Money Schemes - Learn How To Make Money Online

This is a great little tip for anybody looking at improving their affiliate earnings, there’s nothing black hat or nasty about this it’s just a genuine way of getting more referrals.

It’s a well known fact amongst internet marketers that visitors do not like clicking on referral/affiliate URL’s and that’s why so many people go to great lengths to hide them. Perhaps the most common way of disguising these links is to use a 301 redirect from a PHP file, if you look closely you’ll see that I use that tactic several times on this blog. However whilst that is fine for many average users what happens if you want to use an affiliate URL on forums and blog comments etc. Webmasters hate the idea of anybody other than them profiting from “their” traffic. Most webmasters can spot an affiliate link from a mile away and will simply delete your post or comment. It’s a damn shame because this is a great way of getting your link in front of thousands of visitors without having to go to the trouble of actually attracting them yourself. What if I could tell you a way of being able to use your affiliate link on whatever forum/blog/publically editable content you like?

This is so simple that a lot of people are just about to start kicking themselves….use a domain name as your referral link. Buy a domain name that relates to what you’re promoting and create a 301 redirect to your affiliate URL. No forum moderator or blog owner is going to suspect that the link to http://www.myfavouriteholidays.com in your signature is an affiliate URL (unless they read this!) and it gives you much more license to spread your link around the web. It’s even a way of getting your link past some of those fussy CPC networks.

I’ve got several domains setup like this and it is a tactic that works very well, if you want a quick example of what I mean try typing in www.widget-bucks.com and see what you get (That ones not mine by the way)?

Did you see what I did there (thanks or no thanks….get it….I’ll get my coat)?

Following on from John Chow’s startling revelation that the only way of making any real money online is to attract visitors and have them view ads that are targeted to what they are looking for this seems like a great time to write about my experiences with TNX, yet another way of getting those all valuable eye balls in front of your ads. By the way John is completely right, targeted ads in front of visitors is all it takes to make a living online (as if getting visitors is that easy).

So What Is TNX?

In short TNX is a link brokerage service, they allow you to both buy links on other webpage’s and sell links on your own. This is not a new format and for a long time it has been one of the best ways of securing one way links for many websites that struggle to grow natural links. It’s probably no secret that a lot of the link sellers are blogs with a lot of the link buyers being businesses. Where TNX differs from many of the other services is that it’s possible to get a lot of links for your buck (10,000 PR0 links for only $11 a month, surely the next best thing to free links). I’m not really bothered in selling links, in terms of my own websites I don’t think I would earn a lot with TNX so my experience is entirely limited to using TNX to buy links and getting those visitors in front of my ads.

Getting Started
To give TNX a fair chance I deposited $50 into my account, this was enough to buy 60,000 TNX points. Whilst still a small amount in link buying terms TNX implies they’ll deliver more for your dollar so I thought this was a nice amount. Once your points are safely in the system (you can also earn points by selling links) you can they go about creating an advertising campaign, this is where things can get a little confusing. In order to get your campaign up and running the first screen allows you to select a category (they recommend selecting 5-7 of the 17 available options), GEO targeting (English all the way for me), the number of Yahoo Back Links for the page you want your link on, the page ranks you want to target and finally how many points you’d like to spend. There is no way of softening this, this page is bloody complicated to use. As you change your target PR, Yahoo links and categories then the number of links your chosen points can buy will change. The other confusion comes later along because the amount of points you specify here is a guide only and doesn’t actually affect your link buying at all. At a later stage you have to specify the number of links you want for each category, TBL, PR combination (with no real indication of how much this is going to cost in terms of dollars). If your looking for thousands of links across lots of categories this can take some setting up, luckily for me I was only targeting one category, with 2 sections of YBL and a couple of PR’s.

Setting Your Links
So once you’ve got your campaign settings sorted it’s on to actually creating your links. TNX like you to create a minimum of 10 unique link texts. A great tip here is to use the import facility (I spent 30 minutes creating my links the first time only for them to be refused for a typo). If I would have used the import then I could have quickly just changed the text file and re-imported. TNX sets a 65 character limit for the length of your text (this is for link text and does NOT include your anchor html) which is quite generous in terms of getting plain text before and after the link. Make sure to target some of your links to deep pages as well, mix it up a bit. You can of course use more than the minimum 10 links.

Once you’ve got your links done you can now select how many links you want for each category/language/YBL/PR combination. I kept life simple order in groups of 10. Once you’ve completed that then it’s just a case of waiting for your campaign to be approved and for links to be assigned. To give you some idea I ordered a total of 60 links 48 of which were fulfilled at a cost of 35088 points a month. A bit of quick maths works out at about $29 for the month. Considering 13 of those links were on well targeted PR3 (with 1500+ Yahoo back links) pages that’s amazing value for money, I seriously doubt whether you could find that sort of link buying power elsewhere.

