reports with the affiliate links embedded. This report for instance, contains information of affiliate marketing and carries a deadly payload of affiliate links. It gets to work once I upload them to high traffic sites for more eyeballs. In my case, my facebook has 4000 friends, so I inserted such reports into my wall- leading to almost $1000 of revenues in a single evening. I also posted the PDF on forums like Warriorforum, Digitalpoint Xtrememind and Entrepreneur It’s at places like this where you can get almost 2000 views in a week. If even 10% convert, your effort was worth your while.

Good luck!

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Most people think that making money online entails creating one’s own content. That can daunt you because nothing can be more frightening than a blank page. But did you know you can make money using the input of others?

I already discussed this last year with the use of CMS system like an online recruitment portal. One example I gave was Jobcentralasia which streams in an extra $1500 without intervention.Today, I want to share with you another method. This one entails selling interviews of successful folks.

The objective of this system is to create profitable websites or reports from scratch- but using the brains of those who’ve made it. It will have just one page and contain the responses of successful web entreprenuers.

To begin with, you are going to ride on the success of strong businesses. You will use these
successful businesses to churn in cash by creating informational products around their various
businesses, and then sell them on our website.

I know what you’re thinking. You feel that creating your own informational product is just too hard, well it’s not. It’s a piece of cake and you can do this in a day. Hence the first step is to find a successful online business. I prefer working with businesses that are making between $1k-$10k per month. Any less than that, and your market won’t be interested. Much more than this and people become skeptical of the claims.

Here’s how to find those businesses:

1. Mining the Sites for Sale category at Sitepoint.com and forums.digitalpoint.com
2. Mining the top sellers in each category on eBay – Many of these sellers have an
online store too.
3. Posting a classified ad on sitepoint, etc…looking to interview those who are successful.
4. Posting a message in the joint venture and/or off topic forum at WarriorForum.com

The next step is the easy part. You are to send the owners of these businesses an email soliciting their secrets. Understand that folks are leery about giving answers regarding their business to a
random stranger, so you must send in a very non intimidating letter.

My preferred method is to send a letter like so:

Hi,
I’m working on a presentation that features inspiring success stories from those who have
created powerful businesses for themselves. I’ve looked at your business, and must say that it’s very interesting! I’d like to do a short interview via email with you regarding your business. You can answer these questions at your convenience, and it should take around 10-15 minutes, that’s it. The contents of this report will be used to inspire aspiring entrepreneurs at xxxx.
For your time I will give you a free copy once the report is completed.
Let me know if this interests you.

Thanks,
Joey Plazo

Once I get a positive reply, I email the questions to them. It is critical that you want to ask questions to get a detailed understanding of exactly how the business works.

This done, you simply create a three page report containing their answers in prose format. (Make it funny and insightful- this way you get word of mouth advertising!)  Compile the data in secured  PDF then sell the report on a one page website or at ebay, digitalpoint, warrior forum or sitepoint. Good ad copy is what will sell the report. The following are my favorite venues:

1. SitePoint “Advertise Your Services” Forum

http://marketplace.sitepoint.com/categories/advertise-your-services

2. DigitalPoint “Buy Sell Trade” Forum

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/forumdisplay.php?f=24

3. WarriorForum “WSO Forum”

http://www.warriorforum.com/warrior-special-offers-forum/

4. WarriorForum “Classifieds”

http://www.warriorforum.com/warrior-forum-classified-ads/

At these sites, I personally make an additional $2000 a month at no advertising cost! These locations are frequented by hundreds of users at any given hour. Imagine the views you’ll get!

Good luck!

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My friends are overstressed. Last week one of of my banker friends threw up her hands and said, “How do I get out of the rat race? How do I make money in my pajamas like those people who blog when they feel like it”?”

I sympathize. There is nothing like being your own boss and holding office with nothing but a laptop and wireless connection. Running to the beck and call of a grizzly boss isn’t the way to live. But it’s the surest way to get silver hair if that’s your fancy.

So how does one become a monstrously popular blogger?

Jane, the frazzled banker, scrutinized the  popular blogs (including this one) for an insight into their secret. Her effort was in vain. She couldn’t find any that truly set them apart. All she knew was that they wrote well and had a following.

For Jane, and others aspiring to be popular bloggers, one thing should be made clear right now: there is no secret technique in blogging save for one. Bloggers must simply write about their fancy and be well informed about it.

The best blogs on the web are tightly niched. They focus on only one subject and they contain various takes on the topic. People with an interest in the subject keep coming back for fresh perspectives. That’s what drives the income. The more people there are, the higher the chances the blog will earn advertising revenue.

A great blogger doesn’t have to be an expert on the topic. He merely must know a little more on the subject and he must write it with a passion. This won’t be a problem if the blogger builds his site around ideas he already gossips about. Blogging would then be an electronic version of gossip!

It’s really easy to begin.

One of my passions was airsoft. I built a niche blog on airsoft simply by buying a For Dummies Guide on Airsoft and pouring over my piles of airsoft mag.  From that I literally had a treasure trove of tips, tricks and techniques to share on the wargame. People loved it and kept coming back such that airsoft companies offered advertising bids.

Want to break the shackles of work? Pick a topic, any topic. Make sure you love it and and can write about it. Then start a blog!

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I generated quite a bit of negative buzz last week when I riled up some of our readers with a provocative article regarding ad blocking.

While most of the comments were reminiscent of the sort of flaming that killed usenet as a viable platform for discussion, there were a few reasonable readers with opposing viewpoints who took part, and some good arguments were made for both sides.

Ad blocking certainly isn’t going anywhere. It isn’t limited to the Firefox web browser. Ad blocking solutions exist for Internet Explorer, Opera, Safari and Google’s Chrome. For that matter, OS X and unix users don’t even need to bother with a web browser add-on, they can just add offending domains to /etc/hosts. While I doubt that vendors like Microsoft, Apple or Google would ever make ad blocking an intrinsic behavior of their browsers, there will always be someone out there who will pick up the gauntlet and create an add-on to do the job.

The fact of the matter remains, users who utilize ad blocking add-ons are creating and using a derivative of the original content, something that violates copyright law. Not to mention those web publishers who have a terms of service requiring users to view their content in it’s entirety. So, whether for or against ad blocking, expect to eventually see litigation regarding copyright and terms of service violation.

Obviously ad blocking is problematic for web publishers who depend upon ad revenue to make their content available. Is this the end of the internet’s current financial model?

In a word, no.

The amount of users using ad blocking add-ons is miniscule. If 20% of Firefox users are using an ad blocker, that still only accounts for 4% of all internet users. If 10%, or even 20%, of all internet users were using ad blocking technology, you still have the 80-90% that only install add-ons necessary to enjoy content, like Flash. So the web publisher doesn’t really like the idea of people using ad blocking technology, but it isn’t a threat to his livelihood either as long as ad blocker usage levels remain where they are.

I’m all for playing devil’s advocate though, so let’s explore what the alternatives are to the current ad based financial model:

• Membership Sites start charging a monthly fee for membership. This will do three things:
  1. The vast majority of websites who do not want to provide content for no financial return will disappear. Would you pay $5 a month to read Connected Internet? How about the 40 other sites you read on a regular basis? You guys are probably a lot like me, and are all over the web soaking up information and taking part in discussions. Enjoying internet content just became really expensive, didn’t it?
  2. The extremely vocal anonymity crowd will lose their minds because they have to sacrifice some of their sacred anonymity to enjoy web content.
  3. There will still be sites giving you the same content for nothing, except now you are a pirate for using them, just like you would be for downloading the latest music, software or movies. While the small percentage of ad blockers who feel no shame for doing so because they defy the idea of intellectual property won’t care, the average person doesn’t want to intentionally break the law.

• Networks The ad based financial model of the internet has failed, and the larger internet concerns form networks, just like television. Your internet service provider has to pay to access the various networks. As a result, your monthly internet access costs more than what you are paying now. Again, those sites not affiliated with a network who don’t wish to produce content gratis disappear. Your internet gets a lot smaller, and you’re paying more for it.
• Metered use Litigation spirals out of control, and some rocket scientist’s answer is to legislate a mandatory pay-as-you-play scheme for the internet. Some goofy client-server relationship is integrated into the major web browsers, and you are charged by your isp for your actual usage. Sounds expensive to me. Again, someone will work around this, but you’re pirating when you use a hacked browser to get the content for free, and there will be even more litigation.

I guarantee you if any of the above three models ever became a reality that the most vocal opposition would come from the people who presently support ad blocking.

Face it, while the current model may annoy you to the point of running specialized software to subvert it, it’s the best solution we have. Both for publishers providing you the content and for users enjoying access to unrestricted content.

While there may be a sizable chunk of bandwidth consumed by content that is not of use to anyone and which no one would miss, think of all the great content produced by people that would disappear on a web with a different financial model.

Some people use a condescending tone when referring to blogs. I used to feel the same way. I don’t anymore. There are a lot of people out there bringing content to the web that is of tremendous value. You don’t have to be a journalist to blog, and frankly I’ve read better commentary from bloggers on the same topic than what “legitimate” news sites have had to contribute at times. Not to mention that depending on where you live (and yes, this includes the USA) your media news coverage is censored to some degree or other. Blogs are and have been an instrumental vehicle for delivering news that you may not have gotten otherwise. No, I don’t want a web without blogs, even if that means the overall noise level of the internet increases exponentially with their presence.

The ad-based internet isn’t going anywhere, even if a percentage of users find advertising so intrusive that they use ad blocking browser add-ons to filter their content. If you have a better idea please share it in the comments section so I can steal it we can discuss it further.

For more on this subject take a look at Joseph Rosenbaum’s article Ad Blocking Technology – The Potential Effects & Implications.

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What was the last thing you watched? Surrogate? That was a good one. I just loved it when Bruce Willis’ wife appeared in person. I refer to the flesh and blood person, not the robotic femme fatale that had everyone swooning. The stark contrast dropped my jaw.

Prior to this I saw a few other good ones like Red Cliff and Ninja Assassins. Good epic flicks that had swords and gore aplenty. I relished Red Cliff so much I saw it a second time- all 3 hours of it!

People spend lots of time with movies because it helps them forget the real world. The escape into fantasy helps blur away the stress and pressing problems of the moment. Indeedy do- movies are a boon to couch potatoes.

But did you know movies can make you rich too?

Nope, you don’t have to be a director or actor to cash in on the popularity of movies. You don’t need to know your aperture from your video pans to make a buck. You simply have to know how to make simple movie themed websites.

