Money Schemes - Learn How To Make Money Online

The Benefits Of Content Management Systems
Three of the easiest (read laziest) ways of creating a website that can earn you money. Essentially Pligg (A Digg Clone), WordPress (The number 1 blogging platform) and BANS (Build A Niche Store, an e-bay store generator) are all based around the same idea, combining PHP and a mySQL database to make creating content as easy as possible. Off the 3 BANS is the least hands on, in 30 minutes you can have a nice looking store front loaded with eBay goodies, Pligg requires some updating (sourcing new stories helps to encourage other people to contribute) whilst WordPress is all about your own content. What the three of them have in common as well is that they are capable of being made very much search friendly, it’s entirely possible to attract good amounts of search traffic with these content management systems if configured correctly.

So I was wondering what would happen if you combined all three on one website? This is my plan, I’m going to create a social shopping website that features a Pligg style front end. I’m going to load this up with more unusual items, the sort of items that you don’t search for everyday but are easy to rank for (WebCEO helps with this). Behind this I’m going to use BANS to build an eBay store front but only for eBay bargains, anything under $5 will do. The final element will be a WordPress blog to serve one purpose only, discount vouchers. I have a couple of sources for discount vouchers for big name stores and I’ll be using WordPress to put them out there. Eventually I’ll automate this process so that the blog can largely update itself. What I’ll end up with is a website that has unusual items, a bargain basement and a source of discounts for the big boys.

The Goal
What I’m hoping to achieve here is a website that will eventually update itself yet provide an income via the various affiliate deals (eBay and Amazon for example) being used. I think by offering Pligg and WordPress it gives visitors twice the opportunity to pass comment which will hopefully result in a more dynamic website. In terms of original content the Pligg front end will be entirely original posts and I’ll be taking time out each week to publish something meaningful to the WordPress side as well. Other than that I’ll be relying on comments and contributions, a vital key in this is getting a decent page rank to reward top commentators/contributors with.

I wouldn’t like to try and convince anybody that online shopping is an easy niche to get a piece of the pie in so I’m going to set very modest goals for this experiment. I’m giving myself half a day for initial setup and no more than 1 hour a week for updates. The first target as to get that first affiliate sale!

I’ve just this moment gone to sign into my Kontera account and a few things have changed. Least importantly there is a new sign in form (this always catches me out because I rely so much on Firefox to remember my passwords). Once you have trawled through your old e-mails to find your password the next thing you’re faced with is some new terms & conditions. Seeing as how the changes were publisher requests and not advertiser requests I took the usual assumption that all was fine and agreed!

This is where you get to the meat of the Kontera updates, the reporting. The very simplistic date range and website reports have now been greatly expanded. First of all you’re given a 1 week summary up until the last confirmed days earnings (that’s still normally 1 day behind real time). Even better you now get a monthly graph allowing you to see how your earnings fluctuate day by day, this is a great addition, I’d certainly never realised how much my earnings with Kontera fluctuate.

Under detailed reports you are faced with just about the same options as what the old Kontera offered. Pick a date range and then decide if you want to see for all websites or just one. Not that interesting really. It’s the last 2 report options that have been offered that will really help you to make more money with Kontera. The keyword report will show you which words/phrases are getting the most clicks for whatever website you choose. In that past this has always been left to guess work but now you know what people are clicking on you can think about altering your content to suite. I’m sure above the fold is just as important with Kontera in text advertising as the more traditional ad blocks. Lastly there is the URL report, this does pretty much the same as the keyword report but instead tells you which URLs on your website get the most clicks. By combining the information from these last 2 reports you really do have a much better chance of making even more money with Kontera.

Kontera has always been one of my favourite ad networks, not only do they pay very well but to date I’ve found that implementing them on a website that already contains adverts doesn’t affect your other revenues. If you haven’t already I’d recommend you give Kontera a go.

As part of my big experiment on PPC/Affiliate marketing I also setup an advertising account with FaceBook. I purposely didn’t write about it in my review because as an advertising network it was so different to the others I’d tried.

Forget Keywords, Think Demographics
The big difference between FaceBook and Adwords, YSM etc is that instead of targeting keywords and phrases you’re targeting a demographic. Select a location, sex, age range, education status, political views and even there relationship status and your ad will only be shown in front of the group of people you select. I’m sure you don’t need my help to point out what sort of potential this has for dating adverts and things like that, it’s also no coincidence that so many of the adverts on FaceBook are dating or education related.

