Money Schemes - Learn How To Make Money Online

Agloco is now dead, gone, kaput. I bet all those people that really pushed it hard are feeling a bit stupid today. Not as stupid as the doom merchants claiming that WidgetBucks will be the next to go! Agloco was based on a single idea (viewbar), executed badly that never had any real way of generating an income. WidgetBucks is based on a very stable business model that works well (if not slowly for the creators) and also has enough backing (Mpire) for the development to be done correctly. It’s like comparing chalk and cheese.

The truth is that the doom merchants are bloggers, relying solely on blogs for their income. As has been said a hundred times before WidgetBucks ads DO NOT work well on blogs. They require decent amounts of product targeted search engine traffic which does not mix nicely with general blogging, no matter how specific you think you are being. The Blogosphere is not the internet, it is not the world wide web, it is only a tiny part of it. I have Adsense ads on here because they will generate an income on even the least untargeted websites, even if it’s just from affiliates bidding 2 and 3 cents. This website is not how I make my living. In general real money on the internet is made in 1 of 3 ways:-

1. Content websites
2. PPC Affiliate Marketing
3. Mail list marketing

I was watching a TV program on Sunday morning and it had a famous ballroom dancer being interviewed on it. One of the presenters asked “but ballroom dancing has only become popular recently, only old people used to dance?”. He was totally wrong, there has always been a dancing community, in their own eyes a large one at that. The truth was though that if you weren’t “part” of that community it might as well of not existed. Blogging is the same. My 12 year old daughter doesn’t blog so has no interest in them. My mum and dad don’t so have no interest in blogging but they still use the internet, they will both use Google to search for things to buy. I think we bloggers can sometimes get caught up in our own little worlds, John Chow, Darren Rowse, Jeremy Schoemaker are only truly famous amongst bloggers and people interested in making money in the same way that I’m sure there are plenty of “famous” erotic blog writers out there that I’ve never heard of. Of all the people that visit my blog how many are not bloggers themselves, very few I would guess? Natural search traffic for blogs (the type of people that buy things) is a infamously low percentage compared to other types of website. There are people out there making 10,20,50 times from the internet what the more well known a-listers are making without ever feeling the need to talk about themselves or write a blog, why, because they know blogging doesn’t pay and they don’t need the ego boost. This isn’t supposed to be criticism (hell you are reading MY blog), I’m just pleading with you all to diversify, when you have been introduced to making money online through blogging then it’s natural to think it is the only way. It is these people that will hammer anything that doesn’t work for them on their blogs i.e. WidgetBucks.

WidgetBucks does not work well on general blogs, you will not get the same number of clicks that you see from Adsense. If you have product related content webistes that attract targeted search traffic then WidgetBucks ads can perform very well (I know of one medium sized publisher that has made more than $15,000 in a month with them). If you’re looking for the next idea to go belly up I suggest you look in the direction of BlogRush

I stayed up late on Saturday to watch the Hatton, Mayweather big fight. Hatton was totally outclassed in the later rounds but started really well with Mayweather hanging on (with the help of the ref) for the first 4. All in all it was a fair result and I look forward to Ricky making his come back in the ring soon. By the looks of it Mayweather is ready for retiring and will be dipping his toes into the world of fight promotion, more money and less pain. Because of the build up fights running late the actual main event didn’t get finished until 6am UK time. I’m shattered and it will probably take me a few more days to recover properly, it’s tough doing that work that needs doing never mind posting here but I’ll try and come up with something a little more creative later on. I suppose one lesson can be learnt from this and that’s always to have a few backup post drafts lying around for days like this!

WidgetBucks are definitely the real deal, I got my first payment from them yesterday. Their terms state that they pay within 45 days of the end of the month so this payment covered the money I made from the week or so I had the WidgetBucks ads live in October.

45 days might seem like a long time but there are a couple of things that make that wait worth while.

1. They pay via Paypal so no need to worry about cashing USD cheques
2. There Paypal payment doesn’t incur any charges (unlike a lot of other services that pay via Payal)

What this means is that I earnt $783.18 and that’s what they paid me! It doesn’t sound a big deal but it’s just nice not to have any hidden charges in there.