Here’s what’s in it for you. Early this year, I discovered how one of the most searched phrases on Google is the phrase “movie  trailer”. Google in the phrase and you’ll get 43 Million results.  That’s a lot of info on movie trailers. Now try long tail key words like “GForce movie trailer” or “halloween 2 movie trailer”. These also rank in the millions.

Open up adwords or overture keyword tool and key in the same. You’ll discover that both rank to the heavens in terms of search weight. People are into this stuff! There are lots of providers and a lot of searches!

So how do you make money out of this?

Utter simplicity.

First, watch the movie industry for movies that will show within 6 months to a year. Look for the overhyped ones. (Transformers 2 and 2012 were overhyped). These are the flicks that generate a lot of searches.

Next, buy a domain name that has the keywords of these movies, for instance, Transformers2movietrailer.com

Create a single page web and populate the title, meta and all that with the relevant keyword “transformers 2 movie trailer. This ensures that you snag top spot in the rankings without spending an advertising dime.

Grab a movie trailer from from Youtube and upload it to your website. You’re 99% done.

To make money, you must have an affiliate account with Clickbank.  Post the video on your page, and have it link to free movie sites like themoviedownloads.com. Also, add a phrase underneath each movie trailer you place on your site. Make it go like this:

Watch the Whole Movie Online By Clicking Here or on the Image Above

People searching for the movie and who land on your page will see your trailer, watch it, and click on the link. When they sign up, they’ll make you lots and lots of money.

To date, I have three websites on movies that have already shown, so traffic to them dropped considerably. That didn’t bother me though. I’ve made over $5000 on the three sites. Not bad, when hosting costs $9.

Now go out there and make cash!

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It’s been 4.5 years in the making but I handed my notice in at work three months ago and my last day of service was Friday, and after returning from a long weekend break in Madrid with my wife, I now find myself a full-time ‘blogger’.  I use the term blogger losely as I don’t really consider myself a blogger in the truest sense; I just happen to use blogging software like WordPress to power some of my sites.

Nevertheless, I now find myself totally reliant on the income generated from this site and others like Windows 7 News. Even though I’ve created budgets and rechecked them probably a million times over the last 6 months and I know I should have enough money to live off, it’s still quite scary that the paycheque I will receive tomorrow could be my last ever.   Things that I took for granted that came with my work package such as a guaranteed salary, company car, pensions, life insurance, critical illness insurance, health insurance etc have now taken on a totally different meaning now that I have to source them myself.  Also, a bad quarter now no longer means my firm loses money and the share price goes down, with no real impact on me… it now means I can’t support my family!

It’s a great feeling though to be my own boss, and I no longer have to worry about members of my team calling me, pleasing my boss or dragging myself to work on days when I’m just not in the mood.  No more getting upset with office politics for me, or bitching when someone else gets a promotion, or blaming someone else when a project goes wrong.  Now if things go right I can take all the credit, and if things go wrong I’ll have no-one to blame but myself.  This is the main reason I’ve taken the plunge and decided to work for myself full-time; because how successful I am from now on will be mainly down to me and my own efforts.

It’s been a long road for me to get to this point and I’d like to thank all the people who helped me get here.  First of all I’d like to thank Loic Le Meur for convincing me to meet him back in 2005 so that he could talk to me about what a new blogging service could do for my ISP.  At the time I’d heard of  ’blogs’ but I just couldn’t get my head around what they were.  Loic did a very good job in convincing me that my ISP users might be interested in setting up blogs, and he setup a free test typepad blog for me which eventually became this site, Connected Internet.

I’d also like to thank Darren Rowse for making me realise that it was possible to make money from blogging.  The first network I tried was Google Adsense and thankfully I can access my historical data which really made my afternoon.  In March 2005 I made the princely sum of $0.56 from Google Adsense, then in April 2005 I significantly improved my Adsense income to $3.13.  May 2005 brought home $5.05 and June 2005 $7.05.  I didn’t run any ads again until November 2005 where I made a huge $60.79.

December 2005 was the month that really changed things, where I took home $750.73 just from Google Adsense.  I couldn’t believe at the time that something I was doing up until then just for fun part-time could actually generate income!  Without reading Problogger, I would have given up on trying to make money online and I never would have considered targeting making $100 a day from Adsense or a six-figure blogger, marks that I hit back in August 2007.

Other people I would like to thank are Martin and Mikael who I shared and still share learnings, tips and tweaks that I’ve discovered along the way.  My informal partnership with Martin in particular has grown significantly this year and we now own a number of sites 50:50, including Otaku Gadgets and Windows 7 News. They both went full-time a while ago, and I hope that my sites improve as much as theirs have since.

I’d like to thank the various guys who have kept Connected Internet going during the months where I’ve been too busy to post, or when I’d just lost my blogging mojo and had no interest in churning out posts late at night.  Michael and Joey in particular have been there from day one, and for over 2 years have faithfully turned out great posts every week.

Lastly though I’d like to thank you my readers for giving me this opportunity.  Even if it weren’t because of the income generated from blogging, I’d still be blogging as I still get a buzz from being able to reach out to tens of thousands of people each day.  I hope that you’ll stay with me as I enter the next phase of my online journey!

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Thanks to a tip off from my business partner Martin, I’ve had unprecedented free access this week to my the top Google keywords that are sending traffic to my sites.  Using Google Analytics you can now track the top keywords for your site.  Armed with this data you can intelligently decide what keywords you want to target to try and drive additional traffic to your site, as well as tracking the impact of your efforts.

Just follow the steps below to setup google keyword tracking in Google.  You need to create three custom filters in a new profile.

Step 1: Add a New Profile To An Existing Website

To create a new profile, click on Add New Profile in Google Analytics.

Select the domain in the drop down list and give it a unique name, e.g. website rankings.

Step 2: Create 3 Filters

To create the three necessary filters, click on ‘edit’ next to the profile you just created and then click on ‘Add Filter’:

Now create the following three filters:

• Filter name: Ranking 1
• Filter type: Custom filter – Include
• Filter field: Campaign Medium
• Filter pattern: organic

• Filter name: Ranking 2
• Filter type: Custom filter – Include
• Filter field: Campaign Source
• Filter pattern: google

• Filter name: Ranking 3
• Filter type: Custom filter – Advanced
• Field A -> Extract A: Campaign term, (.*)
• Field B -> Extract B: Referral, (\?|&)cd=([^&]*)
• Output To -> User Defined: $A1 (position: $B2)

Step 3: Finishing Up

That’s basically it and google analytics is now tracking your keywords – it takes a few hours for data to appear.  While you are waiting you can setup the tracking for any other sites you might own:  Just repeat Step 1 but not Step 2, as you’ll find that the three filters you’ve created are already stored by google analytics and you can add them to your additional sites.

To view your keyword rankings, just click on Visitors/user Defined and you’ll see your google keyword stats.  Below is an screenshot from Otaku Gadgets that I own with Martin:

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Until recently, the only Cost per Click (CPC) network I’ve used on my sites is Google Adsense because the performance of the links are very consistent.  In fact, the Google Adsense ads I run in my posts still give me my best overall eCPM – much better than the few cents that some sites seem to get from Google Adsense.  Historically in my other ad units I’ve only ever run CPM ads, but recently I’ve had some success with running affiliate and other CPC banners managed by the OpenX Ad Server to ensure that only well performing banners are displayed.

I used to shy away from running affiliate banners because in my view they were risky as you never knew how much you would make and could end up not making a penny, whereas with CPM ads at least you would always get paid something. I use a number of CPM networks to try and ensure I get the maximum fill rate each day.  They are daisy-chained so that if one network can’t display a banner or hit my minimum CPM, then they pass the impression onto the next network in the chain.

At the end of the daisy chain I have a network who guarantee to display a paying remnant ad if they can’t display a campaign.  Although I’m lucky that I never have any PSA ads or blank slots, the CPM for the remnant ads isn’t great so I started at looking at alternative ways of improving the revenue I make from my remnant traffic.

I’m quite happy with the system I’ve implemented this week, which is working brilliantly and has opened up a whole new potential revenue stream for me.  I’ve been using the free OpenX Ad Server that allows you to run and manage your own ad campaigns.  One of the great features in OpenX is the ability to automate the serving of campaigns, so that the highest paying campaign is always showed first.  OpenX automatically calculates the highest eCPM prioritization by calculating the effective CPM for each of your CPC, CPA and CPM-based remnant campaigns and then determines the optimum weight to assign to each campaign so as to maximize your overall revenue.

This is best demonstrated by a worked example. Let’s say I have 3 campaigns:

• Campaign 1: My Remnant network deal that pays a fixed (or average) CPM of $0.5 (not the actual amount)
• Campaign 2: Affiliate banner where I get paid $30 per sale, where I know that I get 1 sale for every 20 clicks i.e. an average revenue per click or eCPC of $1.5
• Campaign 3: CPC deal paying $0.1 per click

When loading up these campaigns I can tell OpenX how much each one makes – $0.5CPM, $1.5CPC and $0.1CPC.  OpenX then starts serving test impressions and monitors the performance of each campaign.  If it finds that for Campaign 2 it takes 50,000 impressions to generate the 20 clicks to get one sale and $30 of revenue (20x$1.5CPC), then it works out that the eCPM is $0.60 ($30/50k impressions).  It now knows that Campaign 2′s CPM of $0.6 beats Campaign 1′s, so it will show Campaign 2 more often than Campaign 1.

If it finds that Campaign 3 is getting a good CTR, say 3%, then because I’ve told OpenX each click is worth $0.1 then it knows that 1,000 impressions will make $3 i.e. that the eCPM is $3 (30 clicks x $0.1).  So, even though the CPC is low OpenX knows this this is actually the best campaign out of the 3 and will show Campaign 3 more often the other two.

To ensure that OpenX always has the right data, it serves a minimum number of impressions of each campaign each day –  I’ve set mine to 100.  Using this method I’m now running a handful of affiliate/CPC ads on my sites to supplement my CPM adverts.  I’ve even setup OpenX to serve my network CPM ads by uploading their tags and manually entering the average CPM I see from these ads, so that if any of my CPC/affiliate deals are performing better than my CPM networks then these ads will be shown more often.

OpenX allows you to run and test multiple offers at the same time.  Loading up a new campaign only takes a few mins, and once uploaded the only additional work that is required is to update the eCPC numbers for affiliate deals based on the sales conversion you are seeing from your clicks.  The video below shows how easy it is to load a campaign to OpenX:

I’ve loaded up about half a dozen affiliate deals so far – if you have any others that you’ve used on your sites that have worked well for you then please let me know so I can load up more campaigns!

