Money Schemes - Learn How To Make Money Online

I’ve had to break away from Halo 3 to make this official announcement, Agloco as a money maker sucks big time! They have finally got around to announcing how they are going to make payment to their members (or as they like to call them “owners). If you were banking on using this as a way of escaping the day job I’ve got some really bad news for you.

Agloco Payment Distribution

At a first glance the figures don’t actually look that bad, to date the payment amounts are as follows:-

June – $0.48 an hour

July – $0.42 an hour

August – $0.54 an hour

That doesn’t look too bad does it? Except when you realise that each payment is to be spread over the next 10YEARS! Say for example you have no referrals in your network and you did the full 5 hours in June. That means you made $2.40 Spread that over 10 years and it means each month you receive $0.02 a month, woo hoo! During the last 3 months of running Agloco with no referrals (as 85% of current members are doing) you have ensured a grand total of about $0.05 a month, think about inflation and how little your money is going to be worth in10 years time and it just gets worse. Did I mention also that it looks like the minimum payout is going to be $100?

But What If I’ve Got Thousands Of Referrals And Hours

Even if you’ve worked your ass off on promoting Agloco, have spent money and have a substantial active (active is the key, only 1 of my referrals actually uses the toolbar) referral network you’re not going to be making that much. Lets say for example you’re putting 5000 hours in the bank each month, for June you’ve just made $2400, but here’s the kicker, spread that over 10 years and what you actually see is $20 a month. After 3 months you’ll be earning around $60 a month so even with them numbers it’s going to take 3 months before you see any money from Agloco. How many people are going to earn 5000 hours a month, not many I would guess! What’s even worse is that people with larger networks are going to have real trouble holding onto their networks thanks to Aglocos payments news, how many of your referrals are only earning 5 hours a month? How many do you think will carry on using a toolbar that searches via the Ask search service for the princely sum of $0.02 a month? Expect to see the number of active uses in your referral network decrease in the coming weeks, Agloco have taken a good idea and made it bad. You’ll not find any Agloco affiliate links in this post, there is no way that I could recommend Agloco as an online money maker.

Totally off-topic today but I’ve got a good excuse. Ever since Halo 3 was released for the X-Box 360 on Wednesday it’s been eating away at my time more and more. First of all I just HAD to complete the single player, 5 hours later and that was done. Next I started on the online game, in being a veteran of Halo 2 I can’t say how much I was looking forward to this. My only worry was how could they possibly improve on it? Well they have, if this isn’t the best video game of all time then I don’t know what is. I’ve been playing games since the very early 80′s and I’ve never experienced anything so close to perfection. Not only that but you can record what you’re doing in all it’s glorious detail and share it with your friends. At last I can get some recognition for “running riot”! My only question is when are they going to make Halo an Olympic sport, surely it can’t be that far away? I will still be playing this in 5 years time I just know it, all I can say to Bungie is thank you, thank you!

If you own a 360 then you need to own Halo 3, if you don’t own a 360 then you should buy one just to play Halo 3. I’m afraid that’s all you’re getting out of me today because I’m going back online to save the universe or at least lay the smack down on a few people. If anybody ever wants a game my gamer tag is “paulb iom” but be prepared to bring it cos I’m on fire at the moment.

ps Back to work on Monday so normal blogging service will be resumed then, I’ll probably let you know how my TLA campaign went, the results might just surprise you.

No I’m not asking you to leave your life partner or change job, just to put some effort into the most important part of your make money website, your ads and banners!

Change Is Good
Some of the regular readers here might have noticed that I’ve changed the Text-Link-Ads banner that was at the top of the page. That one advert made me $50 last month so you might be wondering why change it? The truth is that this month has been poor, it’s showing a much lower CTR and has only made me $25 and that was right at the beginning of the month. The problem as I see it is that all the people interested in Text-Link-Ads are already signed up and if like me you’re here every day you will eventually become blind to that advert. Without huge amounts of fresh traffic I know my current visitors are 75% the same faces each day. From my own experiences that blindness can happen after as little as 3 or 4 weeks and at the point you ads become nothing more than page filler. Now I know that some people put adverts up and just leave them forever, I’ve been guilty of exactly the same thing in the past and that’s why I know how important it is to vary things. If you want to make money you are going to have to put the effort in, try different banners in different positions for different products. Always remember to use some sort of analysis tool so that you can track results. Even when you have something which is working for you DO NOT BE AFRAID TO CHANGE, remember that you can always go back to what was working later and it might be even better now that it is fresh again. In changing my banner I’ve already made 1 sale so perhaps it wasn’t that stupid an idea!

