Money Schemes - Learn How To Make Money Online

Photrade.com is a photograph management website, if you’ve got pictures you can upload and share them, if you’re looking for pictures then it’s a great place to source them. Where Photrade is a little different from the multitude of other photo websites is that it allows you to make money out of your pictures in 2 ways:-

1. Prints, stock photos and merchandise – Once on the system people can buy copies of your pictures of which you’ll receive a percentage (that you can specify).

2. Image impressions – Every time somebody views one of your pictures anywhere on the internet you’ll earn money. This pay per impression for photos has great potential in my opinion.

As somebody who takes quite a few photographs I like to think of it as Flickr but with an earning potential. In saying this I haven’t really been using Photrade properly, I found the interface a little confusing and I wasn’t sure about spending time on it when it all looked a little beta’ish. It’s been sat on my white board for over 6 months!

The great news is that as from today Photrade has been updated. The new interface is very slick, very finished. The first thing I’m going to do when I get home tonight is move my albums onto Photrade, it’s a handy backup if nothing else and possibly another income source. Here’s a small video to show you just how it works:-

Site Tour from photrade on Vimeo.

At the moment Photrade is still invitation only, luckily enough I’ve got 3 invites so if you’re interested then just leave a comment?

If you’ve ever dabbled in the world of affiliate marketing and PPC you’ll know just how important landing pages are. They are the first page your visitor sees and your conversion rates will largely depend on what is on that page. Lazy sods like me will usually dump visitors onto an existing page or even worse, a generic landing page provided by the product supplier. This is the quick fix. Most of the time this doesn’t work that well, in fact the only real success I’ve had with affiliate marketing has been when I’ve taken the time to best fit what my visitors were looking for and design especially for that. Trouble is it takes time. Landing pages are seen as a big part of the mystery in affiliate marketing, luckily one of the masters in this area of making money online has designed a generic template that he’s giving away free. Even better he’s done an example complete landing page that you can use as well just to show what the finished product will look like. A large part of the time issue when creating landing pages is knowing where to start, now you’ve got a template all you have to do is fill in the blanks.

So The Master Isn’t You Then?
Ha ha, not quite! Certainly not when it comes to affiliate marketing. It’s none other than Zac Johnson who is giving away the landing page template. Zac has been around on the IM scene for a long time and has made a great name for himself as one of the a-listers. When it comes to affiliate marketing and PPC I’d suggest that you listen to him and when he decides to give something away for free you take advantage of it. I know I have.

I’ve been using My Search Funds Now for nearly a month and don’t have anything bad to say. So far just my own searches have netted me nearly $15, add in the searches from my 120+ referrals (and their referrals) and the total means I’ll be getting paid very soon! Not bad at all for doing what I was already doing anyway. As far as getting referrals goes it’s not a hard sell, get paid for doing the internet searches you do anyway, who could resist?

In the time I’ve been using My Search Funds they’ve had problems with their Meta search engine but the good news is that things are now sorted. Whilst it didn’t hurt any earning potential it did raise questions about future plans. In a move to rebrand My Search Funds have now become HomePages Friends. As part of the re-launch they’ve now also teamed up with a permanent search partner in the shape of Yahoo. This is excellent news for future stability and shows that they are in fact a serious business with long term plans. I can’t wait to get my first payment from them and will be posting proof as soon as I get it.

For those not in the know HomePages Friends pay you for doing the searches that you do anyway. It works by installing an extra search bar in your browser, every time you use this to search you get paid (no popups, spyware, extra ds). Average payment for each search is around 2p-3p (or $0.04 – $0.06 US). What I’ve learnt since using it is that I don’t search as much as I thought, even so I’ve quickly built up some nice earnings with them. Before you ask, you are paid a percentage of the advertising revenue that they generate from Yahoo so it is a pretty future proof plan, certainly as long as Yahoo are still around! The key with earning money with these systems is to get your friends on board, HomPages Friends will pay you 3 levels of referral, so you’ll be earning from your friends, friends, friends searches. As I’ve found already the numbers soon start to stack up. When I joined My Search Funds there were about 70,000 members, when I look today I see that HomePages Friends has over 100,000. This is growing quickly and it’s the early adopters that will benefit most.