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Back in October 2007 Google went on the warpath against sites that sold text links and reduced their Page Ranks.  This site was one of those penalised, with its Page Rank reduced from 6 to 3.  At first Ididn’t know what to do, and because this site was making a decent amount of cash from selling Text Link Ads I thought I would carry on selling links until the advertisers inevitably deserted me because of my new low Page Rank.

However, the advertisers didn’t desert me as expected and nearly two years later I was still left with several advertisers.   My Google traffic continued to come through, but I’ve just decided to remove the links because it’s dragged on too long and I don’t want to risk incurring Google’s wrath further and maybe even getting delisted completely.  Being removed from the Google index would be a disaster for this site, which still receives around 70% of traffic from Google.

Should I have removed my text links sooner?  Probably.  I’m going to inform Google of the change and let them know that I’m being a good, responsible web citizen and ask that they reconsider my site to see if I can recover some of my Page Rank.

I’ll let you know if I manage to reclaim some blogging Page Rank rights!

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The economy just keeps getting worse. Inflation eroded much of our purchasing power that what purchased a quarterpounder 10 years ago buys an shriveled meat that’s tinier than the cushion of your shoe. It’s for this reason that online auction sites and flea markets like ebay, atomicmall and craigslist draw crowds. People hunting for bargains find goods at rockbottom prices. That make much more sense than paying retail, right?

Just last week, I purchased some nearly new iphones as incentivized gifts. These were 16GB 3G models that had nary a scratch. Guess how much I got each one for? $300? Hell no. I paid for each one at about $170. Now that was cheap. The receipients even thought they were brand new.

But auction sites are not the only way to save cash.  A new breed of service to help the consumer beat the crunch is found in the form of online bartering sites. Remember what it was like to barter? Back in primary school, you traded your ice cream or little Johnny’s frog. Today, you can trade your 4GB ipod for some writing services. You can trade anything in fact. There will always be someone needing something of yours.

So what makes online barter so attractive?

It Saves 100% Cash. Instead of spending retail or even reduced prices at auction sites, you simply trade your junk for someone else’s junk. There’s no exchange of currency. There’s merely a transfer of ownership. Think of it as a way to channel your funds to other income generating endeavors.

It Recycles Resources. Everytime you dump things in the trash, you contribute to pollution. Right now, we have enough cellphones, mp3s and laptops to create a medium sized country. Do you want to leave that to the next generation? Don’t trash your stuff. Let someone else use them!

It Lets You Gain Free Services. You don’t just barter products, you barter services. Look at your skills. Maybe someone needs snazzy graphics for his friendster profile. Maybe someone want a thesis. You can do work for, say, a second hand Asus eeePC. Cash saved!

Bartering predated the invention of modern currency.  Don’t assume it’s irrelevant today. It can save not just your cash, it can save the world. Are you ready to barter?

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Do you remember the time when  Blog and Pings helped skyrocket a weblog to success? That was 2004 to 2007. Now, with the abuse of that method, blogging and pinging has lost its power. Try using it. You’ll notice that it barely affects your PR or SERPs at it used to.

Where one SEO technique has faded away, a new method of improving engine visibility has arisen. And that’s through the help of massive web 2.0 site, Twitter.

With twitter, you can easily drive traffic to your site. The social networking site lets it become so easy to get the word out so you can enjoy effortless viral marketing. The rise of twitter led to the rise of dozens of twitter apps. Each one offers features that claim to help online marketers achieve their goals. Of the hundreds of twitter apps, I love only two. Once you try them, so will YOU.

TweetSuite- King of WordPress Tweet Plugins

Tweetsuite is a wordpress twitter plugin that does the work of a handful of twitter plugins. In a nutshell, it accomplishes the following

• Server-side (no-JS or remote calls) TweetBacks
• ReTweet-This buttons for each TweetBack
• A digg-like Tweet-This Button
• Automatic Tweeting of new posts
• A Most-Tweeted Widget
• A Recently-Tweeted Widget
• A My-Last-Tweets Widget
• A My-Favorited-Tweets Widget

You’ll discover that the integration of this plugin lets you keep n eye out on the twitter landscape and how it pertains  to your blog. It affords your users the capability to spread the good word on your gosepel and keep tabs on related posts. Once you install it, I doubt you’d ever take it off. It’s so comprehensive that it ranks up there with the All In One SEO Pack as a must-use wordpress tool.

Twitter Friend Adder

The Twitter Friend Adder, on the other hand is a free application and not a plugin. It runs of XP and Vista. The objective of the Twitter Friend Adder is to amass a great deal of followers to your twitter account. The steps it takes are simple

1. Input your login details
2. Input your keyword. The program will scan twitter for people matching that keyword. So if you put in ‘football’, it looks for people who tweeted recently about football or have the word in their profile or nick.
3. Alternatively, you can input a persons twitter handle. This way, the software app will hunt for all the twitter friends of the target
4. Set the program to add 100 friends daily. More than that and you may end up finding your account vaporized.
5. Set the program to pause 2 seconds in between adding. This mitigates screening filters.

Press GO! That’s  when the magic begins. Twitter Friend Adder logs in, scans for targets then FOLLOWS the matching targets. By reciprocity, people you follow, may follow you back and et voila! They become your followers.

I’ve experimente with one twitter account and its grown from zero to three hundred in three days. Those are potential eyeballs for ads!

Oh- one caveat- some people the program adds may not be people. They’re bots. Zombies. Twitter marketing androids. Meaning that they may be pure marketing vehicles for other SEO and SEM specialists as well. If you find that some people you added are mere robots, you can unfollow them. They’re useless to your camplaigns because they’ll probably ignore your tweets. Worse, they may even bombard you with advertising tweets!

This program is so good and so handy that I’ve notice people on eBay and DigitalPoint selling clones of the program. The lowest priced one was $19, and the priciest was $97. They promise the moon and stars, vowing that a tidal wave of traffic will come in. Not true. While you can use the Twitter Friend Adder to get the word out, abuse of it by means of blasting nothing but ads will get people annoyed. You’ll be UNFOLLOWED.

My advice? Send marketing spiels once a week. The rest of the week, send em the good stuff. Like what you ate for dinner.

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Say ‘Affiliate Marketing’ to the average online marketer and they’ll immediately think of Clickbank and CommissionJunction. It’s not surprising. Both companies have been around since 1999. Both companies boast publishers numbering in the thousands and affiliates in… the hundreds of thousands. Those who jump into affiliate marketing start out with Clickbank first. Then they stick with clickbank.

But there’s life outside Clickbank. And there’s more money to be made with an alternate affiliate network that can eclipse Clickbank earnings in no time. I refer to the Ebay Partner Network.

As we all know, ebay is that monster auction house about a decade old. They hold the monopoly in advertiser listing and visitor traffic. At any given day, you can expect about a million or so running auctions. Money changes hands in realtime as auctions close and winning bidders pay. Ebay is not content with the current growth and seeks to expand. To do this, Ebay mirrored the affiliate marketing networks and ported a powerful system into their business model. Now, affiliate marketers like you and I can promote ebay products- and take huge cuts out of closing auctions.

The ebaypartnernetwork, in a nutshell allows you to sign up and input code into your site. The code displays relevant auctions- listings that mirror the content of your web. Your visitors now enjoy not only your content, but also your relevant adsense ads, related clickbank products and now your ebay listings. Talk about multiple streams of possible revenue. A click on anything leads to cha-ching in the bank!

To earn from the Ebay Partner Network, you simply do the following:

• Sign up
• List Your Sites (if you have no sites, you won’t be approved)
• Choose whether to be paid via paypal or cheque
• Wait for approval
• Get approved
• Inject the code and wait for commissions

The ebay partner network has spawned dozens of creative monetization ideas. One which I recently stumbled across is the wordpress system first marketed at DigitalPoint called PhpBay. Originally released for free,  the phpBay script allows WordPress owners to transform their blogs into fully functioning niche sites promoting ebay listings. Simply activate the code, insert into content pages, and voila, you have bag auctions on your fashion site or truck auctions on your trucking site.  Visitors who love your content see the listings and itch to bid… after all, who can resist ebay prices? It costs $79 and I tell you- well worth it. I’ve begun to integrate this into some of the blogs I run.

A competing method to leverage the ebay niche marketing system is that which Everton mentioned earlier on called the Number 1 Way to Make Money online. Everton’s related post on making money online via ebay reveals to us just how powerful the new business model is and how we can profit from it building niche sites focusing on ebay listings. When you create niche sites using the Build a Niche Site method or the PhpBay method, you offer visitors tightly niched content that irresistibly goad your readers to the ebay listings. You also rank highly in search engines without Adwords advertising because your theme is tightly built around related keywords!  If you ask me, I agree that niche sites focusing on a narrow set of ebay products can eliminate costly advertising but drive heavy buying traffic in less than a google update.

The benefit of adding ebay listings to yout site is that:

• You don’t maintain inventory.
• You simply integrate it into your content
• People associate your quality content with the listings.
• They buy!

Currently, I’ve actively began promoting fledgling sites with the ebay listings using Facebook and Twitter. In particular, I’m using the Twitter Friend Adder tool (it’s free! don’t buy Adders that cost $$$)to expand my twitter network so more people can enjoy the gospel of ebay marketing. It’s working. Quite a few people have purchased from my ebay listings.  I expect ebay to cut me a paypal cheque sometime next month and I’m hoping it’d be at least $500. If things work out, I’ll weed out the anemic networks on my blogs such as Kontera.

Ebay has over 10,000,000 products. Are you ready to profit?

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I’m leaning back on my high chair right now, musing my next possible  product offering. Will it be ebooks or information? CDs perhaps? Maybe outsourced content supported by ads and affiliate links. I personally love the latter as that allows me to be a true royal bum,

Or maybe I’ll expand my physical product line. Attacking the ebay arena with low priced LCD TVs is one option. Maybe peddle digicams and PSPs. Then again I can cater to the vanity of aged ladies and go fullsteam with branded items like LVs, Chanels and Pradas.

Choices choices choices. There are myriad possible marketable items that can generate quick revenue, but whatever the marketer decides, the product can be divided into one of two classes: those self-created and those procured from wholesalers and subsequently disposed retail. Both types have advantages and disadvantages. Know what they are?

Self Created Products

Self created products generally afford numerous advantages. The first is that it allows the creator to appropriate full profit. There is no revenue sharing with the inventor. As the maker, you wield total control over branding, promotions, pricing and locational disposition. A killer product can then be marketed through agents and downlines, allowing the you to profit from the activity of sub salesmen.

