Money Schemes - Learn How To Make Money Online

Giving up a full time job to go and work for yourself is a scary thing to do. You’ve certainly got to have self confidence but luck and some guts also don’t go amiss. In my case I left a nice little cushy government job, if I’d have stayed my salary this year would have been about £30k a year, 30 days a year holiday plus up to 18 flexi time days. Up to 6 months full sick pay, a non contributable final salary pension scheme etc etc…the benefits just go on and on. If you’re looking for a stable “nice” job then it would be ideal. Unfortunately it was never me.

I only fell into that government job because things went rapidly south in the IT sector where I live, companies going under, absolutely no jobs that would pay a real salary. Cheap labour, you can’t stop market forces. Unfortunately within 3 months of starting in 2003 I knew the public sector wasn’t for me. Too many people stuck in their ways content with a life that guaranteed them pay rises, knowing that they couldn’t be sacked meant that everybody just dawdled along shuffling bits of paper and doing as little as possible. Well all except the 10% who were required to work flat out to make up for everybody else (I did promise a couple of these jobs when I was sorted). I couldn’t stand it, I was used to working hard and playing hard, this was more turning up to work, spending 50% of your time bitching about how slack everybody else was, the other 50% whinging about how your pay rise was never enough and then going home tired from actually doing nothing. It was not an existence I could ever grasp so I started making plans early, I had to spend the next few years gritting my death and baring it.

In order to break away my first job was to design a family budget. What exactly did we need to make as a family in order to survive (survive first, grow later!), once I’d analysed everything it turned out that we didn’t need that much it all. Take away my wife’s income and I needed to earn £1000 a month in order for us to survive. This was with cutting back on all the luxuries that we didn’t need, they key with this was to go through the list of direct debits that come out each month and see what you do and don’t need. In my mind up until this point I was thinking about going back into the world or private sector IT work (which had recovered slightly by this point), however with such a low amount I saw an opening of what would maybe be a once in a lifetime chance to work for myself. It would require some sacrifices but oh what an opportunity.

The next step was to plan just how I could make £1000 a month. At this point I already had a growing web empire, I started my first website in 2001 after the down turn in the IT sector and was now starting to make some money online. Adsense that started of as $20 a month and stayed that way for several years was now growing rapidly to the point where I was at first getting a cheque every month and then getting a four figure amount paid directly into my account each month. This gave me the confidence to start several more websites, my aim now was consistency. Whilst in a good month I could make more than enough to survive in a bad month we’d be very poor. My first tactic was to add Adsense to my new websites in the hope of providing extra sources of Adsense income and levelling out the peaks and troughs a bit. It never worked quite as well as I wanted as my time was now spread more thinly amongst more websites. Quality content rules. With working 8 hours a day in my normal job, supporting my free software and creating new web content I had to work my ass of for 18 months before things really started to come together.

I got lucky (If you can call 2 hours a day of keyword research lucky) with a few niches and then started looking at ways of diversifying my income streams and finding something other than Adsense that would pay. Affiliate marketing seemed an obvious answer for the large amount of traffic I was seeing. As with Adsense it started slowly but within 3 months I had another source of income that almost equalled my Adsense earnings. Commission Junction and Click Bank in particular were sending me payments every month. It was now coming up to Christmas 2006. I’d put 3 months worth of salary in my bank account, I’d made more than £1000 for at least 3 months with my online earnings…I handed in my notice…ready to start work for myself on the 1st of January 2007. On the first of January I transferred £500 of my savings into my newly created business bank account and that was me.

There were a couple of assumptions I’d made at this point that maybe others can learn from:-

1. Just because you put more time in does not mean that you will make more money
2. 3 months is not a long enough consistent time to base life changing decisions on

