I’m experiencing some technical difficulties with my ISP, don’t expect much in the way of updates for the next few days (This took 20 minutes to post 
)
Normal service will be resumed shortly, fingers crossed.
This is a great story, and a completely true one at that.
A few years ago one of my neighbours, a lad by the name of Andy Whewell decided to take up metal detecting. He had no experience of what he was doing, in order to get started he bought a few magazines and then made the decision to spend a bit of money on a decent detector. He asked a local expert for some advice just so he wouldn’t be a total newbie. For the first month or two he spent all his time going over the usual spots, the local beaches, hills, all well trodden paths and he found nothing of any real interest. Several months into his new hobby he decided to take a risk and get permission from one of the local farmers to try in one of his fields, some new territory. An hour into this new area and he stumbled across something, something big. What Andy actually unearthed in that field was one of the largest finds of Viking coinage ever found. A find so big as to be life changing. In that little inconspicuous field Andy dug out 464 silver coins, 25 silver ingots and a silver armlet dating from the 11th Century. All in a find valued at between £250,000 and £350,000. Remember he wasn’t an expert in what he was doing and had only taken it up a few months earlier. What he’d done was gain a bit of knowledge and then went of in his own direction. It paid royally. You can read the full story here:-
Viking Treasure
So why write about this? Think of fields as niches. What Andy had discovered was his own niche. The Make Money Online blogging niche was a gold mine for those people that found it early, John Chow, Problogger and several others make large amounts of money every month out of it. Be first or be better. Those that follow including me can make a little bit from it but basically we’re just finding the scraps. I’m sure a dozen or more people have gone over that field and found very little of any value. In the mean time Andy has continued his hobby trying different fields, again he has had some success!
“Astonishingly, Mr Whewell went on to make another startling discovery with his metal detector, uncovering 26 Henry VII and Henry VIII coins in German. That too has been declared Treasure Trove. It is understood that MNH has valued that find at around £20,000.”
Take the advice from the pro’s about how to make your money, but to make it you have to apply that knowledge to your own “field”. Sure you’ll spend plenty of time wandering around where there is nothing but all it takes is to find that one and then who knows.
To this day I’m still genuinely stunned about how many “make money bloggers” there are out there trying to make money from a niche that has already been dug to death. I’ve mentioned several times how I make almost nothing from this blog, it’s certainly the worst niche I’ve ever tried and yet every month there are even more cropping up. John Chow probably says it best, he makes money online by telling people how much money he makes online. That should be enough to tell you that the maths dictate there’s not a whole lot of room in that niche if you want big money. Who knows, maybe it’s time I stopped ploughing this field and concentrated on some new ground?
It’s a nice way to wake up on a Saturday morning, catching up on my regular blogs and I come across a contest being run over at DNXPERT with some belting prizes. Total prize fund is in excess of $8900 and there are some real gems in there including $700 in cash, a 2month banner ad on ClickFire.com and a Market Leverage promo pack (i’ve been after an iFlip for a while). It’s one of those really easy to enter contests, subscribe to the newsletter and blog about it. There will be more entry options during the month, closing date is the 19th of June 2008.
Just to wet your appetite here’s the full list of prizes:-
I’ve got a couple of tips today that will help you squeeze more money out of Adsense, these are tried and tested by me, on my own sites they have pushed the CTR up without fail. Even better they are things that you can do straight away. It’s these sort of things that pushed my own Adsense earnings up over $140 yesterday.
Adsense Tip Number 1 – Contrasting Colours
This works really well on sites where ad blindness is killing you. The trick is to present 2 Adsense blocks next to each other with completely contrasting colours. Maybe try one block with subtle colour on a white background and the other with bright colours on a black background. I’m no psychologist so I can’t say for sure why this works but I think it’s because we (especially us web masters) are used to associating an ad style with a website. From my experience people seem to bypass the first block and click the second. Here’s an example of what I mean:-
Adsense Tip Number 2 – Swapping Out Your Menu
This is one of those techniques that you have to be very careful with. I wouldn’t recommend using it anywhere where you are trying to attract a loyal readership! Every website has a primary navigation area, I like to call it a menu. Many websites also have a secondary area, a sort of subset of the main menu. On my website it’s that bit at the top that contains the popular posts etc What you are going to do here is swap out your secondary navigation area for an Adsense block, but not permanently. There are literally hundreds of free ad-rotator scripts out there (just Google ad rotator), we are going to use one of these to randomly swap between our secondary navigation and Adsense. The end result is an Adsense block in a prime area of our website that users are used to clicking to navigate. Does it work, yes! Is it nice? Probably not.
That’s 2 practical tips that should help you to increase your Adsense earnings, of course if you wanted to take it to the next level you could try combining both techniques.
My work/life balance is screwed at the moment. Everything is about work, I go to bed worrying about work, I wake up and the first thing I do is turn a computer on, I feel guilty for taking the time to go to the gym. I don’t ever seem to spend any real time with my family anymore, it’s got so bad that I even went to a Ballroom Dancing competition on Sunday night (she came second by the way) just to get a bit of quality time. Things don’t get much worse than that!
The problem is that I’m always worrying about the future, what if this happens, what if that happens, where can I make up for that from etc etc It never ends. Google, Microsoft and certain governments who shall go unnamed have all conspired to make things a little bit more interesting for me but with all the best will in the world there is nothing I can do about it. What I’m forgetting is that as things stand I’m actually doing more than OK. Plenty of money in the bank, still earning more than I spend, I should be out relaxing a bit. Even in the past when things have gone pear shaped I’ve always been able to adapt and come up with something new so why spend the time worrying about it before it even happens? It seems very stupid to me!