This is not without its disadvantages. Creating a product takes time and resources. Unless the product is informational, the inventor stands to lose money if the creation does not sell. For the online marketer, this may not be palatable- hence if you’re venturing to the web for side income and you plan to create your products, I recommend  that you restrict yourself to informational products such as ebooks, site content and ebooks.

Historically, I’ve made the highest yield with the following self-created products:

• ebooks- these don’t take much time to create and costs for disposal are shockingly low. You can sell 1 ebook or 10,000, but each succeeding book wont add to your variable cost of goods. It’s also easy to promote these ebooks. You can do it via Clickbank and earn from the collective effort of thousands of affiliates. You can also sell on ebay and exploit the million of visitors the site affords. Then there are niche sites such as DigitalPoint, WarriorForum and BlackHat World.
• Software- Visit elance.com or rentacoder.com and you can hire a genius to create a killer XP app, iphone proggy or symbian widget. Sell these online after paying the coder $200 and its all pure profit from there. I used download.com to sell windows optimizers for $9. The profit was great, but I had to ensure occasional updates when bugs surfaced.
• Mp3- Sell music! No, not songs because that would take a great deal of luck. Sell self-help Mp3s. Spend 20minutes discussing rare information like ‘selling with NLP’ and you’ve got it made. There are niche markets that lap up such subjects. One fellow I know sold explicit MP4s (videos) that teach how to lead women to orgasm and he made a fortune!

Outsourced Products

Acting as a middleman can pay off big time. For starters, you don’t need to spend time on R&D. You also can rely on the product’s existing brand equity. There’s no need to start from scratch. The downside is that capital expenditure can be quite iffy. Expect to spend at least $1000 for starting stock. There are two ways to succeed in this arena.

• Buy Things in Bulk. Check out Global Sources or Alibaba. At these sites, you have access to a range of products that that can be imported en masse then redistributed. Choose this option and you enjoy up to 80% discounts. In 2002, I purchased Biotim, a wellness device, from an Alibaba supplier at $2 a piece as a wholesale buyer. Suggested retail was $24.95. My spread was massive. The stock of 1000 units emptied in less than a month at ebay and my homesites.
• Engage the Services of Dropshippers. If spending on initial stock scares you, then don’t fear. You can still sell 50 inch LCD TVs and the latest Blueray players with the aid of dropshippers. A dropshipper is a company that ships products for you in your name upon remittance of payment. The system is simple. Simply create an account with credible drop shippers, grab products you’d like to sell , and dispose of them on ebay, your website or on your blogs. The only thing you have to do is to provide customer support and to remit payment to the dropshipper who then ships in your name, making it appear that the products came from you. This is one heckuva way to make megabucks at almost no cost- while appearing like a tycoon! Be warned, there are numerous scam dropshippers out there out to fleece you. The only one I trust as of this point is World Wide Brands which never failed me and offers MILLIONS of products for distribution. World Brands is an aggregator of credible suppliers as well as a support system for retailers who want to make a living starting online shopping malls at next to no cost.

The recession is getting worse but I still smile. I’m self-employed and I determine my future with my effort. For as long as the internet is there, I have safety net that buffers me from insolvency. How have you used the internet lately?

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Until recently, I’d made next to no income from affiliate marketing apart from the occasional referral.  However, recently I’ve started to put a few affiliate deals in place and I’m now making a decent amount per day from affiliate marketing.  However, I still think I’m just scratching the surface and there’s much more that I could be doing.

I’ve just purchased a new 9 Step Guide to Affiliate Marketing that I think is a must read if like me you want to learn how to do it properly.  After skimming the first section of the guide, I excitedly told my wife that we were going to increase our earnings now, and she asked me to print out the guide because she wants to help and she still works better with paper.

The guide is called The Number 1 Way To Make Money Online which I know sounds like all the other guides on the web, but this one really is extremely good. It’s been put together by the creators of “Build A Niche Store” (which many of you will probably know as BANS) and is built off the back of their 4 1/2 years spent making money in this way and their 2+ years spent helping over 10,000 people do the same through the development of the BANS platform.

It’s well presented, contains solid step-by-step information and it is very probably the best “make money online” guide of the summer.

More: The Number 1 Way To Make Money Online

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Imagine yourself walking home late at night. It’s 12mn and there’s nary a soul in sight. Then something cold presses into your back. Damn. A burly man in a clown mask has a .45 caliber and he’s demanding your cash. Emotions cloud your judgment. You’re an 8th dan blackbelter in Karate and you’ve whipped UFC champions single handedly- on sick days! But somehow, you can’t move. Fear has grounded you. Or could it be the absurdity of his humorous mask? You hand over the wallet and the comedic  ruffian blends into the night. You just lost $2000.

Fear drives people to do crazy things. Fear stops the thinking process and channels behavior to preset outcomes. Like with the case above. That guy maybe a high school kid and as strong as your 10 year old brother, but fear killed your capacity to defend yourself. Fear is a powerful tool to make money!

I don’t recommend cashing in on fear to prey on hapless old ladies or shuddering accountants in the dead of the night. I do, however, recommend leveraging fear in your online marketing campaigns. Fear and humor coerce people into crazy things in the real world; and they also compel action in the intangible universe of the web.

Many of you probably use paid ads to promote your products. The two most popular include Adwords and Overture. These ad systems allow you to post a few lines in the hopes of attracting eyeballs which you hope leads into the predetermined behaviour of clickingthrough and visiting your site. Have you been stumped? I’m sure you’ve tried all kinds of  cute ad lines but people just don’t click. Here’s why: you’re probably not using fear and humor. Stop for a moment, step back and take this in right now:  when you compete against millions of ads, the only way to stand out is to get them wetting their pants or laughing their nuts off.

Consider the following examples.

Make Money Now - You can make $$$ Easily, Best Program in the web!

or

My Friends Lost $3201- Are you being scammed? Don’t pay till you read this!

I bet my socks that the second ad will drive more clickthroughs. People fear loss. They’re afraid of being the next guy run over beneath the massive wheels of a fraudster out to make a quick buck. On the other hand, the first ad resembles every other ad on the web. It fades into the background of the white noise of advertising.

Now consider the next example.

Affordable Domains- It’s only $15. Now you can have one!

or

Your Wife Got Hers Cheaper- If you pay more, We’ll tell her. Idiot.

Like fear, humor has a way of driving traffic. Sometimes, it may not convince people to buy, but it inspires them to satisfy their curiosity and see what you have to offer. So they visit your site. And you hook them and laugh your way to the back. Contrast that with the first ad. It doesn’t matter that you’re selling your domain for $15 or $13 or even $1. Everyone else is. Do you think people will click? No. Your ad fades into the limbo of advertising white noise.

To stand out, hit the emotions. If your an ad man, make people act irrationally and the best way to accomplish that task is to raise their hairs or tickle their ribs. Your ads must accomplish either. Otherwise, you’re wasting your advertising dollars

Now before you get out there and start tweaking your ads, remember one last thing. People are vain. They don’t care about you or I. They care about themselves. Your ads, therefore must answer one single question:

“What’s In It For Me”

Fail to answer that question, and no matter how funny you are, you’ll end up looking  hilarious going broke on adwords. Only Goolge ends up laughing.

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Every heard of the term bum marketing? It’s got nothing to do with hobos or panhandling under a bridge. Rather, it is a solid alternative to making quick cash online. Bum marketing allows you to do a bit of work today  and receive residual income long after the groundwork had completed. Execute it properly and you can make about $200+ a week without further effort.

For the uninitiated, bum marketing is a nearly zero-capital endeavor that requires:

• An account with an affiliate marketing company like Clickbank or Commission Junction
• A propensity to write
• Basic knowledge of keyword analysis
• An account with top article aggregators like Ezinearticles and GoArticles

Have these and you’re set to make some serious and lasting streams of cash. Shall we begin?

First, understand the objective of bum marketing: to release helpful articles that will be republished by numerous web owners. Each article carries a lucrative bomb in the form of affiliate links that earn you up to 75%  from products sold as a consequence of clicking those links.

The blow by blow method to basic bum marketing consists of the following steps.

1. Decide first on topics you are passionate about. This is vital because you will be writing 250 to 600 words on it.
2. ReSearch google on the chosen topic by typing in related phrases . If you see that search results for the topic is over 10,000 and under 100,000, you have a profitable niche. I’ve observed from experience that self help topics command great interest. Examples include weight loss, dating, starting businesses, power dressing ad travel.
3. Visit the Google Adwords, keywords tool. Verify that the phrases you selected result in advertiser interest. If Advertisers bid on the phrases you chose, it’s profitable for you. Jot these down! An easy way to determine advertiser interest is how deep the bars are colored. Those bars over half gray indicate considerable advertiser spending.
4. Construct your article based on your findings. Use the phrase you searched for on google as your title, but tweak it to make it enticing. Something like “7 Ways To Make Your Dog Stop Pooping” is clickworthy. “Dissertation on Labradors” is yawn inspiring. Remember that your title will make or break you.
5. Once your articles are done (make five of them), search clickbank.com and commission junction for products related to your article. What you plan to do is insert these products’ affiliate links in your article. Choose products that have compelling sales pages. Avoid those that look unprofessional. It also helps to look at the %ref indicator for each product. The higher it is, the more likely it will sell for you.
6. Create a tagline at the end of your article following the formula “If you’d like more information, check out xxxx”. XXXX will be a tantalizing anchor text to the selected clickbank product. Exercise your imagination when creating the tagline. You want them to click on that link.
7. Visit the article repositories. I recommend EzineArticles.com and GoArticles.com Submit your articles complete with the taglines. In a few days your articles will go live. I love these sites because thousands of webmasters visit this site to get content and replicate them within their own sites.  Imagine an army of over 500 to 1000 sites promoting your article with the affiliate links. Each time someone reads the article and buys a product as a result of your links, you get a huge cut! Realistically you’re looking at a steady stream of cash for the long term. Expect that these websites (as well as the article repositories) will keep your articles for a few months. For as long as the articles are live, you enjoy the possibility of making money.

Personally, I make it a point to upload at least one article to Ezine every week. I monitor the clickthroughs from the URLs and the originating pages (Clickbank allows you to track referrers). The evidence is clear: the three minutes you spend writing the articles is worth the time. Every article I’ve ever written generates at least 2 purchases a week. That’s been consistent for two years now

Are you ready to make serious cash as a bum?

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Heard of Clickbank? For the uninitiated, Clickbank is one of the world’s largest affiliate system. It serves two markets. Publishers selling software upload software, ebooks and other intangibles to Clickbank’s system to find buyers. Website owners, market these products as affiliates and earn up to 75% in commissions. The site has paid out an astounding $1 Billion US ollars to date. That’s the GDP of  medium sized country!

