The Big Mistakes to Avoid When Making Money Online from eBay

After you have successfully setup your eBay business and started to make some money from the eBay auctions, it is a wise idea to keep on reading and learning about eBay selling as much as you can.

There are a few big mistakes that you might be making when doing business on eBay. That can cause you a lost. But, these mistakes aren’t difficult to correct if you know what they are. Below are some samples:

Setting Wrong Timing for Your Auction
The time that most people have a few hours of free time to spend is Sunday evening. Researches show that this is the most popular time for going online and purchasing on the Internet. So, if the timing of your auction has been set to miss Sunday evening, then you could be losing a lot of good sales.

Ignoring the Importance of Photos
If you think the item photo has not much help in your eBay selling, you could be losing many buyers. The eBay buyers often want to see how the item looks like before bidding it. So, it is necessary that you take 2 to 3 photos in different angles for every item, letting the potential buyers see totally your item.

Poor quality of the photos is another mistake. eBay does give advice about the types of photos that work best. For example, the photos need to be in plain background so that the products can be appeared clearly and eliminate confusion on what actually you are selling. Clear photos that show up your products well will certainly attract more and higher bids.

Over Formatting Your Sale Text and Descriptions
Putting too much animation, eye-catching color text and other distractions in your sale description isn't a good idea. This attempt was actually to get the customers' attention and bids. But, it results the opposite way. It provides great distraction and causes the sale message and details difficult to read. If a potential eBay buyer has clicked on your auction, you already have got their attention. The details and description should be clear, easy and simple to read with the aim to get the viewers' bid.

Setting a Reserve Price may be a Bad Idea
Placing a reserve price on your item can scared off your potential eBay buyers. Many of the potential buyers will not place a bid on the listings that have a reserve price because they worry that they are going to pay a lot money if they win the auction. So, it is better not to set a reserve price on your listed item. Low starting bid price is encouraged to get the maximum bids.

Mistakes cause you lose money. But once you have learned and found out what you are doing wrong, you can deal with them easily.

Free Resources Helpful to Make Money Online - 14 November 2008

Here are the latest useful resources I came across:

Blogging Marketing E-course

You'll need advice and practical tips when you just started blogging for making money online. The Blogging Marketing eCourse of Simon Hodgkinson has the useful information you need. Simon realizes that blogging is a wide topic, it is not possible to learn all of them in short period of time. So he divided his blog marketing course into 35 parts and send them out in email every day. When you sign up for the course, you will adsorb new info about blogging every day which will help you success in blogging.

Teenagemarketer.com

James Penn is just a 18 year old teenager, but he already made a living online. He has his own online business and know how to market it to generate profit. James is sharing with others now in his site Teenagemarketer.com on how he build a online business from scratch and the strategies he has applied to make the business generates full-time income for him. If you are interested to learn his strategies, you may go to.

The Social Media Manifesto Report

This report is all about social media marketing. If you believe that social media traffic can be converted well into leads or sales, then this report is for you. The author of this report will show you how to turn social medial traffic into leads or sales and how to take you online business to next level through using the power of social media. Download a copy of this report here.

Google AdSense Tips: Formatting Your Content Looks like AdSense Ads is Disallowed

Last Tuesday morning when I checked my email, I found there was an email from the Google AdSense team sent to me. I quickly opened the email to find out what it is about.

Well, it was a bad news to me. It was a warning from Google AdSense team. They said when they were reviewing my AdSense account they found violations of AdSense policies on my pages such as http://moneymakerinfo.blogspot.com. They then further explained that I cannot implement AdSense ads in a manner that disguises the ads such as formatting neighboring content to look similar to the ads, or by making ads look like games or forum threads. Additionally, images cannot be placed close to the ads. And I was given 3 days to make the necessary changes. If I choose not to make the changes I will no long allowed to display AdSense ads but my account will still remain active.

After finished reading the email, I really feeling worry and confuse. How come I can against so many policies since I have read their policies and add the Adsense ads carefully? This made me headache a while.

I browsed my own pages to find out what really went wrong. I thought back what types of content pages I have created. Fortunately, I managed to figure out and conclude that the violation of AdSense policies is due to some of my content pages formatted to be look similar to AdSense ads.

Once I found out this, I immediately started checking all my pages. I clicked on my own archive pages to review each post and make changes to the posts that disallowed by Google. There are total of 772 posts I have to review and it took about ten hours to review all the blog pages and modify the problem pages. My head is spinning doing all these works.

After three days, I saw my AdSense ads still appear on my pages. So, Google has probably satisfied with the changes I have made and let me continue to make money with AdSense.

Why I'm telling you this?

I hope that you didn't make the same mistake just like I did when implementing AdSense ads on your site and blog to make money online. It is painful to make changes especially if your site have hundreds of pages. It is a tedious work to check back each of your pages.

So, don't format your neighboring content look like AdSense. Google actually spend the time to check AdSense publisher accounts. I think they are checking each publisher account, just don't know whether they are doing the checking manually or automatically.

How to Generate Passive Online Income Using Articles - Part 2

The part 1 of this article has been shared with you two ideas of using articles to earn passive income. Below is another two ideas for you.

Contribute in HubPages

A huge content network that you probably have heard about is Hubpages. Hubpages has articles and information in a wide range of topics. All the content are contributed by HubPages Community of authors around the world. Hubpages is opened to anyone. If you have information or content to share, then you may join Hubpages. Each article page you create is called hub. You can add in your AdSense code to have your AdSense ads automatically displayed on your hubs. If you are also an affiliate of eBay and Amazon, you can choose any product of eBay and Amazon; and feature them in your hub.

The good thing about Hubpages is that it attracts search engine attention because there are loads of content published in Hubpages. So, with some informative and keyword-optimized hubs that you built, you can attract constant traffic from search engines like Google. Part of the traffic may convert into AdSense and if you are lucky, your hubs might generate a few eBay or Amazon sales that will further increase your income.

Hubpages makes no promise on how much the authors can make. The income you can earn is much depending on the volume of content you contribute. The hubs you created, the greater your passive income potential might be.

Build You Own Content Website

This is an ideal option for you if you don’t want to write content for other sites. You can use a website builder such as Xsitepro to build you own niche content website. The topic of your website should be popular or it is the one that you interested. Then write good articles for the chosen topic and publish them on your niche content website. Each of your content pages will be optimized with AdSense ad and link units to generate income.

You have full control when publishing articles on your own site, but you are going to need to market the site yourself. Targeted traffic will generate AdSense revenue. You have to keep on marketing your site to drive targeted traffic to your site in order to make thing works. That certainly will involve a learning curve and a lot of hard work on your part. So, be prepared for that.

How to Generate Passive Online Income Using Articles - Part 1

The webmasters and online marketers are seeking unique articles for their websites. You can write unique articles for them to get a one-time payment for each article you send them. It is nice to get paid for each article you write, but do you know that you can also use your articles to generate passive income.

If you weren’t already known about using articles to earn passive income, it is where you write and publish articles once and later they will earn money for you continuously. This means that you can make money from an article that you wrote 6 months ago.

