Money Schemes - Learn How To Make Money Online

No, not another dodgy niche website but my list for Father Christmas this year.

Dear Santa,

This year I’ve been very good (my mum says so too), I’ve played fair and shared with all the other boys and girls and I’d really appreciate it if you could maybe help me out with some of the following:-

1. Could You Please “Fix” The Exchange Rates? – All because of some very naughty men in the US lending money to people who couldn’t afford it I’ve had to take an 18% pay cut. This is really bad because I’m doing the same amount of work and earning my friends the same amount of money but when I get paid I get a lot less. Either weakening the pound or strengthening the dollar would really help!

2. Can You Make Google Play Fair? – I don’t know what I’ve done to upset them but they’ve not only been spreading bad rumours to make me unpopular but they’ve also started to take money of me. It seems that they don’t want me to have any of my own money. I still like them (they’re almost my bestest friend) I’d just like it if they could be honest with me and let me know where I stand.

3. Can You Make WidgetBucks Like My Other Friends? – I made a new friend this year called WidgetBucks, we got on great but then they suddenly announced that they didn’t like me anymore just because of where most of my other friends live. It was really bad because I’d just told everybody how nice WidgetBucks were!

I only want 3 things for Christmas this year so if you could help me out I’d really appreciate it.

Merry Christmas,

Paul

ps Doesn’t Santa work fast, looks like WidgetBucks are going to start paying out something for non US visitors after all!

What’s on your list?

Agloco, the get paid for surfing mega plan looks like it might be on its last legs. I don’t sign in to my account very often, maybe once every few months but I just have done to be greeted with a SSL certificate expiry notice. Looks like they haven’t bothered to renew their SSL since the 18th of November. Not paying for things is always the first sign that any business is struggling, I’ve worked for 2 companies that went from great to struggling so the signs tend to be quite obvious* (bills getting ignored, people starting to blame anybody and everybody other than themselves, lots of talk of “if we can do this.. and “if we can get that..”). A quick read of their company blog shows that

1. It’s not been updated in well over a month
2. The last several entries are all about magical “ifs”

I might be completely wrong, it has been known from time to time but my guess would be that the Agloco concept won’t be around much longer. Makes me really glad that I gave up the idea of ever making any money with them months ago.

* Nothing to do with me I must add

It only seems like yesterday that I was writing about Click Fraud and how the new breed of CPC advertising networks were going to need to up their game when it comes to preventing it. It’s one of Google’s biggest issues with Adsense and if they can’t eliminate it completely then who can? I wasn’t surprised to see then that John Chow’s TTZ Media affiliate network is already starting to experience some problems.

“One of the things that came up as we started accepting more affiliates who are not friends with John Chow was this : CLICK FRAUD.
So many affiliates are starting to take advantage of it, logging more clicks than they should, that are not deserved.”

Apparently thousands of clicks have already been removed from the system due to some simple IP checks. From my own experience this is not good enough, for example I can think of at least 2 employers I know where more than 9,000 employees share a single external IP address. Even several hundred clicks from that same IP over the space of a month or 2 may not be fraud, it can easily happen once those spammy work e-mails start getting circulated about a page that perhaps has TTZ ads on it. Not only that but large scale fraudsters will of course be cloning and hijacking thousands of IP’s which simple database queries are not going to easily detect. There is nothing easy about stopping click fraud (Just ask Google) but in order to make life fair for both the advertiser and the publishers you’ve got to invest in it, as far as TTZ Media are concerned it looks like they are prepared to put that investment in and it will be interesting to see how they get on.

Just to make things clear I would never recommend anybody try and con an advertising network. It is this sort of thing that will eventually see the end of CPC advertising that so many of us rely on for large parts of our income. Think about it, when the advertisers don’t see a good enough ROI then they either lower prices or pull the plug. Making money online takes work and time, click fraud is for fools.

Although it doesn’t appear to be advertised anywhere on the Kontera website they do actually run an affiliate program for publishers. I wish somebody would have told me about it earlier because I’ve been referring new publishers from here for several months now!

In order to join their affiliate program you’ll have to be an existing Kontera publisher and be able to meet the following 3 criteria

1 – Publisher must be in good standing with Kontera.

2 – Publisher has to run our Content links for at least 3 months.

3 – Publisher revenue of $100 or more each month.

I don’t think I’ve ever had any problems with Kontera, using their ads has been great for me and I certainly pass points 2 and 3 without any problems. Once you’ve been signed up the Kontera affiliate program pays out 10% of each referrals earnings for the first 12 months. That’s seems to be quite a standard affiliate deal these days and with the amount of money it is possible to make with Kontera I can’t imagine it taking too many sign-ups before you can earn a nice wedge with this.

I’ve been running alternating colours for my Adsense ads for a little while now, it would have easily been enough time to identify any patterns….BUT for one thing. When Google decided to change the clickable area of Adsense blocks the stats really started to swing around. It’s still early doors but there was enough of a shift to make it worth while posting about.

What Were The Best Adsense Colours
When I first started this I borrowed some colour combinations from some of my other websites just to try high and low contrast, same and mixed font colours etc. The one which I wasn’t expecting to perform at all was the yellow background with green title. I was wrong. The bright/stand out Adsense colour combo was outperforming every other combination on here. The differences were not amazing but definitely a 1-2% CTR improvement.

