Money Schemes - Learn How To Make Money Online

Towards the end of last year Google unleashed a slap of monumental proportions on people who were seen to be selling links. The easiest targets to identify for this slap were websites selling through TLA (mainly because most also pushed TLA as an affiliate). The slap involved destroying the page ranks of these websites that were seen to be selling page rank, page rank is Google’s toy and they certainly don’t won’t anybody else playing with it! In many people’s opinions this crackdown would be the end of link selling as websites that previously openly supported Text Links Ads started to run for cover and beg the Google gods for their page rank back. It’s been several months now since that happened, here’s how I think things have gone.

Link Buying And Selling Is Still Alive
No doubt about it, for lazy SEO’s (buying) and webmasters (selling) TLA was the easiest way of buying and selling links, after the slap the scene has changed quite a bit. As a webmaster myself I find that I now get many more requests for people wanting to buy links directly. Not from Joe Average, it’s much more likely that I’ll be contacted by a representative of one of the larger SEO firms who represent big companies looking for an increased web presence. I talked to a few friends about this over the weekend and the general consensus is that the price for a link has increased post slap. For a link that you may have received $10 a month for from TLA (they take a 50% split) you may now see $30-$35. Somebody even reported selling a single 3 word link for $1500 a year. It was also generally agreed that link buyers are looking for longer term deals, they want 6/12/18 months, obviously it’s horses for courses but with the level of uncertainty in the global economy at the moment I’m sure plenty of us earning at the lower levels of online income would be glad of the stability. So it is still very much possible to make money selling links, but there are a few rules that you should stick to:-

1. Only EVER accept payment for a link to a website that is relevant to the page content on which the link is to be placed.
2. Consider your visitors, is the destination a quality website, would you visit it/consider linking to it if there was no money involved? (This is a valid point, of course we aren’t aware of all the websites in ours and related niches and the request for a link could be the first time you’ve ever heard of the site they are promoting)
3. Don’t even consider the thought that you are selling page rank, page rank means little to nothing (depending on who you believe), the slap itself proved how irrelevant page rank is because even as sites lost all their page rank their positions in the search results for the most part stayed the same.
4. Beware of people wanting you to add large mounts of text to your page to “fit” their link, if your current content isn’t relevant enough to their market then don’t accept the link.

What About Buying?
To get the most from buying links you’re going to have to do a little bit more work. For a start you’re going to need to contact the webmaster of the site you’re interested in having a link on personally. This involves finding their contact details (either through their website or domain registry). Be polite and don’t take offense if somebody doesn’t want to sell you a link (I suppose this is where TLA came into it’s own, at least you knew each site on there was actively looking to sell links). Also, make sure that your intended site is relevant to the website you are promoting, this should be a no brainer really. One final point is to consider trying to get a longer term deal for a better price. The good sized single lump of money may be enough to get you that link you desperately want, if not then don’t take offense. (Can you see where I’m going with this, having turned down a number of link requests I’m sort of sick of being called an asshole).

In Conclusion
I don’t think there is any doubt that the link market has changed quite a lot since Google got the slapping gloves on. The real winners are the webmasters who have spent time building high quality websites with lots of original content and good amounts of visitors. If your site is good enough you will get requests for links. If you want to move things along a bit consider contacting some of the larger link building companies and make them aware of your websites (Warning, crap websites will be found out). In terms of buying the winners are generally those bigger companies/website owners that can afford to pay for genuine interested visitors and not page rank.

The losers in all this are the webmasters who insist on pumping out spammy websites that quickly achieve a page rank of 3/4 and have spoofed Alexa rankings whilst having very little genuine traffic. Unfortunately TLA has plenty of these. Page rank and Alexa rankings are not important for those in the know when it comes to getting a link, what they really want is relevancy and ideally targeted visitors.

In a world wide web where links are getting harder and harder to come by if you’ve spent the time to build a high quality website that can deliver real live visitors then there is plenty of money to be made selling relevant links.