Do They Work?
This is the thing, did my links either improve search ranking or provide direct referral visitors? The truth is that yes they did refer traffic and my search rankings did improve after 2 weeks of using the links. I can’t say for sure if those links provided the extra search benefit but it would be hard to argue against them (They all look fine in Google’s Webmaster Tools). Perhaps even more importantly to us make money onliners the extra income from the target website more than paid for the cost of buying those links. Whilst the traffic wasn’t huge (more because of my target niche) several hundred people made there way over and stuck around for more than 2 minutes and viewed several pages. What I liked most about my TNX links was that they all seemed well positioned above the fold, this really helps when it comes to getting those visitors.

When it comes to link buying I’d recommend TNX, if you’ve got large sites with thousands of pages then I’m sure they’d be a great place to sell links as well. Whilst it’s true that the actually campaign isn’t the easiest thing in the world to setup once you get there it is worth it. They also run an affiliate program that I’ve just joined and will be writing about if and when it proves to be any good. All in all I’m happy.

Boo accounting, nobody really wants to bother doing the books but I’ve got news for you, if you want to take your online career to the ultimate stage (working for yourself) then you’re going to have to understand at least a little bit about where your money comes from, where it goes and perhaps best of all just how much you have left over to buy that Ferrari this month! As blogging and making money online moves from just being a hobby that pays to a full time job you’re going to face some decisions that anybody setting up their own business has to face e.g. self employment as a sole trader or forming a company? In order to make a decision that is best for you you’ll have to have some idea of cash flow, profit and loss and all that other horrible accountancy stuff.

Accountants Are Expensive
Sorry if that seems like a generalisation but it’s true, it’s also one expense that many people making the break from employment to working for yourself could do without out. When I first started making money online professionally it was one of my biggest fears, in order to give the tax man what he wanted I presumed I’d have to pay an accountant and in the process actually put a big dent in my chances of turning a profit and giving myself a wage. It was then that I bought myself a “For Dummies..” book, spent a few days reading up and finally came to the realisation that’s there not actually a whole lot to it. To make life even better there is affordable software out there that can get you up and running at a fraction of the cost of an accountant.

Accountancy Software And Why Use It
I use QuickBooks to record the in’s and out’s of my business activities. It has a great help system to get you started and it’s layout is so intuitive that you’ll only have to do something (like paying a bill) once or twice for it to stick. I was a Sage developer for a few years so I also know how good that is. One of the coolest things about using a propper accountancy package when you’re making money online is that you’ll end up with loads of different sources of income (each affiliate program you join etc), the number of people that try to use spreadsheets to make sense of all this is ridiculous. With a propper program you’ll be able to see what money has come from where and how it’s changed over time. It also helps me because I need pounds sterling to live and yet I earn in dollars. By converting the dollar amounts to sterling and holding the amount I earn in pounds it lets me see exactly what is and isn’t performing. For example it recently became apparent that even though I thought I was earning about £750 ($1500) a month with one affiliate program I could see from my accounts that only £670 was ever hitting my account. A quick e-mail and a change of payment method and I’m now earning much closer to £750, this is something that I wouldn’t spot unless I was keeping accounts in sterling.

By actually taking a little time every week or even every 2 weeks to record what comes in and goes out not only will it make your life easier when you do switch to full time making money online, it will make keeping the tax man happy and even more importantly may even help you save money.

I really can’t believe that I’ve just had to create a blog post with that heading but it’s true. In only a couple of months my WidgetBucks earnings are on the very brink of overtaking the money I earn from Adsense (and in the process becoming my biggest income earning PPC network). What is even more remarkable is the fact that I only use WidgetBucks on probably 5% of the number of pages that I use Adsense on, that’s seriously awesome earning power.

To be honest I haven’t even been keeping track of my WidgetBucks earnings, I installed the widgets on some product pages, some non product pages and just left them to it, I would have been happy with $5! Only the fact that they’ve been getting a rough time recently from some big name bloggers made me check my stats. I still haven’t managed to wipe the smile of my face.

If you’ve got product related articles and pages then I would seriously recommend that you give WidgetBucks a go, whilst they might not suite everybody’s websites (they don’t perform well on general news non product web pages) if you can find a page or two when you can match their offers to your page content then you can make some serious cash.

Rather than start answering individual questions I figured it would be easier if I just did a post about how I make money online. This isn’t so much about the networks I use as the actual tactics I use to make money.