Of course within 2 weeks of starting the US Dollar GBP exchange rate was getting worse by the day, I was earning 100% of my income in Dollars but spending in Pounds. Initially working 14-18 hours a day was not directly increasing my income. This was not good. I shit myself. Fortunately as word spread that I was leaving my normal job I was being approached by people about helping them with websites. Whether is was golden balls, years of working with my own sites or just luck every website I’d created was doing very well in terms of natural traffic. I seemed to have a gift for SEO. I was entering markets that I had no right to do well and getting first page SERPs. Those skills were in demand and whilst at first I declined offers in order to concentrate on my own work I did accept a few jobs eventually. There was no point being big headed here, I needed the money. This was enough to get me through the first difficult months after which my new websites were in place, I’d spent serious amounts of time (14 hours a day) researching the best ways of making money from my traffic, increasing my traffic and was now taking this as a very serious job. Yes it was enjoyable but yes it was also very hard work. After 6 months working from home I made the decision to move into an office, this upped not only my output but also the quality of my work. It was another gamble though, more expense with no monetary gain. For me personally there is nothing like a proper work environment for producing proper work and the decision paid off. I’ve not looked back since, working for myself was without doubt the best thing I’ve ever done, I had a bit of luck, a good support network from friends and family and it has worked out great.

By sticking to what I knew, build, optimise, monetise and repeat my websites combined with software sales and the bits of freelance SEO work I do ensure that my family have a very good quality of life. We have our holidays, our own house, 2 cars and nice things. We certainly don’t live to our full means but that’s my cautious nature! I’m always waiting for something to go wrong. Governments, Microsoft and Google rarely disappoint in changing the rules of the game on a regular basis. By diversifying my income not only in terms of what websites make me money but also how they make me money I am building what I hope will be a future proof business. If all is well I’ll be forming a limited company in the next year. Who knows a little bit down the line I might get the chance to employ those civil service slackers I promised jobs! For some people setting up for yourself just happens after 1 great idea and a huge amount of luck, for me it was a careful plan that was years in the making.

If you can do it I can’t recommend working for yourself highly enough, get it right and it can give you a lifestyle that most people truly envy. These are my top 5 tips for deciding if making the break is right for you and what helped me:-

1. First of all make a realistic budget of what you and any dependents need as a minimum to survive. Do not fool yourself at this point.
2. Decide what you have to lose if you don’t succeed, for some people it may put them off, for others it is great motivation (either way give it some thought)
3. Working for yourself is not about taking holidays when you want and slacking, it’s about working harder for greater reward, if you can’t work hard for somebody else do you have a good reason for believing that you’ll be able to work hard for yourself?
4. Get out of the house as soon as you can, I can’t over emphasise how important it was to me to achieving that next level of income
5. You will need your friends and family, they can refer people to you, help out when you’re stuck or just tell you everything is alright when you think the world has it in for you (Believe me when the exchange rates altered I was in mourning)

I know that lots of people turn their noses up when I tell them that I make some of my money online from filling in surveys. To be honest I don’t care, I spend anywhere from 8 to 12 hours a day with my head buried in web pages, software coding or internet marketing and a couple of 5 minute “no brainer” breaks a day are quite welcome, the fact you can get paid is a bit of a bonus. Now there is a way to make money from people like me who do surveys, other than promoting survey lists through ClickBank. You can now refer people and get paid each time they complete a survey. Get more than a few active users and this becomes a much better payment model for affiliate marketers who are interested in this niche.

Casharella (yeah bad name I know) are the newly released affiliate wing for Planet Panel surveys and they want to encourage affiliates to build thier own little (or not so little) harems of survey participants. For the first survey that each new referral completes you will be paid €1, for each survey after that it’s €0.25. Now I know this doesn’t sound a lot but say for example you referred me 12 months ago. I’m not exactly overly active but conservatively I do 2 surveys a day, you’ve just made €175. The thing with surveys is that once you do a few they become addictive (My wifes sister spends 3 hours a night filling in surveys and entering online competitions!) I know that just by word of mouth I’ve referred 6 friends and family who do at least one survey a day each. I haven’t been paid a penny for that, if Casharella was around at the time then I’d have made a nice bit of money.

As with all these rolling commission based referral programs the key is getting the numbers in. Refer enough active users and you will do really well out of it. The best way of making that reality is to jump on any new program early before everybody else starts promoting it. I’m always a bit reluctant about recommending any new affiliate program until I’ve had enough time to give them a propper go but I’ve already made some money using Casharella so I’m happy enough to post about it.

(Just to make things clear that payment currency is Euros and not Dollars, for any of us on the Eastern side of the Atlantic that makes a big difference).

Attract more search traffic (especially from MSN/Live search) and use the square/rectangle ad formats blended into your body text. They you go, done, Adsense Secrets 5.0, or Adsense Common Sense as I like to call it.