There are a number of options of generating passive income using articles. Before looking at these options, it is important for you to know that the articles written for this purpose wouldn't earn you profit instantly. The earning will start coming in soon, but it may take some time (5 days, 10 days, 1 month, etc).

Publish Articles on Revenue Sharing Article Directories
One of the most common ways to earn passive income is by publishing your articles on the AdSense revenue sharing article directories. These are the article directories that let you place your Google AdSense ads on your article pages to earn Ad revenue. Usually the sharing term is your AdSense ads will appear on 50% of the page view of your article pages. So, once you published some interesting articles, these articles will attract traffic from time to time which will earn you AdSense revenue constantly. The article directories that share revenue are Articlesrevenue.com and Articlecodex.com and Shareyourexpertise.com.

Write for WorldVillage Bloggers Network
There is also a blog network called WorldVillage Bloggers Network that shares 50% of AdSense revenue. It is owned by the famous AdSense e-book author, Joel Comm. Joel has been building up his WorldVillage Bloggers Network for years and now it is generating thousands of visitors daily. If you become an author of WorldVillage and contribute informative and keyword optimized articles for some time, you might be enjoying nice passive income from those articles.

I was an author of WorldVillage Bloggers Network and published about ten articles on the network one and the half year ago. Those articles that I published really generate traffic and they earned me about $35 monthly AdSense for a consecutive of 6 months. If I have the time to write on a regular basis, then I may be able to earn tripple or more of that AdSense figure every month from this network.

To become an author of WorldVillage Bloggers Network , you may got to http://blog.worldvillage.com/sys/signup2.cgi to send your application. You need to include a sample of your work in the application.

10 WordPress Plugins for New Blogs

Over the weekend I set up and launched my new Twitter Tips Blog - TwiTip.

Since announcing the launch of TwiTip here on ProBlogger I’ve been asked quite a few times about what WordPress plugins I’ve installed to enhance and add features to the blog.

I still need to add a few more but so far I’ve added the following 10 WordPress plugins:

1. Akismet - a great comment spam plugin. Interestingly I had comment spam on TwiTip that Akismet filtered within minutes of launching the blog on Twitter.
2. All in One SEO Pack - a plugin that helps to optimize a blog for search engines. It gives easy ways to set up title tags, descriptions, keywords (both for home pages but also on individual posts) and a variety of other settings that have an impact upon SEO.
3. cforms - a powerful contact form plugin. It’s a lot more complex than other comment form plugins out there but has a lot more features (some that I’m yet to fully test).
4. Google XML Sitemaps - a plugin to help Google and other search engines to find every page and post on your blog - good for getting a new blog indexed quickly.
5. Simple Tags - extends the built in tags features on WordPress.
6. Subscribe To Comments - a WordPress plugin that allows those leaving comments to check a box and be notified when other people leave a comment on that thread.
7. Tweet This - ads an invitation for readers to Tweet a link to the post they are reading. While I wouldn’t put this on every blog - it seemed a no brainer on a blog about Twitter.
8. WordPress.com Stats - I’m using Google Analytics as my main metrics tool for TwiTip but it doesn’t update in real time so this plugin helps to get a quick update of what’s happening on the blog at any given point in time.
9. WP-Polls - an AJAX polling plugin with some nice features. I’ve previously used the Democracy Plugin but this one seems to be working really nicely so far.
10. WP Ajax Edit Comments - this plugin allows those leaving comments to edit their comments for a short period of time after they leave a comment.

These are just the first 10 that I’ve already installed (listed in alphabetical order and not in order of importance). There are more to come. For example I’ll install Related Posts (pointless at this point as there are only 5 posts on the blog), WP-Navi (again, no point to install it yet as I don’t have enough posts to need a navigation tool) and WP Super Cache (I’m not doing enough traffic to really need it yet).

They are the 10 WordPress Plugins I’ve installed on TwiTip. If you were starting a new WordPress blog today - which plugins would you be installing?

WidgetBucks Offer New Publishers a $50 Sign On Bonus - Baseball Card Promotion

I’m doing a little promotion with WidgetBucks while at BWE this year.

They’re giving me some 70’s style ‘baseball cards’ with my face on them to give out (why they chose that picture I’ll never know) and are offering ProBlogger readers (whether you get a card or not) a $50 signup bonus if you sign up as a WidgetBucks publisher.

To get the $50 you need to sign up as a publisher and when you’ve earned your first $100 you get the bonus.

WidgetBucks is an ad network that give bloggers the opportunity to make money using their ‘widget ads’.

As with all types of ad networks WidgetBucks convert better on some blogs than others - but they’re worth a try, particularly if you have blog with any kind of products featured on it. They’re also expanding into more geo-targeted ‘travel ads’ (should be announced soon) which will have opportunities for a more international group of publishers.

PS: the baseball card picture is of me eating a New York Pizza while I was there last year. It’s not sweat dripping down my face either - I think it’s a ‘crease’ photo shopped into the card to make it look old (it’s a 70’s style card after all). The back of the card has a few of my ’stats’ on it. You’ll have to find me at BWE to see it.

There is at least one other blogger with their own cards at BWE - collect the complete set and they could be worth something on ebay one day (or it could just be an embarrassing thing that my wife pulls out to show the grandkids in years to come)!

AdSense

When I survey bloggers about the methods that they use to make money from their blogs Google’s AdSense is always the number one response. It is a quick and easy way for bloggers of all sizes to display ads that are relevant to their content.

AdSense is a ‘contextual’ advertising program where publishers simply add a piece of code to their blogs that helps Google analyze what your page is about so they can serve ads on that topic. This increases the chances of your readers clicking the ad which increases the chances that you’ll earn something from them.

AdSense also provide a variety of other income streams to bloggers including a site search tool (you make money by people searching your site) and referral tools (where you can make money by recommending Google products).

AdSense is how I earn around 35% of my income as a full time blogger and I would thoroughly recommend it as a way of monetizing a blog - especially for those just starting out.

If you’re not already an AdSense publisher sign up for it using the following button.

How to Get Media Coverage for Your Blog

One way to build awareness, brand, credibility and buzz about your blog is to appear in mainstream media (read more about the Benefits of being featured in Mainstream Media).

A lot has been written about how to get your blog featured on other blogs - but how do you get press coverage whether it be TV, Radio, newspapers or magazines?




Following are a few tips on how I’ve done it:

Develop a Unique Story

One of the best tips I can give is to really think about the story that you’re pitching to journalists before you approach them. If you simply contact the editorial staff of a mainstream media outlet and say that they should write about you without giving them a unique angle they’re unlikely to respond positively (if they respond at all).

Stories about a blog are not that exciting to write - so what angle can you give them? What have you done, experienced or achieved that is going to grab people’s attention? What relevance does your story have to the readers or viewers of the media outlet?

Note: you don’t just manufacture these stories out of nothing but if you’re on the look out for opportunities they do come up. They might emerge out of a post that you write that gets attention, causes some controversy (controversy is a great way to get media attention), gets picked up by other blogs etc - or it could even emerge out of something that someone else does that you could comment about or that you’re featured in.

For example I was featured in a ‘top Aussie bloggers’ list last year and shot a link to the list to a national newspaper - the story got picked up with me as one of the bloggers featured.

