Money Schemes - Learn How To Make Money Online

Have you ever heard of Domain Flipping? To put it simply it’s selling a domain for more than you buy it for, making a profit. It is supposed to be one the easiest ways of making a quick buck online after all you can pick up domains very cheap (my average domain costs around $7). The idea is then to sell it via any means necessary for more than that, the most popular options seems to be e-bay. Some of the real big boys in this niche know that this works as well, for instance as part of ShoeMoney’s tools he has a domain marketplace where he takes the idea 1 step further by finding domains that are available with good back links. He also doesn’t register them to sell but rather sells you the name (more profit for him if he doesn’t have to register it first). Selling domain names is a very legit business.

So this is where I go on to tell you about this excellent new e-book called Fast Domain Riches, I hype it up, tell you how money much I’ve made with it in the hope you buy from an affiliate link and I cash in, right? Well wrong actually! I did see an advert for this a little while ago and on the back of my Shoemoney Tools experience I was interested. However before buying anything now I tend to do as much research as possible, I Google some amazing terms to try and get ANYTHING HONEST about the product in question. I found more than that this time.

Some kind sole (or thief, depending on your point of view) seems to have taken the content and published it online. If you ever wanted to learn bout how to make quick money selling domains then it’s all there. And yes, it does work. It’s not quite as simple as “do this”, “do that” and make money. Like anything in life you will have to use your head, certainly only buying domain names that you think will be of value to “somebody” (this doesn’t mean it needs BR or back-links, it’s all about the name). If you can get your head around that then you should be flipping and making a good profit in no time. If there’s one thing not at doubt here it’s that you can make very good money using the Fast Domain Riches method!

Check out the blog fast-domain-riches.blogspot.com (oops that blog has now been removed – the information is still available to buy though and well worth the small outlay) and give it a go. If you do value the information available then I’d plead with to go and buy the full info product. I’ve no idea how long that dodgy blog will last before it gets shut down so I’d suggest you check it out soon.

When I first started working for myself I had a dream, I wanted world peace, an end to poverty…..nah only joking. I wanted the freedom to work on what I wanted to work on when I wanted to. Work freedom I thought of it as.

The problem was that in order to get through the first few months I became reliant on client work. Now don’t ever fool yourself, doing client work IS NOTHING LIKE WORKING FOR YOURSELF. Rather than working for a single employer with all the perks of being an employee you’re simply working for a great number of bosses, all of which tend to be more demanding than any employer you’ll meet!

Over time I’ve managed to lose them (in the nicest possible way) one by one until as things stand today I’m left with one real client and one half client. The half isn’t an issue, I host a few services for them on my infrastructure. It’s only pennies but it’s completely hassle free. The other client is a little more involved. Well it’s a lot lot more involved. The money is ok, certainly no great shakes but it made a big difference when I needed it. The trouble is I don’t anymore. For the amount of time it takes (I spend as much time on their site as I do my own) I’m probably making about $5 an hour!

Even worse, they are prone to being quite for weeks. Understandably they see quite time as me not doing anything. This is OK but of course whilst they aren’t wanting updates I’m still very much doing all those SEO things for them (link building, optimizing, adding new content) that they don’t really see, the extra traffic and enquiries happens by magic Then every now and then comes a huge request. Next week I’d planned so many things, not least starting on PPC again and I need to be able to commit 100% to it. That was until today. I’ve got a choice here, I can either stick with my plans and say goodbye to my last real client, or change everything last minute and spend a week completely re-doing their website?

I think for one of the first times in my life I can hand on heart say I haven’t got a clue what to do.

I was really excited about this post! I’ve had it prepared for a day and was just waiting for the right time to put it up. However FaceBook are a real pain when it comes to advertising, they are so sensitive about what you can and can’t have. So I’m going to post this anyway and I’ll explain near the end the problems you might encounter.

Using FaceBook To Make Money With My HomePages Friends

I wrote a little while back about how to get some free adverting spends on FaceBook. Ever since that time I’ve been struggling with what to do with that money, as I later explained I wasn’t having much joy with the affiliate marketing, I did get one exclusive offer to work but the traffic level was low enough to leave me with a chunk of free advertising money left. I didn’t just won’t to throw that away on some random offers and besides I was really struggling to get anything approved, advertising on FaceBook is a mighty great pain in the hole. I wanted some value out of it though and that’s when I started to use my head. FaceBook has one type of user above all others, students. Now I don’t know about elsewhere but in the UK students are known as being one thing, tight. Most would sell their mothers at the end of a night for an extra drink

I needed to think of something that would appeal to studenty types, people after a few easy £$ who also have friends to refer. My Home Pages Friends, perfect. Get paid just for doing your normal web searches, even better refer your friends and take a commission. 2 pence (about 4 cents a search) might not seem like much too some people, but to others it’s free money. So I setup an ad targeting UK males and females in the right age group. Here is that ad:-

Search the Net, Get Paid
Earn money for doing what you do now for free every day!