Joel Comm’s latest e-book (spit) Adsense Secrets 4.0 has caused quite a stir in the blogging for money niche. Every a-lister and their dog has wrote about it in order to try and cash in on some affiliate sales. For only $9.95 how can you possibly go wrong? Let me start by telling you that in the past I’ve bought several of Joel Comm’s titles for much more than $9.95, I can hand on heart say the only e-book I’ve ever recommended buying is Aarons Wall’s SEO Book, read into that what you want. Enough to say I won’t be buying this one, especially not as it also signs you up for a $30 a month subscription at the same time.

The big secret to earning money with Adsense is that there is no secret, YOU NEED LOTS OF TRAFFIC. Once you have lots of traffic (preferably natural search traffic, MSN/Yahoo click best) you then place rectangle/square ads in the text of your page. You can go on from there to try experimenting but either way Joel Comm isn’t going to have the magic answer to what will work best on YOUR pages, only you can find that out by trial and error. Take note though, IF YOU’RE NOT GETTING LOTS OF TRAFFIC THEN YOU’RE NOT GOING TO GET RICH USING ADSENSE! Got a site that get 20 visitors a day, you’re not getting to earn hundreds of dollars a day from that, I promise.

There are a couple of reasons I wouldn’t recommend Adsense Secrets 4.0

1. Extra long and extremely spammy “standard” e-book sales page
2. Added “bonus” of being signed up to a monthly subscription service plus no fewer than three mailing lists
3. It won’t let you leave the page, first of all a “are you sure” dialog box and then one of those faux instant chat boxes (these should be made fucking illegal). The whole reason I’m not linking to it anywhere in this post is because if I did you’d never be able to get of the page again and would probably never forgive me for sending you somewhere so shitty and spammy.

If anyone does buy it, good luck. I’m looking forward to hearing your success story of how changing one ad attribute increased your CTR by 15522% or something similar.

This isn’t the sort of post I’d normally put on here but what the hell heh. I was just checking a few things on Facebook yesterday when I noticed an alert that a friend had added a new video. The mate in question now races motorbikes and he was back on the island last year to take part in the Isle of Man TT races. Seems Tony also decided to stick a camera on his bike as he did it, the end result is a great view of what is probably the most dangerous race track in the world! A few companies/people have done this in the past put edited it and put some cheesy rock fest over the top. The only noise you’ll hear on this is the noise of the engine. Even if you’ve never heard of the TT I suggest you check this out, one lap is roughly 37.75 miles with the top lads doing an AVERAGE speed of 127mph +…. talk about balls of steel.

Part 1 – From the Grandstand start to the Curraghs Wild Life park

Part 2 – From the Wild Life Park to the Creg (Over the mountain)

Towards the end of last year Google unleashed a slap of monumental proportions on people who were seen to be selling links. The easiest targets to identify for this slap were websites selling through TLA (mainly because most also pushed TLA as an affiliate). The slap involved destroying the page ranks of these websites that were seen to be selling page rank, page rank is Google’s toy and they certainly don’t won’t anybody else playing with it! In many people’s opinions this crackdown would be the end of link selling as websites that previously openly supported Text Links Ads started to run for cover and beg the Google gods for their page rank back. It’s been several months now since that happened, here’s how I think things have gone.

Link Buying And Selling Is Still Alive
No doubt about it, for lazy SEO’s (buying) and webmasters (selling) TLA was the easiest way of buying and selling links, after the slap the scene has changed quite a bit. As a webmaster myself I find that I now get many more requests for people wanting to buy links directly. Not from Joe Average, it’s much more likely that I’ll be contacted by a representative of one of the larger SEO firms who represent big companies looking for an increased web presence. I talked to a few friends about this over the weekend and the general consensus is that the price for a link has increased post slap. For a link that you may have received $10 a month for from TLA (they take a 50% split) you may now see $30-$35. Somebody even reported selling a single 3 word link for $1500 a year. It was also generally agreed that link buyers are looking for longer term deals, they want 6/12/18 months, obviously it’s horses for courses but with the level of uncertainty in the global economy at the moment I’m sure plenty of us earning at the lower levels of online income would be glad of the stability. So it is still very much possible to make money selling links, but there are a few rules that you should stick to:-

1. Only EVER accept payment for a link to a website that is relevant to the page content on which the link is to be placed.
2. Consider your visitors, is the destination a quality website, would you visit it/consider linking to it if there was no money involved? (This is a valid point, of course we aren’t aware of all the websites in ours and related niches and the request for a link could be the first time you’ve ever heard of the site they are promoting)
3. Don’t even consider the thought that you are selling page rank, page rank means little to nothing (depending on who you believe), the slap itself proved how irrelevant page rank is because even as sites lost all their page rank their positions in the search results for the most part stayed the same.
4. Beware of people wanting you to add large mounts of text to your page to “fit” their link, if your current content isn’t relevant enough to their market then don’t accept the link.