Think (inter)National AND Local

I know one blogger who complains every time that I bring up mainstream media that he’s never had any success. When I ask who he’s pitched his story to he tells me that he’s approached the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, ABC and a few other top tier news outlets.

While I commend him for thinking big - a more successful approach is likely to be to approach not only the big guns but smaller outlets. For one you’ll increase your chances of success in approaching a more local outlet - but you might also see the story picked up by larger media outlets (or you can use it to pitch to them later).

Write the Story

I’m not suggesting that you fully write an article when pitching mainstream media - but I’ve found that when I pitch a story and when I do a little extra work in showing how the story might look that journalists sometimes take what you present them with and build upon it.

So do some work on your pitch. Provide the media outlet with any facts, figures, stats or quotes that might help the journalist do their job more quickly and efficiently.

Be Approachable

Sometimes it isn’t a matter of pitching your story to mainstream media as them approaching you. This grows as your blog and profile grows but you can enhance your chances of being approached by being contactable.

An essential item for blogs should always be a way to contact the blogger. Whether this be by providing an email address, phone number and/or having a contact form - if you’re able to be contacted (and make it easy to be) you’ll drastically increase your chances of being approached.

Also useful for this is developing an about page that contains the type of information that journalists are looking for. Include information like your biographical information, links to a FAQ page and even a specifically written Press Page that shows how other press outlets have covered your story.
Press Releases

I’ve had limited experience and success with writing press releases but know at b5media that we regularly use them and that they are very useful - particularly when launching new blogs/portals.

You can learn more about the power of Press Releases here.

Build Profile

Perhaps the most important thing to do is to work hard at building a fantastic blog and having a great profile in your niche.

I’ve found that as I’ve done this that mainstream media outlets have increasingly come to me and that on the occasions that I’ve approached them that they’ve been much more open to covering me.

This of course comes with time and you can’t manufacture it over night - but I say it to give bloggers having problems getting on the radar of media a little encouragement - stick at it and build a great blog and it’ll come in time.

Keep In Touch with Journalists

If you do strike it lucky and get featured in a story - keep the contact details of the journalist that writes the story. If they’ve written one article they might be willing to do another. Also let the journalist know that if they ever need a quote for another story that they are writing that you’d be willing to take their call.

11 Tips from my Friends on Getting Media Coverage For Your Blog

I asked my Twitter followers for their tips on getting press coverage for blogs. Here’s some of what they said:

1. “If your writing to try and get press coverage be emotive, timely and topical - demonstrate ’special’ or ‘insider’ expertise” - keithdon
2. “1- easy to find contact info; 2- photo of self & decent bio; 3- blog trends, hot topics” - alizasherman. She also tweeted - “My miscarriage blog was featured in More mag. I was blogging a “controversial” topic in a daring way. Got noticed & featured.”
3. “Break the news so the press use you as the source. Has worked multiple times for me.” - michaelmeloni
4. “Keep blogging your niche and the reporters will find you. And when they do contact, jump at the chance to help them.” - GrantGriffiths
5. “Treat traditional media like you would want 2 B treated; don’t spam them, read their stuff 1st, be concise, give links 4 more” - CathyWebSavvyPR
6. ” 1) write quality content 2) have clients that write quality content and reference you” - leahmac
7. “Be bit controversial, write press release for them (they lazy) be original.” - theworstofperth
8. “provide constructive criticism when everyone else is bitching about a problem and you’ll be noticed” - MadLid
9. “give your blog a spit shine before press release. Check spelling, grammar and theme errors. Be prepared for a big jump in hits.” - beanfair
10. “Start small. Offer something eg tips, advice, short column to local newspaper. See what works then go for the bigger papers.” - bussogardener
11. “Media coverage advice for bloggers- Be honest, be brief, and find a relevant hook. I’ve had success with the press doing this. ” - BJMendelson

To be included in future lists of ‘tips from my friends’ - follow me on Twitter.

Adsense Tips for Bloggers 1

How do you make money from the Google Adsense Program? What AdSense Tips can you share with us?

I have been asked this question so many times in the past few weeks that I thought I should write something on the topic. It seems increasingly bloggers want to try to cover their hosting and ISP costs with some revenue from their blog - and increasingly they’re doing it and are able to make a few (or quite a lot) dollars on the side. Many are turning to Google’s Adsense program.

Covering costs of my Digital Photography Blog is why I originally signed up with Google Adsense - blogging can get expensive when you have high levels of traffic and a lot of pages.

Whilst the agreement you sign with Google stresses that you are not allowed to give specific information about your earnings from the program I can say that I’m glad I’ve signed up because its well and truly covered my costs - and then some. In fact I think its quite feasible to expect that Adsense coupled with other strategies for making money from Blogging could quite easily generate a decent living. It takes time and hard work, but I think its very doable. (Update: Since writing this series I’ve revealed that I am now looking at making over a six figure income this year in 2005 from blogging).

So how do I make money from Google Adsense? Let me share some AdSense Tips that heve helped me.

This will be the first in a series of posts on this topic. Let me say up front I’m no expert - there are a lot of people out there making a lot more money than I am using Adsense - however most of them are not telling their secrets - well not for free anyway. I’ve got no secrets to hide and am willing to share what I’ve learnt since I signed up for the program 8 months ago. If you want a REAL expert’s opinion on Adsense I’d recommend buying Joel Comm’s What Google Never Told You About Making Money with Adsense E-Book. Joel earns $15,000 per month from Adsense and has some good things to share.

I know some bloggers are put off or offended by the idea of making money from blogging so I’ll try not to let these posts dominate my blog - however if you are not interested in the topic, simply skip over these posts.

I am going to assume a few things in this series to cut down the amount of introductory comments I have to make. Here is what I am assuming:

* You have a blog. Whilst most of the following tips will apply to other types of websites I run Adsense on blogs and will speak from that experience.
* You have (or will) read a basic overview of Adsense and have some understanding of what it is.
* You have(or will) read the program policies as outlined by Google. These give details of site eligibility, ad placements and other requirements for using the system.

Enough introductory comments - lets get stuck into the Adsense Tips for Bloggers!

A Make Money Online Update

Hi Folks... no... I'm not deceased!

Thanks for the 1247 emails over the past couple of weeks. I was down and out with a vicious Flu bug for a week and then spent some quality time on my favorite golf course just to get back into the swing of things - pardon the pun.

I have not made a dent in reading all the mail in case you were wondering or worse - are waiting for a reply. My email is just silly!

On a personal note - I am touched by how many of you wrote to see if I was alright or if there was anything you could do. I'm fine and amazed at how many great people I have met through this crappy little blog. Thank you all - it really meant more than I can say.

I just want to touch base on a few topics so this post isn't going anywhere in particular.

As most of you know Vic has begun his Affiliate Academy and asked if I would help moderate. I, of course, am honored and will try my best given my time constraints. I have received quite a bit of mail about the Academy and need to clarify a few things. Believe it or not but I haven't had a chance to talk to Vic yet and I'm not up to speed on what is happening over there yet. I know he has had some bugs and is busy ironing them out - the joys of starting a new program online. Unfortunately I have been blocked from most of the site as a result and am in the dark about most of it so please send your questions on to Vic. Hopefully I will get a chance to talk to him shortly and get up to speed. I really haven't wanted to add more to his plate at the moment.