What About Adsense?
I’m glad you asked. Google has a sort of “hot spot” map of where you should put your Adsense blocks. The simple version of this is above the fold, in your content and to the left. However what they don’t tell you is that varying your ad positions, size and colours can really help you make more money. Once again it’s a simple case of monitoring your results, it’s easy to be lazy and content with how you are doing but if you don’t try different things how will you ever know? One of my favourite Adsense tricks is to find the 2 Adsense combinations (format, position, colour) that work best for a given page and rotate them every month. It keeps the page fresh and helps to prevent the inevitable lag in Adsense earnings that people experience as a page is left with exactly the same Adsense on it for months if not years.

There are a lot of blogs about making money online. There never used to be so many but in the last 3 months it has exploded (who am I to talk, I jumped on the bandwagon as well!). What did it for me and I suspect a lot of the others was the success of John Chow, $13,000+ a month from just writing about making money is unbelievable going. The trouble with all these new blogs is finding any writing not only original content, but also the ones with useful information. You want the information that is going to help YOU make more money so with that in mind here are my top 5 make money online blogs, these are the ones I read daily:-

1. JohnChow.com – Not always on topic but when he is some of the information he gives out is great. It’s also a brilliant place to go to find the latest trends and offers in the Blogosphere. When John mentions something it nearly always turns out big.

2. BCMBlog.com – Big Cock Marketing is all about how you can make more money. Although now always “white hat” the information is straight forward, honest and if applied properly will make you money.
3. Cash Quests – A perfect example of how commenting on other peoples blogs can drive yours. Bit of a wind-up merchant but again there is good make money online info to be found in most of the posts on Cash Quests.

4. ProBlogger – Each post tends to be epic in proportion but when it comes to finding information on building a successful Blog you’ll not find anywhere better. Not strictly about making money online more about building a blog, but as everybody knows more traffic equals more money.

5. Emonetized.com – A bit of an Adsense whore like myself but like the others in my list doesn’t concentrate on how well they are doing but more on how to improve the amount of money you are making.

Of course there are plenty of others out there but a lot of just seem to write constantly about what the John Chow’s , John Cow’s and ProBloggers of this world are up to without actually giving you any real orginal content.

Almost forgot, it’s not about making money online but my top commenter SEO Optimization has a very nice blog on
SEO tips that’s very much worth reading also!

As part of my ever growing online empire I’ve been looking at starting another Blog, the idea being that I take what I’ve learnt from his one and apply it to an area that is worth more than the “Make Money Online” market. To keep things cheap I was looking at free hosting via either WordPress or Blogger. Boy was I disappointed. Neither of these give you anything like enough flexibility to make real money from your blog, templating with hosted WordPress is rubbish whilst Blogger can’t give you static pages etc

Get 3 Months Of Hosting For Free

In the end I decided that cheap paid hosting* with a WordPress install would be good. Now I’ve let my feelings about Midphase by known in the past, I had a really rough time with them. In a strange twist of fate one of my client accounts couldn’t be moved, mainly cos the client was a being a pain. Since I wrote that post things have changed radically. Midphase are now providing the sort of service level that I experienced during the great times. I’ve not experienced any down time since their move to a now much more robust hosting data centre. In fact if anything their servers now appear even quicker as well. In being one of the biggest yet cheapest hosts out there and with their new much improved service it was an easy choice, especially seeing as how they are now running a promotion that gets you 3 months for free. Simply use the coupon code CHICKEN and 3 months will be subtracted from the checkout amount. Cheap ($7.95 a month), fast, reliable hosting with 3 months free and up to a massive $150 in free advertising credits will get my vote every time! This allows me to host my own WordPress install which I’m sure will help to pay for the hosting in no time!

