Money Schemes - Learn How To Make Money Online

It’s not very often I do a post looking back over the week but there have been a couple of stories around this niche of ours that have stood out this week.

As part of my ongoing process of spending my cash to find out how you can best spend yours I had a review done over at JohnChow.com a little while back. The review was actually part of the Blogging Mastermind course I bought (and liked to some extent) so rather than do what I would normally do in this situation i.e. pay for a review of a product of which I’m an affiliate and hope to get my money back, I just asked in a very roundabout way for a review of this blog. I wanted honesty and got it. My goal was to find out what spending $500 over at JohnChow.com would get you for your blog. Why is this important? Because John makes a lot of money pushing high value affiliate offers for products to improve your blog. If you take him up on his offer and try to use his blog as a springboard then this is what value you get. We all know it wasn’t a great review, but then again if you go back and look at Johns review history you’ll find very little in the way of positive reviews of other blogs. Even so the review post attracted quite a bit of debate and was certainly well commented on. So without further a do here’s the raw stats:-

Well not for me anyway. John’s blog used to be a great source of PRACTICAL tips for making money online mixed up with some entertaining personal posts and even some cracking pictures of what he had for dinner yesterday! It seems that every other post now is from some hippy called Alan Johnson who wants to write huge amounts of meaningless crap about giving 110%, motivation and whatever other shit he can come up with to fill a guest post without actually ADDING ANY MEANINGFUL CONTENT TO THE BLOG ON WHICH HE IS GUEST BLOGGING!

If I wanted to read what Alan Johnson has to say about whether or not I’m really busy or not then I’d probably ask him, or read his blog, or subscribe to his RSS feed. As it is I haven’t done any of them. John knows better than anybody, when it comes to making money online content is king, not the quantity, but the quality. When I visit JohnChow.com I expect to see either money making tips (marketing, ad networks, time saving I don’t care), personal posts from John (I like his writing style) or some of the best paid reviews in the business written by Michael. What I don’t want is to be faced with yet another Alan Johnson “maximise your max by giving 573%” nothing post. Me thinks it’s time to redo my list of top money making blogs!

£97 Million (Or roughly $194 million US dollars) is quite a prize I’m sure you’ll agree? I’d go as far to say that it might even eclipse the couple of hundred Entrecard credits I gave away a little while back! EuroMillions is Europe’s lottery and this Friday that huge amount is the jackpot prize, in the drop of a few balls you could join the super rich blowing John Chow, Darren Rowse and ShoeMoney (and about 99.9 of the entire population) out of the water. To put this amount into perspective for make money bloggers that prize would get you over 430,000 reviews over at John Chow, enough to keep the ever willing Michael Kwan busy for the test of his life!

This is one serious amount of cash and although the odds are slim somebody has to win. Even if you don’t match all the numbers in this Friday’s EuroMillions draw the £97 million jackpot will go down to the next prize level. This has got to be worth a punt, for the sake of a few pound you’ve got nothing to lose.

How To Play EuroMillions Online
First of all if you’re in the UK you can go and sign up at the Official National Lottery Website. I’d recommend you do this anyway, before I started playing online I was always forgetting to buy a ticket.

If you’re outside the UK then you can still get in on the EuroMillions action by signing up at TheLotter.com, they offer a global lottery agent service allowing you to play lottery games from all over the world no matter where you live.

If you do decide to play then the best of luck to you, if you don’t then remember you have to be in it to win it!

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.

So here’s the deal, you’re going to be stuck on a desert island for 1 year with a pro blogger of your choice. After that year you are going to be rescued so that you can use all the knowledge you’ve nagged out of your unfortunate island mate to make your fortune online. The big question is if you could be stuck on an island with any blogger who would it be?

Here’s some of the top contenders:-

1. Darren Rowse AKA ProBlogger – Darren is seen as one of the originals in the blogging for profits niche, I’m positive that he was responsible for the whole professional blogging movement. His ProBlogger.net site has enormous authority across the internet as a whole and by taking a successful recipe and repeating it over and over he has built what is possibly the most powerful blogging network on the web today. Darren has a great reputation for liking to share information so that could be a good thing when you’re stuck together for 12 months, he’s also an Aussie so is bound to be a dab hand at cooking sea food so that’s another bonus. On the down side Australians are very competitive so the endless races from one end of the island to the other might get a bit too much. Oh yeah, and it is only me that finds his video blog posts a bit dull?

2. Jeremy Schoemaker AKA ShoeMoney – Easily one of the best content website marketers around Shoe has become a legend in his own lifetime. Unlike Darren Rowse ShoeMoney makes his money by building “real” content websites and using sponsors, ads (Adsense) and affiliate deals to make his money. From the humble beginnings of being a fat lad working at an IT support desk to one of the webs best known marketers the amount of cool info ShoeMoney could dish out in your year together would be enormous. As well as that he also enjoys the UFC and has a bit of a reputation as being one of the lads so that would be pretty cool (assuming you get stranded with some beer as well).

3. John Chow AKA John Chow – John is most famous for his technology website TTZ (The Tech Zone) which was founded when he started to mess around with over clocking processors and writing about it on the net. Nobody knows for sure how much John is worth but as somebody who survived the first dot com collapse and who has came back stronger than ever it’s bound to be a lot! I might be wrong but I think John has been around on the net longer than the other 2, perhaps even as long as me? John’s latest money making venture is johnchow.com, this was his personal blog but has developed into a case study on how to make money online blogging. In just about 1 year he’s gone from nothing to last month when he pulled in over $20,000+ from his hobby blog. Known as Mr Evil the tactics John would share would no doubt be on the edge of what is acceptable, but then again when it comes to quick results maybe the John Chow way might be the best way? On the down side John is well known for liking his food, thinking about it I wouldn’t actually fancy my chances of lasting 12 months without ending up on a BBQ for the very hungry Mr Chow.

I think of those three I’d choose……………..none of them. I’d go for Angela over at Boston Brat and it’s got nothing to do with her being my first ever commenter. Being stuck on a desert island for 12 months is one thing, but being stuck without any chicks to look at* would be 1 step too many! I might not learn much about making money but I’d sure have fun

So who would you choose to be stuck with and why?

* I should probably add that my wife doesn’t blog, otherwise I’d bring her obviously!

John Chow, he’s been making mega bucks from the internet for a longer time than most of us. A lot of what he writes is really worth listening too, one of his recent posts really hit a chord with me. He was questioning “Are You Getting Maximum Dollar For Your Ad Space?“, after reading this I knew that deep down there were certain web pages that I just wasn’t making the most of. Feeling inspired I set about doing a bit of direct marketing to try and sell one space in particular, it was making me less than 2 dollars a day from over 1200 page views.

Instant Results
After only 2 emails pimping my page to best fit services I got a hit. A little bit of back and forwards e-mailing and there is now a deal in place that will allow me to make much more money from that page and a few others. If I go by previous experiences with conversion rates then a very worst case scenario will see that ad spot generating $40 a day, at the upper end of conversion (not impossible considering just how well targeted the page is) then it could be $400 a day. It should all be live by the end of this month so I’ll let you know how I get on then.

John Chow, Inspiring People
I’d never have bothered doing this if it wasn’t for John’s blog post. I’ve already bought him a large beer to say cheers, if everything works out how I’d like there will be a keg heading his way as well.

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.