So it’s not making money in the strictest sense of the words but not wasting money is just as important when it comes to making a living online. When I first started this blog, my first real blog, I shot of like a rocket looking for ways of getting those initial visitors. Don’t know why really, I could have relied entirely on good old fashioned SEO techniques to draw in natural search and referral traffic but I was excited and wanted some quick results. I spent quite a lot of money in that first month, some was money well spent, some was just a waste. What it did prove though was the power of affiliate marketing from a blog because I’m pretty sure everything I signed up for was being promoted by at least one of the A list bloggers. Without further a do here’s a quick run down of some of the things I spent money on:-

Million Dollar Wiki
My online money makers page cost me $100 at the million dollar wiki, expensive for a single page but when I saw the number of bloggers promoting it and the fact it was a 15 year investment I decided it was a calculated risk worth taking. In the first few weeks of my page being there it managed to pay for itself (mainly thanks to TLA) and although the traffic it refers has dropped to a trickle it still does send the odd referral this way. Overall I’ve got to say that I am happy with the Million Dollar Wiki but if you’ve only got $100 to spend it might be better going elsewhere, especially now that the initial buzz has died down.

Bloggings Most Wanted
Everybody has seen one of those buy a pixel etc etc websites, well this was just the same but for bloggers. Buy a square for $25, upload a picture and have traffic referred to you for ever more. The problem with these sites is that they are only as good as the person marketing them. In this case after the initial surge of being featured on John Cow nothing seems to have happened since. Like the Wiki, traffic was high with the initial publicity but I’ve just checked and in the last week it has not referred any visitors (and I’m at the top of the most clicked bloggers list). At the end of the day this is $25 that could have been better spent elsewhere (note to self, impulse buying is stupid)

Blogging The Movie
This is probably the craziest thing I got involved with. I’ve even had to go back and look at the details to find out exactly what I’ve signed up for! Anyhoo, for $100 I get to have a permanent link on the Blogging The Movie website (as one of the first sponsors to sign up), a couple of reviews and if the target to buy a car is met my domain name plastered on the side of a car! If they don’t meet their target then I get the $100 back. Blogging The Movie is a project to travel the world videoing 10 bloggers, I prefer guns and scantily clad chicks in my movies but each to their own and all that. Either way I’ve paid $100 to help promote it, in terms of referral traffic it’s been a bit of a shocker but to give them their due it is delivering consistent traffic levels. All I need now is for them to make a mega hit and ride that traffic wave to wealth (or not). I guess time will tell whether this was worth it or not.

TLA
My $135 spend with TLA was money well spent, not only did it draw in some/lots of traffic but it also proved conclusively that buying traffic with TLA was a very viable option. I have considered doing the same again (I only ran the ads for 1 month) to give the blog a boost but at the moment with Christmas fast approaching I’m going to stick with my own rules and be a little conservative.

It seems funny but when most people talk about how much they make from blogging they ignore their expenses. My expenses were quite a lot to start of with but now are next to nothing, I’ve got this blog to a level where it can pay for itself and give some return as long as I don’t do any crazy spending, I almost feel like I’ve found my own little place that I can use to build from. If I carried on like I was then it would have been a lot longer before I could say I was making a profit, sure I was making money, it’s just I was spending it before I got it!

What a day, Google have stirred up all sorts of crap by dropping the page rank of many top name bloggers. The widely accepted view for why this has happened is 2 fold.

1. They are punishing sites that sell links
2. They are dropping sites that are part of networks that artificially boost page rank

There are many Blogs that conform to the first, if you sell links on your Blog and make it public knowledge then you have either been hit or will be. For the second point most people highlight ProBlogger who has seen a drop from PR6 to 4 even though he claims he’s not selling anything (although I seriously doubt that his advertisers links are no followed)! Then again what is the point of having established high trust websites if you can’t use them for your own benefit? My own personal opinion is that this is Googles latest attempt at totally devaluing the selling page rank business. Of course brokers like Text Link Ads have the most to loose by this…that’s why I have a sneaky feeling that they knew it was coming!