I set my bid to $0.65 (high but it’s free money so who cares, I’ve got no plans of spending my own money on this). After a few days the figures were in, around 200,000 impressions, 78 clicks at an average cost of about $0.51 Whilst that doesn’t seem that great a CTR, out of those 78 clicks I had 32 My Homepages Friends accounts setup. That’s $1.24 per sign up. What I’m just started to see now is my MHPF second level referral earnings going up, obviously my direct signups are starting to refer friends, which is exactly what I’d hoped for. If friends refer friends who refer friends then I should be OK at worst.

Now I fully understand that $1.24 per signup might seem expensive, especially when you can’t know for sure what return you’ll get. Not much short term I’d imagine. But the beauty with the MHPF system is growing your network and to be quite frank targeting FaceBook users is the perfect way of doing it. Doing it for free is even better. I could have chucked that free FaceBook advertising money at a few ClickBank products and hoped. From what I’ve read elsewhere nobody is having much joy with that. Instead I’ve put it towards an online money maker that I can only see growing over time. Even better, already I’ve turned that virtual FaceBook money into some real cash.

Problems With Advertising On FaceBook

Unfortunately the story doesn’t end here. In order to replicate and grow this I tried the same ad with different countries, it was a complete lottery to whether or not it was accepted or not, some were, some weren’t, some I got a threatening e-mail back about. FaceBook seem to not want their advertisers to…well….advertise. They are very touchy about where you send their users, how you send them and making sure your advert doesn’t sound like an advert. But on the other hand some just get straight through. It’s a bit of a lottery and one you enter at completely your own risk.

So I’ve given you my advert, my target, and my bid. This worked to get me new signups. If you’ve got some free FaceBook advertising in your account (I wouldn’t recommend spending your own cash on this or FaceBook advertising full stop) why not get yourself signed up at My HomePages Friends and give it a go?

Make no mistake, I really hate doing these proof of payment type things. There are so many people out there who think that everything online is a scam, people out to rip you off. They avoid signing up for anything just in case. That’s why I’ve posted this, just to prove that InfoLinks are very real and they do pay. This payment is for the month of July (well however many days in July I was using them), in their terms they say that payments are made with 30 days of month end, this one was received after 19 days. There is nothing wrong with their payment schedule. As far as the program itself goes I’m still seeing eCPM figures of between $3.50 and $5.00, how does that compare to you in-text advertising? You’re probably thinking why aren’t I using them on here then? This is very much a webmaster based blog, you guys don’t click ads (pay per impression is where-it’s at)!!!

I first started making money with the eBay affiliate program through Commission Junction, in fact getting on board with eBay was the only reason I joined CJ! I’d heard so many stories of people making a killing with eBay, they really do pay top dollar for new bidding sign-ups. However I never had much joy with getting new users for them, I did OK, just seemed that everybody I sent over was an existing user. I did do well out of their revenue share on successful bids for affiliates, overall I was happy. It was then that I discovered BANS. A PHP script designed for only one purpose, to build eBay powered store front websites with the goal of picking up commissions. This boosted my eBay income significantly. It was at this point eBay decided to split from CJ and setup the eBay Partner Network which I quickly joined and spent some time moving all my links.

From that day onwards strange things have started happening to eBay affiliates. Early reports of much lower CTRs were forgiven and put aside as teething problems with the new system. But then they started changing the payouts, all of a sudden the EPN was less profitable. It’s almost like they didn’t want affiliates. Then last week a number of affiliates (in their thousands and many of the very top eBay earners) were booted out of the program. The reason being…well nobody knows 100% for sure. eBay refused to give any real information, instead citing some nonsense about the long term value of affiliates referrals. Sorry eBay, but it’s the affiliates job to get the prospect over to you, it’s your job to keep them interested in eBay and bidding well into the future! eBay seem to have shifted the responsibility of “future profitability” to eBay of an affiliates referral onto the referral themselves! Excuse the language but that is f’in mental! In all my years online I’ve never ever heard anything like it.