For those interested in knowing more about the Affiliate Academy Vic provided me with the following link. Affiliate Academy Registration or head over and check out Vic's videos on Blogger Unleashed. Affiliate Academy Videos I suspect at this stage there won't be too many of you who aren't already familiar with what Vic is doing as we have most of the same readership. If anyone can fill me in on how things are progressing please don't be shy.

Forums

I have been getting links from forum threads for some time and a lot of them are private forums in which I can't join in - I'm not a member. I get mentioned in relation to my views on various topics and Adsense is prime among them. It appears that there is a lot of confusion over when to add Adsense to your new blogs. I thought I would touch on this briefly as I would like to explain my reasoning for NOT adding Adsense to a new blog and only adding it when the right conditions are met. I used to tell people to get some posts up - 10 or so - and wait til G started sending some traffic. I have a much more refined approach these days and I think it is worth sharing with you. I know many of you are making at least some money from Adsense after having followed my advice and I say this just to get across my bona fides. I have never had anyone tell me they make money following the advice of Joel Comm - advice they paid for. There may well be other methods of making money with Adsense but all I see is countless followers of the "get as many sites making $1 a day as you can and smart pricing be damned" method. This is just so inefficient and "2 years ago" that I'm not sure anyone else has really figured Adsense out yet.

Not long ago I mentioned how I doubled my Adsense Income. The post referred to Smart Pricing and why it was important not to use Adsense on poorly targeted sites. I won't get into smart pricing again (you can follow the last link) but I want to show you what has happenned with the blog I used as an example of in the previous post. The blog is now 7 months old. It had been earning $20 - $30 a day for several months when it suddenly grew in earnings after I quit being smart priced. This happened in early August. Below is the earnings for September from the same blog. From $900 per month to $1800 per month and growing. If you look at the last day in Sept. you will see that the blog broke through the $100 a day barrier. Actually, as happened with the blog you are now reading - it didn't just climb to the $100 mark, it raced well on by. Yesterday it made $126.38. It is now my 7th $100/day blog. It will bounce back and forth for a while as all the others do (the more money you make with Adsense the bigger the swing in earnings from day to day - a $10/day blog may make $8 or $12 but usually close to consistent. A blog making over a hundred dollars a day can make $175 one day and $65 the next in an extreme case - a $20 swing is normal.)



I harp on Adsense for a reason and use this example to point out a few things. The blog in question is only 7 months old. Many of you have been with me for longer than 7 months. Many of you have asked me how long it takes to make any real money with Adsense. I would say you have an answer although to be honest that is the fastest I have had any blog turn a $100 day. This MMO blog took a year and a half. Those of you who have been with me since the beginning have seen me take 7 blogs to that level - a little over two years. So in two years I have 7 Adsense blogs bringing in a rough average of $700 per day. I have no technical computer skills. I use free crappy looking Blogger blogs that any technically challenged person can operate and I am trying to teach brand new bloggers how to make money online. That is why I harp on Adsense so much. It is something that absolutely anyone can master and provided you don't screw up - is continuous... day after day...

Now don't get me wrong - it ain't easy but it is doable if you do things right. Yes, finding the right niche is crucial. I have many failures but have put those blogs to other uses. I can't tell you the niche to pick but I can give you some pretty accurate tips as to what to look for from my own experience.

All 7 blogs rank number 1-3 for their main keywords. They all broke the $100 barrier between 500 ad impressions and 1500 ad impressions daily. Some average as low as $0.60 per click and some as high as $2.00 - none are high CPC niches. This means you want a niche that can deliver 500 to 1500 people a day to your site. You want a niche that has people looking for an answer to a question - sounds obvious but most people don't realize this. This blog does well because a lot of people are looking for the answer to "how to make money online?" All the blogs save this one have only one form of monetization - Adsense. There are few links to leave the page other than ads or backing out.

All the blogs are highly targeted to their keywords. I say "highly" because they have to be to do well with Adsense. Google ranks them on top of the serps and you can't get more highly targeted than that. Because they are so targeted they get the best adsense ads - meaning the highest paying and or converting - whichever brings in the most daily revenue. The majority of traffic comes from search engines and not social sites. This means the traffic is highly targeted. When highly targeted visitors visit a highly targeted adsense ad good things happen for all involved - I get paid more and the advertiser gets the type of traffic they were paying for.

None of the sites are splogs - the content is decent, bordering on very good and most of all, highly relevant to their respective keywords - just as this blog is.

None of the blogs are pretty.

Only one of the blogs has a readership - this one.

So... I bet it would help if I showed you what it takes to create a perfect Adsense blog in record time in one of the most competitive niches online. Guess what? I already have...

Let me introduce you all to Make Money Online with Grizzly

Okay so you've seen it already but guess what. It is ranking on pages 1-3 on Google for the term "Make Money Online" depending on your data center. It will be 3 months old on Oct 5, 2008.

Below is a screenshot for the keywords I'm receiving traffic for - notice the prevalent keyword "make money online".



Notice the similarity to the keywords used to find this MMO for beginners blog.



Granted the new blog is only getting 20 - 30 hits a day as it bounces in and out of the top pages but this only confirms that it is moving up nicely and in record time. What it really tells me is that the site is highly targeted in Google's eyes and I could now ad Adsense to the blog. I won't get smart priced as the traffic is finding me predominantly for my main keyword. If you have a wide range of long tails that aren't closely related then don't use Adsense. This is how you know when to ad Adsense. Any sooner and your traffic will not be targeted and you will suffer poor clicks and possible smart pricing. If you can't generate targeted traffic - don't use Adsense.

How often do you post? The new blog has a grand total of 5 posts. It is a PR3 and is now ranking well in Google. You now know just how little content or PR is needed to rank well in a very competitive niche. Imagine how easy a less competitive niche is to dominate.

It has about 100 backlinks - yup - that's all.

The thing is the backlinks are mostly keyword anchored for my "make money online" keyword or are closely related. This folks is the key and what I have been going on about for some time now.

Forget all the advice you read elsewhere - get targeted backlinks and you will make money online using Adsense.

Study the blog - it won't take long. Check my links. There is no secret weapon being used. The site is an example of the bare minimum needed to make money online. You can see what I have done and how long it has taken.

Btw. I still wont ad Adsense until I get a few hundred hits a day on a consistent basis and only if the traffic remains targeted.

If you are a beginner I urge you to conquer Adsense first. In doing so you learn all the SEO you will ever need and then you can easily move on to other types of monetized blogs. Learn how to get targeted traffic and everything else will follow naturally.

I had more I wanted to talk about but this is long enough for today. I'll be back soon with something related that I want to share with you.

It's All in the Back Links

It should be evident by now that I have been trying to demonstrate the power of backlinks when it comes to making money online. It doesn't matter what niche you are in or what form of monetization you are after - without traffic you will starve. You can waste your time courting social traffic only to find out that other bloggers will not spend money on your site, use your affiliate links or click your ads. (or even give you useful links when they do link to you). Or, you can target search engine traffic right from the get go and find out how well targeted traffic converts compared to bloggers. Ranking on top of the search engines will send you a continuous flow of people who are actually looking for what you have.

