I’m signing of for a few days now to spend some quality time with my family, I’m quite looking forward to not turning a computer on for a few days! Anyway, those of you that celebrate Christmas have a great one and I’ll be back in a few days.
All the best,
Paul B
You may have heard me banging on about TrialPay for a while now, the reason is simple, if you are currently giving something useful away for free then you can earn a good chunk of cash with them. It’s a simple process whereby you get paid by companies when your customer accepts their offer in order to get your product. A lot of the offers are free, some aren’t but it is a great way of monetising what you currently do for free without causing any inconvenience to the end user.
The problem with TrialPay comes when you don’t have anything to give away. What if you don’t have an e-book, design templates or you don’t write software? Well now they’ve come up with a solution, you can now sign up to be an affiliate for other TrialPay products and earn a revenue share (many are as high as 50%, some higher). Just to make this clear you are an affiliate for a valued product that costs the user nothing and you get a share of the money. To give you some idea one of my own free products regularly generates transaction amounts of $35+ on TrialPay. If I did a 50% revenue share on that then for each customer you refer (remember it costs the customer nothing) you would receive $17.50+
At the moment there are about 70 products you can sign up to promote as an affiliate covering a very broad spectrum. The real beauty in this system is that everybody loves free stuff. I’d go as far to say that if you can’t make money being a TrialPay Affiliate that now might be the time to give up on affiliate marketing.
If you can’t tell already I’m very excited by this, for me this is the best IM news I’ve heard all year. Straight away my mind is thinking “ClickBank but where each product is free to the end user”. Affiliate marketers have managed to make millions with ClickBank, this has the potential to be bigger, especially for those that get in early.
Well this blog is dying on its arse isn’t it, a simple “post a comment” competition and only 2 entries, ah well. Anyway congratulations go to SEO Optimization for winning, if you can drop me a line with the e-mail address you use for Entrecard I’ll have the points sent over ASAP.
Getting links to your website is essential if you want to have a good position in the search results, certainly with Google the overall linking picture is the biggest influence on where your pages end up showing, or so they say. The trouble is that over time it has become harder and harder to attract links that Google will value, or so the story goes. With this in mind when it comes to my clients I am very strict on the types of links I build, for some appearance and reputation are perhaps even more important than SERPS positions and with these I am extra careful.
One good example is a company I’ve been working for a year now, because of the sums of money involved (per transaction) it is more important for them be completely above board than to rank number 1 for everything. But why should these 2 things be mutually exclusive? In that year I have build over 400 natural links to their website, all of them on target and related via personal communication with other webmasters. The results although not spectacular are good, from PR1 to PR3 and from no natural search traffic to several thousand visitors. On average they rank about position 20 for each of their main keywords and in the top 10 for all long tail targets. More importantly to the client the traffic converts and all metrics are on a steady upward rise.
I was a bit miffed though this week to receive a link request from a competitor who although only being going several months is already ranking above us. A little bit of checking shows that they’ve done it by gaining tens of thousands of spammy links in a very short amount of time. Thanks Google. As far as I’m concerned their spam site shouldn’t be there but obviously Google doesn’t agree. It seems that all links are good, no matter how bad. I suppose this makes sense, if a link could negatively affect your ranking then what’s to stop people scuppering their competitors efforts by paying for links from a bad neighbourhood? Although Google claim that these links will be of NO benefit I have the feeling that they do provide some tiny tiny amount of benefit in Google’s algorithm. Enough of these and hey ho you’re jumping above legitimate competition. My belief is at some point they will eventually start slipping back down the results, but that is only based on blind faith in Google.
So here’s the question, when it comes to linking does slow and steady legitimate linking really win the day or do you see better results by having huge amounts of non relevant links?
One of the best ways of making large amounts of money online is to harness the power of pay-per-click with affiliate deals. When it comes to PPC networks the daddy is Adwords from Google, the trouble is if you have no experience in this type of marketing where do you start? Well you could do a lot worse than popping over to www.googlelady.com and downloading her new FREE Adwords e-book “The Adwords Quality Guide“. I’ve spent significant amounts of money on e-books that have proved to contain a lot less information than what you are getting here for free. Covering topics including:-
Getting Started With Adwords
The Benefits Of Using All Match Types
49 Killer Adwords Tips
The Ultimate Google Adwords Landing Pages Guide
plus much more this is a really great guide for novice & intermediate Adwords users. The real advantage to using Adwords over organic search results is the speed at which you can test new ideas. In 1 or 2 days you can discover what keywords are working (i.e. that generate profit) so that you can then put all your SEO efforts into optimizing for those words. To see the same results with organic search you may be talking months rather than days. The big downside is that if you don’t know what you’re doing it is possible to loose quite large amounts of money in no time at all. The good news is if you download and read thoroughly The Adwords Quality Guide you’ll be in a great position to take full advantage of what Adwords can offer us.
I’ve decided to run a little competition to win some Entrecard points. I’ve got 200 to give away which should be enough to place a couple of adverts on some fairly well positioned blogs. Either that or you can save a little and try and blag a spot over at johnchow.com
All you have to do to win is leave a comment on this post (1 entry) or mention and link to this contest in one of your blog posts (2 entries). Obviously you can only leave 1 comment but if you’ve got more than 1 blog please feel free to mention it more than once for multiple entries.
I’ll do the draw some time around Friday lunchtime (GMT). Good luck one and all.
Not much of a post to come back with after my little break, it’s more an explanation of my why I’ve not been updating than anything juicy!
The truth is that since the beginning of September I’ve not been sleeping properly at all. A small part of the problem is the change in routine as my daughter switched from primary school to secondary school (it’s a much earlier start to the day for us all) but the major part is the worry/stress of coming up with those new ideas that pay the bills. Like just about everybody out there making money online I have an approach that involves me churning out fresh idea after fresh idea in the hope that 1 or 2 hit (for every site I have that makes 10 dollars a day I have 10 that make less than a dollar). As certain things that have worked in the past come to the end of their natural cycle I need to replace them with new ideas and in the current environment very few new things are actually making any real money. So stress leads to a tiredness which leads to a lack of good ideas which leads to stress?! It’s a bit of a vicious circle really and one that I’d like to break as soon as possible.
So cue Wednesday where I finally get to relax with my mates and drink beer (A cracking night out it was too). Of course one side affect of this is a good nights sleep, a first in months. Now my body has realised on what its been missing all it wants to do is sleep, so from Wednesday to today (Sunday evening) I’ve done next to nothing other than sleep. My eyes will only stay open for a few hours at a time, I’m either tired or have no energy all of the time. I’m not going to the gym or doing any exercise and my body is in a state of melt down at the moment (Yes I was half tempted to start the “I’m Falling To Bits Trying To Make Money Online Blog”). The good thing about all this is that eventually I will hit rock bottom, will feel refreshed, will get back in the gym and will start working (both mentally and physically). My plan for now is to try and relax, enjoy the Christmas break with my family just keeping what I have already ticking along ready for a resurgence of energy in the new year. Until that point updates may be sporadic, I’m not going to push myself to post daily but as and when something stand out happens I’ll sure let you all know about it (now might be a good time to think about subscribing to the RSS feed, at least that way you’re not wasting your time coming here if I’ve not updated).
Take it easy,
Paul B
It’s the office/lads christmas party today which means that I HAVE to go out drinking beer all afternoon. I’ll be disappearing to the pub in about an hours time and will fall through the door probably sometime in either the very late hours of today or the early hours of tomorrow morning. The really cool thing about this is that as I’m out and about getting drunk and having fun I’ll still be earning money, sometimes you just gotta love the internet!