From 2001- to 2008, the company enjoyed stellar growth. Millionaires have built a fortune with clickbank. Heard of the RichJerk? He’s one of the mavericks who created a massive clickbank affiliate system selling his ebook RichJerk… which simply teaches people how to market product using affiliate systems! Then there are the niche authors specializing in nlp, SEO,  seduction, etc. There’s a great demand for esoteric knowledge. Clickbank helped them sell and made a lot of rich folks.

Today, Clickbank has failed the expectations of many. From blog rumblings, you’ll discover that sales have slumped across the board with affiliates barely scraping in a paycheck. Some attribute it to recession. Some claim that affiliate marketing simply lost its luster. I agree. But there’s still a hardcore way to make money of this marketing monster.

• Skip the One Page Affiliate Website Method. The average affiliate marketer cashed in on clickbank creating a clone of the original product’s site. He used the same spiel and plugged in his affiliate link at the bottom to reap in the commissions. This worked well in the past when it was easy to get indexed fast and achieve Pagerank early. It’s not the case today. Google is strict in its listings and rarely will a new affiliate marketer find his new webpage listed. It could take months or years to show in the index.  Sometimes these sites never appear on the index because of duplicate content filters. Either way, the e-product may already have disappeared, denying the affiliate a sale!
• Quit The Adwords Blitzes. Another popular method was to spend on adwords to promote an affiliate link or to point to one of the new, unranked affiliate websites. Know something? This has to be one of the lamest methods ever used. Try promoting forex ebooks on adwords with this technique. It will cost you almost $10 o $20 per click (the niche is very costly) and in the rare chance that the purchases closes the sale, you make a measly $30 per sale. Or less. Adwords and advertising networks like overture is not cost effective for clickbank affiliate marketing systems. Variable cost of operations simply goes through the roof!
• Instead, Set up Honest To Goodness Review Networks. I maintain a few sites that give real reviews. These blogs and fora don’t use the exact marketing spiel deployed by the original product owner. Instead, writers look in depth into the product (by borrowing from those who purchased) and whip up solid insider looks. Pros and cons are listed, as well as hidden costs. There’s a balance of view. Some products are trashed. Some are rated highly. At the end of every review, we plug in the hoplink. What happens? The reader feels that the information is valuable. He’s not bamboozled into buying something on the basis of something contrived. Even better, google loves it for unique content.
• Get the Review Network Spidered Well. I want Google to update  data on the blogs so that new reviews appear almost overnight. There’s no point if users search for an eproduct review and don’t see it on my site till months later. My trick is simple. I get backlinks from gargantuan pageranked sites like W3C and .edu. This method gets google spiders crawling like … well… spiders… daily.
• Look at the %refd Attribute of the Product. Don’t just sell any clickbank product. Select the most saleable. When you browse the clickbank marketplace, take note of the %refd attribute. This tells what percentage of the product sales came from affiliates and what came from the company. 100% means that ALL it’s sales came from Affiliates. That means it lends itself well to affiliate marketing!
• Look at the grav Attribute – Gravity is key!  This pertains to the number of affiliates who earned a commission selling the product. It is not an exact number. It is a weighted sum, deeply emphasizing the sales performance of the preceeding 16 weeks. Higher grav means  solid performer.

Have your clickbank sales slowed? Don’t despair. Take a step back and evaluate your strategy. Then try my methodology. It could kickstart your thousand dollar paychecks!

How I Still Rake It In With Clickbank is a post from Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news. - Updated daily with the latest news, tips, tweaks, social networking, wordpress tips & tweaks, windows optimization help and more.. Visit Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news. for more articles.

There’s SEO and there’s Black Magic SEO. They’re quite the same. Both have the objective of increasing rankings. Both aim for more traffic. And both cost quite a bit if you outsource it to a third party optimizer. The difference, however is stark and startling. SEO, normal SEO, that is, produces positive results gradually. The results stay for a long time and guarantee solid web brand equity. Black Magic SEO, on the other hand, tempts the practitioner with allegedly rapid results and at a lower level of effort. The reality of it is, Black Magic SEO does the exact opposite of what it promises. Over a month, you can be deranked, deindexed and transported to oblivion. The implication? Never use Black Magic SEO for yourself. Use it on competitors you want to bury in the web.

You must be wondering what constitutes Black Magic SEO.  I’m confident you’ve used its one tine or the other- without realizing the damage it wrought on your sites. The following are some of the most popular methodologies in this dark craft:

• Cloaking Your Web. Cloaking is great if you’re a Klingon Warbird. It isn’t so great if you’re a website. The gist of cloaking is presenting keyword optimized data to search engine robots, and a totally new set of people-friendly information to humans. The action is accomplished using special onsite scripts- something Google finds in blatant violation of TOS. Prior to getting caught, you will rank well because of keyword rich information digested by web bots. But once your caught- goodbye pagerank. Prepare a good re-consideration letter to your google account exec.
• Submitting to 1000s of Free For All Directories. You know what these are: they hold absolutely no unity of information and are  so useless as repositories of knowledge that no websurfer nor SE robot visits them. Google tends to consider them link farms and devalues links found thereupon. In fact, SEs may even downgrade the ranking of sites that boast many incoming links from the same because these are bad neighborhoods. You want to increase your ranking? Grab inbound links from related quality sites. Avoid thousands of useless unrelated links.
• Use Stealth AutoCommenting Software. Check out your hard drive. Do you have software like AutoBlog Poster or Commment Poster Pro? These products promise to automatically  send your link to 1000s of blogs using generic comments like “Nice Site, check out my viagra”. The objective is simple. To spam blogs with anchor text pointing to your URL. There’s a problem with this method. First, Google gets suspicious when multiple sites point to one site using the same anchor text. Second, Blog owners may report you as a spammer. Either way, you stand to be blacklisted. (Consider also, that the exercise is now futile- most blogs already block comments)
• Spawn an Army Of Mindless Blogs Those with deep pockets actually go through the trouble of creating hundreds of domains, populating them with blogs and having them all point to one URL. This used to work- until google started sniffing out for warning flags. It’s an easy task to discern the culprits. When too many blogs using the same C class IP address point at the same URL, the tactic screams “Im doing black magic SEO! Ban me!”. Your entire network, including the primary site will go down. Overnight. Google hates artificially inflated rankings. This is one of the most overt and it clutters the web with useless sites.
• Raid The Fora Online communities built around niche topics attract Black SEO practitioners who believe that posting useless comments like ” Nice thread” and ” Good idea” is a good way to market their warez.  Of course, leaving the useless comments is the secondary objective. The primary objective is to sign in with forum signatures that contain links to their magical sites. Now think. Would anyone visit the site of such insensitive members? Definitely not. But they persist- going even to the extent of using auto posting software that creates hundreds of fora accounts on the fly and posting random messages taken from dictionary algorithms. My own forum had been attracting pests and I tell you- it’s such a pleasure swatting them down! Simply report them to their ISP for malicious spamming. There’s already prima facie evidence left behind.

So, do you use any of these techniques? Don’t be misled. You won’t get high rankings with these. You’ll end up bumped down the food chain. Use these techniques only for ONE purpose: attacking your competitor. Other than that, steer clear!

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The internet will always be a moving target. New technologies and fresh ideas will continue to emerge, and there will never be a “snapshot” for developers and users to reference to know what the boundaries are.

I remember when Safari first came out with RSS support. I didn’t know what RSS was, and my initial reaction was “what do I need this for, I already have a means to read web sites?”. Before long I was able to see the usefulness of RSS, and now I would feel lost without an RSS reader.

I’m not a big fan of Twitter, but I can understand how the idea of a personal pseudo-feed appeals to people. Twitter is another example of a new idea that adds value to the internet.

Ideas like these are the product of fertile minds who figure out new ways to make the global network useful to people. Within the next five years new ideas will arise, and some will become just as indispensable to our internet experience as the preceding good ideas were. It’s all about adding value to the experience.

Similar evolutions have occurred with web content. Is there more content out there today that adds value to the internet than there was ten years ago? Is there an order of magnitude more detritus on the web than there was ten years ago? The answer on both counts is an unqualified “yes”.

It’s a topic I think of quite frequently. I believe that the two motivations behind the creation of web resources are money and value. I happen to fall in the latter category, and the desire to add value to the internet is much more important to me than any financial reward I may incur from my internet related activity. This is a detriment to the level of success I experience earning extra income from the web, because I ignore avenues that I know will guarantee me revenue if they don’t meet two criteria. First and foremost, the pursuit must interest me. Without a personal interest I am quite unwilling to expend any energy toward a desired end.

Second, I must be convinced that the endeavor will be of use to someone. If no one can relate to what I’m doing, learn from what I’m doing, find use in what I am doing, or care about what I’m doing, then there’s just no point in doing it as far as I am concerned.

I’m sure that my lofty values are a source of concern for this site’s proprietor at times, who would much rather I write articles that are link bait, or that produce generous comment traffic. While I like links, and I appreciate reader interest, they aren’t my primary motivation.

Don’t get me wrong- there is absolutely nothing wrong with financial gain from your internet endeavors. I’ve written many articles on how to and how not to have some measure of success doing just that. My concern comes from the vast amount of fortune seeking that occurs on the internet that benefits absolutely no one but the proprietor of the scam, er, venture.

Remember when you first realized that letting your private email address get published anywhere on the web was a Bad Idea? How much spam was showing up in your inbox at the time that revelation hit you?

The internet has so much more of this noise, or static, than it used to that we have to figure out new ways to avoid it. I’m not talking about email spam. I’m talking about the oppressive weight of internet sites that serve absolutely no purpose whatsoever but to make the site owner a buck.

We need search engines to be our shield from these annoyances, and we need smart, new ideas for how to filter out the static without reducing the effectiveness of our search results. The last thing I need in my search results is spam.

Google, as they tend to do, lead the way with their Trust Rank system, which is intended to weed out the sites with genuine content from the sites that are made to manipulate Page Rank in order to achieve higher search results. It’s a work in progress, as a given Google search still produces way too many splog hits and e-commerce site links, but it’s a step in the right direction and will continue to evolve over time.

Am I condemning all mercenary internet endeavors out of hand? Not at all. Even among the sites that are intended for the sole purpose of affiliate commissions you will find sites that provide a genuine service, intended or not.

It’s just that there is so much damn static on the internet. We don’t need any more, and I am making a personal appeal to all of you who contrive to make a profit on the internet:

Whatever your goal, create something that is of use to others. That’s all. Make truckloads full of money, just don’t do it at the expense of the global bandwidth.