Most of my readers know this by now. The problem is that most of you are unable to get the kind of backlinks needed to rank well in the serp's.

In most cases you are targeting niches that are too competitive for your resources. I have tip toed around this issue on several occasions, most recently with my credit card post. Many of you are targeting keywords that are dominated by professional marketers and this means that while you are busy getting links from articles and do-follow blogs etc, the big guns are busy buying the types of links that do the most good. This doesn't mean you are doomed but it does mean that at some point you will all have to decide just how far you want to go with your online business. I am not trying to dissuade anyone - just trying to keep things real.

I set up a little contest back in February on a blog called Asia'h Epperson and challenged my readers to outrank my site for the term "Asia'h Epperson". I offered $500 to anyone who could outrank me for the term.

As of this date no one has been able to accomplish the feat.



I will bring the contest to a close at the end of this month - October 2008. I hate leaving things open ended and have decided to split the money between the top three sites as of the end of the month. The highest ranked site will get $350, second will get $100 and the third place position will get $50. I hope this will be amenable to all involved. I had promised not to do anything with the site until a winner came forward but I would like to put the blog to use and can't until this issue is resolved. Should anyone overtake me before the end of the month they will of course get the $500. If this doesn't occur please email me at month's end with your blog and ranking and add a name to your blog so that I can verify who is who in relation to the top finishers. Should you be a winner please acknowledge the receipt in a blog post of your own just so people know I have sent out the cash as promised.

I also thought this would be a good time to explain why you have all had such a hard time overtaking the site. It all comes down to links folks. And speed. And a little luck as well.

First off. The blog was created to take advantage of short term niches. To this end you have to be fast when a popular topic suddenly appears in the news. I was quick and got the best keyword url when I started the blog. In fact the only terms in my URL are the keywords "Asia'h" and "Epperson" - nothing else. http://asiahepperson.blogspot.com/

Always use your keywords in the URL when you can. You can still rank well without them but having the right URL is a big advantage and almost impossible to overcome if the site has the right backlinks.

Btw, did any of you happen to snap up sarahpalin.blogspot.com just asking...

Because I had the right URL, Blog Title and was fast with getting properly anchored links I jumped to the second spot in the serp's instantly. This is where luck came into play. Because I ranked so high the blog was noticed by others - notably the LA Times and AOL.com Television. As a result both these sites linked to my blog and the contest was effectively over before it began.

Click to enlarge all images.

The LA Times Link.



The AOL.com Link.



Both of these links are worth a ton of juice as both websites have a great deal of trust with Google - regardless of the PR of the page the links are on. Both used the right anchor text in the links.

I got to the top quickly by simply linking to the Asia'h blog from this site. This site also has trust in G's eyes and the link was followed instantly and the Asia'h blog was indexed and ranked within hours. That is the power of having a healthy flagship blog like this one.

The screenshot below shows a partial list of the links the Asia'h blog has. You will noticed that the anchored text used is almost exclusively "Asia'h Epperson". You will also notice that most of the linking pages have no PR at all. I have mentioned this before - the right anchor text is the important part in getting links - not the PR of the page sending the link. PR is great if you get it but isn't necessary to ranking well.



Now some of you may wonder about Google Bombing - ie. too many links, too fast all using the same anchor text. In the case of this blog I was not Google bombed because it is natural to predominantly get links using the right anchor. The keyword is a person's name, the site uses that name in the title and the URL. It would have seemed strange NOT to have got so many perfectly optimized links - what other links could it have got?

In any event the cards were stacked against anyone trying to outrank the blog right from the start.

I realize that most of you don't have the resources to get the links I get but that isn't the point of this. The real point is to concentrate on niches that you can compete in until you build up a healthy stable of sites to draw upon in future. Further more, concentrate on getting what works and don't waste time with other endevours. Like my new WP make money online blog the Asia'h blog didn't require a lot of content to rank well. Both only have 5 posts. Neither have a huge amount of sites linking to them. Asia'h has about 35 links and the Griz blog has about 100. Both are only PR3 sites. The Griz site isn't at the top yet but is well on it's way and now outranks millions of older sites with thousands of links and higher PR.

So what is the common equation - the quality of the backlinks. Specifically I build sites with optimized anchor links. I concentrate on getting backlinks that use my keyword and don't waste time with anything else. This accomplishes a number of things. I get ranked fast and high up in the serp's. It sends me traffic fairly quickly. The traffic is targeted to my keyword. I know what the traffic is looking for and can monetize the sites accordingly.

The Asia'h blog was a dud for making money but so what. I still have a nicely juiced PR3 site that I can use for other things such as sending links or targeting other celeb stories. The point is that if you do things right you never waste your time and continuously build up your network.

Folks - stick with keywords and niches that you can dominate with your current resources. Build your network one site at a time if you have to but make sure you spend time doing the right things. Many of you have more posts than backlinks. What is wrong with that?

I know getting backlinks is tough. I have been trying to build up our little community over the past few months in order to help you achieve better links. If you haven't joined in on our Niche Support program I urge you to. (Note: You can use a different name and email if you wish to keep your identity quiet.) You can read more about it here. Finding Links for Niche Blogs. Also I have provided a page full of bloggers who have quality flagship sites who understand the value of helping each other out. You can visit that page here. Friendz of Griz. If you are new here then spend some time getting to know the blogs I have highlighted and get to know each other as well. Help each other.

On a related note...

Indexing Blogspot blogs.

Denise mentioned that she is having a hard time getting Blogger blogs indexed. Actually a number of readers have brought this up recently. I haven't had any problems myself but assume that G is now making Blogger harder to use for spamming purposes. What I have found is that new blogspot blogs need a few good links in order to get the ball rolling. By this I mean links from an authority site or two. This is what I do with all my new blogs - I send a link from one of my closest related authority sites. I have also found that this seems to keep the new blogs from entering the sandbox in most cases. I still get the odd one sandboxed although they would be the type of niches that raise flags as spam heavy niches. When this happens I work on adding more posts than normal and get a lot of decent links. They usually get de-boxed fairly quickly. One note - I do not monetize any site now until it is firmly ranked and getting targeted keyword traffic. I do believe this makes a huge difference in how well and fast you get indexed and gain rankings in Google. Nothing in the way of proof - it just seems to work well from my experience.

If you don't have an authority site to use then all the more reason to get to know those who do and work on building your own. This is where all those "social" blogging sites you all seem to have can come in handy. If your flagship isn't making money itself don't give up on it - keep building it up and use it to propel new sites into the system.

Btw. I am now building WordPress (ok Terry is building them - I'm just optimizing them) sites and use the exact same system with them as well. It seems to be working.

One last thing for today.

Getting links the white hat way.

I would like to add a page to the new MMO blog listing as many available sources as I can find for getting links. I have my own sources and don't spend a lot of time chasing links like most of you do. Because of this I am falling out of touch with what is available and what is and isn't working these days. To this end if any of you would like to email me with sites, directories, programs etc that you successfully get links (especially anchored links) with I will create a working list for all to use. Yes I'm lazy but in my defense you should all have a better idea of where to find legit white hat links than I do these days. (oooh I didn't just say that out loud - ouch) I spend very little time keeping up with what is available mainly because I don't have too. Those that do please share your findings. You can leave comments on this post or just send me an email with this link. Grizzly I will add the page to Make Money Online with Griz as soon as I get some feedback.