You see not so long ago I received an e-mail from TLA that suggests a change in the way they do business, it strongly suggests that they are looking to sell site visitors rather that page rank. As Google attempt to remove the industry that has built up around page rank perhaps the biggest benefactor of that business has announced a switch to a CPC model. You will soon be paying for each visitor sent via a TLA link thus taking the emphasis away from page rank to that of visits, switching to cost per click instead of a fixed monthly price can be the only way of achieving this. It looks like you’ll no longer be using TLA to improve your search position but instead you’ll be buying visitors and this is something that will not incur the wrath of Google. Of course with this switch they’ll be going from being the biggest fish in the link brokerage pond to just another PPC seller in a big ocean but with the team they have I don’t think they’ll struggle too much.

I completely forgot that I was supposed to be doing the results of my TLA experiment today. If you missed the first post the idea was to see exactly what $125 ($100 of which would be free as a new Text-Link-Ads member plus the $25 it takes to qualify for the free $100) would get me with TLA. I got slightly carried away and spent $135 instead but what’s $10 between friends?

I ran my ads from the 1st to the 30th of September on a number of “Make Money Online” blogs, the results were very interesting and to be honest if it doesn’t inspire you to sign up with TLA then nothing will.

My TLA Blogs

These are the blogs I chose to advertise on, how much it cost for the month and how many visitors each referred as well as the number of pages each visitor viewed and the amount of time they spent here:-

www.matrixmails.com – $15, sent 130 visitors each of which viewed on average 1.32 pages and spent 1:03 on The Make Money Online Dot Net.

www.5xmom.com – $15, sent 29 visitors each of which viewed on average 1.55 pages and spent 1:13 on The Make Money Online Dot Net.

www.carlocab.com – $25, sent 87 visitors each of which viewed on average 1.45 pages and spent 1:21 on The Make Money Online Dot Net.

wwwjohncow.com – $20, sent 141 visitors each of which viewed on average 2.13 pages and spent 3:16 on The Make Money Online Dot Net.

adsense-tw.com – $20, sent 73 visitors each of which viewed on average 1.81 pages and spent 1:39 on The Make Money Online Dot Net.

cashbulge.com – $15, sent 12 visitors each of which viewed on average 1.42 pages and spent 1:26 on The Make Money Online Dot Net.

www.soulcast.com/tag/blogging – $25, nada, nil, null, nothing.

In total my $135 resulted in 472 targeted visitors in a highly competitive niche. If you’re not an existing TLA customer and take advantage of the $100 worth of free links you could have that same traffic for the grand total of $35 (and that’s not forgetting the $25 I wasted on soulcast.com). At a little over $0.07 per click that’s unbelievable value for money in the “Make Money Online” niche.

The great news as well is that all this extra traffic has resulted in my RSS count growing from 10 to nearly 50, increased Adsense revenue and some extra inbound natural links as people like what they read and link here. So the question is just how popular is your Blog and are you prepared to spend $25-$25 to give it a boost? If you are then you could do much worse than taking advantage of TLA’s $100 offer!

No I’m not asking you to leave your life partner or change job, just to put some effort into the most important part of your make money website, your ads and banners!

Change Is Good
Some of the regular readers here might have noticed that I’ve changed the Text-Link-Ads banner that was at the top of the page. That one advert made me $50 last month so you might be wondering why change it? The truth is that this month has been poor, it’s showing a much lower CTR and has only made me $25 and that was right at the beginning of the month. The problem as I see it is that all the people interested in Text-Link-Ads are already signed up and if like me you’re here every day you will eventually become blind to that advert. Without huge amounts of fresh traffic I know my current visitors are 75% the same faces each day. From my own experiences that blindness can happen after as little as 3 or 4 weeks and at the point you ads become nothing more than page filler. Now I know that some people put adverts up and just leave them forever, I’ve been guilty of exactly the same thing in the past and that’s why I know how important it is to vary things. If you want to make money you are going to have to put the effort in, try different banners in different positions for different products. Always remember to use some sort of analysis tool so that you can track results. Even when you have something which is working for you DO NOT BE AFRAID TO CHANGE, remember that you can always go back to what was working later and it might be even better now that it is fresh again. In changing my banner I’ve already made 1 sale so perhaps it wasn’t that stupid an idea!