What About Buying?
To get the most from buying links you’re going to have to do a little bit more work. For a start you’re going to need to contact the webmaster of the site you’re interested in having a link on personally. This involves finding their contact details (either through their website or domain registry). Be polite and don’t take offense if somebody doesn’t want to sell you a link (I suppose this is where TLA came into it’s own, at least you knew each site on there was actively looking to sell links). Also, make sure that your intended site is relevant to the website you are promoting, this should be a no brainer really. One final point is to consider trying to get a longer term deal for a better price. The good sized single lump of money may be enough to get you that link you desperately want, if not then don’t take offense. (Can you see where I’m going with this, having turned down a number of link requests I’m sort of sick of being called an asshole).

In Conclusion
I don’t think there is any doubt that the link market has changed quite a lot since Google got the slapping gloves on. The real winners are the webmasters who have spent time building high quality websites with lots of original content and good amounts of visitors. If your site is good enough you will get requests for links. If you want to move things along a bit consider contacting some of the larger link building companies and make them aware of your websites (Warning, crap websites will be found out). In terms of buying the winners are generally those bigger companies/website owners that can afford to pay for genuine interested visitors and not page rank.

The losers in all this are the webmasters who insist on pumping out spammy websites that quickly achieve a page rank of 3/4 and have spoofed Alexa rankings whilst having very little genuine traffic. Unfortunately TLA has plenty of these. Page rank and Alexa rankings are not important for those in the know when it comes to getting a link, what they really want is relevancy and ideally targeted visitors.

In a world wide web where links are getting harder and harder to come by if you’ve spent the time to build a high quality website that can deliver real live visitors then there is plenty of money to be made selling relevant links.

If like me you tend to just accept TOS changes willy nilly without actually reading too much into them you may have missed a major change that Adsense are implementing (TOS change 25th February 2008) that could eventually get you banned. Part of the new Adsense TOS is that you are required to have a Privacy Policy that notifies your visitors that cookies are being placed. It’s a mute point because Google do what Google want to do but surely a Google privacy policy link under each add block would make more sense? Don’t hold me to this but I heard somewhere that these changes have to be in place by the 1st of May. Luckily I already have a privacy policy on 95% of my websites so it should just be a case of amending it, the problem is though where do you start if you’ve never had anything to do with privacy policies before?

In order to comply with the new Terms of Service you’re going to have to add a Privacy Policy link to each of your pages that serves Adsense, but what do you put in your Privacy Policy to comply with Adsense? Well I’m nothing if not helpful, here’s a link to a generator that will create your privacy policy for you:-

Adsense Privacy Policy Generator

One thing worth noting is the importance of nofollowing you privacy policy link. The last thing you want is being penalised for duplicate content as well

This one is just for “Web Hosting”, a quick explanation of why promoting eBay as an affiliate really rocks!

Just before I start it’s best to say that I only promote the US and UK eBay programs because that is where 95%+ of all my traffic comes from, so it’s where I make my money.

OK, first of all this is what eBay US will currently pay you at the very basic level:-

Winning Bid – Your Share
$0.00 – $99.99 50.00%
$100.00 – $4,999.99 55.00%
$5,000.00 – $199,999.99 60.00%
$200,000.00 – $699,999.99 65.00%
$700,000.00 – $2,999,999.99 70.00%
$3,000,000.00+ 75.00%

Secondly and most importantly this is what eBay in the US will pay you for a new signup:-

0 – 49 $25.00
50 – 1,999 $28.00
2,000 – 29,999 $31.00
30,000+ $35.00

Lots of numbers there but let me give you a real life example. Through one of my BANS stores I refer a new user to the US eBay website. He signs up and places a bid, I receive $25. He loses. Next week a different user bids on something else through one of my links and wins, I receive 55%. For the UK site the rates are the following:-

