Money Schemes - Learn How To Make Money Online

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.

If you’re an advertiser then it’s a pretty good time to be involved with Pay-Per-Click advertising. My own personal experience is that I’ve seen costs coming down since the beginning of the new year and that’s always a good thing. On the other hand if you’re a publisher then times are not as good. This is what I want to talk about today, I know I’m suffering but I wonder just how much everybody else is suffering as well?

I’ve been using Kontera to provide “in text” advertising for over 18 months now. With Kontera you’ll see certain words or phrases that become double underlined, hover over them and you see an advert. If a visitor clicks on one of these ads then you get paid a share of the advertising revenue that Kontera receive. I’ve found that on content websites they work very well and compliment other bolder advertising options (such as Adsense) very well. On of the biggest worries people have before implementing in-text adverts like Kontera is that it will have a negative impact on their other advertising revenue. I’ve never experienced this (yet, touch wood).

I’ve been using Kontera on The Make Money Online Dot Net for about 6 months now. What I’ve found is that with blogs (and certainly the MMO niche) it doesn’t do that well. The click-through-rate compared to my other sites is lower and the CPC doesn’t seem so good either. However I’m fairly sure that I’ve not made the most of it. I’ve tried a couple of 3rd party plugins, none of which seemed to work as I’d like. At the moment I have the Kontera code included in the page footer of every page, this results in some quite nasty ad placement. Basically my whole page is seen as an open playing field for Kontera, interfering with titles, comments and much more. In fact I’m running a final trial for a few weeks, if things don’t get better I’ll be dropping Kontera from this website.

Luckily for me then Kontera have decided on the perfect time to release an official WordPress plugin. Promising much greater flexibility with the following features, I can’t wait to give to give it a go:-

Insert the ContentLink™ tag into all your pages.
Block ads from particular posts or categories.
Decide when Contentlinks will appear on new posts.
Block ContentLinks from comments.

With any luck by targeted post content the visual impact will be less and I’ll start to see Kontera performing a little better.

You can get your copy of the Kontera plugin for WordPress here

I’ve just this moment gone to sign into my Kontera account and a few things have changed. Least importantly there is a new sign in form (this always catches me out because I rely so much on Firefox to remember my passwords). Once you have trawled through your old e-mails to find your password the next thing you’re faced with is some new terms & conditions. Seeing as how the changes were publisher requests and not advertiser requests I took the usual assumption that all was fine and agreed!

This is where you get to the meat of the Kontera updates, the reporting. The very simplistic date range and website reports have now been greatly expanded. First of all you’re given a 1 week summary up until the last confirmed days earnings (that’s still normally 1 day behind real time). Even better you now get a monthly graph allowing you to see how your earnings fluctuate day by day, this is a great addition, I’d certainly never realised how much my earnings with Kontera fluctuate.

Under detailed reports you are faced with just about the same options as what the old Kontera offered. Pick a date range and then decide if you want to see for all websites or just one. Not that interesting really. It’s the last 2 report options that have been offered that will really help you to make more money with Kontera. The keyword report will show you which words/phrases are getting the most clicks for whatever website you choose. In that past this has always been left to guess work but now you know what people are clicking on you can think about altering your content to suite. I’m sure above the fold is just as important with Kontera in text advertising as the more traditional ad blocks. Lastly there is the URL report, this does pretty much the same as the keyword report but instead tells you which URLs on your website get the most clicks. By combining the information from these last 2 reports you really do have a much better chance of making even more money with Kontera.

Kontera has always been one of my favourite ad networks, not only do they pay very well but to date I’ve found that implementing them on a website that already contains adverts doesn’t affect your other revenues. If you haven’t already I’d recommend you give Kontera a go.

Although it doesn’t appear to be advertised anywhere on the Kontera website they do actually run an affiliate program for publishers. I wish somebody would have told me about it earlier because I’ve been referring new publishers from here for several months now!

In order to join their affiliate program you’ll have to be an existing Kontera publisher and be able to meet the following 3 criteria

1 – Publisher must be in good standing with Kontera.