You can sign up for the new improved Midphase service here or alternatively if you have friends that you think might be looking for hosting you can sign yourself up as a Midphase affiliate here.

*I didn’t want to use one of my existing accounts due to IP limitations when linking.

I have a very limited number of web directories that I actually consider to be of some benefit to webmasters in terms of either referred traffic or link love. My list at the moment is headed up firmly by DMOZ (The ODP) and the Yahoo Directory.

Aviva Directory is another one of the directories that gets mentioned a lot whenever anybody tries to point out that there are good directories out there. It’s one that I’ve used for several years so have easily been able to shoot down anybody trying to make out that that will boost your page rank and deliver thousands of visitors to your door. Just because the directory has a high page rank and a great Alexa ranking DOES NOT mean that it’s going to pass that on to you.

However, after having 1 clients website listed in the directory for 6 months with no referrals something is just beginning to happen. This month has seen 19 referrals and 2 enquiries coming from the Aviva Directory. Of course those 2 enquiries were from the operators of spam directories looking to add our website but at least it’s traffic! I suspect that it’s a combination of new directory owners looking for websites to add and maybe that the Aviva page with our listing on is now starting to rank somewhere in a search engine (I strongly doubt that it’s Google) for maybe the companies name or a related phrase.

So if you are willing to pay the $49.95 for a regular listing then it looks as though Aviva Directory can refer you some traffic. On the other hand it’s made no difference to the search results or page rank.

Can anybody who can see my BlogRush widget down at the bottom right please speak up? Looks like its gone, that’s what I get for telling people how to cheat the system!

If there’s a blog out there that you don’t like that is currently running BlogRush then simply use one of the cheating tactics pointing at your targeted blog and have them struck of the BlogRush system. I didn’t see a warning or anything like that so it must be very straight forward to get people’s blogs banned. Now if I catch the little bugger that has done it to me…..

Sounds like a scam doesn’t it? It’s not though, it’s just a very simple tactic I discovered by accident that I’ve now applied to a number of my content pages. It was something that literally did double my Adsense earnings overnight and what’s best, it was something that happened totally by accident.

When Less Content Is More Adsense

It started of when I wrote an article about cold sores and potential cures. I’d just got back from a family holiday to Alcudia in Majorca and was suffering from the worst outbreak of cold sores in my life. I was feeling pretty rubbish, my mouth was killing me and I had to update a website that had been ignored for several weeks. The only thing I could think of writing about was my cold sores and if anybody knew any cures. Of course to make the article slightly more useful I went through all the methods I use to prevent them, old wives tales and more importantly linked to the best resource I could find on the internet. As was my way at the time I put an Adsense channel on the page and forgot about it. Two months later whilst going through some Adsense earnings I could see that my Cold Sore channel was doing ok, about $100 from a single page over 2 months. Cool. Seeing as how it was such a good start I decided that I’d keep an eye on that channel as part of my daily checks for a little while.

About a week later something strange started to happen. The earnings from that page went from $1-$2 a day to more like $5. The amount of traffic hadn’t changed, I couldn’t figure out what was going on. It was then that I ran a link check and found out that the cold sore authority page I had been linking to had been taken down. I don’t know why but the whole website had just gone. But why would that affect my earnings? My guess was that people were finding my page through Google (it was ranked in the top 3 for cold sore cures), in the past they were jumping of to the authority site finding their answers and being happy. Without that link working they were now using my page as a jumping of point for Adsense ads. That’s certainly what the CTR seemed to indicate. As a further experiment I decided to remove some more of the content from that page, just enough to not give any definite answers but still make the page useful. The result was almost instant, from $5 a day to over $8 a day. Eventually as the content became stale the page fell down the rankings and the Adsense income from that page dried up, but whilst it lasted it was a great discovery.

In finding this out I then applied the same technique to several other content pages. I had lots of pages ranked very highly for many phrases. Once a page was established in the rankings it was very easy to just remove a couple of the outbound links and even re-word the page ever so-slightly to make it less of a definite answer to what people were searching for. On every page I tried this I noticed a significant increase in Adsense earnings. It’s a technique I still apply to this day on many of my content websites and it’s still working. The key is to rank your page first and then re-adjust your content for Adsense.