February 29th, 2008
It looks like Google have just sneaked in another page rank export. The Make Money Online Dot Net has stayed the same with a PR of 3. John Chow continues to be hit hard by the big G and is now ranked with a PR of 3 also, not that I think it will affect his money making mission 1 bit.
Generally speaking I’ve just had a quick flick through the majority of my websites and this export appears to have reversed a lot of what the last one did. Many sites that went up 1 have gone down 1 and of the ones that went down 1 most have gone up 1. Not that page rank really seems to matter much these days anyway.
How have you got on, is anyone seeing any major changes?
February 29th, 2008
Back in January I decided that I’d start 2008 with a bang by throwing a bit of money at the world of affiliate marking using Pay Per Click advertising (PPC). I rapidly managed to go through nearly $500 in clicks with very little in the way of a return. In my daughters words “awesome”, it was not.
Then in February against my better judgement I decided that I’d have another go but with one major difference. Initially I’d started this using the pre-packed landing pages of ad networks like NeverBlueAds. I wasn’t really doing any of my own pre-selling, I was actually being very lazy. In my defence I’ve read plenty of “gurus” spout of about how easy it was to turn PPC traffic into affiliate sales without any real effort so it was at least proof that however you decide to try and make money online you will need to put in some work! Anyway, I digress, this time around I decided to concentrate on only 1 affiliate deal for 1 product and to create my own landing page. In fact I used a blog post from this here blog to promote the deal I was pushing and channelled the PPC traffic to it. I was much more focused on having this work.
So after 1 month how did I do? Well I didn’t make the mega bucks I was looking for but I did make a nice bit of profit. My Adwords spend (I stuck to only using Adwords for this) came to rather tame $98. From that traffic I made a nice but not enormous $318. My maths isn’t great but I reckon that’s about $220 in profit. When I first started it for a few days I was making just a little bit more than what I was spending but then I got a bit of luck which allowed me to get a very good ROI.
It’s That John Chow Man Again
The offer I was promoting was for those Peel Away Ads that you use in the corner of your website. I was actually dropping of the PPC traffic on my Peel Away page. I was showing people how to get those ads for free (from which I was still paid a commission, Trial Pay is awesome) and I also included a link to a ClickBank seller of the script. Where I got lucky with this was that John Chow decided to start using that type of ad and made a point of writing about it. Of course where John Chow goes many thousands follow and the number of searches for free Peel Away Ads and the like increased significantly. This brought many more people to that page via PPC, decreased the bid amounts I needed and resulted in better conversions. What was surprising to me was that just as many people were prepared to pay for the Peel Away Ads script as get it free?! Either way the end result was the same and a nice profit for me. I’m sure if John Chow wouldn’t have starting using Peel Away Ads then I still would have made a profit, just not as much. I got lucky!
What this has done is renew my faith in this type of marketing, I’ve just got to try and find another offer that’s worth promoting now.
February 28th, 2008
Ever since I can remember the lowest bid you could make on a single keyword with Yahoo Search Marketing was $0.10. Whilst the price you paid may have been lower than this, $0.10 was the low bid amount.
Yahoo Search Marketing have just changed this though so that there is no limit on how low you can bid for a particular keyword. When I was putting some money into affiliate marketing via PPC one of the things that put me off using YSM long term was the fact that I had to bid this high amount for keywords that sometimes had almost no competition. I was able to get lower bids and higher traffic amounts using Adwords. Hopefully this change by Yahoo will resolve that situation, I’ll certainly go back and have another look at them.
As part of the e-mail that announced this change, YSM also pointed out that having a higher “ad quality” would result in you being able to bid lower amounts. All of a sudden this sounds very much like Adwords.
How To Improve You YSM Ad Score
1. Use a landing page that has been specifically written for the keywords you are targeting
2. Include your keywords in both your ad title and content
3. Write ads that are appealing to visitors, a higher CTR will help your quality
4. Keep your ads up to date, change them regularly
If you’re an existing Yahoo Search Marketing user now might be a good time to go back over your campaigns to make sure you’re getting maximum value for money from your bids.
February 25th, 2008
I’ve got myself a new advertising network and it goes by the name of Project Wonderful. The question is though does it live up to its name?
