Money Schemes - Learn How To Make Money Online

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).

Back in January I decided that I’d start 2008 with a bang by throwing a bit of money at the world of affiliate marking using Pay Per Click advertising (PPC). I rapidly managed to go through nearly $500 in clicks with very little in the way of a return. In my daughters words “awesome”, it was not.

Then in February against my better judgement I decided that I’d have another go but with one major difference. Initially I’d started this using the pre-packed landing pages of ad networks like NeverBlueAds. I wasn’t really doing any of my own pre-selling, I was actually being very lazy. In my defence I’ve read plenty of “gurus” spout of about how easy it was to turn PPC traffic into affiliate sales without any real effort so it was at least proof that however you decide to try and make money online you will need to put in some work! Anyway, I digress, this time around I decided to concentrate on only 1 affiliate deal for 1 product and to create my own landing page. In fact I used a blog post from this here blog to promote the deal I was pushing and channelled the PPC traffic to it. I was much more focused on having this work.

So after 1 month how did I do? Well I didn’t make the mega bucks I was looking for but I did make a nice bit of profit. My Adwords spend (I stuck to only using Adwords for this) came to rather tame $98. From that traffic I made a nice but not enormous $318. My maths isn’t great but I reckon that’s about $220 in profit. When I first started it for a few days I was making just a little bit more than what I was spending but then I got a bit of luck which allowed me to get a very good ROI.

It’s That John Chow Man Again
The offer I was promoting was for those Peel Away Ads that you use in the corner of your website. I was actually dropping of the PPC traffic on my Peel Away page. I was showing people how to get those ads for free (from which I was still paid a commission, Trial Pay is awesome) and I also included a link to a ClickBank seller of the script. Where I got lucky with this was that John Chow decided to start using that type of ad and made a point of writing about it. Of course where John Chow goes many thousands follow and the number of searches for free Peel Away Ads and the like increased significantly. This brought many more people to that page via PPC, decreased the bid amounts I needed and resulted in better conversions. What was surprising to me was that just as many people were prepared to pay for the Peel Away Ads script as get it free?! Either way the end result was the same and a nice profit for me. I’m sure if John Chow wouldn’t have starting using Peel Away Ads then I still would have made a profit, just not as much. I got lucky!

What this has done is renew my faith in this type of marketing, I’ve just got to try and find another offer that’s worth promoting now.

So it looks like WidgetBucks aren’t welcoming clicks from us foreigners, it must have been a temporary glitch in the system, bugger!

Anyway, it got me onto thinking about this from a much broader angle, is it harder to make money online if you’re based outside of North America? I think it is. There are a number of reasons why I think like this but these are my top 3:-

1. Treated As 2nd Class Citizens On Ad Networks – There are a number of ad networks out there that treat us very poorly compared to Americans/Canadians. Some won’t let you sign up (regardless of where the traffic you bring them is coming from), others lower their pay outs or otherwise try to “put you off”. Even the big G is now guilty of this. I live in the UK and notice it a bit, I imagine it’s even worse if you live outside of Europe and Australia.

2. News, What News? – I have a large list of blogs that I either visit on a regular basis and/or I subscribe to their feeds. I think it’s really important to be right up with the latest developments in this game, the early adopters always seem to benefit the most from any new networks and methods of making money. The problem is that so many of the big names in make money blogging are based over the Atlantic that for most of my day there is no news (it’s just bad luck I suppose that Darren Rowse is equally as far away). Press releases and breaking news is understandably released at a time to suite North America. Of course when something does break by the time I read about it the next morning it’s too late.

3. Exchange Rates – During December and January it actually looked for a little while like things were picking up, but no. I can’t think of any of the big ad-networks that let you earn your money in anything other than US Dollars*. When the dollar weakens we all end up taking a pay cut. I can completely understand this for many of the smaller networks but I guess the one that really bugs me is Adsense. There must be as many Adsense/Adwords users outside of the US as there are in the US? When using Adwords from the UK I pay in sterling, my bids are in sterling. Seems they can do the conversion one way but not the other because in Adsense every click earns me cents and dollars. It can look like it’s going to be a good month right up to the day when Google go to payout and then the slightest shift in the exchange rates can make a big difference to what you get in the bank.