That's it for today.

Cheers

Griz.

Note: The new page has been started and is called Link Resources

Making Money Online a Different Beast

As many of you have probably already felt making money online is not quite as easy as people think. And the actual different ways to translate your blog to what type of actual niche or style determines very much how and if you can monetize the traffic you have. I have always said and I will keep repeating it. Traffic is easy monetization is a fucking bitch.

Our buddy Frank from OpTempo wrote a post a few days ago named eBook Review: How To Develop Money-Making Niche Sites with WordPress now let me say this review is so dead on it is scary. Now this ebook was written by Caroline Middlebrook again she seems to be a very nice lady but geezz she is so fucking clueless it is just painful. Now the sad part is that Frank made a really good description that this could be an awesome ebook for the noob on setting up a wordpress blog. But for making money online even though Frank did not say it in these exact words, it is a fucking joke.

What made me write this post is a comment she made.


Thanks very much for the awesome review - it has really highlighted a couple of points for me that I think I need to address in the book.

Firstly, I differentiate between a niche blog and a niche site and thats the reason why I advocate the use of pages over posts and the decision not to have comments. I think I need to explain this further.

Secondly the book really is about WordPress and not about making money, but I might need to either expand on this a little or perhaps even link out to some external resources about making money with niche sites as that is not really something I am an expert on yet.


Now I ask you if the ebook is not about making money can please some one explain to me why it is fucking called How To Develop Money-Making Niche Sites. Please can some one clarify me mmmm does the Money-Making Sites part by definition is about making money or is it that my illness has just made me a fucking idiot?

I sometimes ask myself why is it for some people so hard to just say fuck it, I admit it, I do not know and just move on. But the fact is that she wrote another fucking ebook full of fucking fluff with a bunch of affiliate links. Because this is the shit she sees the so called A-lister do and she thinks this is the way to the holy grail. Grizz made this point very clear in a comment he made.

People I will not go deep into the facts but you need to make and take decisions before you start a new niche and you need to understand that if you are looking to make money online from a blog you need organic traffic period and this is not fucking debatable. If you are fucking clueless to this fact then you are done before you even started. Grizz wrote an article that just outlines this and uses my best friend John Chow as an example his post it is called The Make Money Online Niche Grizz breaks down this point that even a fifth grader could understand it.

Now folks as with the rest of the bunch what seriously scares me about Caroline Middlebrook is she has up to now 1024 feed readers and not counting the people that read her blog and are not subscribed to her feed. Folks I really really hope she has all this readers because they enjoy how she writes and have become friends but if these people are actual bloggers trying to learn to make money online I can tell you right now their are 1024 people who are getting fucked and kissed at the same time and have years ahead of them trying to figure out how to really make money online.

People if you are looking to make money online you need organic traffic any dumb fuck that is telling you how to use StumbleUpon or Twitter or any other service to drive traffic your monetize blog is fucking clueless about how to actually make money online. Anybody that is telling you to tell Google to go fuck themselves is fucking clueless to how to make money online. THIS IS FUCKING UNDEBATABLE!!!!!

NOW TO PROVE THE POINT AS GRIZZ HAS STATED BEFORE THIS IS A PR0 BLOG AND I JUST GOT INSTANT INDEXING ON HIGHLY COMPETITIVE TERM JUST BECAUSE OF THE KEYWORD AUTHORITY.

Make Money Quick

Make Money Quick With Google Adsense
Written by: Jeff Schuman

Do you want to make money quick? In this article we are going to talk about one of the quickest ways you can make money. Making money quick is not only possible there are people doing it everyday with Google Adsense.

Google AdSense delivers text and image ads that match the content on your website. These are very targeted ads that you can choose the size and color of and they come across to your customer as helpful more than an ad itself

Google Ads require virtually no maintenance and they help you put advertising on your website without actually having to deal with advertisers yourself. If you can copy and paste a small code you can have targeted advertising on your website in minutes.

Adsense is simple to join and it is free to join. Whether you are an internet newbie or a veteran you can profit quickly by placing Google Adsense ads on your web pages.

Since Google does all of the work by finding the most profitable ads for your pages you can do what you do best....provide good content and lots of it. The more web pages you create the quicker you will be making money. You can learn more here:

https://www.google.com/adsense/

Once you have joined Google Adsense you will want to combine Google search with AdSense to monetize more of your web pages. You can do this by placing a Google search box on your pages. Google AdSense combines Google's search technology with thousands of keyword advertisers to deliver targeted text-based ads to search result pages. People find these ads useful and click on them, and when they do, Google pays you.

You can see an example of how this works right here on this web page. In fact we combine Google search and Google Adsense on almost every website and web pages we create. We have found it a very easy way to make money quick and to make money over and over. It's great.

The internet offers many ways to make money quick. The nice thing about Google Adsense is you have the largest search engine in the world doing your advertising for you. This truely allows you to make money quickly and you can do it over and over with as many products as you want.

Make Money Online Now or Starve

Make money online now or do you really want to wait till next year? Before I hear the whiners that this is unethical let me just say kiss my ass and go starve yourself. There are some basic problems that a new site has that you just can not get around, it is what it is but if you are creative you can still make money online now. One of the biggest problem is keyword authority and this is really huge folks if you have intentions to make money online now. Anything that is well searched and published in 100k sites you will have no chance in hell to rank high on that term. The gravity of the situation depends on the niche you chose to blog about.

This post goes for Costa and a couple of you that have privately mentioned that you feel that you are having some success but at the same time you are just not breaking huge ground or if we translate what they are really saying is they want to make money online now and not in 5 years. One of the the worst niches is the make money online niche and how to blog niche. Does this mean that it is game over mmm not really if you are willing to game the system you can start to make money online now and get the big payoff once you have built keyword authority.

If you use the Bait and Switch in the real world your ass will be in jail so fast you will not know what hit you, but here in the virtual world we can use the bait and switch and the worst that will happen is some one notice what you did and make and obscene comment. But if you want to make money online now in certain niches, I tell you what buddy you better start getting the worms.

Lets look at the make money online niche. If you do a search for for “make money online” you will see that the number one page is carlocab.com now this is the term that I am building this site around but I know that right now I would be fucking greedy for me to go after that. On a side note folks I hope he enjoyed his position one because by next month guess who will be first ;) anyway back to the post. So I will need to focus on a keyword or keywords that will still bring target traffic so I have a few options I can go straight up and try to use a longer string using make money online as the base or I can do a bait and switch. Let’s see who would be interested in making money online mmm how about some one that is looking for a job, this would be perfect because not only they are your best target but they have not being contaminated yet by the other bullshit make money online bloggers. So using my keyword research tool I will research “jobs” I find that the best shot I have is the search string “getting a new job” last month it had 1258 searches the number one position is a PR3 static page so I will actually have a really good shot to land on page one if I write the post well.

So how does the bait and switch work. Here is a brief example on how I would write it.