HomePages Friends has quickly become one of my favourite totally passive income earners. Why not give them a go, you’ve literally got nothing to lose?

This one is especially for all the people who find their way here via Google who are moaning about working for themselves. Compared to being stuck in an office pen, working for the man us self employed’ers have nothing to complain about! People used to think I was a bit mental because I’d break the odd chair, this guy shows how it should be done, enjoy. (Senior race day at this this years TT Festival today so I’ll be out enjoying the sunshine and bikes).

Office Worker Goes Absolutely Insane – Watch more free videos

Stuff!

I’ve been doing this online thing now for over 6 years and in that time I’ve accumulated quite a lot of stuff. Ranging from content manipulators, money making secrets to PLR content to things to help you better organise your day! In order to try and get more people to subscribe to the RSS feed via e-mail I’m going to open a whole load of this stuff up to you guys! The vast majority of this is the type of stuff you join membership sites for. I’ve gone through roughly a quarter of what I have and uploaded anything that I think I have the rights to put up, to start of with their are already over 40 downloads available! As and when I get time I’ll be adding even more. I’m not going to promise you that all of this is useful but the chances are you’ll find one or 2 bits that you can use.

How do I get It?
It couldn’t be easier, just subscribe to the RSS feed via e-mail using the subscribe box up there on the top right hand side. Starting today (the 4th June 2008) I’ll be checking my FeedBurner e-mail subscribers list, I’ll e-mail any new active e-mail subscribers with login details so they can get their free stuff! The plan is to do this check every day at 7pm UK time so please be patient but if you have subscribed and don’t get your login details within 48 hours please feel free to drop me a mail or use the contact form. The same goes for any current e-mail subscribers who want the free stuff, just drop me a mail and I’ll make sure you get access.

Just one last thing, the content available has not been written by me and I can’t offer any support as to how to use it. Most stuff comes with at least a readme so you should be ok, but once you’ve downloaded it you’re on your own!

This has really pissed me off. A little while back I received a notification from Text-Link-Ads to say that one of the sites I advertise on (on behalf of a client) was no longer using TLA and that my link had been moved to an equivalent website. Whilst I didn’t consider the new website a good match I thought for the sake of 1 month I’d give it a go just in case it did bring some nice traffic. Turns out it wasn’t a good match, brought no traffic and so I wanted rid of it.

I’ve just signed into my TLA account to get rid of that advert and I see I’ve got an invoice outstanding, seems to be for twice what it would normally be so I open it up for a look. Now this is where I got annoyed. Text-Links-Ads (without telling me) have added my original advert to that invoice, it looks like the website concerned had a change of heart and TLA put my advert back whilst keeping the new one they assigned me leaving me with a double bill. All of this has been done without me actually having to do/click/confirm anything. The only notification I received was to tell me about the first website no longer being available. They’ve basically doubled my bill.

Luckily for me I pay my invoices manually, if they were set up to be paid automatically then I’d already be out of pocket. I hope this isn’t the first signs of a business in trouble, it’s stupid little tricks like that which damage reputations and can be the start of a slippery slope.

So which one is best, Kontera In-Text advertising or the inline ads offering from AdBrite? Both essentially do the same thing taking words from your content, double under-lining them and showing an advert when your visitor hovers over them. If the visitor clicks on the ad then you get paid. It’s an affective way of squeezing extra money out of your content. I’ve now used both Kontera and AdBrite on different sites, the same sites and totally different styles of website. It’s been good fun to see how the different implementations compare.