I’m not trying to blame anyone here, some things just are what they are and aren’t likely to change anytime soon. As much as the internet is global it is still dominated by North America, I only have to look at my traffic stats to see that. I guess the real question should be are you prepared to move to make more money online? Not at the moment so I’d better stop my whinging!

* I stand corrected, somebody just pointed out CJ.

This is something I don’t do enough, going through the stats to find out where the majority of my visitors come from. When it comes to making money from your website this data can actually be some of the most important. Some pay-per-click programs will only pay your for North American clicks (WidgetBucks for example) so if you’re not getting a high percentage of that type of traffic then is it worth using them? A hell of a lot of affiliate deals that you’ll find on the various networks are also geo sensitive, you might think you’re advertising one thing but the majority of your visitors are seeing something totally different.

Perhaps one of the most important examples of this to me is being an e-bay affiliate. E-bay has a deal with Commission Junction to manage their affiliates but depending on which Commission Junction you sign up at will depend on which e-bay you are promoting. If your traffic is quite diverse then it’s a nightmare and not worth using them at all, lets face it a UK customer is very unlikely to buy something from the US e-bay etc I have a US and UK affiliate account but I only use them on websites where over 80% of all the traffic is from one location.

When it comes to checking I swear by Google Analytics, mainly because it’s free but also because it once wasn’t and so you can fully appreciate the time and effort that has been put into it’s development. If you’re running a WordPress blog and don’t want to have to check a full on stats package then something like FireStats can be a life saver, besides it’s worth it just for the little flags that appear next to your commentators!

With a new year comes new impetus for most of us, this means getting of our back-sides and reviewing what we’ve done whilst making plans to help us do better. During my review of last year I realised that from about September onwards I’d started to stand still and was actually investing very little back into my online plans. Sure the time was there but in terms of pumping some money back in I just wasn’t doing it, the problem with standing still is that in reality and relative to inflation you’re not still but going backwards. Time for a change, so this year in order to try and boost my earnings to the next level I’m starting with a shot at PPC affiliate marketing. It’s very important for me to never lose site of my overall goal here, financial freedom. I’m not fussed about being a millionaire or any other sort of status tag, just to earn enough online to be financially free.

What I’m trying to do here is promote affiliate deals (the sort of offers you find on Commission Junction, Never Blue Ads and ClickBank) by paying for clicks through the various PPC networks. To get things of to a good start and with the idea that I don’t mind losing a bit of money I’ve jumped straight in with Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, Microsofts AdCenter and FaceBook. Whilst I’ve run these types of campaigns for clients before I’ve never used this method at all in order to create an income for myself so it’s all new to me.

Having some amount of common sense I did decide to read up quite heavily before I started, a couple of the blogs I regularly read are very into this type of marketing. MSDanielle, GoogleLady and Zac Johnson are all big experts on this type of affiliate marketing so who better to learn from? If you’re also considering giving this a go then I suggest you go and read through their archives before spending any money. Even so I’m well aware that I’m bound to lose until I get my feet properly wet.

So how does this all differ from what I’ve done in the past, I’ve made money from affiliate deals before? Up until now I’ve made all my money promoting affiliate deals using free traffic. In order to do this I create a website, pour out new content and then when an affiliate deal matches I use that website to promote it. All the traffic is coming from the search engines natural results so any sales I make are all profit. The problem with doing things this way is attracting enough people to make large (or even decent) amounts of money, at best natural search traffic is only going to be partially targeted so conversion rates are traditionally quite low. PPC is different, you can absolutely target your affiliate offer to the exact phrases that you think people will be searching for, you can also use GEO targeting to make sure you’re only getting your offer in front of eligible eye balls. The downside is that you have to pay for this traffic, because of this it’s all about maths and percentages.