This one started about a month ago, I seem to be spending more and more time on my websites that produce the least. One good example of this is a ballroom dancing website I started nearly 2 years ago for my daughter. She was never interested in doing anything with it and it has sat there getting 1 or 2 updates a month for the last year. It makes enough money to more than cover hosting and the domain registration but not enough to justify the time I spend updating it. This was one of my original hand built websites written using nothing more than notepad and any new pages have to be manually linked to, menus and sitemaps updated etc etc. The thing is my wife is a crazy mental Ballroom Dancing freak and loves everything about it. In fact she is always commenting on forums so I decided why not give her own website? Unfortunately she is a technophobe so I’d need some sort of CMS so that she could create new content. After trying Joomla and Drupal I settled on a WordPress install (ease of use being the main criteria), I’m very glad I did!

So I set about moving my lovely ASP.net based hand coded website over to a free WordPress theme that I had found. I was prepared in the short term to kiss goodbye to all my good rankings and any money it made, this was about giving my wife an outlet for her dancing rants. I moved all the existent content over into new pages and posts (depending on the content) and my wife started posting about her favourite dancing programmes. I kept an eye on the site daily (waiting for my figures to disappear), here is the unique visitors chart from Google Analytics showing what happened (Our visits are filtered out):-

Unbelievable. In the space of 2 days the new website was performing 3 times better than the old one, natural search traffic had gone through the roof. Even better my Adsense earnings from that single website had increased by the same percentage. What all this comes down to is this, WordPress besides being an excellent blogging platform is a very search friendly CMS. To not waste my own time I put as little effort as possible into this change over but it has given me a blue-print for the future. WordPress takes your content and with a little help can create multiple search friendly copies that can really suck in those long tail keywords. This is where all my new traffic has come from. In fact I’m going to be moving one of my primary business websites over before the end of the month. I f I see the same results again I’ll be moving all my static websites.

The Changes I Made To Make WordPress As SEO Friendly As I Could

Once I had my WordPress install sorted and my template in place I did change a few things:-

1. Permalinks, I changed the permalink structure to /%postname%/
2. Add the All In One Seo Pack, Feedburner, Google Sitemaps and Related Posts plugins.
3. Add the following to the htaccess file so that only 1 copy (with and without www) of each page is linked to:-

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^(.*)\.yourwebsitehere\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourwebsitehere.com/$1 [R=301,L]

4. Alter the robots.txt to the following to remove much of the duplicate content

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /go/
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /author/
Disallow: */page/*
Disallow: /wp-images/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /backup/
Disallow: /banners/
Disallow: /archives/
Disallow: */trackback/
Disallow: */feed/
Disallow: /*?*

User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Allow: /wp-content/uploads/

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Allow: /

5. To only post to 1 category. The same content appearing in multiple categories is one of the biggest duplicate content issues with WordPress.

So that was it, those were the 5 steps I took. To be honest the only one that took any real time was installing and configuring the plugins. Even so I reckon from start to finish I could have a great performing WordPress website up and running within an hour. The only extra thing is that when it comes to making money I found that altering your Main Index Template to include a large Adsense block in the page not found area really helped. The results seem to speak for themselves, if I can repeat this success with another website then that would be proof enough for me to spend some serious time next year moving all my websites over.

If you’ve got some old content hanging around why not give it a go and let me know how you get on?

(Several people have asked in the past why I don’t link to my websites. Put simply it’s because far too many people steal/rip my original content from The Make Money Online Dot Net for me to risk sites that actually make me money).

No top money making tips today, I’m of to the funeral of one of my aunties soon and in my family these sort of events tend to drag on for the whole day.

The post I was going to write will have to wait until tomorrow but it’s a goody! You’ve heard about swapping different ad formats/ad types to see what works best? Well I’ve taken it to the next level and swapped out my own completely hand coded static HTML website for a CMS. The result, over a 300% increase in traffic and earnings in 2 days. Unbelievable results but I’ll be explaining exactly what I did tomorrow.

Some of you might have noticed that I’ve added a new money maker to the list, it’s not there only because I want affiliate commissions but because it works, really!

BANS (Build A Niche Store) is one of those products you see advertised from time to time that claims it’s going to make you loads of money with very little work. The trouble is that many of these PHP scripts are very buggy and you spend more time trying to actually get them to work than making any money with them. BANS is very different, it works with very little setup and it DOES make money. It claims to be search engine friendly and from my experience it certainly is.