I’ve no idea what this is going to mean to the long term future of not only the EPN or eBay as a whole. Luckily for now I still have my account, I presume because I was never that successful at getting the high commission new signups (It seems to be mainly the top earning new signup affiliates that have been bummed). I gone only imagine how annoyed I’d be if I’d spent years of my time, not to mention my own money on promoting a program that I was suddenly kicked out of with no real explanation. Anyone in that situation truly has my sympathy.

For now I’m going to only use the EPN and BANS as a test tool, it’s a real quick way of testing a niche for portability. At this point I certainly won’t be spending any real amount of time or money on promoting eBay. The question is, is eBay just consolidating or are they genuinely in trouble as a business?

(Just got another e-mail from eBay this morning:-

We’re making big changes on eBay.co.uk and eBay.ie, effective 24th September 2008, and they could affect the way you’re currently trading on the site.
Please take note of the following changes:

Fee changes
We will be making changes to our overall fee structure, including Insertion Fees and Final Value Fees.

Changes to eBay Shops
Fees for eBay Shops will change, and we will also be introducing new criteria to sign up for a Shop, for example, including Detailed Seller Ratings requirements.

Looks life they are going to make life less profitable/difficult for sellers as well)

If you’ve never heard of the 30 Day Challenge before let me explain briefly. It’s a 30 day step by step guide to how to make money online. It’s run by a couple of successful Australian internet marketers (led by Ed Dale) and has been successful in launching several well known affiliate marketers careers. If you were following the Top Affiliate Challenge hoping to learn something and were left disappointed then this could be for you.

The course assumes no knowledge of internet marketing, websites, blogs or anything else and takes you through the whole process in your own time. Each day is accompanied by one or more videos, which deserve special mention of their own. In terms of production quality these are right up there with anything else that is available in e-tutoring. Besides the video lessons they have a few basic online tools that you can use as part of the learning process and one real gem, Market Samurai. This keyword research, content sourcing application is brilliant. Whilst it is still in early Beta by joining the 30 Day Challenge you get a 40 day free trial of all the features that will eventually be in the final paid software. I will be adding this to my webmaster software collection.

So in summary that’s excellent course material (genuinely there are some tips that I’d never seen before), top quality production and access to exclusive IM tools. How much you ask? Nothing. Nada. Nill. Zip. It’s 100% free. Create an account over at Thirty Day Challenge and login and that’s it, you’re good to go. You’ll not get spammed offers or anything else, there is no scam involved at all here. It’s just a very well put together 30 day course for teaching you how to go from nothing to earning “something” online. If you’re not already signed up at the 30 day challenge then I suggest you get over there now and do it. Trust me, it’s worth it just for 40 days free access to Market Samurai.

About the blog that is. Just a lot going on at the moment, family commitments, car crashes, just the usual.

Plus I had the fun challenge today of creating an excel spreadsheet that can reconcile a large list of payments to a total. It had to find every combination of amounts that could satisfy any given total. Easy enough to do, but getting it to do it quickly is another matter! My head hurts.

Should be back in the hot seat soon.

I had a bumper weekend, a lot of traffic and a lot of money (well for my level anyway). With the extra traffic it gave me the chance to run a few very simple, quick experiments and I ended up hitting on a little tip that anybody who is trying affiliate marketing with organic traffic might enjoy.

My tactic with this type of affiliate marketing is to just embed links into the page copy. Highlighting any key phrases and using an affiliate link. It works reasonably well, it’s not like the traffic costs anything so any income is a bonus. Click and conversion rates tend to be low. It’s a much more subtle method than the heavy sell landing pages of PPC affiliate marketing. I was reading something last week though and it was going on about the “average” web browser and how stupid they are. Do you believe that? They were hinting that subtle may not be the best policy, so I changed things around on a couple of pages.

Instead of linking some text I decided to put a small 1 or 2 sentence “You can find out more etc etc by visiting…” at the top and bottom of the page with a link like this www.themakemoneyonline.net. The link text shows the URL of the home page but the link contains my referral ID. I’m not sure why but using the URL instead of the name of the site or any other text to link to gave a much better click through rate. Long story short my new top and bottom non subtle links immediately improved conversions by around 25%.

It was an interesting lesson, as webmasters I think that we sometimes assume that all visitors are looking for the same things as us. Maybe it’s time to stop being so subtle with your affiliate links and get them in people’s faces.