Truth hurts, this says it all really, don’t like what I write then don’t read it!
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Money Schemes That Work
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Ever since I changed the tagline of this website to "Wading through the waist deep bullshit of the Make Money Online niche" I've been getting ever increasing amounts of mail from absolute (and some not so absolute) beginners who are stuck with where to get started? The more blogs you read the easier it is to get confused, every week there seems to be a new must have course or product out there that guarantees (yeah right) success. So for all those people baffled and bemused by the whole where the hell to get started thing here's what I would do, in plain English.
Think of a subject that interests you, create a blog about it (doesn't matter if you use Blogspot or buy your own hosting and domain name). Post 2-3 times a week about your chosen subject. Register for Adsense, slap some ad blocks on your blog (Just to emphasise, Adsense is by far and away the easiest way of making money from a website that I have ever found!) Do a Google search for other blogs and forums that are about the same subject as yours. Start leaving some comments and contributing to forum threads. Learn all you can about building backlinks and keep adding unique content.
That's how I started my first website (without blog commenting, blogs didn't exist back then). It's also how most of the big names in this industry started, they created a site about something they enjoyed and stuck Adsense ads on it. Once you've got your first site up and running (and even making a few cents a day) and are in the routine of posting content you can begin to worry about niche research, keyword research, ad optimisation, alternative revenue sources, social marketing and all that other fun stuff. If you can't be bothered to create your first site about something that actually interests you then I don't think you're going to get very far with this whole make money online thing (Go and sign up with SwagBucks or something) Great, now I've got that out of my system below are some of the networks I use to make money online, not all of them all of the time, but these are the ones I have used to make money, have always paid on time and I've never had any issues with. I recommend you give them a try at some point:-
MarketLeverage - CPA Network I've not been signed up with them that long but there is no doubt about just how impressive a CPA network MarketLeverage are. The thing that will hit most affiliates who sign up from smaller networks first is the sheer number of offers and the diversity of those offers. There are very few online markets that MarketLeverage don't have an offer suitable for. On top of the number of offers is the very generous base level payouts. For example when I switched I went from promoting a Home Survey offer from another network that paid out $1 a lead, a very similar offer on MarketLeverage was paying out $1.50. For me that meant an instant profit from my already established traffic. I'm no big hitter in the CPA market preferring to keep it small and low risk but even I can appreciate the instant benefits that being signed up with MarketLeverage bring. There are CPA networks cropping up all over the place at the moment but the way I think about it is this, if you're only going to sign up with one you might as well make it the best .
PeerFly - CPA Network I have to mention PeerFly. They are one of those new CPA networks that I mention above however the reason I recommend PeerFly is very specific. PeerFly are very welcoming to foreign affiliates, and by foreign I mean outside the US and Canada (I live in the UK). This welcome extends to using an automated "call back" system so that you can instantly confirm your details and get up and running. Every other CPA network I've joined has involved several phone calls and the sense that you are being interviewed to join their network. If nothing else the time difference can make this a major pain. This is bearable for me but I imagine must be a serious pain if English isn't your first language. PeerFly obviously appreciate this fact and whilst there are still checks in place their system makes it a much more comfortable experience for non US/Canada based affiliates. Once in you'll be greeted by a very clean interface highlighted their top performing offers. Whilst the number of offers can't match MarketLeverage they do tend to get some excellent exclusives - 1 or 2 of which I've managed to convert into good profit.
SwagBucks - Paid To Search With the demise of My HomePages Friends I was left with a gap. I was used to being paid for my searches but it looked as though that opportunity had gone forever. Then I stumbled across SwagBucks. SwagBucks don't pay you per search but rather run a lottery each time you perform a search. In this lottery you can win SwagBucks which can then be redeemed against prizes. So what I here you say, that's not being paid to search? Well what if I told you that one of the prizes is a $5 Paypal voucher? Now that is being rewarded with cash for searching. In order to redeem this prize you'll need 70 SwagBucks but get this, you can win up to 20 SwagBucks with a single search! Personally I've had plenty of 5 point searches and even though I've not been using the SwagBucks system very long I've already redeemed plenty of $5 Paypal prizes! In short this pays better than My HomePages Friends.
