Money Schemes - Learn How To Make Money Online

I have a very supportive wife that doesn’t mind so much when I spend hours and hours on the internet at home after I have supposedly finished my days work (probably because it lets her watch TV in peace!). The problem is that when I get an idea I have to go with it there and then which can occasionally disrupt happy family life. A while back in order to compensate for this I decided that we’d start a blog together, a learning experience for her. The truth is that Suzanne has never been short of an opinion anyway and was contributing to quite a few forums. Instead of ranting long and hard on other people’s websites why not have her own? And so the Ballroom Dancing Blog was born, somewhere for my wife to write about her favourite hobby with the odd rand for good measure thrown in.

Having been posting content for a few months now what has surprised me is how the evolution from a “I just want to write something online” blogger has evolved into a “now I want more readers blogger”. The next step of course will be the “well how can I make more money from this” blogger. She is interested in making money now (hence a bit of Adsense and a few small affiliate deals) but not as a priority, last night I decided to go through a few ways of increasing her traffic (and comments, she loves comments, if anybody wants to stop by and leave a comment please do!) and will eventually help her to make more money. The embarrassing thing was that as I discussed these things it became apparent that I wasn’t really doing any of them any more on my own websites. I can’t remember when I stopped actively link and traffic building but by all accounts I have! When was the last time my RSS count jumped up, I can’t even remember? I start “PROJECT TRAFFIC” on Monday.

A Few Of The Things We Discussed

1. Forums – Forums are great for getting like minded people to your blog. My wife was already a member of several dancing forums and has a history of posting on them so the trust issue was not and shouldn’t be a problem. We updated her profile to include her website as her home page and I’ve left her to think of a nice signature to use. By ONLY posting a valuable contribution to any forum topic this is a legitimate way of link building and gaining traffic. My wife’s forum posts are epic, I also explained that when a post gets beyond the 3 paragraphs stage that it might be a better idea to hold onto that content for your own website.

2. Blog Comments – Having explained to her that a URI, URL and Website are all a place where you can put a link back to your own website and shown her a few Google searches for finding dance related blogs that have comments sections she can not get more active in her own niche community. This isn’t all about getting followed SE links but about getting more visitors to her website, doesn’t matter if a link is no followed for that to happen!

3. YouTube – There are lots of dancing videos on YouTube with lots of people commenting on them. Get your name out there, be witty and when the time is right consider posting a few videos of your own. We have hundreds of clips that could go online at some point.

4. Stumble – Each page of my wife’s blog is now stumbled by at least one person. With a few more (not a problem when you’re active in a niche community) this can be a valuable source of new visitors. I’ve only just started to reap some benefits from social bookmarking myself so I’m as interested in seeing how this turns out as she is.

5. The last source of links we talked about was directories. I’ve explained that most are junk and not worth wasting time on and then went on to go through some that might be worth going for a listing in. We have now submitted the site to a few of the higher quality ones (DMOZ, Aviva Directory etc), every little bit helps and besides a listing in DMOZ will provide some benefits with the search rankings, not that our dancing website ranks badly anyway.

Finally we discussed who was making the drinks and whose turn it was to load the dishwasher. As she was busy posting in forums it seems like it was my go to do both!

I did consider filming our talk and trying to sell it using one of those horrible black on yellow squeeze pages for $97 (with $182,291 of FREE BONUS ITEMS!), but in the end apathy took hold and I couldn’t be bothered. Maybe next time when I teach her about alternative revenue sources for her website?

No top money making tips today, I’m of to the funeral of one of my aunties soon and in my family these sort of events tend to drag on for the whole day.

The post I was going to write will have to wait until tomorrow but it’s a goody! You’ve heard about swapping different ad formats/ad types to see what works best? Well I’ve taken it to the next level and swapped out my own completely hand coded static HTML website for a CMS. The result, over a 300% increase in traffic and earnings in 2 days. Unbelievable results but I’ll be explaining exactly what I did tomorrow.

This last 11 months has seen some of the most amazing ups and downs of my life, one day it looks like I’m finally going to achieve the financial freedom I’ve been fighting for the next it looks like I’m going to be looking for a normal job again (days like today). One day I clear more than $1000 the next it’s $100 and all without any apparent pattern or reason. Making a living from the internet is not easy, there is no guaranteed pay cheque each month, what works one week may not the next, even when you do nail it the rules often change plus the more you begin to make the more people are looking to put you down! The strange thing is that it is this freedom to flourish, this uncertainty, this stress that made me want to leave my Civil Service ($45,000 a year salary, 30 days a year holiday, up to 18 days flexi leave a year, 11 bank holidays a year) job behind. I only lasted a couple of years of tearing my hair out at the lethargy around me, it was those years that gave me the incentive to get my little money earning part of the web in place so that I could not only support myself but my family.