If you make splogs, sites that aggregate mailing list postings with a large helping of intrusive advertising, blogs with questionable content but plenty of advertising, monetized placeholder domains, sites that masquerade as product review sites but under further inspection really aren’t, monetized Amazon affiliate sites that attempt to hide what they are, bogus web forums with compensated postings and lots of Adsense, or any of the other sites that provide nothing to anyone but you, you are a scumbag and you are making a mess of my internet.

If you have considered any of the above as a means of income, I urge you to consider the consequences and reconsider.

What kind of mark do you want to leave on the internet? Are you ok with being a snake oil salesman that has to travel from town to town to stay one step ahead of an angry mob, or are you an entrepreneur that cares about how you make your fortune?

Create something of value. There’s too much static as it is.

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This morning my best friend and I were comparing notes on the latest money making schemes that took our fancy. He shared how his newly launched thesis site made money selling dissertations. The upside of it was that it grossed him $8000 a month (there are tons of lazy students out there… even PhDs!). The downer was that it cost him $5000 to maintain. Writers, adwords marketing and hosting ate into most of the profit. He took home $3000 to show for  his hard labor- which more or less was what the janitor in our building made for less effort.

I, on the other hand, expounded on how my 4 year old online recruitment site kept on raking it in with advertising revenues despite it being free for employers and a large drop in pagerank. SERPs remained unaffected despite the same and traffic drove  adsense and affiliate sales through the roof. The downside came from the seasonality of earnings, with the site barely scraping through during the brrr months.

Three drinks into the gettogether, a third friend joined in and threw in a gem to our money-mining discussion. He shared how Instructables.com made him close to $1000 extra a month. We listened spell bound.

For the uninitiated, instructables.com is a relatively unknown how-to site. The visionary developers organized a repository of free information that focused on the theme of creation.

The site attracted innovative minds. Members joined in order to dissect in full color, video and text, methods of creating something new or doing something better. Think of it like a giant library that teaches one how to do things without emphasis on theory. Everything here is to the point. On site, you can find plans on how to create a more comfortable slipper, fashion a laser gun out of  DVD player and even wow your friends with a free energy robot that never runs out of steam.

My friend monetized all this in conjunction with ebay.com.  He simply searched the auction giant for in demand items, matched them with building plans from instructables and promoted a better item. Here’s how he did it.

• Check out What’s Hot. Ebay lets its members discover hot searches as well as wishlists. Currently, items like modified PSPs and novelty gadgets like low powered laser guns and sonic blasters command moderate interest.  Users either bid for these actively or post a request for the sale of the product. The trick is to identify these hot items and cash in.
• Scan Instructables.com for Plans. The next step is to obtain plans on the How-To site for building instructions. Once found, it’s a simple matter of building the device in small quantities depending on projected demand. My friend admits canvassing around other auction sites for demand. If the desire for the item is strong, he has the item built en mass by students wanting part time income. He’d pay about $10 to $30 for assembly depending on complexity.
• Market The Product. This is the easiest step. My friend didn’t even bother to learn copywriting. According to him, that would be reinventing the wheel. Instead, he scanned ebay and auction sites like atomicmall.com for listings that commanded a lot of bids. These, he called ‘Hookers’. Hookers draw in eyeballs and convert well. The plan is to copy the ad copy of the Hookers and make substantial modifications to preempt any complaints. He also plugs in numerous pictures that highlight the features of the item. Now, since the product is not the average off the shelf item, he levies a premium for customization. Prices like $300 for an item that cost $50 to build is not outrageous because people are willing to spend  a big amount on unique items.

My friend’s most recent product line includes an electronic zapper that kills bacteria in the body. He’s made about 6 sales selling it for $250. Cost of goods? $80. He found the plans for free and has made over a grand selling it.

Are you ready to be the next web maven?

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Web start-ups face a daunting task of getting known. As of last count, over a billion pages literally litter the web. That’s a billion competing pieces of informtion swamping yours. Compound that with the short attention span of the average surfer. And the problem of ever shifting viewer loyalties. No wonder many netrepreneurs surrender and pack their bags in less than a month. Have you ever given up in despair?

Startups need web visibility. They crave keyword dominance that lead to online brand equity. This problem becomes a need that lends itself well to “expert SEO services”.  So, it’s no wonder that enterprising entrepreneurs have begun launching SEO companies.

I’m confident that you may have received the occasional email to “increase your ranking” or “be the top ten in google”. Visit the webpage behind these emails and you’ll be treated to a glossy website that promises exotic services like directory submission, keyword optimization. Do these make you salivate?  Think again. How many of these really make an impact to your online web presence? I’ve been into SEO for almost a decade now, and I’ve realized that many paid services simply do not work. The following are among the poorest SEO tactics you can buy:

• Submit to 10000 Directories.  Nobody visits the HappyLuckyNine.com directory and its ilk. That goes for human vistors and search engine bots. These sites have negligible impact on your real world visibility and do little for keyword ranking. I find it odd, therefore, that SEOs offer the “premium service” of blasting your site to 10000 directories for a low price of $299.95. Listing in such directories may even be harmful as some search engines consider such sites link farms.
• Blog Spamming.  Run a blog? Then you must be a master of patience. You probably receive hundreds of comments each day from people called “BuyViagraOnline” and “HoodiaWeightLoss Now”. I don’t know about them, but I’d sue my mom for giving me such a name. But seriously, blog spamming benefits no one. It irritates the blog owner and does zilch for search engine ranking. One reason is that search engines devalue most blog comments. Another is that blogs tend to infuse the NoFollow attribute to comments. Be wary, therefore, when an SEO offers to send your URL to thousands of blogs using an automated software. You’ll end up on the receiving end of very angry email.
• Article Submissions. “We send your articles to 1000 article repositories for $99 only.” Is that a good offer? It depends. If it were 2002, that would work to your advantage. Today, that’s no longer the case. Articles can give human readers a reason to visit your site if they like your information. However, it does not have favorable impact on search engine rankings because the engines hate duplicate content. The algorithms used by google filter out copy that look similar to another. If 90 documents look the same, expect that they’ll be consigned to the supplemental search results- or worse- to the sandbox. That means your $99 for thousands of duplicate articles just ended up in smoke.
• .Edu Spamming. Some SEOs think that edu domains hold a mystique for the search engines and offer to send your links to .edu blogs. Alternatively, they offer to broker off the sale of your links on .edu sites. This arrangement benefits only the SEO and the edu site that receives your “charity donation”. True, the search engines accord great respect for educational sites- but if it sees an external link to your poker site on Harvard University, it gets suspicious. Nothing screams “paid link” louder than unrelated sites on the footer of educational webs. We all know how worthless paid links are.

Whoops. I think I just eliminated 80% of most paid SEO services. So what else can you buy from them?  I’ll cover that in the next article. Meanwhile, hold on to your cash!

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I’ve read many blog posts advising as to when aspiring bloggers should add banners to their sites.  In my opinion the advice given in most posts that you should only add adverts once you’ve got an established readership is wrong.  A good blog should always be attracting new readers, so why should new readers be treated any differently to readers who were lucky enough to see the blog in its infancy without ads?

My advice is, if you are going to monetise your blog, then you should do so from day one.  This will also allow you to experiment with placements and different networks when the numbers are not critical e.g. a 10% reduction in earnings from a bad decision will only be worth cents in the early days, whereas a bad decision when your site is successful could cost you hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars.

When I’m experimenting with new ad types, I tend to look at a combination of two factors in deciding whether or not to maintain the ads on my sites.  If a new network meets both criteria, then I run their ads.

CPM

The only CPC ads I run on my sites are Google Adsense ads.  This is because these were the first ads I added back in 2006 when I decided to try and make an income from this site (my first site), so I have a lot of knowledge about how they can perform.  In fact, Adsense is still one of my best performing networks from a eCPM perspective.

For my other networks, I only run the ads if the CPM meets my min requirement.  This used to be $1 CPM but I’ve recently raised it.  I set a CPM floor, because in my opinion I’d rather not show ads that have low CPMs because the payments at the end of the month aren’t spectacular and also because they tend to be cheap and tacky ads, or aren’t paying enough to warrant forcing readers to look at them.

Ads I’ve removed because the CPM are too low include Google Adsense for Feeds ads.  The CPMs I saw there were obscenely low, less than $0.10.  Many users use RSS to get an ad-free reading experience, so subjecting these users to ads when I was making less than $20 per month just didn’t make sense.

Fill Rate

Running a high CPM ad is no good though, if the fill rate is too low because all it means is either lots of empty ad spaces, or if you are using an alternate network, unnecessary delays to page loads while the ad network registers yet another page impression they can’t monetise.

An example of a network I removed despite a very high CPM was Vibrantmedia.  Their InterestAds sounded perfect, paying a guaranteed CPM in excess of $4.   However, the fill rate was less than 0.5%.  This meant that on almost every pageload there were noticable delays while their script ran with no ads being served, so I removed their script.

Another example is the Videoegg ads you might have seen running in my footer and header earlier this month.  The CPMs again were decent at just over $2, but again the fill rate was too low to justify the additional delays to page loads.

Do you assess any other factors when deciding whether or not to display an advert on your site?

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95% of new investors fail the forex game. That’s a fact. The average bloke jumps into the market with a $10,000 investment hoping to hit a goldmine. He purchases scores of forex indicators off ebay to get an edge. Then he tries autotrading robots amounting to a thousand dollars. Then reality sets in. Losses accumulate until the account is wiped out.  All the fancy tools and indicators amounted to nothing.

I’ve seen it happen too often. I’ve had  friends bled of a hundred grand in a month. I personally lost $20,000 the first time I tried 5 years ago. It’s not the game for the faint hearted.

Worried? Should you keep away from this money making industry then? It depends.

One reason most fail at this endeavor is that decisions are made on an emotional level. The amateur trader spots a trend, bets on it, makes a profit…  then he enlarges each succeeding bet thinking he’s on a roll. Big mistake. The larger the bet, the more monstrous the potential for loss.  The next position he enters reverses and tanks up everything he’s bet. A whole day of winning obliterated in one move.

So what does the trader do? He illogically bets larger on succeeding trades, hoping to make up for the whopper losses in one move. It’s a spiral from there. Logic is thrown out the window. Emotion dominates succeeding moves until the account registers 0.00 US Dollars.

The trader contemplates a skydive from the 30th floor.

Making money online with forex houses can be very rewarding. But it can be seriously deadly as well. For those wanting quick bucks from the forex market, I offer the following tips:

1) Check your Emotion at the door. Make trades when you’re neutral. Avoid trading when your pride is stinging- you’ll end up dashing into illogical maneuvers to redeem yourself.