Why Google Have It Right And FaceBook Have It Wrong
I started of only bidding $0.10 for my FaceBook ad, this is where it is cool though, even with such a small amount (I ignored the $0.30-$0.40 recommendation) I was getting 5,000 impressions plus a day. Not bad considering I was targeting a quite small amount of people as well. The problem was though that my CTR was almost non existent. This is where Google have things right and FaceBook don’t. When somebody enters a search into Google thy have an intent, they are actively looking for something. When you sign into your FaceBook page, you’re not actively doing anything. You can have all the ads in the world but if the person isn’t looking for that product then your CTR is going to be very low. This is a large part of the reason why search related traffic always converts so well compared to direct type in or referrals. FaceBook ended up costing me very little (it’s pay-per-click after all) but also returned very little as well.

Where Would I Use FaceBook Advertising
Where I think this has huge potential is for gaining exposure, not so much selling but for getting a name out there. FaceBook receives huge amounts of traffic (that tend not to like clicking on ads). By creating a carefully crafted advert it’s possible to get almost free advertising for a website or product of your choice. You might not directly get the clicks but it’s putting a name or website in front of a lot of people.

It seems that the post I did about SiteCube has caused a bit of a fuss. In fact I’ve removed the one way link to the reseller that was originally mentioned (because I was asked to) , I’m not trying to wreck anybody’s business, just make a point. Whenever I talk about Flash I’m talking from a business perspective, more specifically a small business point of view, if you want to have a Flash website built to host your family photographs then each to their own. Personally I’d go for a free service like Flickr or even better PhoTrade (and make some money out of it) but that’s just me.

Anyway, Flash and the small business. Here are my top 5 reasons why I don’t like Flash websites:-

1. Eliminating Dial-Up Traffic – I know this will shock a lot of people but there are still a great number of people who access the internet via a dial-up connection. A quick look at my stats shows around 40% of people who come here do it via a dial-up internet connection. The load time involved with even a modest Flash website will be enough for most people to hit the back button.

2. Portability, Or Rather The Lack Off – In a modern world where the world wide web is about far more than using a computer it’s important that your website is usable on as many devices as possible. There are portable devices that support Flash but because of the lack of external formatting options/settings in my experience it is pointless. With a nicely valid xHTML/CSS site you’ve got no problems.

3. A Whole Website On 1 Page – In the eyes of the search engines your website is going to be limited to your title, description, keywords and as much text as you can get into your noscript tag. This not only has a terrible affect on any potential rankings but it also means that if somebody wants to link to a specific part of your flash website they can’t. This actively discourages other webmasters from linking to you. It’s also commonly accepted that larger websites are seen with a better light by the search engines.

4. Link Relevancy – It’s not the number of links that count anymore, it’s the relevancy. How can the search engines know if something is relevant or not if it can’t read what is on the page (beyond the title, description etc). Even if you can get links (which you’ll most likely have to buy) the chances of the search engines counting them as quality links is minimal.

5. PPC Quality Penalty – Have you ever tried attracting visitors to a Flash website with PPC, I have? It all comes back to that same old problem of what the search engines can and can’t trawl but you’re going to find it very hard to get a decent quality score when your landing page is a Flash website. This mean higher PPC costs per visitor, you’d also better hope that they’re not visiting via dial-up.

I own a small business and the thing that has made me relatively successful is the idea of a ROI. Everything I do with regards to my business has to have a ROI, having a website built is no different. With Flash I see the chance of getting anything back out the investment (no matter how small that investment may be) is extremely limited.

You can call me a chicken if you like but I’ve ended my experiment into affiliate marketing via PPC early this month. I initially set aside $500 in a slush fund to “give it a go” and see what happened but at around the $420 down mark I’ve decided to call it a day. I’ll admit that there are a few things I’ve learnt from it so it hasn’t been an all bad experience, in fact I’ve treated it very much as a gamble, don’t bet with more than you can afford to lose and you can’t get too upset!

First of all I’ve learnt that for the same ad spend Yahoo Search Marketing can deliver more clicks for your buck than Adwords. I was also using the Microsoft equivalent but in the end the traffic amounts were so low that I gave up early. I started of doing what I though was the right thing with Adwords, high bids, reducing as the quality score (and CTR) increased and I did get my bid amount down from $0.75 to $0.12 for the same position. The trouble was that for $0.07 I was getting a much larger number of clicks with YSM. The real problem I faced with this was going from clicks to conversions, obviously clicks cost money and conversions generate money. I figured before I started that because people were searching for something specific, dropping on a page with what they were searching for would have a higher conversion rate than just creating a link on a page and relying on organic traffic. It didn’t really, conversion rates from my PPC campaigns and “normal” website traffic was about the same. The end result was that as each conversion from one of my sites was profit, a conversion from the PPC sources was just a dent in my loses.