What About Adsense?
I’m glad you asked. Google has a sort of “hot spot” map of where you should put your Adsense blocks. The simple version of this is above the fold, in your content and to the left. However what they don’t tell you is that varying your ad positions, size and colours can really help you make more money. Once again it’s a simple case of monitoring your results, it’s easy to be lazy and content with how you are doing but if you don’t try different things how will you ever know? One of my favourite Adsense tricks is to find the 2 Adsense combinations (format, position, colour) that work best for a given page and rotate them every month. It keeps the page fresh and helps to prevent the inevitable lag in Adsense earnings that people experience as a page is left with exactly the same Adsense on it for months if not years.

When I first started this I debated long and hard about the idea of sharing everything. Lets face it, there is enough competition out there already, why give away your best tactics? In the end I figured there’s plenty of money to go around and decided that it would be best to reveal all, even the super sneaky, s**t hot tactics that have really helped me pack in the day job. This one firmly falls under that category!

A Case Study With JohnChow.com
Quite a few people have probably noticed that I’ve been a top commenter on John Chows blog for a couple of weeks now, besides being an easy blog to comment on due to the sheer number of other commenter’s, I’ve also had another motive for this. You see John, like a lot of blogs uses Text Link Ads to sell post level links. It’s a very cheap way of getting a one way link from a blog in your market. The trouble with post level links is finding the best post to put your link on. You might be thinking just look at the Page Rank, but you’re wrong! The page title, number of outbound links, the text of those other links, the content of the page relative to yours all figure in deciding just how much “link love” your page is going to get. Wouldn’t it be great if there was an easy way of finding out which pages would be most beneficial to your website before paying for your TLA?

The Big Secret
Google are very secretive about how they pass link love between sites, but there are other search engines that aren’t. Now everybody knows that Yahoo and Google don’t use identical algorithms but they are similar. We can use this to our advantage. It’s probably easier if I describe this in a step-by-step so here goes:-

1. Comment on your blog of choice a lot. You need to maintain a top commenter spot long enough for the Yahoo spider to pick up the “top commenter” link from each page. I recommend 2 weeks for a popular blog, maybe a little longer for a less popular one.
2. Go to www.yahoo.com and type in “link:www.yoursite.com” (don’t forget to use your site and not yoursite.com)
3. Change the Show Inlinks drop down option to “Except from this domain”
4. You’re now left with a list of inbound links, ranked in the order of how important Yahoo thinks they are to your target URL.
5. Find individual article links from your target blog in the list, make a note of the top ranked ones.
6. Sign up for Text Links Ads (And get $100 worth of free links!)
7. Buy post level links on the articles you’ve made a note of.

But how do I know that they are listed in order of importance? Easy! I spent 6 months experimenting with my own sites to see how I could affect the order of those inbound links on Yahoo. I got it down to the point where I could predict it. Just for the record here’s the top 5 pages of johnchow.com in terms of link juice they will pass over here:-

The Home Page
Using The Competitive Ad Filter To Increase AdSense Earnings
Why Alexa Is Worthless
How To Get Free Stuff At Trade Shows
New Google Ad Placements

You’ll notice all those titles relate to things that I have written about. Adsense, Alexa, Adsense Earnings, Free Stuff, Google Ads, they are all there amongst the existing content of my blog. If you checked using a page rank tool you’d find that those pages are not amongst the highest (other than the home page of course) on the target blog, but in terms of being related to my content and passing the most juice they’re right at the top.

Text-Link-Ads referral program seems to be going great guns at the moment, I’m seeing more and more banners. Every blog I view seems to have at least one on show and some really hammer it home (although in my opinion a banner at the bottom of each post is just a bit too sickly!) I can see why this is the case, not only is it a great program for the referrers at $25 a sign-up but those $100 worth of free links could help elevate a nothing website to a money making website.

In being a great fan of not promoting what I wouldn’t buy myself I’ve only gone and splashed out $135 of my own cash on some links. The coupon code “starter kit” will get new sign-ups $100 free on a minimum $125 spend. I got carried away and went $10 over, with any luck the wife won’t find out. It’s going to be really interesting to see just what this $135 gets me in terms of traffic figures and income. There’s nothing like setting yourself a challenge and I can’t wait to find out if this is going to be a profit making exercise or just more money down the drain. At the end of the month when I reveal how I got on I’ll even give you the 7 websites that had my links on, just in case anybody wants to try the same thing for themselves.