As A Project Wonderful Publisher
For anybody who has ever signed up with any advertising network in order to have ads published on your website the whole process at Project Wonderful should be instantly recognisable. Put in a few basic details about yourself, the website you want to show ads on and wait for approval. Mine took a couple of days to come through but I’d rather have that wait and they be manually approving websites than have little or no wait and have a network flooded with rubbish websites. Once approved you can then design an ad block to put on your website. Once your ad block is in place advertisers get to bid on how much they are prepared to pay per day to have their advert show in one of your slots. From then on every second that their ad is live you are earning money. Only the top bidder (or enough top bidders to fill your slots) gets their ad shown. This ever lasting auction format should ensure that each ad spot will eventually find it’s “natural” price. What I’ve found though is that most ads seem to be well under priced, I’ve been struggling to find many where the daily cost is more than a few ($0.10) cents, mine here averages around 3 cents a day (or $0.93 a month). I haven’t tried direct advertising on themakemoneyonline.net yet but I’m fairly sure I could muster more than that for a 125×125 ad slot. So with this fairly low income source you have to ask yourself what type of website will Project Wonderful ads work best on? I have a feeling that low traffic, very tightly targeted niche sites are going to demand the best prices, lets face it if you have large amounts of traffic then there are better ways of making more money from advertising. On a niche site all it takes is a few others in your same niche to start a bidding war and you could make a nice bit of change from very little traffic with Project Wonderful.
As A Project Wonderful Advertiser
This is where wonderful almost becomes apt. Because of the relatively low value that publishers seem to be getting for their slots the flip side of this is that as an advertiser Project Wonderful offers a great opportunity to get some cheap visitors. I’ve only bought a couple of ads so far but for 2 cents a day I’ve got an ad running linked directly to an affiliate deal on a very high quality, targeted authoritive website. The result is $10 conversions from almost no advertising cost! I’m not talking huge numbers here but for 5 minutes setup time you can’t complain! Obviously as Project Wonderful becomes more popular you can expect the advertising costs to go up but as it stands it must be one of the most cost effective ways of getting a niche market ad.
What About The Money
I’ve talked about how to make money with Project Wonderful but how does the money side of things work? As I said you make money for each second that there is a top bidder showing in one of your ad slots. This money is added to your balance which you can then use to either fund your advertising (this is what I do) or alternatively when your balance reaches $10 you can withdraw the money via Paypal. Project Wonderful cover the Paypal charges so you do get paid what you have earnt, no hidden fees here. If I was you though with advertising costs being so low I’d be tempted to leave the money there to fund some advertising and try and leverage some affiliate deals to make the bigger bucks.
February 19th, 2008
This isn’t aimed at anyone in particular, OK well actually it is but it’s also some great general advice for anybody planning on making money from a website.
Links this, links that, links, links links. There are actually a number of things that are MORE important than links when it comes to creating a website that will do what you want it to do, be it make money, increase awareness or anything else for that matter.
1. Reliable Hosting
Your website has to be where it says it is as much of the time as possible. You need a host that keeps your web pages published on the web 24 hours a day, 7 days a week so that when one of the search bots/spiders comes on by it can trawl your content. When a visitor from any source finds your website your content is there. This is how the web works, if your pages aren’t there then it doesn’t matter if you’ve got 10,000,000 inbound quality links because eventually your going to not only lose your listings in the SERPs but even more importantly you’re going to piss off a lot of visitors. This is even more important if you’re running a business, you can not afford to have a domain holding page over your website for days at a time, it smacks of amateurism. If you want to change hosts and you rely on your website then remember the 6 P’s. Proper planning prevents piss poor performance. Plan with military accuracy. If you can’t manage that then kiss good bye to your rankings, visitors and reputation. Do it often enough and you can kiss good bye to your SEO Consultant as well 
2. Unique Content
You should not syndicate your unique content to other websites, sales agents or anybody else for that matter. I repeat you should not give away copies of your website for people to re-brand as their own. IF people require content for sales literature then by all means supply them with cut down, altered content that links back to your website as the original source. This goes for people who like article syndication as well. If you’re going to syndicate an article make sure that you retain a full unique version on your website that can be pointed to as the authority copy of that content. Duplicate content penalties are not imaginary, it is something that the search engines really do take into account which means if you rely on your website it has to be unique.
I can’t believe that in this day and age that “big” companies would fall into the above mistakes and yet it’s still happening. Do you ever get the feeling that you’re talking to the wall? All I can say is that it’s a good job I keep a punch bag in the office!
February 18th, 2008
I don’t get a huge amount of e-mails or contact form submissions from this website but of those I do get most tend to be quite interesting. Perhaps the message that crops up more than any other is from the person who just doesn’t seem to be able to make any real money online. They try the same ad networks what I use (Adsense, ClickCash, Kontera) but don’t seem to be able to make any money.
I think the problem here is that people have become so used to having everything put on a plate that they actually aren’t doing what they think they are doing. Sure they are reading information and going through top 10 lists as if their lives depended on it but when it comes to actually doing it, are they?