My Standard Recipe

1. First and primarily I build content websites and not blogs. I have one golden rule when creating any new website for myself, and that’s only to create websites about subjects that interest me AND that I can provide original content for. In short I only write about the things that I know about. Some of these websites might get updated several times a week and others barely once a month but whatever content I add is my own and is always written to be of some benefit to whoever ends up reading it. If it’s a major project I will custom build a template, if it a small website I’ll probably for for a freebie template.

2. Once I have my website I then perform lots of basic SEO checks and keyword optimise it. For me my first lot of traffic always comes organically from the search engines, as long as your content is original and interesting then linking and referral traffic tends to build naturally from that. At this point I should actually be promoting and marketing using the social networks but to date I’ve not had much to do with them, this is something I will be looking at in some detail in the future. If you are struggling to attract natural traffic then read the SEO Book, download WebCEO and if needs be consider spending a few dollars on some links even if only for the first month or so.

3. This is where the interesting part starts, making money. So I’ve got my new optimised (for visitors and search engines) website, the next step for me is always adding at least 1 Adsense block. This is very effective with new quite small websites because your visitor may not find all the information they want, a text Adsense advert can actually be of real value. I will leave the new website with only Adsense ads for 1 to 2 months. If there is no traffic in a niche no matter how well placed you are and you’re not seeing anything from Adsense then this is the point at which to stop and try something new.

4. In the time Adsense is running I will look through the various affiliate networks (Commission Junction, Trade Doubler, Click Bank, Never Blue Ads) and try and find any good fitting deals. Do not waste your time with affiliate deals that do not match your websites content (no matter how big the commission), you’re just wasting space. If I find a nice product I’ll add it to my website, as a rule I will create a whole new page for the affiliate deal rather than just use a banner. Adding value for your visitors as well as pre-selling is vital.

5. At this stage my new website is making a little money from Adsense and slllooowwwlllyy starting to convert the odd affiliate deal. It’s making money.

6. So my website isn’t so new at this stage and has nice amounts of traffic, now is the time to add another ad network. Kontera has been a nice earner for me and doesn’t tend to have any bad affects on other ad networks. My website is now earning money from several pay per click networks, affiliate deals and building a nice mailing list. THIS WILL ONLY WORK THOUGH IF YOU CAN KEEP PUMPING OUT ORIGINAL AND INTERESTING CONTENT.

7. Once a website has several thousand unique visitors a day I start to think about direct ad sales. This can take anywhere between 12-18 months. I treat every website I create as a long term project with the guaranteed money from direct ad sales each month being a great goal to target.

Selling Software & My Original Products

1. Besides making money from advertising and affiliate deals from content websites I also sell my own software. I can’t really give you much guidance on this other that to say that if you’re not a software developer I suggest you check out Rent A Coder. For a small outlay you just might get yours hands on something that you can sell over and over for many years.

2. Build a website using the recipe above for each product you wish to sell, key elements are home, product, FAQ, support, privacy & terms. Use the PAD standard to gain hundreds of free 1 way links, press releases are great for promoting new products.

3. This is the only point at which I would ever use Adwords or any other PPC advertising network. I do not use PPC networks to advertise anything other than my own products simply because if you’re promoting an affiliate product via Adwords then you can bet that another 10 affiliates are doing the same thing (inflating bid prices). This makes making money in this way very hard, some pro’s make a fortune this way but they are spending very big in the first place.

So as you can see I keep things really simple (ads, affiliates, newsletters, original products) and as low risk as possible. I can’t recommend spending hundreds/thousands of dollars on any website until you have found a niche that proves itself both with PPC and Affiliate sales. Because I have kept things so simple to date it also means I have lots of room for expansion in the future e.g. my first steps into blogging with this blog. Hopefully I’ll be starting my first forum website soon as well as starting to do a little bit more with Adwords and affiliate deals. As you grow and get sales you can start to negotiate improved rates, I’m sure that this is how the so called super affiliates make so much money. That is my next target.

The e-mail I got went something like this:- “AN Hosting is currently running a limited time special. 999 GB of Disk Space, 9999 GB of Ba ndwidth, 999 Domains on 1 Account, Just $4.95/month to the end user“. Wow, that’s a crazy offer and they must know it because it’s limited to the 22nd of November.

So that’s pretty much unlimited domain hosting, with more bandwidth than you could ever use for only $4.95 a month. I’ve signed up, even if I only put 2 or 3 domains on that hosting it’s still amazingly cheap, heck, even if I only put 1 domain on there it’s another class C IP address to link to and from with my other websites. The single domain (resellers resale) hosting that hosts this website with its tight limits on bandwidth and storage space costs me more than $4.95 a month!

As you expand you’ll want to add more hosting options (and the ever important Class C IP’s) to your inventory, this is one offer that should be very hard to pass up on.