Google Adsense - Contextual Ads Contextual advertising from Google. Google have the largest pool of online advertisers and they are just desperate for more places to show these advertisers adverts. By signing up with Adsense you can display these adverts and earn money. In return each time an advert is clicked (pay-per-click) or viewed (pay-per-view) you get paid. Earnings are always in US dollars. In order to get the most from Adsense you need lots of targeted traffic. Any webmaster can make a few dollars using this approach but to hit the big time you need to be thinking about thousands of visitors a day. My own experience has shown that it's not always the traffic you think that pays best with Adsense, for example I've found visitors from the Live and Yahoo search engines create more of my Adsense income than Google's own traffic. I wrote a post a little while back about one of the methods I used to make big bucks with Adsense!
TrialPay - Payment Method Think of TrialPay as an alternative to Paypal. If you are selling a product or a service then TrialPay offers your visitors another way of paying you that doesn't have to involve them parting with cash. In return for your product or service the visitor agrees to try something from one of the large online retailers or services. As it's likely something they would sign up for anyway in effect they are getting what you give them for free. In return the other company pays you. TrialPay has slowly grown over the last 3 years and I can't believe that more merchants haven't taken advantage of their services to get paid for what they currently give away for free. Some examples of companies that have recently jumped on board include AVG and Ad-Aware.
InfoLinks - In-Text Linking This will be the bit where I used to write about Kontera. Not any more I'm afraid, InfoLinks well and truly blow Kontera out of the water. Using InfoLinks on your webpage’s causes certain keywords to be underlined (either single or double), on hovering over them an advert appears and when clicked you earn. It's as simple as that. Some people find them obtrusive, however I have never ever had a visitor of one of my websites complain about the use of In-Text advertising. The fact is that the only people who tend to not like them is other webmasters. As with any pay-per-click based advert in order to maximise earnings you need to maximise traffic. Unlike Adsense, organic Google traffic has always contributed most to my InfoLinks earnings.
Build A Niche Store (BANS) - EBay Partner Network If you've ever experimented with niche marketing then you'll know what a gold mine it can be (as long as you can find a profitable niche of course!). Niche marketing works best when you create a small highly targeted website (for example maybe about 1 breed of dog) and then use it to show adverts or promote affiliate deals. What BANS does is allow you to add yet another source of income, it is an almost entirely automated system that builds a complete store front based on e-bay products. Get yourself an e-bay affiliate account through the eBay Partner Network and away you go. Don't have a website? The BANS system is also flexible enough to allow you to make your BANS store your entire website with the ability to ad static content and much more, all you need is a domain and some hosting. BANS is your ideal introduction to niche marketing, I use it on several of my websites and as long as you use it in the right way BANS always delivers. I wrote a post recently about how some people have seen their BANS income dropping and how to make the most from the Build A Niche Store system. BANS is the only way in which I use the eBay Partner Network yet the EPN contributes a good amount to my monthly income.
Click Cash - Being An iFreinds Affiliate Click Cash is the affiliate for iFriends an online dating/adult friends website. Whilst this might appear at first to be a very small market they offer many creative’s that you can show on your more general websites. In my experience they work well on general personal blog style websites. Perhaps the best thing about Click Cash is the payout, they'll pay you $80 for each free sign-up you can get them plus a $50 bonus just for signing up as an affiliate That's a huge chunk of cash.
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From Our Blog
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10 Tips For Making Your Own Make Money Online Product
July 13th, 2010
1. You have to make it very clear to your potential customers that what you are offering is 100% different to all those other products that don’t work. (It doesn’t matter that it isn’t different or doesn’t work, this is what we call marketing
)2. Go with the flow. Look at what is popular amongst the a-list bloggers at the moment and sell that. At one time it was domaining, then Adsense, then PPC, then media buys, now it seems to be mailing lists promoting Clickbank products. Make your product about making money with lists and Clickbank. Remember though, YOUR product IS different to all the other shitty products out there.
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Market Samurai
June 14th, 2010
Market Samurai have just launched their affiliate program so expect to see a lot of fake reviews from the usual A-List suspects. A totally legit piece of software that has helped me make thousands of dollars is about to get the full IM launch treatment and I want you to be aware of just how unlike 99% of the crap out there this is.
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