Title : Getting a New Job or an Opportunity

Getting a new job is not an easy thing in todays market but yet we find ourselves getting a new job. The question we need to ask ourselves while getting a new job is do we really want this or do we need another type of opportunity. Many people that have found themselves getting a new job have found one of the best online opportunities still available. How about getting a new job as a blogger. Blogging is one of the fastest professions in the internet and it provides you the opportunity to start your online business for less than $20.00. Blah bah blah you see where I am going with this.

Now let’s say that I land on the first page with this post I just increased my sites unique hits by around 600 do the same thing with different terms 10 times and I just increased my unique hits by 6000 a month in one good day of posting. Now is this a way to make money online now or what?

Now if we really want to be aggressive or we really need to make money online now you can make the bait and switch more obvious. Let’s say you wake up in the morning and you hear that Bob Helronersonme has just won the lotto in California. Now through the day folks because the name is so fucking weird people will be searching on the net to find out who the hell this guy is. You do a search and it turns out there are only 200 results. Using the techniques I taught you yesterday now you know you can write a post that will get instant indexing and you will be competing on a top five position for 20k to 50k unique hits. The important thing is you need to know how to write your post that is fluent and it does not look out right that what you are doing is a bait and switch. Now I used a crazy name but you can do this with anything that you hear that is hot and when you search on the net you see less than 50k results, you should be able to compete even if you have a low PR. So how about if you go try this right now and try to Make Money Online Now?

Make Money Online 100% Success

Make money online 100% success, and you guys are saying yeah right. But you can actually make money online with a 100% success rate and it is not rocket science, the question really is are you willing to pay the price to make money online with a 100% success rate. The problem with people that are trying to make money online is they think their is a magic bullet, that it will be easy and that they will not have to invest money but folks I have said it before and I will keep saying it. The same rules that apply to making money in a traditional business also applies to making money online.

Now in a traditional business that you want to make money with you would have to invest from a rental to all the tools and gadgets that you need for the niche you will work but in order to compete you have to make the best logical assumptions you can about your competition. To make money online you have to invest in the domain a theme some tools like BookmarkingDemon but the crucial thing is you really do not have to make assumptions you can actually see exactly what your competition did to get to position one in Google and replicate step by step to guarantee your 100% rate of success to make money online.

Ok so let’s say I want to compete for the key word string “wordpress theme” so I do a search for the keyword and using SEO Elite I back trace all my competitions in links now I go one by one and find out how they got the link if it is a blog I comment in the same place my competition did now if it is not a blog or forum where I can easily comment and get a back link I just look at the type of content their is in the page and it’s page rank now I find a dofollow blog that has a post with the same content and the same PR and I leave a comment so I replicate exactly what my competition has to match his exact keyword authority.

Now will this be simple or easy or fast, FUCK NO!!!! Who ever told you it would be a breeze lied to your ass. But again I ask you can you guarantee the success of a Burger King franchise? FUCK NO! They have stores close just like every other business, now with there branding they sure are ahead of the curve with the rest but do you have the million dollars it takes to start a Burger King franchise? But even then you can not guarantee to make money.

In the internet you can replicate another persons success and make money only with a 100 percent success rate. The question is are you willing to pay the price to make money online? Folks writing the post is the fun part getting authority links is the most fucking boring thing in the world you will consistently be at the 110% effort and you will only see 20% results but over time you will keep moving up on your route to the illusive making money online.

Make Money Online

Make money online is the number one thing I want to teach you while reading my site Blogger Unleashed. I know how hard it is for most people to make money with Internet marketing. Most struggle and never make a cent. I will teach you useful information to actually make money on the Internet, either with a blog, a niche site or vlogging. Whether you will actually make money, is entirely up to you and how you use the information provided on this site. I advise you not to get sidetracked by reading the various “make money online” blogs who are not qualified to teach you, since all they care about is to sell products to you.

If you feel you have been going in circles up until now and assumed there were easy ways to make money, think again. Success doesn’t happen overnight and to become successful with Internet marketing, you will have to put in the effort first. Unfortunately there is no quick fix to success.

Most newcomers who happen to start their online success journey want to make money blogging. While this is very much possible, you need to understand how to structure a blog and I can show you how for the most effective results. If you follow my lead, you will make money for sure. But be warned, it will only work if you allow me to teach you and perhaps re-train your faulty understanding of how money is made on the Internet.

Contrary to most of the other make money online sites you will learn some effective methods to build a successful Internet marketing business with my help. You won’t find hype here and neither will I try to sell you tons of worthless ebooks. However, I will mention to you if I find a particular product useful and you are free to follow my advice. I also want to let you know that I only ever promote products I’m using myself in my online business.

You might wonder what it really takes to run a successful online business? I tell you what it takes. Dedication, passion and a plan you can actually work. All too often we try to construct useless plans of action, only to find ourselves totally overwhelmed by them. I’m sure you are familiar with this feeling if you struggle to make money right now.

On Blogger Unleashed you will be shown the core basics of online marketing, without any fluff. In the dozens of videos I have posted already I show you exactly what to do and when. Once you gain a better understanding of the whole process, you can take these principles and run with them. Many of my readers are already doing just that.

I advise you to check out my comments sections on Blogger Unleashed too. But be warned. Sometimes my language is quite colorful. I know this only too well and many people have taken offense on this. While I don’t see the need to defend my intentions, know this; the reason why I do this is because I’m sick and tired of seeing people like you fail on the Internet. I’m no mother Theresa, but I am a nice guy and if you look beyond the obvious, you will find out for yourself.

My online business is very successful. I could just as easily stop helping others and make more money myself. You might wonder why I don’t. I suppose I call it “paying it forward”. If I help you to change your life, would you do the same for others? I truly hope you will. We can all do our bits to make this world a better place.

You can also make money vlogging. A vlog is an online video log, like Blogger Unleashed in some ways. While I didn’t start out with videos on this blog, I found them a better medium to actually “show” you what I do - step by step. It seems to have worked well and by learning what I do, you can do the same.

In the online world, there isn’t just the make money blogging model. I guarantee you that your eyes will be opened when you read this blog. I guess this is your choice. I can only advise you to check out what I have to say and make up your own mind whether I can help you on your online journey.

Also, on Blogger Unleashed you will find a huge community of like minded people. Many of them had no clue about making money online before they visited here for the first time. They are Internet marketers, bloggers, vloggers, niche marketers and others in all stages of their business. Many of them actively work their business now and have seen a tremendous increase in their online income.

To me, this is the best present I can get. Knowing that I have helped some of you to business success makes me feel that I have contributed value to the community. I advise you to make the most of the people who interact with each other here. The more you get involved, the faster you will learn and make money.

In the end, the ball is in your hands. Blogger Unleashed is here for you to learn and apply and as long as you stop believing there are easy ways to make money online, you have the utmost chances of success in your own business. Also, once you start applying what you learn here, you will be most likely less inclined to keep buying into all the online hype and save money in the process. All you will ever need for a successful income is presented to you free of charge. Add to this wealth of information the tools I suggest and your business is ready to rock.

Contrary to popular beliefs, you don’t have to spend thousands upfront before you can earn some decent income. But never make the mistake to think you can do it for free either.

Whether you want to make money blogging, or find other means to make money online, you can find it here on Blogger Unleashed.