What Are The Best Adsense Colours
Now that Google have changed the rules my high contrast block is crap. In fact both the blocks with different background colours to the page (Yellow and Blue) have almost stopped performing completely. That leaves 2 options, the block with all black text and the standard Adsense Blue, Black and Green combination. No suprises here but the block that contains links that look like standard links (blue) are at least twice as good as the all black text block.

So the morale of the story here is that from my experience under Google’s new rules their standard Adsense colour combination works best. Now might be a good time to start experimenting with your Adsense colours again, if nothing else but to confirm that what you are using now works best with the new Adsense rules. I’m going to carry on running my different Adsense colour combinations until the end of this month but if it carries on like it is I’ll be heading back to a Google standard Adsense block.

First things first, www.entrecard.com will get you more traffic to your blog, I started using it yesterday and this is my analytics unique visitors chart.

So what is it? Entrecard is a system that allows you to build up credits to display a 125×125 advert on other blogs. You build up credits by dropping your card on other blogs that are using the system, by having people drop their card on yours and by selling your entrecard spot.

Once you’ve got these credits you can then buy an advertising spot on your target blog (Just like Internet Riches Exposed has done with me). So far I’ve not used my credits to buy a spot on anybody’s blog, all the traffic I’ve seen has come from me dropping my card of on other people’s blogs and them checking me out but it’s already quite a spike. Can’t wait to see what happens when I get enough credits to pop my advert up on ShoeMoney for a day! Overall it’s a quick, simple and free system for attracting visitors. I reckon this kicks the ass out of BlogRush not only in terms of looking nice but also is getting those vital visitors.

It doesn’t take too long when looking at this blog to realise the due to the narrow template I went with I’m a bit limited when it comes to advertising. Other than a small banner at the top, a bit of Adsense and Kontera content links I’m pretty much stuffed. I don’t think there is anyway that I could fit in any direct ad sales on here as it stands without everything looking very cluttered. It’s a shame because direct ad sales are where it’s at right now, cutting out the middle man and keeping 100% of the revenue for you. I decided to have a look and see what other options were open to me.

Peel Away Ads

Not for one moment did I think of using pop-under or pop-up ads here, they are a giant pain in the ass as far as I’m concerned and would be disastrous for a blog style website. How many minutes after getting the first pop-up before you never came back here? Whilst looking to see what options were open to me I just came across something that I’d never seen before, now it might just be me but I think Peel Away Ads are cool. What it does is create a little lip in any corner of your page when then “peels away” to reveal an advert when the visitor hovers over it (You can see a demo over at Peel Away Ads top left corner). I actually don’t think that this is intrusive at all and the graphical affect is very clever. Before using them here I was wondering if anybody had any experience with this type of ad and how well they performed? Chances are am going to buy Peel Away Ads anyway because I’ve got a couple of content sites I think they’d go down a storm on but it’s always good to find out what you guys think?

Whilst it’s always great to read about these guys and girls making hundreds of thousands of dollars a month from the internet I sometimes think that it paints a false picture of what it’s really like trying to make a living online. Something that most new internet marketers and bloggers don’t realise is that the majority of these people have been around a long time and have built up slowly. They have a number of launch pad websites that they can use to launch any new website onto a running start in terms of links and traffic. This is why the rich get richer on the internet.

It’s no secret that in order to make money online you need traffic, you can either try and get it for free via natural search and referral traffic or you can pay for it via services like Adwords. It’s this getting traffic part that puts most people new to the internet off (normally after only a month or 2 of trying). The problem is that the search engines like old trusted websites, all new websites are treated as a being a bit suspect. If you don’t have any established websites then you’re going to struggle to get both search engine traffic and links. This is especially true if you’re doing something that a hundred other people have done before you. Unless you are very good at social networking and can manipulate some links from Digg, StumbleUpon, you are sunk in terms of high levels of natural traffic before you even start. This leaves paid for traffic and buying visitors out of your own pocket. This gets very boring very quickly and that’s why most new marketers, online money makers don’t last more than a couple of months. You have to realise that this is a marathon and not a sprint.

The secret here is you need old established websites in order to help you build your new ones. I have websites that have been knocking around for 11-12 years now and it is these I use to launch any new projects. A link here, a mention there and soon I’m being featured in the SERPS. After a few months in the SERPS the natural links start to build and before I know it there is yet another website in my arsenal that is seeing nice amounts of traffic. Without these launch pads I wouldn’t expect to see the same progress for 12-18 months and this is what people need to think about. Whilst it’s nice to be rich this week, if you’re new you are much better thinking 12-24 months down the line. Start buying domains and building domains now that you can use to launch and invoke trust in your new projects and you’ll reap the benefits later on.

A few tips:-

1. When you buy a new domain, put something/anything unique on it straight away.
2. Let the search engines know about any new domains you have ASAP, building trust takes time.
3. Do not be afraid to interlink your own websites, at worst you’ll only get a small benefit
4. Rather than paying for links to a new domain consider spending the money on an old established domain that comes with links