According to ProBlogger Darren Rowse Google are going to change the rules for Adsense publishers by limiting what areas of an ad are clickable. Going are the days when a click anywhere within the block counted, visitors will now have to either click the ad title or the URL at the bottom in order for you to earn money.

I’ve got mixed feelings about this one, in the short term I expect to lose money. It’s not that I built MFA websites or deliberately try to mislead visitors it’s just that a certain percentage of any Adsense publishers clicks must come from accidental clicking. On the other hand if it improves the quality of the ad network as a whole then bid prices will naturally go up over time resulting in more bang for you legitimate clicks. As an Adwords publisher it’s not going to affect me at all, I experimented for a long time with the content network (Adsense) but CTR and ROI were soo bad each time that I gave up. Who knows if Google can improve this it might be worth looking at again. Also the fact that Google are still tweaking Adsense gives me hope that they are not going to phase out pay-per-click adverts quite yet.

Overall I think the biggest losers here are going to be the people who insist on churning out MFA spam websites so that’s not a bad thing for the rest of us.

Here are a couple of things to keep in mind as Google roll out the new rules:-

1. I’m assuming images will remain entirely clickable, is it worth reconsidering accepting image ads?
2. It is now even more important than ever to make sure your ad titles look like standard web links.
3. With this extra level of targeting before a click counts is it worth swapping out PPC blocks for CPA?

So it’s not making money in the strictest sense of the words but not wasting money is just as important when it comes to making a living online. When I first started this blog, my first real blog, I shot of like a rocket looking for ways of getting those initial visitors. Don’t know why really, I could have relied entirely on good old fashioned SEO techniques to draw in natural search and referral traffic but I was excited and wanted some quick results. I spent quite a lot of money in that first month, some was money well spent, some was just a waste. What it did prove though was the power of affiliate marketing from a blog because I’m pretty sure everything I signed up for was being promoted by at least one of the A list bloggers. Without further a do here’s a quick run down of some of the things I spent money on:-

Million Dollar Wiki
My online money makers page cost me $100 at the million dollar wiki, expensive for a single page but when I saw the number of bloggers promoting it and the fact it was a 15 year investment I decided it was a calculated risk worth taking. In the first few weeks of my page being there it managed to pay for itself (mainly thanks to TLA) and although the traffic it refers has dropped to a trickle it still does send the odd referral this way. Overall I’ve got to say that I am happy with the Million Dollar Wiki but if you’ve only got $100 to spend it might be better going elsewhere, especially now that the initial buzz has died down.

Bloggings Most Wanted
Everybody has seen one of those buy a pixel etc etc websites, well this was just the same but for bloggers. Buy a square for $25, upload a picture and have traffic referred to you for ever more. The problem with these sites is that they are only as good as the person marketing them. In this case after the initial surge of being featured on John Cow nothing seems to have happened since. Like the Wiki, traffic was high with the initial publicity but I’ve just checked and in the last week it has not referred any visitors (and I’m at the top of the most clicked bloggers list). At the end of the day this is $25 that could have been better spent elsewhere (note to self, impulse buying is stupid)

Blogging The Movie
This is probably the craziest thing I got involved with. I’ve even had to go back and look at the details to find out exactly what I’ve signed up for! Anyhoo, for $100 I get to have a permanent link on the Blogging The Movie website (as one of the first sponsors to sign up), a couple of reviews and if the target to buy a car is met my domain name plastered on the side of a car! If they don’t meet their target then I get the $100 back. Blogging The Movie is a project to travel the world videoing 10 bloggers, I prefer guns and scantily clad chicks in my movies but each to their own and all that. Either way I’ve paid $100 to help promote it, in terms of referral traffic it’s been a bit of a shocker but to give them their due it is delivering consistent traffic levels. All I need now is for them to make a mega hit and ride that traffic wave to wealth (or not). I guess time will tell whether this was worth it or not.

TLA
My $135 spend with TLA was money well spent, not only did it draw in some/lots of traffic but it also proved conclusively that buying traffic with TLA was a very viable option. I have considered doing the same again (I only ran the ads for 1 month) to give the blog a boost but at the moment with Christmas fast approaching I’m going to stick with my own rules and be a little conservative.

It seems funny but when most people talk about how much they make from blogging they ignore their expenses. My expenses were quite a lot to start of with but now are next to nothing, I’ve got this blog to a level where it can pay for itself and give some return as long as I don’t do any crazy spending, I almost feel like I’ve found my own little place that I can use to build from. If I carried on like I was then it would have been a lot longer before I could say I was making a profit, sure I was making money, it’s just I was spending it before I got it!