2) Issue online trades shortly after the release of fundamental news data, not before. When information like CPI, GDP or Unemployment is released, the market reacts. Violently. If you made a trade prior to the release, the trend can reverse abruptly to you expectations and annihilate your account.

3) Resist the urge to overspend on all those cutesy $100 trend prediction indicators so popular on ebay. Scammers wrote many of those just to make a buck from losing traders. If you must purchase one, the only one I recommend is the fx4caster written by trading genuis Tom Yeomans. It’s the one tool that worked consistently well- and which most forex houses would love to ban.  I’ve personally made megabucks with it- especially when paired with standard market tools like the MACD, 20 day moving average, stochastics and Aroon indicators.

4) Join forex support groups. Fxfisherman.com and Forexfactory.com bustle with thousands of traders on a mission: to beat the market and the forex house.  What these people discuss daily is more valuable than any thousand dollar ebook you can buy on the market. They have have real experience and are raring to share.

5) Finally, bet safe. Making money online with forex is easy when you don’t risk all your eggs in move large move. Avoid exposing more than 10% of your equity on a currency pair. Diversification is key. You’ll appreciate this more if you’ve been exposed to the world of online affiliate marketing: the more websites you have attacking numerous markets, the more money you’ll make. But when you focus on just one niche… and that niche dries up… you’ve pretty much kicked the bucket.

Happy money making!

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It’s been a long time since I’ve produced a post about making money with blogs.  I used to share my tips regularly in my MyBlogEarnings posts, but I stopped sharing my earnings and tips, because I didn’t want people to think that I was boasting, and also because some of my colleagues found out and I was getting a bit uncomfortable with them knowing about my second income.

One tip that I really want to share though is how to use multiple ad networks to increase blog earnings.  Over the last couple of months I’ve been working really hard to grow traffic to my sites by creating more posts, both myself and through recruiting authors.   On this site for instance, 3 new authors have been added who are doing a fantastic job, and on Windows 7 News that I run jointly with Martin, we’ve added 4 great authors within the last month.

If one of your objectives from blogging is to generate an income/second income, then creating additional traffic isn’t going to benefit you if you don’t find a formula for generating money.  For most bloggers this involves joining one of the many advertising networks out there.  What I’ve learnt over the last couple of months is that being a member of multiple networks allows you to soften the blow of one network performing badly, through the use of alternate urls.

Most ad networks allow you to add code for other networks, or an alternate url, when they don’t have a paying ad to show.  Some networks go one step further and let you even set a minimum CPM that has to be hit, and if not the impression gets handed over to the alternate network.  I’ve joined a couple of these networks and I’ve connected them up in a chain, so that if one network doesn’t hit the min CPM I’ve set, the impression is handed over to another network who also has a min CPM to hit, and so on, until my final network is reached who guarantee that every paid slot is filled.

What I do every day or so is see how each network is faring in terms of campaigns and eCPMs, and adjust their min target up or down depending on how the next network in the chain is performing.  E.g. if the network behind is performing well, then I raise the CPM so that the network behind gets more impressions, and if the network behind is performing badly I lower the CPM to improve fill rates.  Overall, I think I’ve managed to improve my eCPMs by around 20% through juggling multiple networks.

I’ve been paying particular attention to Adify, because from next month there will be fundamental changes (very bad changes IMHO) to the way their ad network will work in the future, which will significantly reduce my earnings.  I’m trying to counter this by setting my Adify CPM mins, so that no low paying ads are shown and so that any high paying ads still help to bring up my average CPM.

Other benefits of working with multiple networks include being able to negotiate better revenue shares.  I’ve managed to successfully get higher percentages on a few occasions; never assume that the offer on the table can’t be improved.  Always ask if you can get a better rev share before joining a network – the worst that can happen is they say no.

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Earlier, I mentioned how easily you can make $200 a day with $5 cost. But did you know you can actually make $900 a day at almost no capital expenditure?

I discovered the method years ago when a relative gifted me a pair of shoes. Not just any kind, mind you. These were Louis Vuittons. $400 kicks that turns heads…. but in the wrong way.  I tell you, those were butt ugly shoes. Any sensible man wearing them would scream tycoon… but he’d also look very cheesy. Who wanted to go around in a pair of brown kicks that had ugly monograms looking psoriatic? Not me.

The shoes stayed in the closet for months until my mom said I may as well dispose of them. I tried in the newspaper, magz and on bulletin boards but no one bit. Then I tried ebay.

With an asking price of $50, people bid up to $220. Yep, I recall that number till today because I spent it all on a decent sound system. There indeed is money in trash. Well.. branded trash that is.

Momentum picked up. I then started disposing of assorted branded goods I rarely used. Lacoste, Ck, even Hugo Boss. I often got 50% to 80% of what I originally paid for them. That’s when I hit on an idea making cash off second hands: use other people’s trash!

I had friends with branded stuff that just grew mold in the closet. With my camera and their permission, I snapped up shots and posted them on ebay. True enough they sold- with next to no cost from me. I just bought the item from my friends at a low price which was far lower than the winning bid.

I then started visiting second hand branded goods stores. Befriending the owner was the first step. The second step was asking permission to take shots of their goods. Many readily did. The shots ended up on ebay. If the item sold, I came back and bought the item and shipped it out. If  it didn’t (which was rare), I lost 50 cents listing fees.

This method alone can give anyone a comfortable life. There’s no need for initial cash outlay.  Consider it a blend of JIT systems with online marketing. Acting as the middle man, you can squeeze a massive profit from those hunting for bargains.

Ready to visit the flea market?

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Did you know you can make megabucks with a $4 item?

A few days ago, a local call center requested for a motivational speech, particularly one that empowered their agents to ooze charisma over the phone. It was an easy job. I simply gave the basics of tonality, pacing and leading as well as emotional infusion.  The crowd loved it. Management happily paid me $170. That wasn’t exactly something to jump up and down about… but not bad for an hour’s work. I packed up my projector and had my assistant shut off the recorder.  (It’s my practice to record presentations made.)

Back home, I unwound a bit with eBay, a large box of Yellow Cab pizza and cans of soda. The $170 disappeared in a flash, what with the pizza costing $30  and the rest going to a pile of $3 to $30 ‘good deals’ eBay offered me. My wallet was forlorn but my belly satisfied.  I started to grumble about inflation.

Then it hit me. There were scores of guys selling $3 items and making a decent living off it. If they could survive off it, there must be something to it.

I scrolled the ebay listings again. Whew. Hot items with multiple bids included low priced $3 CDs . Most were of the ‘how to kind’. My mind started freewheeling. What if I jumped into the bandwagon?

Next to me were a pile of CDs containing my different audio and visual lectures. The titles looked good:

“How to Charm Your Boss Out of A $900 Raise”

“How to Make $400 a Day in Forex”

etc.

I selected a few and whipped up draft listings under my ebay account. Normally, I’d dispose of high end Pradas or iPhones on the auction giant. Today, I’m attempting the opposite end of the spectrum.

I created compelling ad copy,  and snapped up pix of the home made CDs.  No fancy labels, mind you- this way it looks customized and rare.

I decided to start the auction at $3. Shipping was pegged at $10.  I clicked LIST and away they went.

Hours later, I checked my PC.

I had bids. In fact, the average CD  had 8 or 9! I got excited

On the third day, end of the listing, all CDs had a winning bidder with the price jacked up to $9 to $20.

I shipped out five CDs that day. Net profit was good. I incurred .3c cost per CD and just $5 for shipping (each CD left in a paper sleeve). I charged $10 for S/H and bidders paid anywhere from $6 to $20. All in all, I earned a margin of at least $15 per CD. Now that was something.

But I wanted more.

I entered my eBay account again and availed of the option “Make Second Offer” to the losing bidders. This option lets them purchase a lost item at the winning price. Now, I didn’t have big expectations, but I did not have anything to lose by trying.

Next day I checked my account.

My jaw dropped. Almost everyone responded. That was about 9 new buyers per CD!

The post office did good business with me that day.

So how much did I earn?

Go do the math.

Good luck!

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I try to not make calls or send emails at work in anger, and this is the first time I’ve done this on this site, but the Adify Ad Network that I’m a part of have just made one of the stupidest business decisions I have ever come across, which is surely going to lead to a number of publishers reducing the number of ad impressions they deliver via Adify or who will leave the network completely.

If you haven’t come across Adify before, in addition to selling their own campaigns they provide ad network services to companies like Forbes, Six Apart, Dennis Publishing and The Guardian newspaper allowing them to run their own private ad networks, where they can sell their own campaigns and offer them to publishers who are accepted onto their private networks.  In total, Adify power 180 networks on behalf of other companies.

The beauty of being an Adify Publisher is that you can apply to multiple networks and if accepted, ads from all networks that you are a member of are served via one set of ad tags, and Adify manage the whole process to ensure that the ad from the network with the highest paying ad is always displayed first, ensuring that fill rates and eCPMs are as high as possible.

The mad decision that my Adify representative has just told me about, is that from mid July Adify will no longer allow publishers to manage their network memberships through one dashboard and one set of ad tags.  Now publishers will have to setup a separate account for each network they are a member of i.e. join multiple networks rather than ‘one’.  This will mean that publishers will only be able to show campaigns from one network at a time, rather than from multiple networks at a time:

Dear Valued Publisher:

We would like to inform you of some important changes we are making that will affect the way you use Adify and the networks of which you are a part.

Although these changes potentially affect many customers using the Adify platform, due to your large quantity of sites and network relationships you may need special assistance.

Here’s a very brief summary of the changes we are making that affect you:

Starting in mid-July…

- Adify is moving toward an architecture that maximizes our capacity and scalability.

- In order to achieve this goal, each account may only be associated with a single network.

- Therefore, each ad tag may only run campaigns from one network (plus Adify Media campaigns approved by that network).

- If you would like to continue to have advertising on your site from multiple networks, you will need to use separate accounts. Your primary account, with all of the historical reporting it contains, may be associated with one of your current networks.

I’m currently a member of six Adify networks, so it will be impossible for me to maintain my earnings because I can only queue ads from one network at a time, rather than having a pool of six to choose like I do currently.  I could try and manually manage my six networks by juggling them each day based on what campaigns they have running, but it would be too much work (I have 3 sites that have different types of content, geo profiles etc so I’d have to optimise each site differently) and I’d probably be better off just handing over my banner impressions to one big network.  