So in the very near future I’m going to be making a few changes, for a start I’m going to be leaving the office and will be working from home again. It seems to make sense at this time, less travel, more time with the family and more of the flexibility that was part of the reason for working for myself in the first place (It feels a little like I’m working for somebody else in a 7-6 job at the moment!) I’m going to be free to look after my rapidly growing daughter during the school holidays, this will be the last chance before she turns into one of these teenager monsters. Another big change will be in how I work, from now on my computer doesn’t get switched on unless I have a clear idea in my mind what I’m going to be doing, no more hours of stumbling and just general nothingness. Checking stats for the 100th time today doesn’t count as something to do. When I’m finished the computer gets turned off, not left on “just in case”.
In general I want to work harder and be more productive but work less hours. Even if the worst comes to the very worst and the bubble pops completely, I’ll just have to get a normal job. But in the mean time I’m going to try and enjoy working for myself as much as possible again.
Now I don’t ever pretend to be an affiliate marketing expert, in fact of all my online income sources it’s probably the 1 I would like to be much better at. What I would say though is that I do manage to make “some” money from selling other peoples products and services. Having spoken to quite a few people about this it seems that I’m doing better than most. I was thinking of this post and how I was going to do it last week, I was trying to think of three key points just to get you started with affiliate marketing but was struggling. I know in my mind that the big guys aren’t telling us everything. So over the weekend I sat down with my daughter and decided what better way than to go through with her how she could make some money. Anyway, this is what we came up with (I’ll let you know how she got on after):-
1. Avoiding the big commission products. There are plenty of products that you can find online (especially with ClickBank) that will give you a 70%-80% commission. You have to ask yourself if what they are giving away is really worth the money? For every genuinely generous merchant you’ll come across 100 flogging over priced crap that end up getting refunded. These high figures also attract serious amounts of affiliate competition. You’re the new guy, start small.
2. The route of least resistance. Before trying to promote any product as an affiliate research heavily what has to happen in order for you to get paid. What is the sign up/purchase page like. Is it easy to follow, does it ask too many probing questions, is it secure? At the end of the day would you buy from them?
3. Every affiliate expert I’ve ever read has gone on and on about the need to pre-sell. Whilst this is true for most products over $20-$30 there are plenty of products that you can sell using nothing more than a casual mention or even in extreme cases the pre-bundled banners that most merchants supply.
We also came up with 2 extra tips:-
4. Doing it for the kids. Laura came up with this herself. She wants to sell things to her friends. Do you know how ShoeMoney made most of his money? Ringtones! Who buys ringtones, certainly not most of the sane grown ups I know, it’s teenagers and kids nagging their parents. If you’re struggling to make money from one demographic don’t be afraid to look at others, Bebo and FaceBook are worth billions for a reason.
5. Free. Free is a great word, especially combined with tip 4. Find products that are “free” but pay an affiliate commission.
So over the weekend we combined all of this. Laura has been heavily into Bebo for a while now, happily clicking ads and earning them money. Generally anything that flashes. She now has her own website where she’s going to post all of the rubbish (in my opinion) that she used to put on Bebo. I’m sure it’s going to be great stuff! To get her started with affiliate marketing we put a few banners up for some free toolbar offers, the same sort of stuff plastered all over Bebo. In terms of promotion all she did was create a link to her site from Bebo, just a plain old link, she’s got lots of friends who are very active on Bebo. So as an affiliate marketing dummy how did she do?
I don’t suppose I should be telling you this but by this morning she has made more than me in affiliate earnings over the weekend! Of course this won’t continue unless she can get fresh sources of traffic and carries on posting. Then again she’s never been short of things to say.
This has taught me that yes you can make money as an affiliate. It’s also taught me that I should maybe try following my own advice every now and then. I just hope that my daughter remembers me when she’s of living the dot com lifestyle.
Since I mentioned My Search Funds I’ve had a couple of people e-mail asking if there is some catch to using it? I’m sorry to disapoint but there really isn’t. Just to prove how easy it is to get started I’ve knocked up a little video so that you can see for yourselves. The only possible problem would be if you abused the system by just doing searches all day, I’m sure there would soon lay down the ban hammer on you for that. So as long as you use it properly it really is as simple as this:-
I’ve been spending quite a bit of money lately, some of that has gone to repair my damaged ego. I didn’t like the idea of failing with Adwords so I decided to run a little study that would make me feel better and also provide you with some great long tail keywords for the make money online niche.
All I wanted out of this was to run an Adwords campaign that found good amounts of traffic (proving that I’ve still got the keyword research skills) and that got a good CTR (to prove I could still write an ad). I decided to try out in one of the most competitive niches out there, how to make money from the internet. I chose this because of the amount of competition and also that it would give me some great long tail keywords to target for organic traffic further down the line. But you know me, I like to share. So anyway, what did I find out? Well for a start most people are lazy, great words include easy, quick, and fast. On the other hand ideas, opportunity and opportunities don’t do nearly as well. I guess they give the indication that it might involve too much work?
So without further a do here’s some of the search phrases I found for the MMO niche that generate traffic (based on search impressions):-
1. “Making money on the internet”
2. “Easy money online”
3. “Easy money from home”
4. “Making money fast”
5. “Quick ways to make money internet”
6. “Earn money from internet quickly”
7. “Ways to make money online fast”
8. “How to make money at home online”
9. “Easy way to make money”
10. “Earn money online easy”
I’m sure you get the idea. Use these as a base and expand. Some of these aren’t that competitive and would be relatively easy to start ranking for in Google’s natural results. Possibly not the best way of spending £200 I’ve ever come up with but at least I feel better now!