The next lesson was that no matter how much people tell me, I can’t get any joy out of squeeze pages. Rather than creating my own landing pages I was happy to dump the PPC traffic at a pre-existing squeeze page for each product. Personally I hate those bold on yellow excuses for web pages but I went with it anyway. In the past when I’ve used PPC marketing for clients I normally put them on a relevant page within the context of a professional looking website. Conversion rates have always been high using this approach. I just can’t get any decent conversion rates out of squeeze pages. This was where my whole plan fell apart, if you can’t get enough of your traffic to convert then no matter how low a price you are bidding you’re still going to lose money.

The final lesson I could take from this was the time involved. I so desperately wanted it to work that I was micro-managing everything. It ended up taking up so much more of my time than I’d initially planned to spend on it. This was as much a reason for calling it a day early as the money side of things.

So I guess the question is what next? Being a sucker for punishment I’m going to start over fresh next month. Same slush fund, but this time I’ll be creating my own landing pages and doing my best not to nit pick too much. I’m convinced that there is money to be made with this, it’s just going to require a little more experimentation and patience.

…is turning into a massive mistake. It’s been a bad day all around so no real time to post about how bad things are in detail, will do a propper update tomorrow. In the meantime here’s a stupid monkey with more balls than brains (a little similar to how I decided to tackle paid click affiliate marketing)

A friend mentioned this to me so I thought I’d have a look. SiteCube.com offer a Flash website generation service and website hosting that they are selling to small businesses. I think what the idea is that you pick one of their pre-made templates and then you add text and your own pictures etc until you have a finished website. That in itself is not too bad, after all if people want to rely on a cheap Flash based website for their business then all the very best to them. What concerned me however was that they are reselling this service.

What they are trying to offer you as a reseller is your own website design business. In a market swamped by cowboys and hobbyists is it really wise to offer people with even less knowledge of the whole hosting and design market a business in a box? They’ll set up a domain for you and then you end up hosting pages from their website in frames on yours. Does anybody still use frames these days? What about support? How the hell is Resleller going to respond when his client needs support? The resale plan relies on you marketing to businesses skills that you don’t have. You are then responsible for billing them and collecting payment.

“You do not need any programming knowledge, design skills or any technical expertise to avail of this business opportunity.”

“The system has been setup such that YOU own the customers under your own business name.”

So I own the customers who I have got by misleading them into using a service that I don’t have the skills or knowledge to support, ace!

“integrated web solution created for independent professionals like, doctors, attorneys, musicians, models etc and small businesses like restaurants, salons etc”

Having been involved with small business website design for a long time now there is something else that doesn’t sit right with me with this. With every client their primary concern was using their website as a marketing tool, making sales and lead generation. They all wanted to rank well for search terms related to their business and products because the search engines can provide free eye balls, when you are starting of in business free can be a great word! It is wrong to pitch Flash as a suitable tool for small business websites, unless the client is in the design industry where lovely animation can count. If my business had been sold a SiteCube website then I think the chances of me ever having anything to do with the web again would be a bit limited. And some people wonder why website design has such a bad reputation?

hey Paul,
Quick question for you, as an aside.

It’s pr3, will make 55$ this month, and is on page 1 of Google for a bunch of push up keywords.

I’ve got a few thoughts on this. Those people who make a living out of flipping websites would probably tell you that this is a great deal. The basic maths most people use is 12*Monthly Earnings to get an approximate value for your website. In this case an offer of around $660 would seem about fair so $1000 is very good. On the other hand this is a very simple way of looking at things.

Is it consistently making $55 or has it grown to make this amount? If your website is on an upwards curve then who knows what it could potentially be making 6-12 months down the line. John Chow is a great example of this, he could have sold his website after monetising it 1 month for $4000, 12 months down the line and he was making $25000+ a month from it.

Secondly the niche. I know your website is trying to compete in one of the most competitive areas on the internet, health and fitness. If you’re getting top 10 Google traffic from related keywords then that automatically adds significant value to your website in my eyes. Not only is their a huge amounts of eyeballs potentially interested in what you’re writing at the moment but there is also the possibility of using your website as a launch pad for related websites*

In summary I’d say that if you need the $1000 then that is pretty good offer. If you don’t need the money but are sure that you could recreate what you’ve already built but better then it’s a pretty good offer. If on the other hand you don’t need the money, would worry about starting over and think that there is the potential for the website to grow (as I do) then I wouldn’t accept it.

Anybody else have any opinions on this?

*I was offered the standard 12X offer for one of my earlier websites once, I didn’t need the money so declined. I used that website to spawn and boost 3 more related websites. Now all 4 are authority websites that bring in more than what I was offered each and every month. Of course they don’t always work out like this but trust goes a long way when ranking your websites.