I bloody hate it when things like this happen. I had an idea about 12 months ago for an addition to my “Alert” series of programs (Affiliate Alert, Adsense Alert and away from internet marketing a couple more). The new one was an Alert for your website traffic (Analytics Alert), I’ve noticed over the years that all it can take is one mention somewhere online and your traffic can explode. The clever internet marketer can react to this temporary boost in traffic and alter any offers to suite their new visitor source. It’s fair to say that I’ve missed a lot of these opportunities, in fact one of the few I did catch was this one and because I did catch it early I managed to make a nice little earner out of it. So my new Alert program would send me an e-mail whenever traffic rose above a certain threshold for the day. Thanks to a few distractions (I’m writing an awesome 2D games engine) I’ve only got it about 80% complete when today as per usual I checked my Analytics account. There is a new feature called Intelligence in Beta that has popped up.
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Money Schemes That Work
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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. 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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Google Analytics Intelligence – Great Minds Think Alike :)
November 16th, 2009 -
I Was Wrong About The New eBay Partner Network
November 10th, 2009I’m not afraid to admit when I’m wrong and I was definitely wrong about the latest set of changes to the eBay Partner Network. I’ll stand by some of what I said though and that is that the job of any affiliate is to get the prospect to the merchants website. Customer retention and long term value from that customer are the job of the merchant and you can’t hold affiliates to count for that.
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Hosting For Those That Really Want 100% Uptime
November 4th, 2009As I’ve wrote about in the past I really don’t see why the average webmaster would need to use a VPS or dedicated server. The search for 100% uptime, whilst compulsive is ultimately doomed to failure as you soon realise that your extra money only really guarantees you more resources and root access, not extra uptime. But what if you really want 100% uptime, is there a solution?
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Blog Posting Frequency And Your Visitor Count
October 20th, 2009As you know by now this isn’t really an active blog, well certainly not by the definition of any of the expert bloggers out there. According to the “facts” of blog posting my traffic should just about be gone by now, but it hasn’t.
I know Alexa isn’t the most reliable metric but it is a handy publicly available stat. So in the time I stopped regular updates my Alexa ranking slipped to around 110,000 from what was about 102,000. This should really be expected, not only would you expect my traffic to dip as my content looses its freshness and Google reacts but because I wasn’t visiting my own website (I use the Alexa toolbar). It’s fair to say though that my traffic levels never got anywhere near as bad as what the “though must post every day” preachers would have you believe.
In the last 10 days my traffic has really started to perk up, in fact I’m now seeing more unique daily visitors that at any time in the last 2 and half years. This is reflected in an Alexa rank around the 96,000 mark. Traffic does dip at the weekends as it always has, but during the week it’s really good, I don’t want to count my chickens before they hatch but I’d guess I’m well on the way to yet another self sustaining website that requires very little work. And the great thing is that once you reach that tipping point , as long as you keep your nose clean, then there really is no going back.
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ExactSeek, Worth Using For PPC?
October 12th, 2009I’m still dabbling a small amount with PPC traffic, more for fun and kicks than anything else. You just never know when you’ll come across something really good so for the sake of a few dollars I don’t mind giving things a try. Latest up on my list of PPC traffic sources to try was ExactSeek, I seem to remember trying them ages ago but couldn’t remember how it went so I set up a new trial.
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Why You Should Leave MMO Right Now!
September 29th, 2009Ever since I stopped posting regularly to this blog my online life has changed rather rapidly. For several years I had what I would consider steady but non impressive growth. As I’ve alluded to in the past, as one thing would dip I’d find something else but overall I wasn’t making any major breakthroughs. Then I stopped working within the MMO niche. In those last couple of weeks I’ve seen considerably more growth in my income than the previous 12 months and I spend a lot less time on the computer, here’s how:-
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Keyword Elite 2 Review – No Affiliate Links
September 16th, 2009It’s a little bit like Market Samurai but not as good. If you think Keyword Elite does anything magical then you don’t know how to use Market Samurai. Review Done.
If you want to find and utilise niches then use Market Samurai (it doesn’t have an affiliate program so you’ve probably not heard any mega star bloggers talking about it). If on the other hand you have no interest in niche marketing but prefer to make your money pushing something that you’ve no intention of ever using then crack on and promote Keyword Elite 2. And the Make Money Online circus goes around and around….
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Would This Interest You?
August 26th, 2009That last 2 years have been a little up and down for me. As something hits something else dips. Just as I think I have a technique nailed a variable in the background changes and screws the whole thing. This was until the last 4 months. I’m now starting to have some nice success with affiliate marketing of the organic kind. So much so that I’ve got my method nailed down tight enought that I can follow my own recipe and within 6-8 weeks be making affiliate income out of a niche. My success rate at the moment is 77%, of the 9 niches I’ve setup in 7 are making an affiliate income. These aren’t micro niches either, online dating is just one area I’ve setup in and I’m now driving affiliate sales from organic traffic. So what does this have to do with you? My recipe, I’m prepared (I think) to share it, but before I go to the effort of documenting it I’d like to know what interest there is first?
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5 Money Makers I Don’t Use Any More
August 24th, 2009The internet is constantly changing, nothing ever stays the same for very long and it’s because of this we need to change how we make money from it as well. Over the last couple of years several very lucrative ways of making money have come and gone for me and so I thought I make a note of just some of the systems that I’m no longer using.
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Your Chance To Question A Super Affiliate / CPA Network
August 18th, 2009If you’ve been following my blog for any length of time you’ll know that when it comes to PPC/Affiliate Marketing I am definitely not your man! This blog is littered with posts where I get all carried away and throw money at some offers only to run away a few hundred dollars down with my tail between my legs. Usually swearing – a lot. I’m just not very good at it.
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