BANS allows you to very quickly build a niche store based on one or more e-bay categories. You enter the category number(s) and it retrieves the products, sub-categories and automatically builds a great store front for you based on our choice of template. There are a number of templates built in and they are very easy to customise to anybody knowing even the smallest bit of CSS. The whole process from installation can be done in a little under 10 minutes (I’m not going to do a step-by-step, ShoeMoney has already done that if you need proof of just how easy this is). In order to profit from your BANS store you’ll need a Commission Junction e-bay affiliate account for the e-bay locale you wish to target (several are available with more to follow soon). At this time of year when the shopping frenzy is at it’s highest it’s possible to make good money with this, in fact I paid for my $97 copy in a little under a month on a site that only gets 40 visitors a day.

So that’s enough about BANS, what’s all this lazer targeting? Well as I said earlier your store is going to be based on e-bay categories, the trouble is that some e-bay categories are not as targeted as you and I would like. For example I wanted to build a dancing costumes store but the lowest level e-bay category I could select was Children’s Dancewear. This category includes all sorts of stuff ranging from break dancing mats all the ways to Irish dancing shoes! I only wanted to target one type of dance clothing so on went the programmer hat and this is what I came up with.

There are 2 files that you will need to alter in order for this to work, index.php and cont/FrontControl.php, in each you are looking for the line that retireves the products via the e-bay RSS feed for your country. The easiest way is to search in a text editor for the string “rss.api.ebay.com”, there will only be a few entries and you are looking for the one below the e-bay country you are using. For example the UK feed is below “elseif($siteType == “UK”)”. Now in that very long line that retrives the products look for
&satitle=”.urlencode($front->q).” and append + whateverkeywordyouwanttotarget, so if I was looking to target the boys toys category for only transformers I would change it from

&satitle=”.urlencode($front->q).”&ftrv=1

to

&satitle=”.urlencode($front->q).”+transformers&ftrv=1

If you do this in both the index.php and cont/FrontControl.php files then every time products are retrieved they will be filtered to those that include your keyword. It works for sub-categories and any searches within your store making sure that your whole shop is lazer targeting to your chosen keywords. As far as hacks go this is a fairly minor one but in terms of getting more affiliate sales it’s gold.

If you’re convinced and want to give BANS a go then you can get a nice $40 discount by signing yourself up as a ClickBank affiliate and buying through your own link. The problem with this is that you need to generate enough sales including three different sets of credit card details (and one being mastercard) before ClickBank will actually pay you. That’s fine if you’re experienced with ClickBank but a huge number of people never make that payment bracket and ClickBank even start taking money of you if your account stays inactive for too long. On the other hand if you want a much quicker $20 discount sign up using my affiliate link and I’ll split my commission so that you get $20 back via Paypal as soon as ClickBank pay me. If you want to do this buy using my link and use my contact form on this blog to drop me a line (including your paypal e-mail address). As soon as ClickBank pay me, (which they do every month) I’ll send you your $20.

This last 11 months has seen some of the most amazing ups and downs of my life, one day it looks like I’m finally going to achieve the financial freedom I’ve been fighting for the next it looks like I’m going to be looking for a normal job again (days like today). One day I clear more than $1000 the next it’s $100 and all without any apparent pattern or reason. Making a living from the internet is not easy, there is no guaranteed pay cheque each month, what works one week may not the next, even when you do nail it the rules often change plus the more you begin to make the more people are looking to put you down! The strange thing is that it is this freedom to flourish, this uncertainty, this stress that made me want to leave my Civil Service ($45,000 a year salary, 30 days a year holiday, up to 18 days flexi leave a year, 11 bank holidays a year) job behind. I only lasted a couple of years of tearing my hair out at the lethargy around me, it was those years that gave me the incentive to get my little money earning part of the web in place so that I could not only support myself but my family.

Perhaps what I find strangest of all is that whenever anybody asks how I’m doing they all assume that money pours into my account with free abandon and I spend all day dossing about. Of course there are the slack days, but then again they are far outweighed by the 18 hour work days, days of sourcing links where there appear to be none, of squeezing that last little bit of on the page SEO juice out, off chopping and changing for the hundredth time to try out that new network that could be “the one”, of answering the swearing filled support e-mails from people who have downloaded your stuff, off writing new content on a subject that has been covered 1,000,000 times by everybody else, the list goes on and on. I wouldn’t change it for anything in the world though, making that break for freedom was the best thing I ever did, and just like every other roller coaster in the world this one sure as hell has the ability to grab you by the balls and remind you that you’re alive!