Adify just don’t seem to understand that their attractiveness to publishers was from being able to bring together small networks who by themselves can’t sell enough campaigns to attract business.  They claim this change is to allow them to make the service faster and more scalable, but they obviously haven’t consulted with publishers, because they are going to lose a lot of ad impressions as publishers leave the service.  

I really hope that Adify realise that this is a big mistake, otherwise I’m going to have to join the mass exodus away from Adify.  Otherwise Adify’s platform will only get more efficient because it is serving significantly fewer ads.

Are you an Adify publisher?  How is this change going to impact you?

Adify Ad Networks Commits Online Suicide is a post from Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news. - Updated daily with the latest news, tips, tweaks, social networking, wordpress tips & tweaks, windows optimization help and more.. Visit Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news. for more articles.

Last I checked, a lot of folks had been resigning their dayjobs. Nine to five doesn’t cut it anymore – not when there’s the web that lets netrepreneurs line their pockets at their leisure.

The options are mind boggling. You can blog for reviewme.com. You can churn content for adsense. You can promote ebooks at digitalpoint.com. And you can trade at online forex houses. Yesiree everyone can make a buck without a boss. Isn’t the digital world grand? It used to provide entertainment. Now it’s a thriving center for livelihood.

Of all the online money making schemes I’ve tried, it’s the forex market that can provide the largest windfall. The others, like Adsense, generate steady income. So does online retail. But they often pale to what the forex can cough up. In one night, the avid trader can make $10,000. All it takes is cutting intuition and a trigger finger. And lots of waiting. That’s right- to make that level of cash, one needs a gallon of coffee and a good book while waiting for just the right moment to enter the market, scalp the profit and exit.

Some people relish the wait. It’s part of the thrill. Others, however, are impatient and crave for some automated system that cuts the wait and goes straight to the bottomline.  (are you guilty?)

Lazy people like these spawned a whole new industry of programmers who make money off lazy people. (didn’t I say the web was full of opportunities?)  These programmers whip up fancy software that allegedly eliminate the wait by trading for the client on auto. I’ve test driven a few.  The sofftware utilizes simple algorithms and calculate predictions based on past performance.  You can (allegedly) let the software run  while you go on vacation and come back to an equity that triples by the time you return with a golden tan.

Sounds great? Reality check.  All the software I’ve tested generated good profits but run into some very bad trades that wipe out all previous earnings. Somehow artificial intelligence can’t quite hack the real world.  Good thing I ran them off demo accounts, otherwise I’d have lost $1M by now.

Moral of the story? Auto traders are just like all those autocrud software other online marketers sell. They don’t work. You can’t buy an autoblogger, autocommenter, autoforummer, auto content generator and expect big cash flows. No way.  These software lack something. Soul. And it’s soul that drives enterprise.

Do you have autosoftware lurking in your hard drive?

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We all know that there are a handful of blogs out there that essentially are printing their own money. The few that come to mind all share one thing in common: in addition to being set up to generate income, they all add value to the internet. No matter how well marketed, nobody’s going to come if all you have is snake oil.

So throw all your get-rich-quick blogging schemes out the window if you don’t have the content to back up your ambition.

A friend of mine’s sole desire is internet wealth. We are very different people. Whereas my primary motivation has always been to add value to the internet in regards to something I had the passion to sink my time into, hopefully making money in the process, his passion was to find formulas that would generate internet income.

He did so without much success for the first couple of years. He even created one blog that actually took off, getting anywhere in between 1000 to 10000 uniques a day. This blog also created quite a healthy social structure, with one of the more active comment communities I have ever seen on a blog, but it made very little money. It was a tough niche to pair with product, and I think to this day he never makes more than $300/month off it, despite the high traffic. Ultimately he handed the reins of the site over to others, because he was investing a lot of time into it for little return.

Along the way, he developed a host of other sites designed with the sole intent of generating revenue with little effort after the initial setting up. These sites generate anywhere from $30 to $300 a month, which works pretty well if you have enough sites.

Right before Christmas he finally did it. He hit the nail on the head and discovered the right formula, or at least, came up with the idea and execution for a single site that generates a lot of money with minimal effort. It’s an Ebay Affiliate site. He markets the hell out of it on Craigslist, and this single site has generated anywhere between $1000 to $17000 a month in it’s first six months.

Luck is a big part of this. He finally hit the right formula. He could try to duplicate this success for the next two years and get goose eggs, but the important thing is he found it after a lot of trial and error.

So I am not going to use this article as a platform to preach to you how to go forth and get rich on the internet, but I will share some thoughts on ways you can guarantee income, to varying degrees of success dependent on the amount of effort you put into it and the intangible factor of whether or not it’s what the masses are looking for:

• Overwhelm them with sheer numbers In the event you can’t make a site that hits the jackpot, make twenty sites. If they all make $50 a month, you’re now pulling $1k a month in additional income from them. Obviously you can’t devote the time to making all twenty sites quality web content, so do your homework, pick areas you feel have a lot of search interest, and devise ways for those sites to turn traffic into money without a lot of effort on your end. You’re now the internet equivalent of a slum lord, but you’re also more likely to turn some income this way than sinking all of your hopes into a single site.
• Be an entrepreneur Sink a lot of time into getting a site off the ground, ranking well on Google, and developing a community. Then either sell it, or turn it over to others to run so you can move on to the next project. This is how the restaurant industry runs, by and large. This will probably generate the same kind of monthly income as the above example, and will require a lot more time on your part initially, but in the end you will be adding value to the internet, unlike our first example.
• Diversify Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. In a perfect world you want income from different sources. Like mutual funds, you have some protection in case one of your sources of income becomes unreliable, or disappears altogether. Adsense, private advertising, affiliate programs, utilize all so that your site or sites are pulling in money from more than one source. My friend’s Ebay affiliate site that makes so much money, what happens if Ebay decides next month that they don’t need an affiliate program anymore? Spread it out.
• Write for other sites If you’re a good writer, you may be able to market yourself to other sites, depending on what they’re after. Whether it’s quality content, Digg bait, or comment fodder, if you’re writing for enough sites, you may make enough income to fulfill your internet ambitions.
• Hold out for the winning ticket Ok, you’re greedy and you want that one site that generates big numbers every month.A) If you’re certain about your niche, you have first rate content, you’ve done your job with Google so the site ranks well, and you have a solid strategy for monetization….

  or:

  B) You picked a target that you are sure will convert. It’s the right place at the right time. You have an aggressive marketing strategy that will have this site turning big numbers in no time with little or no effort after the initial setup….

  Both schemes can hit and turn into monsters. Unfortunately, this is the dream that people have had since money was invented. Your odds of turning the above into reality are very slim. If you insist on treading this path, give your site six months. A winning site will start converting very soon. If it’s a dud after six months, it will always be a dud. Move on to the next idea, and buckle down for disappointment after disappointment, because if it was that easy we’d all be doing it.

You know how I feel about all this. I would like to make money from my internet endeavors, but not at the expense of adding even more garbage to the internet landfill. I also had a big revelation about a year ago when I realized that my then two year old son was taking a back seat to my internet endeavors. I don’t want to be that kind of dad, I love him too much. Ultimately time spent being a good dad is a hell of a lot more important, and rewarding, than being a good internet entrepreneur. I have branched out into web design to supplement the income I generate from my websites and internet writing, but I carefully manage the time I spend on it.

The one sure thing I can tell you is this: if you are trying, you will make some money doing this. How much depends on how smart you are about what you’re doing. Pay attention, see what others are doing to get results, and don’t spend your whole life waiting for that one big hit.

Winning The Lottery is a post from Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news. - Updated daily with the latest news, tips, tweaks, social networking, wordpress tips & tweaks, windows optimization help and more.. Visit Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news. for more articles.

Google have started writing publishers to inform them of changes to their email notification preferences. Now in addition to the newsletters and surveys, publishers can receive personalised optimisation tips, webinar and event invitations, and news about special promotions and giveaways.

I’m not sure how personalised the messages will be, but I’m sure most publishers will welcome any tips that help them make money. Adsense are by far the friendliest ad network in my opinion, although I have a suspicion that their rev share is fairly low. However, they are very approachable, and in the UK I even have a rep I can speak to who does periodic calls with me to help me optimise my sites.

We’ve updated our email notification preferences.

In addition to the newsletters and surveys that you’re currently signed up to receive, you can choose to receive messages like personalised optimisation tips, webinar and event invitations, and news about special promotions and giveaways. Because you chose to receive newsletters and surveys when you signed up for AdSense, we’ve updated your preferences to reflect the two new categories for newsletters and market research. Please take a minute to look over your options, then visit your Contact Preferences page to confirm your selections.

Customised help and performance suggestions
Receive suggestions from members of the AdSense team for changes that you can make to improve performance and earn more from your site.

Newsletters
Receive newsletters with optimisation tips, best practices and other information to help you get the most out of your Google AdSense account.

Google market research
Receive invitations to test new features, surveys about Google AdSense and opportunities to provide feedback about your experiences.

Special offers
Receive news about AdSense promotions, events and giveaways.

Information about other Google products and services which may be of interest to you
Receive news and special offers from other Google products such as coupons from Google AdWords and other offers that we think will benefit you.

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After a fairly long absence from blogging, I’ve been working behind the scenes to tidy up my sites so that I can start posting again.  I had so much admin to do and emails to reply to, that’s it taken me a week to write my first post!

One email that had lain unread for a long time was one from my adsense rep asking me to add targeting to my google adsense units. My rep recommended that I do this for my more adsense units with higher CTRs, so that advertisers could target their ads to these ad units rather than units performing more poorly.

You can make one of your existing custom channels into a targetable ad placement by following these steps:

1. Log into your account at http://www.google.com/adsense
2. Under the AdSense Setup tab, visit the Channels page
3. Under the ‘AdSense for content’ subtab, make sure you’ve selected custom channels.
4. Click the radio button next to the channel you’d like to make targetable, then click the corresponding ‘edit channel’ link.
5. Click the checkbox marked ‘Show this channel to advertisers as an ad placement’ and fill out the relevant fields plus a description for your channel. Keep in mind that advertisers will see the external name and description, so you want to provide something accurate and informative.
6. Click ‘Save channel’.

Advertisers will now be able to target your ad placement. Keep in mind that if your placement spans across several websites, advertisers will see it split up into a separate ad placement for each site. Please also be aware that if you change the placement name in the future, you’ll lose any existing advertiser bids for that placement.

Increase Adsense Earnings By Making Channels Targetable is a post from Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news. - Updated daily with the latest news, tips, tweaks, social networking, wordpress tips & tweaks, windows optimization help and more.. Visit Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news. for more articles.