Money Schemes - Learn How To Make Money Online

As you know I’ve been playing around with Twitter for a couple of months now. As a communication tool I still don’t get it, sorry if that offends but I just don’t. On the other hand however I have found some very good uses for Twitter and I’m going to share one of them with you now. It’s how I’m using Twitter to funnel long tail keyword traffic straight to my websites.

Who would ever have thought that Entrecard would have become so big so quickly? Not me, that’s for sure. Whilst I thought it would be big news amongst small/medium size bloggers there is no way I predicted that it would have such a large affect on blogging in general. I see Entrecard widgets on almost all of the blogs I visit now. The cool thing is that it does bring traffic so why not?

The Danger Of Entrecard
I was recently asked by somebody to explain the benefits of “free”, he just didn’t get it. Entrecard is a great example of how free can help, there is no way that it would have grown to this size if you had a sign up fee. It just wouldn’t. Nor would it have had the huge amounts of exposure across some of the biggest names in the world of blogging. However, free comes at a price. That price is usually quality. In Entrecards case it’s not the quality of the service itself (it’s as professional a setup as anything paid out there) but it’s in the quality of the members. As the word spread the quality of many of the members blogs was “dodgy” at best, then came the start of the abuse of the messaging system to spam fellow bloggers. Of course everybody is already aware as well of what appears to be huge discrepancies in advertising prices, unless you go for a named blog it’s pretty much a lottery as to how much traffic your ad spot will generate.

All of the above factors are down to Entrecard being a free network and are out of your control. However the biggest danger of using Entrecard is completely in your hands and it’s something I think is going to become a big issue down the line. Bloggers are starting to become obsessive about Entrecard. Spending hours dropping hundreds of cards, boosting not only their own advertising prices but also those of the random blogs they choose to drop on. It’s very easy for people to treat Entrecard as their only source of link building just because it’s so damn easy to drop a card. Rather than spending hours dropping you could be writing new content, commenting on other people’s blogs, creating forum posts, sourcing directories, using Stumble and any number of other ways of link building.

I’m not anti-Entrecard, I use it and will continue to, however I don’t spend much time dropping my card. In fact the only card drops I do are when I visit a blog (usually found through a link on another site or search) and like it. I certainly don’t spend hours on the Entrecard dashboard random dropping. Entrecard can be a good source of visitors to your website but over use it at the expense of your other link building techniques and I think you’ll be sorry in the long run.

A little while back WidgetBucks started to look like it was going to become my number one income generating PPC network, then they changed the rules that meant you didn’t get paid for clicks outside of North America. It was a sad day in my house. Instead you had to make do with pay-per-impression ads that have never really lived up to the hype. My earnings with WidgetBucks since this happened have taken a nose dive and I’ve started to experiment with 2 other networks to see if I can get anything like the performance WidgetBucks were originally giving.

Is Non American Traffic Welcome Again?
I’ve just seen something unusual on one of my sports websites, instead of the usual Ringtones, Dating style ad I normally see (being a UK visitor) this morning I got the old WidgetBucks widget back. I’ve done several refreshes and asked a friends from different networks to have a look but they all report seeing the widget. Does this mean that WidgetBucks are going to start paying for clicks again or is it just a glitch in the system. I really hope it’s the first option, I’d also be interested to know what you see below?

Entrecard have a great little system going that is really starting to have quite an impact on the blogging community. I first wrote about Entrecard here, where you can find out more about what the system does. In that time I’ve used Entrecard to kick start the traffic on a few new Blogs, it’s a great way of getting those initial visitors.

However like any system that has benefits there are plenty of people who will try and game it. I’m guessing that there are a fair few people using bots to auto drop their card and apply to advertise on any new blog that enters the Entrecard system. There are also what appears to be some highly inflated advertising point costs that when you do advertise actually deliver very little traffic if any. With this in mind I thought it would be useful to show the websites I’ve advertised on and the number of clicks I’ve received, some are obviously much better than others. If we all did the same then the cheaters would soon be ousted.

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!

Well this blog is dying on its arse isn’t it, a simple “post a comment” competition and only 2 entries, ah well. Anyway congratulations go to SEO Optimization for winning, if you can drop me a line with the e-mail address you use for Entrecard I’ll have the points sent over ASAP.

First things first, www.entrecard.com will get you more traffic to your blog, I started using it yesterday and this is my analytics unique visitors chart.

So what is it? Entrecard is a system that allows you to build up credits to display a 125×125 advert on other blogs. You build up credits by dropping your card on other blogs that are using the system, by having people drop their card on yours and by selling your entrecard spot.

Once you’ve got these credits you can then buy an advertising spot on your target blog (Just like Internet Riches Exposed has done with me). So far I’ve not used my credits to buy a spot on anybody’s blog, all the traffic I’ve seen has come from me dropping my card of on other people’s blogs and them checking me out but it’s already quite a spike. Can’t wait to see what happens when I get enough credits to pop my advert up on ShoeMoney for a day! Overall it’s a quick, simple and free system for attracting visitors. I reckon this kicks the ass out of BlogRush not only in terms of looking nice but also is getting those vital visitors.

Whilst it’s always great to read about these guys and girls making hundreds of thousands of dollars a month from the internet I sometimes think that it paints a false picture of what it’s really like trying to make a living online. Something that most new internet marketers and bloggers don’t realise is that the majority of these people have been around a long time and have built up slowly. They have a number of launch pad websites that they can use to launch any new website onto a running start in terms of links and traffic. This is why the rich get richer on the internet.

It’s no secret that in order to make money online you need traffic, you can either try and get it for free via natural search and referral traffic or you can pay for it via services like Adwords. It’s this getting traffic part that puts most people new to the internet off (normally after only a month or 2 of trying). The problem is that the search engines like old trusted websites, all new websites are treated as a being a bit suspect. If you don’t have any established websites then you’re going to struggle to get both search engine traffic and links. This is especially true if you’re doing something that a hundred other people have done before you. Unless you are very good at social networking and can manipulate some links from Digg, StumbleUpon, you are sunk in terms of high levels of natural traffic before you even start. This leaves paid for traffic and buying visitors out of your own pocket. This gets very boring very quickly and that’s why most new marketers, online money makers don’t last more than a couple of months. You have to realise that this is a marathon and not a sprint.

The secret here is you need old established websites in order to help you build your new ones. I have websites that have been knocking around for 11-12 years now and it is these I use to launch any new projects. A link here, a mention there and soon I’m being featured in the SERPS. After a few months in the SERPS the natural links start to build and before I know it there is yet another website in my arsenal that is seeing nice amounts of traffic. Without these launch pads I wouldn’t expect to see the same progress for 12-18 months and this is what people need to think about. Whilst it’s nice to be rich this week, if you’re new you are much better thinking 12-24 months down the line. Start buying domains and building domains now that you can use to launch and invoke trust in your new projects and you’ll reap the benefits later on.

A few tips:-

1. When you buy a new domain, put something/anything unique on it straight away.
2. Let the search engines know about any new domains you have ASAP, building trust takes time.
3. Do not be afraid to interlink your own websites, at worst you’ll only get a small benefit
4. Rather than paying for links to a new domain consider spending the money on an old established domain that comes with links