Perhaps what I find strangest of all is that whenever anybody asks how I’m doing they all assume that money pours into my account with free abandon and I spend all day dossing about. Of course there are the slack days, but then again they are far outweighed by the 18 hour work days, days of sourcing links where there appear to be none, of squeezing that last little bit of on the page SEO juice out, off chopping and changing for the hundredth time to try out that new network that could be “the one”, of answering the swearing filled support e-mails from people who have downloaded your stuff, off writing new content on a subject that has been covered 1,000,000 times by everybody else, the list goes on and on. I wouldn’t change it for anything in the world though, making that break for freedom was the best thing I ever did, and just like every other roller coaster in the world this one sure as hell has the ability to grab you by the balls and remind you that you’re alive!

My daughter turned 12 today, we were going to have a big party bash but instead it’s being saved for next year when she becomes a teenager (nooooo, how did the creep up so quickly?!) What she wanted instead was an iPod Nano….in pink. I hunted high and low for one of these mystical pink iPod Nanos to no avail, in the end we had to settle for the limited edition red one(that looks a bit pink), and even then that had to come straight from the Apple online store, looks like they are holding onto these for themselves.

As a little surpise we also got her a Webcam for her laptop, it seems that when girls reach 11-12 MSN Messenger becomes THE most important thing ever, closely followed by Bebo. All her friends have webcams, I was never that keen on her having one but since ICU came about a lot of that worry has been taken away. Anyway a webcam it was, I managed to pick one up locally which was a miracle in itself. The Isle of Man has quite a “shop local” thing going on at the moment and I try to do my bit but when you can order online cheaper and in five minutes why should you wander around for hours looking for the last Webcam in town? That’ll be a whole new rant one day.

Anyway, today she was 12 and opened her presents. See if you can guess which one got the biggest smile, the cheap surprise webcam or the expensive and asked for iPod? She was a very happy little girl but it was definitely the WebCam that got the biggest cheer. Don’t know why, maybe it was the box size (no kidding when they say nano) or maybe because it was a surprise? What I’ve learnt is that big boxes are cool and big surprise boxes are even better! The new iPod Nano does look cool though, I might have to get one for myself now, although I’ll probably avoid the pink.

My not so little anymore little girl starts High School today, now just how smart does she look????

Thanks to the non existent summer we’ve had over in the UK this year my garden looked a mess this morning.

With the constant rain the grass hasn’t had time to dry and so has got completely out of control. Seeing as how we’ve now managed 4 days of almost warm sunshine on the Isle of Man I thought today would be the day. Unfortunately I was out last night and so was feeling a little dodgy, enough to say it was best not to stray too far from a toilet! So that was my Sunday afternoon, 3 hours of wading through piles of cat shit with a lawn mower whilst trying not to throw up from the smell. Dirty bastard cats, what are they for? Other than killing nice little animals they serve no purpose, it’s almost like they live just to shit in my garden. One of the little gits even had the cheek to try and sneak in whilst I was mowing/shit spreading.

If anybody has any tips on how to keep cats out of your garden I’d love to hear them, I’ve tried a sonic scarer, bottles full of water, lemon sprays, my next deterrent is going to be a gun?

I hate it when my daughter spends hours in front of the television, glued to the same old endless repeats on the Disney channel. Doesn’t matter if it’s Hannah Montana, That’s So Raven, Cory In the House, Zoey 101 or High School Musical it just annoys me that’s she’s wasting her time watching the same old repeated rubbish. Even if she was only watching 1 hour a day of Disney it would work out at a waste of 243 days of her life by the time she was sixteen!

This got me thinking about my own time and how I waste it. I’ve managed to get rid of my habit of checking earnings but I still waste far too much time checking Google Analytics instead of being productive. Over the last 4 years I’ve wasted 2 whole months of my time doing nothing but refreshing analytics pages.

That’s enough work for one day, I guess it’s time to get us both out of the house, get a little air and do a little exercise.

I didn’t get a whole lot done yesterday, lots of distractions, some very good ones like looking after my daughter during the summer holidays (one of the great perks of being self employed). Finding it hard to do anything productive I had what I’d like to call a research day, a day of just reading and not doing much. Whilst surfing I came across one real gem, this post by Mr Evil himself John Chow about the internets biggest Adsense earners. I consider myself a bit of a Google whore although I have diversified a lot over the last year, but when you look at some of those monthly figures all you can say is wow! Or more likely holy %^&$%£ ^%&^! $300,000 a month, seriously I’d consider retiring after 6 months of that, but then again if you’re not really doing anything to earn that money how do you retire? It makes me almost embarrassed to mention my recent Adsense advances which have brought me up to the $2500 a month mark. I was so proud, looks like I’ve still got a long way to go.

If anybody out there is looking for a bit of inspiration then I’d suggest they read John’s full post, if it doesn’t make you want to jump back into Adsense then nothing will!

I also came across something else which could be a real serious money earner for people in my niche, but it deserves a post all of its own.