Winning Bid – Your Share
GBP 0.00 – GBP 999.99 30.00%
GBP 1,000.00 – GBP 4,999.99 32.50%
GBP 5,000.00 – GBP 24,999.99 35.00%
GBP 25,000.00 – GBP 49,999.99 40.00%
GBP 50,000.00 – GBP 99,999.99 45.00%
GBP 100,000.00 – GBP 499,999.99 50.00%
GBP 500,000.00+ 60.00%

And for new signups
0 – 24 GBP 8.00
25 – 249 GBP 9.00
250 – 499 GBP 10.00
500+ GBP 11.00

So you can see the numbers stack up quite well. From referring only a few active bidders to the eBay network you can add another regular income stream. In fact the 11 referred new users and handful of referred bidders from one of my websites have between them paid for my new TV that I mentioned yesterday.

How BANS Helps
Build A Niche Store has opened my eyes to the world of eBay referrals. I think it works so well because of the whole idea of niche marketing. eBay want new active users, the problem for affiliates then is finding enough people who haven’t heard of eBay and the bargains that can be found on it. Of course there are certain niches out there where although people do use Google to search for information there is a good chance many won’t be eBay users. It is these markets that you can really target with your BANS store. Hobbies are an obvious target for this, especially those that have a high cost for equipment associated with them. Now might just be the time to start that “Model Railway Fanclub” website (that just happens to have a BANS store stuck on it). You know what would work great? An exercise related website!

The only thing I would say is that I don’t think it’s worth buying the BANS script at the moment. Although a lifetimes worth of updates are totally free it might just be best to wait until they update to use the eBay Partner Network. It’s a very easy script to use but why make extra work for yourself by having to update when you can wait a little while?

So there you have it, the eBay Partner Network pays out great money for referring new users and a good percentage on any winning bids they place further down the line. BANS is any easy way of matching eBay offers to a niche. I can’t believe that more people don’t talk about it is a valid stream of extra income.

Whilst I’ve never made the explosive earnings that some people manage to make using the various eBay affiliate programs I do manage to make some nice pocket change from them (they’ve just bought me a new TV!) The thing that made eBay really work for me was when I started using BANS. I was too lazy to go through all my own pages inserting relevant product links (this is the best way of profiting from eBay by the way), the BANS model of an instant setup store as an add-on to my existing site content required much less effort. In order to make money this required a Commission Junction eBay affiliate account.

The bad/good news is that eBay have decided to sever their links with Commission Junction and run their own partner program (you can sign up here). I can fully understand this, it’s not like they haven’t got the resources to run it and by removing Commission Junction hopefully they can reward the actual publishers with a bigger slice of the pie (OK, maybe wishful thinking). Either way the fewer middle-men the better.

Starting from the first of April you could sign up with the eBay affiliate program, the 2 programs will run consecutively for 1 month and then any Commission Junction based links you have will stop working. If you haven’t already signed up I suggest you do now. They are offering an extra 10% on commissions for the first month. All in it took me about 10 minutes to complete the application form, a day to get approved and then a further 10 minutes going through and confirming my tax status/payment information. First impressions are a nice, clean uncomplicated system. Even better is that the eBay affiliate programs from all the most popular countries have been rolled under one account. This was something I’d wanted for ages. The one thing I did notice though was that the e-mail confirmation link they send you is/was broken. My link looked like this

https://www.ebaypartnernetworkcom/PublisherRegistrationConfirm?r=*****

Obviously somebody hadn’t checked it, the easy solution is to replace https://www.ebaypartnernetworkcom with https://www.ebaypartnernetwork.com

The only thing I’m waiting for now is the BANS team to update their system to work with the new eBay affiliate network. From what I’ve seen the feed information looks very similar, I could probably make the changes myself but then again you don’t buy a dog only to bark yourself do you?

In the meantime I’ll run a few links just so I can get used to the type of reporting that’s available.

Sign Up For Your eBay Partner Network Account Here

(ps I’ve noticed that other than a bit of comment about the announcement that eBay were dropping Commission Junction that very few make money bloggers are giving this much space. Maybe that’s because there’s no way for them to profit from it, those links are straight and not eBay affiliate links).