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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.
I first mentioned Peel Away Ads a little while ago when I was looking for a new form of advertising for this blog. I was first attracted to them because they look good, and yes a little bit flash! I figured if I liked the look of them enough to click then I’m sure other people would. You can see the full Peel Away Ads affect here (top left corner). Because all you bloggers are far too clever to click on ads I decided to not put it here, webmasters are quite adverse to flashy ads and Flash slowing down the page loading time!
The script on that page (that I bought by the way) cost $37, so far I’ve used it on 2 websites (away from blogging) and it’s had some success. On one of my sports websites the CTR has been just under 3% which has translated to nearly $100 of profit in just over a month. Not huge figures but still about the same as it makes in Adsense so double the money for very little work, very cool.
I was a bit sick though when I just checked my inbox and found out that I could have saved myself $37 and got the script for free.
In the past I’ve used TrialPay for making money, turns out it can also save you money.
You may have heard me banging on about TrialPay for a while now, the reason is simple, if you are currently giving something useful away for free then you can earn a good chunk of cash with them. It’s a simple process whereby you get paid by companies when your customer accepts their offer in order to get your product. A lot of the offers are free, some aren’t but it is a great way of monetising what you currently do for free without causing any inconvenience to the end user.
The problem with TrialPay comes when you don’t have anything to give away. What if you don’t have an e-book, design templates or you don’t write software? Well now they’ve come up with a solution, you can now sign up to be an affiliate for other TrialPay products and earn a revenue share (many are as high as 50%, some higher). Just to make this clear you are an affiliate for a valued product that costs the user nothing and you get a share of the money. To give you some idea one of my own free products regularly generates transaction amounts of $35+ on TrialPay. If I did a 50% revenue share on that then for each customer you refer (remember it costs the customer nothing) you would receive $17.50+
At the moment there are about 70 products you can sign up to promote as an affiliate covering a very broad spectrum. The real beauty in this system is that everybody loves free stuff. I’d go as far to say that if you can’t make money being a TrialPay Affiliate that now might be the time to give up on affiliate marketing.
If you can’t tell already I’m very excited by this, for me this is the best IM news I’ve heard all year. Straight away my mind is thinking “ClickBank but where each product is free to the end user”. Affiliate marketers have managed to make millions with ClickBank, this has the potential to be bigger, especially for those that get in early.
I’ve been with TrialPay for just under 1 month now. For those of you not in the know it’s an online payment system that allows people to get something from you for free by accepting an offer from somebody else. The somebody else tends to be one of the major online retailers (ebay, Real, Blockbuster etc etc), some of the offers are completely free others require the customer to buy something. When I first found this I thought it would be a great way of earning a little extra money for not much work. I had software that I was already giving away for free all that was required was a slight change in the download process. 1 month down the line and I’m delighted at how great that little change has been.
Some Trends
It went of like a rocket ship and I couldn’t believe how much money I was earning with TrialPay, I was checking stats 2,3 even 4 times a day just to make sure it was real. Of course after about a week things settled down to a more realistic level, realistic being a couple of transactions a day. What has made no sense to me at all is the distribution of customers. I know for a fact that before TrialPay it was about a 50/50 split between the
So in less than a month I’ve made more than $1000 for no extra work and very little inconvenience. Will be interesting to see what the second month brings but in the meantime if you’ve got a product that you currently give away for free then TrialPay is really worth considering.
It’s been a week now since I started using TrialPay to distribute my free products. To be fair it’s only been live for 6 days because I didn’t take into account the 1 day on average it takes to get a product approved but lets see how I’ve done?
Over those six days I’ve made $291.86 at an average price of $11.67 per download. It’s not cost my users anything but that’s the money I’ve made just by using TrialPay to deliver the software. The funny thing is that it started off on fire, I was averaging just under $100 a day for the first 2 days. Things have settled down but as an extra income source I’m more than happy with it.
TrialPay Trends
A couple of things I have noticed when using TrialPay.
I’ll be continuing to use it and will be adding more products in the near future. If you have something that you’re currently giving away for free then this is a great way to earn some online money. I’d recommend that anybody who can sign up to TrialPay.
A little note about this turned up in my Inbox yesterday and for once I read it instead of just binning it as spam. I’m glad I did. Plenty of people will ask what makes you an authority on something, “why do you consider yourself an expert?” When it comes to making money from the internet my answer is always the same, my niche is free software and I’ve done very well out of it. I’m not a millionaire, the reason being the word FREE, if I could have monetised the actual software then I would be, if I’d charged just $1 each time somebody downloaded my software I’d have been able to retire 3 years ago with 3 million+ in the bank. I’d be pulling in $1500 a day from 1 website alone. It was never an option for me , what started as free shall always be free, I see it as some sort of loyalty to those who have stuck with me over the years. I earn money around my software, not from it. Well thanks to TrialPay that could all change.
TrialPay in simple terms is a new checkout system, but instead of charging for your products (like my free software) it gives them for free. Ok, so how do I make money from this? In order to download your product for free the customer will be shown some offers and trials from some of the biggest brand name companies out there (ebay as just one example). For doing this the advertiser, ebay for example, will pay you an amount of money. You get paid, the customer gets your free product for free. Sounds too good to be true? TrialPay has some very serious backing, some of the backers behind Skype, Google, and Akamai to name just a few. Their idea is simple, to pay for one product by trying or buying something else. It did take a little setting up but I’m good to go now on a couple of products so will report back in a week or so to let everybody know how I got on.
If you deliver any service or product for free at the moment it will be well worth giving it a go, after all what have you got to lose? You can sign up for your free merchant account at TrialPay here.