Say for example I decide to bid $0.10 on a keyword and that $0.10 is how much each click costs me (in reality your bid price and what you pay will most likely be different), in 1 month that keyword attracts 10,000 clicks on Adwords. My Adwords spend for that month is $1000. I’m promoting an affiliate deal that pays me $25 for each new member I get, in order to cover my costs I need to sell 40 memberships. Lets say my campaign receives an average conversion rate of 1%, so out of the 10,000 people that clicked on my advert 100 will convert, this gives me a total income for the month of $2500, or put another way $1500 profit. Nice, if only it was that simple. What happens if my bid of 0.10 isn’t actually high enough anymore, other marketers have discovered my niche and now I’ve got competition. In order to get the same ad position I’m now bidding $0.30, my monthly spend on Adwords has now gone up to $3000 and I’ve lost money ($500). Go back to my original 0.10 bid scenario, what happens if the conversion rate changes? The market is now full of my offer and so conversion rates have dropped, my conversion rate for that keyword has gone from 1% to 0.65%, instead of 100 new memberships a month I’m now getting only 65 or $1625 of income ($625 profit). As long as it doesn’t drop below 0.40% then I’m still covering costs but is it really worth all the hours for $625?

The way I see it

if (Income – Expense >= Time And Effort) then I’m onto a winner.

The above is a very simplified example of just what PPC affiliate marketing is all about involving only 1 keyword, in the real world for each product you would ideally have several campaigns with each campaign containing multiple keywords. It’s quite a robotic way of making money online and requires a lot of discipline and some amount of money to get started but for those masters of it the rewards can be huge. Hundreds of thousands of dollars a month can be made by those with the right approach, for me my goal is to be able to make $3000 a month profit using this method by the end of June. As it stands I’m 5 days in and about $70 down for the month, looks like I need to do some more reading!

You may have heard me banging on about TrialPay for a while now, the reason is simple, if you are currently giving something useful away for free then you can earn a good chunk of cash with them. It’s a simple process whereby you get paid by companies when your customer accepts their offer in order to get your product. A lot of the offers are free, some aren’t but it is a great way of monetising what you currently do for free without causing any inconvenience to the end user.

The problem with TrialPay comes when you don’t have anything to give away. What if you don’t have an e-book, design templates or you don’t write software? Well now they’ve come up with a solution, you can now sign up to be an affiliate for other TrialPay products and earn a revenue share (many are as high as 50%, some higher). Just to make this clear you are an affiliate for a valued product that costs the user nothing and you get a share of the money. To give you some idea one of my own free products regularly generates transaction amounts of $35+ on TrialPay. If I did a 50% revenue share on that then for each customer you refer (remember it costs the customer nothing) you would receive $17.50+

At the moment there are about 70 products you can sign up to promote as an affiliate covering a very broad spectrum. The real beauty in this system is that everybody loves free stuff. I’d go as far to say that if you can’t make money being a TrialPay Affiliate that now might be the time to give up on affiliate marketing.

If you can’t tell already I’m very excited by this, for me this is the best IM news I’ve heard all year. Straight away my mind is thinking “ClickBank but where each product is free to the end user”. Affiliate marketers have managed to make millions with ClickBank, this has the potential to be bigger, especially for those that get in early.

Some of you might have noticed that I’ve added a new money maker to the list, it’s not there only because I want affiliate commissions but because it works, really!

BANS (Build A Niche Store) is one of those products you see advertised from time to time that claims it’s going to make you loads of money with very little work. The trouble is that many of these PHP scripts are very buggy and you spend more time trying to actually get them to work than making any money with them. BANS is very different, it works with very little setup and it DOES make money. It claims to be search engine friendly and from my experience it certainly is.

BANS allows you to very quickly build a niche store based on one or more e-bay categories. You enter the category number(s) and it retrieves the products, sub-categories and automatically builds a great store front for you based on our choice of template. There are a number of templates built in and they are very easy to customise to anybody knowing even the smallest bit of CSS. The whole process from installation can be done in a little under 10 minutes (I’m not going to do a step-by-step, ShoeMoney has already done that if you need proof of just how easy this is). In order to profit from your BANS store you’ll need a Commission Junction e-bay affiliate account for the e-bay locale you wish to target (several are available with more to follow soon). At this time of year when the shopping frenzy is at it’s highest it’s possible to make good money with this, in fact I paid for my $97 copy in a little under a month on a site that only gets 40 visitors a day.