Signup
I guess the first thing you need to know before getting started with either of this is do you have the option of using both? Kontera are much stricter when it comes to the quality of their publishers than AdBrite, you’ll need a decent quality website with good original content and enough visitors. Whilst you don’t need the hundreds of thousands a month that Kontera once liked I’d suggest you not bother unless you are currently attracting around a 100 hundred visitors daily. You’ll also need to apply for every website you want to show Kontera ads on As I’ve said AdBrite is a much simpler and it takes no time to get approved and to start adding ads on any websites you own.

Speed
Once you have your ad code added to your pages a big consideration is what impact if any it will have on your visitors experience of your website. With any advertising the affect it will have on your page load times is a big consideration. In this battle there is a clear winner, AdBrite. I don’t know why but their ads appear almost instantly and certainly a good 3-4 times quicker than Kontera. On all the websites and pages I tried Kontera and AdBrite on Kontera didn’t load quicker once.

Targeting
You want to show adverts that your visitors are interested in. The more relevant the more clicks you’re going to get. The inline ads from AdBrite seem to very much concentrate on getting themselves out there as early in your text as possible. This usually means all links in the first paragraph of your page content and the targeting can be a bit iffy at best. Expect to see some very general words double underlined! On the other hand Kontera seems to spread itself through the page much better and certainly picks out relevant words to what the page contains. This is generally true with Kontera but however there is the odd time where an advertiser seems to buy crazy general words that can have a big impact on the Kontera targeting.

CPC and CTR
Now we’re talking. How much and how often! Remember that this is only my opinion but I found AdBrite to give a higher CPC in almost all instances. I couldn’t believe it, especially seeing as how general some of the AdBrite words were. How the advertisers were making an ROI on that sort of general word bidding I have no idea. Then again should I really care? Kontera’s accurate ads do seem to give a lower CPC, sometimes to the point where you’d wonder why bother. In terms of CTR I had very split results. On high traffic websites where the search engines were dumping lots of content targeted visitors my CTR with Kontera was MUCH higher than Adbrite. A lot higher. On more general websites where there is more referral traffic (such as a blog) then the opposite was true, AdBrite consistently out performed Kontera although the CTR was never anything like as high as on my top performing Kontera sites. Either way there was a split dependent on where the majority of the traffic was coming from.

Payment
Kontera have a number of payment options including bank transfers (available in local currency) and PayPal. For international publishers this gives us the best chance of keeping most of our earnings instead of giving them to banks. I’ve never had a late payment from Kontera and I trust them 100%. AdBrite only offer USD cheques which is far from ideal for anybody outside the US. Whilst I haven’t earnt enough to get paid yet with AdBrite when I do I’m going to end up getting hit with exchange fees as well as fees for banking foreign cheques. I’ve no idea why some companies carry on with this, cheques are by far the least cost effective method of payment for all concerned.

So What Would I Use?
It all depends on where I was deploying the ads. On a popular website that gets heavy search traffic the extra CTR of Kontera (even with the lower CPC) combined with the chance at retaining more of my earnings with their payment methods means that Kontera would win every day. On smaller more general blog style websites where a good percentage of the traffic is referral based then the quicker load time of AdBrite as well as the extra CPC would win. On new websites that you’re looking to squeeze as much money out as possible then only choice is AdBrite. I consider AdBrite to be bonus earnings from my content where as Kontera can be an integral part of my earning strategy.

What you should keep in mind with all this is that I only actually tried AdBrite because I thought Kontera wasn’t performing. I’d seen my earnings crash over the last 2 months (all from the same impressions). I guess what my experiment with AdBrite taught me was that it’s not just Kontera, Adsense or any other network for that matter making life difficult for website publishers. I’m positive there is a general down turn in the amounts being spent online by advertisers and we’ve just got to grin and bear it.

In my next head to head I’m going to put Cow vs Chow in a battle to see where your advertising bucks give the best return, I’ve been running ads on both lately and have got some very interesting findings.