One of the commonest examples of this is with Adsense. How many Adsense optimisation guides are there on the net, hundreds, thousands, millions? Even Google provide you with quite a large amount of information about what ad sizes and positions work best. The thing is though do you actually make those changes or do you just read it, think that’s a good idea and then go of in search of the next bit of optimisation advice? When it comes to implementing Adsense you then go for default everything! Changes do not make themselves, you have to put into practice what you are learning.
Another great example of this is experimentation. Every online marketer I know of or have read has preached the importance of diversification of income and experimentation being 2 keys facts in being successful. You have to experiment with different ad styles, ad types, landing page content, keyword bids and any other number of factors. This all takes time yet small changes can bring big rewards (on the other hand big changes can also bring no reward), this is all part of the game. If there was a simple do this, this and this and you’ll be rich solution to making money online then we’d all be rich. You start small, a few cents here, a few cents there, you experiment, some things work and some things don’t but over time you learn what works where and when and you start making more money. You can give yourself a short cut here by reading about what works for other people. You re-invest some of that money (usually to generate traffic) to make more money and so on and so on.
My recommended money makers list are the sources that provide me with most of my income from month to month. However, just slapping any of those ad networks on “any old site” will not make you much money. Some will make you some money but definitely not as much as you’d like. I recommend them because over time I’ve found that not only do they earn well but they also pay out well. You will have to find out how best to integrate them with what you are doing, read up on what information is available but most importantly put some of that information into practice. Making money online at it’s very simplest can be nothing more than putting the right ad in front of the right person. There are thousands of guides out there willing to tell you the best ways of doing that but at the end of the day you’re going to have to make those changes yourself.
February 9th, 2008
Who would ever have thought that Entrecard would have become so big so quickly? Not me, that’s for sure. Whilst I thought it would be big news amongst small/medium size bloggers there is no way I predicted that it would have such a large affect on blogging in general. I see Entrecard widgets on almost all of the blogs I visit now. The cool thing is that it does bring traffic so why not?
The Danger Of Entrecard
I was recently asked by somebody to explain the benefits of “free”, he just didn’t get it. Entrecard is a great example of how free can help, there is no way that it would have grown to this size if you had a sign up fee. It just wouldn’t. Nor would it have had the huge amounts of exposure across some of the biggest names in the world of blogging. However, free comes at a price. That price is usually quality. In Entrecards case it’s not the quality of the service itself (it’s as professional a setup as anything paid out there) but it’s in the quality of the members. As the word spread the quality of many of the members blogs was “dodgy” at best, then came the start of the abuse of the messaging system to spam fellow bloggers. Of course everybody is already aware as well of what appears to be huge discrepancies in advertising prices, unless you go for a named blog it’s pretty much a lottery as to how much traffic your ad spot will generate.
All of the above factors are down to Entrecard being a free network and are out of your control. However the biggest danger of using Entrecard is completely in your hands and it’s something I think is going to become a big issue down the line. Bloggers are starting to become obsessive about Entrecard. Spending hours dropping hundreds of cards, boosting not only their own advertising prices but also those of the random blogs they choose to drop on. It’s very easy for people to treat Entrecard as their only source of link building just because it’s so damn easy to drop a card. Rather than spending hours dropping you could be writing new content, commenting on other people’s blogs, creating forum posts, sourcing directories, using Stumble and any number of other ways of link building.
I’m not anti-Entrecard, I use it and will continue to, however I don’t spend much time dropping my card. In fact the only card drops I do are when I visit a blog (usually found through a link on another site or search) and like it. I certainly don’t spend hours on the Entrecard dashboard random dropping. Entrecard can be a good source of visitors to your website but over use it at the expense of your other link building techniques and I think you’ll be sorry in the long run.
February 7th, 2008
Just in case anybody missed this reply to my question about WidgetBucks accepting foreign clicks again:-
“Hi Paul – Thanks for your post and bringing this issue to our attention. You will be seeing a public post from us shortly on some CPM changes, but here is a preview:
Last night we implemented a new Int’l CPM model where every publisher/domain is categorized for CPM traffic. Categorized CPM placements are paid higher CPM by Advertisers, so this change is intended to get you higher yield for your Int’l traffic.
The issue you/we ran into was that although new publishers over the past month have been getting categorized, all “veteran” publishers were still un-categorized and when we rolled last night’s update, we missed our step of assigning a default category to all un-categorized publishers. Without a category assignment, you got the WB CPC ad unit. All such publishers are now set to the “Unknown” Category, so you will get CPM Ads – BUT! You will want to go in and edit your widgets and your My Setting page to appropriately categorize your account and widgets to ensure proper ad types.
HINT: Matching your domain category to your widgets will ensure you get the highest possible CPM.
WidgetBucks Team”
So there you have it, if you want to earn more with WidgetBucks CPM ads don’t forget to align your site category with your advert category.
