The internet is constantly changing, nothing ever stays the same for very long and it’s because of this we need to change how we make money from it as well. Over the last couple of years several very lucrative ways of making money have come and gone for me and so I thought I make a note of just some of the systems that I’m no longer using.
1. Text Links Ads – Paid links, the devil’s work! At one point I was making almost $1000 a month with TLA, as Google declared open war fare on them the earning amount decreased until one day I woke up to dfind the visible page rank destroyed across several of my sites. After a quick review of what paid linking was worth to me versus the risk I decided to instantly remove all paid links from all of my websites. You hear that GOOGLE, I don’t have a single bloody paid link on ANY of my websites! Just for the record this blog has never had a single paid link on it. And still my review requests fall on deaf ears. I really should shoot Matt Cutts an e-mail. Anyhoo, it was once $1000 a month, now it’s nothing.
2. Kontera – I signed up for Kontera because of all the hype around the MMO niche. Combining them with Adsense was the next big thing and yes it did bring in an extra couple of hundred dollars a month. The trouble I always had with them was not the intrusion but rather than awful eCPM. It was literally a 10th of what Google was paying me for the same traffic. Then things got interesting when InfoLinks dropped me a mail, I switched over a couple of websites and instantly started making a lot more money. Then Kontera responded by offering me a pay per impression deal that worked out at just slightly better than InfoLinks so I swapped back. The final nail in the coffin of Kontera for me was when they pulled my fixed price deal far earlier than had been agreed. Ever since then I’ve been using InfoLinks exclusively and making more than I ever did with Kontera.
3. WidgetBucks – Started of great, then they started playing around with the rules until eventually it became a shocking way of making money. We are talking about eCPMs in the 0.02 – 0.10 cents region! Not only that but several of their pay per impression advertisers were seemingly spawning pop-ups, many of which sent anti-virus systems of. So you put a widget on your page, a visitor surfs to it and gets all sorts of security alarms flashing! All for a few cents per thousand impressions. In its heyday I was making close to $800 a month with WidgetBucks, it now makes me nothing.
4. TrialPay – From over $2000 a month to nothing all in the space of a year. To be fair to TrialPay their system is still very solid and if you have the right product (or as part of their affiliate program the right website to push others products) then you can still make very good money with TrialPay. My problem was simple, by far and away my most popular product became obsolete thanks to some changes by Microsoft. If people don’t need your product then they’re not going to go through the TrialPay process to get it. As an aside I don’t sell any software any more, this means all my income now comes from internet marketing (that’s a scary thought in itself).
5. Bux.to – These guys deserve a whole post to themselves!
So there you have 5 money makers that are no longer making me any money. Conservatively speaking it’s around $4200 worth of income a month that has gone, it’s a good job that the internet is constantly throwing up as many new opportunities as it takes away old ones!
10 Responses to “5 Money Makers I Don’t Use Any More”
Alan
August 24, 2009
Is your new use for that domain with the additional ‘o’ working out for you Paul. I can see what the use is although looking at some of the pages, you might want to ‘doctor’ the script slightly since each and every page is advertising the script that runs it and the tags for each entry also include a similar advertsing tag as well.
I was going to something similar myself a while back and even bought a domain for the job but never really got around to doing anything with it. Just wondering how it working out for you as far as monetization is concerned.
|.-= Alan´s last blog ..How Much Fat Can be Removed with Liposuction =-.
Anil Gupta
August 25, 2009
Surely we are risking losing or page rank if are involved in any kind of link selling activities. I heard from many publishers on TLA, they lose their blog PR from 5 to 0 in 2-3 PR iterations. So we are inviting Google to end our page rank if we sell links via text link ads, TNX or any other text link selling marketplace
|.-= Anil Gupta´s last blog ..How to make money online writing content for Helium =-.
Petra Weiss
August 25, 2009
@Paul, I get the hint, thanks for smashing me in front of audience!!
(Just kidding 
)
|.-= Petra Weiss´s last blog ..KeywordLuv Installed – Happy Commenting! =-.
Paul B
August 25, 2009
@Petra, no harm meant
I just think that if you’re getting that low an eCPM from any advertiser it’s got to be worth trying an alternative? The thing is that not all networks work the same for all people (I know some people who still swear by Kontera) but if you don’t try then you never know.
As an aside when anything I do drops much below earning of $1 eCPM then I do consider binning it altogether.
|Paul B
August 25, 2009
@Alan – It sure beats a bit of Adsense! I literally just set up a simple redirect and forgot about it. Making it a little more sneaky is another thing to add on to the to do list.
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