So that’s enough about BANS, what’s all this lazer targeting? Well as I said earlier your store is going to be based on e-bay categories, the trouble is that some e-bay categories are not as targeted as you and I would like. For example I wanted to build a dancing costumes store but the lowest level e-bay category I could select was Children’s Dancewear. This category includes all sorts of stuff ranging from break dancing mats all the ways to Irish dancing shoes! I only wanted to target one type of dance clothing so on went the programmer hat and this is what I came up with.

There are 2 files that you will need to alter in order for this to work, index.php and cont/FrontControl.php, in each you are looking for the line that retireves the products via the e-bay RSS feed for your country. The easiest way is to search in a text editor for the string “rss.api.ebay.com”, there will only be a few entries and you are looking for the one below the e-bay country you are using. For example the UK feed is below “elseif($siteType == “UK”)”. Now in that very long line that retrives the products look for
&satitle=”.urlencode($front->q).” and append + whateverkeywordyouwanttotarget, so if I was looking to target the boys toys category for only transformers I would change it from

&satitle=”.urlencode($front->q).”&ftrv=1

to

&satitle=”.urlencode($front->q).”+transformers&ftrv=1

If you do this in both the index.php and cont/FrontControl.php files then every time products are retrieved they will be filtered to those that include your keyword. It works for sub-categories and any searches within your store making sure that your whole shop is lazer targeting to your chosen keywords. As far as hacks go this is a fairly minor one but in terms of getting more affiliate sales it’s gold.

If you’re convinced and want to give BANS a go then you can get a nice $40 discount by signing yourself up as a ClickBank affiliate and buying through your own link. The problem with this is that you need to generate enough sales including three different sets of credit card details (and one being mastercard) before ClickBank will actually pay you. That’s fine if you’re experienced with ClickBank but a huge number of people never make that payment bracket and ClickBank even start taking money of you if your account stays inactive for too long. On the other hand if you want a much quicker $20 discount sign up using my affiliate link and I’ll split my commission so that you get $20 back via Paypal as soon as ClickBank pay me. If you want to do this buy using my link and use my contact form on this blog to drop me a line (including your paypal e-mail address). As soon as ClickBank pay me, (which they do every month) I’ll send you your $20.

It only seems like yesterday that I was writing about Click Fraud and how the new breed of CPC advertising networks were going to need to up their game when it comes to preventing it. It’s one of Google’s biggest issues with Adsense and if they can’t eliminate it completely then who can? I wasn’t surprised to see then that John Chow’s TTZ Media affiliate network is already starting to experience some problems.

“One of the things that came up as we started accepting more affiliates who are not friends with John Chow was this : CLICK FRAUD.
So many affiliates are starting to take advantage of it, logging more clicks than they should, that are not deserved.”

Apparently thousands of clicks have already been removed from the system due to some simple IP checks. From my own experience this is not good enough, for example I can think of at least 2 employers I know where more than 9,000 employees share a single external IP address. Even several hundred clicks from that same IP over the space of a month or 2 may not be fraud, it can easily happen once those spammy work e-mails start getting circulated about a page that perhaps has TTZ ads on it. Not only that but large scale fraudsters will of course be cloning and hijacking thousands of IP’s which simple database queries are not going to easily detect. There is nothing easy about stopping click fraud (Just ask Google) but in order to make life fair for both the advertiser and the publishers you’ve got to invest in it, as far as TTZ Media are concerned it looks like they are prepared to put that investment in and it will be interesting to see how they get on.

Just to make things clear I would never recommend anybody try and con an advertising network. It is this sort of thing that will eventually see the end of CPC advertising that so many of us rely on for large parts of our income. Think about it, when the advertisers don’t see a good enough ROI then they either lower prices or pull the plug. Making money online takes work and time, click fraud is for fools.