2 – Publisher has to run our Content links for at least 3 months.

3 – Publisher revenue of $100 or more each month.

I don’t think I’ve ever had any problems with Kontera, using their ads has been great for me and I certainly pass points 2 and 3 without any problems. Once you’ve been signed up the Kontera affiliate program pays out 10% of each referrals earnings for the first 12 months. That’s seems to be quite a standard affiliate deal these days and with the amount of money it is possible to make with Kontera I can’t imagine it taking too many sign-ups before you can earn a nice wedge with this.

Rather than start answering individual questions I figured it would be easier if I just did a post about how I make money online. This isn’t so much about the networks I use as the actual tactics I use to make money.

My Standard Recipe

1. First and primarily I build content websites and not blogs. I have one golden rule when creating any new website for myself, and that’s only to create websites about subjects that interest me AND that I can provide original content for. In short I only write about the things that I know about. Some of these websites might get updated several times a week and others barely once a month but whatever content I add is my own and is always written to be of some benefit to whoever ends up reading it. If it’s a major project I will custom build a template, if it a small website I’ll probably for for a freebie template.

2. Once I have my website I then perform lots of basic SEO checks and keyword optimise it. For me my first lot of traffic always comes organically from the search engines, as long as your content is original and interesting then linking and referral traffic tends to build naturally from that. At this point I should actually be promoting and marketing using the social networks but to date I’ve not had much to do with them, this is something I will be looking at in some detail in the future. If you are struggling to attract natural traffic then read the SEO Book, download WebCEO and if needs be consider spending a few dollars on some links even if only for the first month or so.

3. This is where the interesting part starts, making money. So I’ve got my new optimised (for visitors and search engines) website, the next step for me is always adding at least 1 Adsense block. This is very effective with new quite small websites because your visitor may not find all the information they want, a text Adsense advert can actually be of real value. I will leave the new website with only Adsense ads for 1 to 2 months. If there is no traffic in a niche no matter how well placed you are and you’re not seeing anything from Adsense then this is the point at which to stop and try something new.

4. In the time Adsense is running I will look through the various affiliate networks (Commission Junction, Trade Doubler, Click Bank, Never Blue Ads) and try and find any good fitting deals. Do not waste your time with affiliate deals that do not match your websites content (no matter how big the commission), you’re just wasting space. If I find a nice product I’ll add it to my website, as a rule I will create a whole new page for the affiliate deal rather than just use a banner. Adding value for your visitors as well as pre-selling is vital.

5. At this stage my new website is making a little money from Adsense and slllooowwwlllyy starting to convert the odd affiliate deal. It’s making money.

6. So my website isn’t so new at this stage and has nice amounts of traffic, now is the time to add another ad network. Kontera has been a nice earner for me and doesn’t tend to have any bad affects on other ad networks. My website is now earning money from several pay per click networks, affiliate deals and building a nice mailing list. THIS WILL ONLY WORK THOUGH IF YOU CAN KEEP PUMPING OUT ORIGINAL AND INTERESTING CONTENT.

7. Once a website has several thousand unique visitors a day I start to think about direct ad sales. This can take anywhere between 12-18 months. I treat every website I create as a long term project with the guaranteed money from direct ad sales each month being a great goal to target.

Selling Software & My Original Products

1. Besides making money from advertising and affiliate deals from content websites I also sell my own software. I can’t really give you much guidance on this other that to say that if you’re not a software developer I suggest you check out Rent A Coder. For a small outlay you just might get yours hands on something that you can sell over and over for many years.

2. Build a website using the recipe above for each product you wish to sell, key elements are home, product, FAQ, support, privacy & terms. Use the PAD standard to gain hundreds of free 1 way links, press releases are great for promoting new products.

3. This is the only point at which I would ever use Adwords or any other PPC advertising network. I do not use PPC networks to advertise anything other than my own products simply because if you’re promoting an affiliate product via Adwords then you can bet that another 10 affiliates are doing the same thing (inflating bid prices). This makes making money in this way very hard, some pro’s make a fortune this way but they are spending very big in the first place.

So as you can see I keep things really simple (ads, affiliates, newsletters, original products) and as low risk as possible. I can’t recommend spending hundreds/thousands of dollars on any website until you have found a niche that proves itself both with PPC and Affiliate sales. Because I have kept things so simple to date it also means I have lots of room for expansion in the future e.g. my first steps into blogging with this blog. Hopefully I’ll be starting my first forum website soon as well as starting to do a little bit more with Adwords and affiliate deals. As you grow and get sales you can start to negotiate improved rates, I’m sure that this is how the so called super affiliates make so much money. That is my next target.

Kontera is the ad network that provides those little double underlined links that you’ll see scattered around this blog. Quite a few people don’t like them because of the pop-up nature of the ads, personally I’ve never had a problem with them. Perhaps even more importantly as somebody who uses Kontera to make money I’ve found that they have had no impact on my Adsense earnings so it’s a pretty good partnership to go ahead with.

One issue I have had with Kontera though is the payment methods available, or should that be method. For many months they’ve been sending me Dollar checks, this is bad not any because of the horrific exchange rate (can’t blame Kontera for that though) but because I get stung every time I pay in a foreign cheque. The good news is that not only can you now get your Kontera earnings paid direct into your bank account, but they’ll also transfer it in your native currency. For anyone earning more than a few hundred dollars a month with Kontera the savings are going to stack up and besides you’ll also be getting payment earlier. No more waiting for a cheque to turn up.

The new service is available to Kontera publishers in Canada, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom so if you are currently getting a dollar cheque I suggest you check it out. The bank transfer form is available for download from here.

I don’t think I’ve ever hid the fact that I rely on Google Adsense and Kontera for a lot of my income. These are both pay-per-click programs, i.e. you get paid when somebody clicks on the advert, doesn’t matter if they then go to buy something or not. I’m good with this type of program, I know I am, in fact there are quite a few make money marketers out there that think I was born lucky! I suppose if I was living anywhere else other than one of the most expensive areas of the UK then the dollars I earn with Adsense would be enough to give me a great quality of life, as it is I don’t do too bad! (Damn you exchange rates!)

Blogging Vs Making Money With PPC

The secret I learnt really early was that it’s a certain “class” of visitor that clicks on your PPC ads. There has been so much written recently about attracting readers, readers this, readers that. “My website needs more readers!” Whilst I value each and every one of my Blog readers, a reader is the last thing I want on one of money making content websites. I don’t want somebody whose going to read each word of each page. I don’t want them because I know that this type of visitor isn’t going to click on my ads. Once you’ve spent more than 15 seconds on my content website the chances of me making any money from you via PPC decreases dramatically. What I want is browsers, people sent straight from the search engines looking for an answer to something, scanning pages in a few seconds and then jumping somewhere else. You need to attract these in order to make any real money via PPC. It’s no coincidence that people find PPC earnings going up as search traffic referrals go up. As you can imagine, Blogs are not the best platform for making this type of money.

Some Big Name Examples

Both John Chow and Darren Rowse have recently dropped Adsense from their Blogs. The reasons for each are similar, they don’t make enough money from Adsense, they can make more using that space for other types of advert. John reported on a recent radio show that his Google search traffic referrals accounted for only about 3% of his total traffic. This is very low and maybe something to do with him being kicked by Google. The fact is that both these big name bloggers have huge loyal readerships but comparatively low search engine referrals. Adsense and other PPC mediums do not work in this environment, John only sticks with Kontera because they give him a guaranteed $1000 monthly payment. Blogging is a great platform for attracting “readers” that you can then try and promote affiliate deals to using your relationship as leverage, however if you are looking to make money from PPC you may be better thinking of something else. You’ll notice that John hasn’t removed Adsense from The Tech Zone.

How Can I Make More Money With PPC ?

Stop thinking Blog and start thinking website! Stop thinking reader and start thinking browsers. All of the biggest Adsense earners rely on content websites, be it dating, pets, dancing, dieting or anything else that floats your boat. Take a hobby you enjoy, use a CMS like Joomla to build some original content and then promote, promote, promote.