101 Ways to make money online

101 Ways to make money online

(part time or full time, and working at home)

Disclaimers

There's no catch and I'm not trying to sell you an ebook. Or anything (read about conmen who do). I'm not even signing you up for a newsletter. This list was put together more as a laugh. It may change your life. Or it may annoy you enormously because of its er, brevity. I hope it does both.

Some ideas here are nice and have halos, others smell of dog urine ... but all these methods allegedly generate lotso dosho, and every single one is legal at least somewhere. There's overlap in everything so some ideas may be repeated (and some may not be covered at all) but I'm still maintaining there are 101 ways to make money online, partly because it makes a good headline. No, solely because it makes a good headline. It sucked YOU in, didn't it?

No, you won't get anything for nothing but there are a lot of things you can get for nearly nothing. Like getting to pick holes in my list. Go ahead. Pick holes and then link back here to show people how stupid I am.

I've put together a lot of these ideas from thousands of hours discussing businesses for sale with their owners. They've shared with me how their businesses operate, how they make money online, how they built their businesses up etc. They've given me access to their traffic stats, their earnings and accounts and tax figures. Many even gave me access to their Adsense or other "main earner" accounts. Some of those businesses were so irresistible that I bought them. And sold them. And bought others. It's a game. I love it.

Most of these business ideas can be run from anywhere in the world, even the United States, Australia and other non-English speaking countries. For consistency sake all figures are quoted in US dollars.

Each method is summarised in a single small para so appreciate it's not the complete unabridged version. And, no, I haven't tried each one so out of the 101 business models to make money online 102 may be completely dud. But, I do intend expanding - in due course - on some of the money-making ideas that worked for me.

More disclaimers will come when people sue me (suing can make you money, see #66)


Finding business ideas:

1. Spend all day browsing Site For Sale forums (like the list we have here) for the myriad ways people earn money online. People looking to sell their sites actually tell you how they make money! Pick one that suits you. Research it a bit, and away and start your own business. Or use a search engine to find ways to make money online. It seems to Finding some things - like nuclear bunkers - is easier than othersbe so easy that it's almost impossible to find someone who doesn't know how to do it. (But why stop at one search engine (SE)? Most people get to less than 1% of the top qualify info they're seeking because they use just one SE like Google, don't have the vaguest of ideas of the advanced search features available, and don't know the benefits to be had using specialised SEs, local SEs etc. )

2. Bundle the two above to tell other people how to make money online. They always want to know. It doesn't matter if you don't know yourself, you can still charge them for it. I obviously don't have a clue as I'm giving it all away. You can now ignore everything else I say. But don't go spending money on internet cons promising to make you a millionaire and here's how to spot them.

3. Be more inventive with your search. Look for small business franchise newsletters. Or for home jobs in your particular niche or hobby. (And check point #2 above for those specialised SEs). You can also go through the appropriate DMOZ categories (examples: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12)

But using "search" is just the start of the game. There are simply so, so many ways. We hope you hang around to find out.

4. Like the guy you can pay to stick a message in a bottle for you and throw it into the sea. He's made tens of thousands of dollars already. And there are several others like him in all parts of the world. Do you live near a sea or river? Or join the cleanup of those bottles and get your council to contribute.


Domains

5. The dot com gold rush made many millionaires but there's still plenty of money in domain real estate and still some good catches available. A good dot com may be difficult to find now. But there are a lot of gTLDs and ccTLDs from the .info to .eu to .tv to .co.in and they all present opportunities being discussed in several good forums. Put your thinking hat on, buy a famous word domain for a few dollars and put it up on the domain selling sites.

6. Lost your thinking hat? Hang out at SEDO. DNForurms, Afternics and other places where domains are bought and sold. Provided you learn enough about the market to recognise bargains you could make a living from just buying existing domains and reselling them.

7. If you're smart you'll run dictionary checks against available domain names and auto-check them against search volumes (using OST, Wordtracker etc.) for that term and Pay Per Click (PPC) rates in the major ad networks (example) to work out which ones are likely to be more profitable. If you can pick up the domain for a profitable term that's searched for often you can use a domain parking program. Or post a little bit of relevant content and get a link or two ... and the search engines will start sending you traffic. If the phrase people are typing in coincides exactly with your domain name it gives you a great head start with SEs.

8. If you're smart AND a linguist you'd be doing that in multiple languages. And not paying for any domain till you've tried it free for five days to see if it does indeed get any type-in traffic (and how well that traffic converts). After you've tried it for five days and dropped it there's nothing to stop you immediately picking it up again for another five day trial. Strange, but true. It's not kiting, it's legal.

9. Misspellings. Massive opportunities still exist in the misspelling/typo market. People trying to get elsewhere land on your site instead ... and you sell them stuff (or use the domain parking idea). Some even tempt fate by making PPC opportunties out of typosquatting on trademarks. Finding typos has never been easier. There are many tools that will find misspellings for you. How easy can it get?

10. Domain parking and type-in traffic: People sometimesThe witch has spoken guess at URLs. If they want a plumber they may try plumber.com though they've never used that site themselves. Find terms that people may be typing in (I will provide a detailed guide to this when I get a chance), buy the domain and populate it with ads. There are several ad programs to monetise your parked domains. Or combine this with the previous idea to buy plummer.com or similar typo domains to make money online.

11. Drop catches. People sometimes forget to renew their domains and these expire. Picking them up will give you some remnant traffic from sites that link to this domain/people who've bookmarked it etc. In some cases the traffic can be pretty high. Provided you're fast enough to replace the copyrighted content that was there with something else you can make quite a profitable business from doing nothing else but this.

12. A variation on the above. Sell the domain back to the previous owners. Note that you may want to tread carefully and get familiar with the rules for that TLD before you start sending off ransom notes. For example, with ICANN (domains that end in .com, for example) the moment you send the previous owners an email saying you've got their domain and you'll give it back for $10K... you've lost. It can't look like a ransom demand. Be reasonable and read the small print of the UDRP. No UDRP required if you're sitting hostage on myspace.com/theircompanyname or the equivalent at blogger, mybloglog, or other big destinations. LOL, watch them kick themselves and sack their web advisors who told them about taking the "dot info" but omitted to mention the importance of protecting the brand by owning the associated myspace directory (and others)! And it costs you nothing!

13. Run a domain management service. Hundreds of thousands of webmasters (or more) have a large portfolio of domains. A lot of them would like the boring bit taken out of their domain management. You can run their DNSes or just a service reminding them when each domain comes up for renewal. Or an automated monitoring service to tell them when one of their domains/sites is inaccessible.

14. Start a directory to list domains for sale. That's what people like SEDO do. You can get money just for allowing domains to be listed in your directory.

15. If you're running a service putting buyers and sellers of domains/sites in touch with one another you could get money for add on services (like providing escrow facilities). For ideas have a look at what existing domain intermediaries offer.

16. Run a domain research service. Wonder what happens when a manufacturer is looking to name a new model car? Or starting a new range of clothing? They need trademark and patent research but now they also need some domain research. Which of the literally thousands of combinations and misspellings (+ sucks.com) are taken and which do they need to buy? With a few of the free domain tools discussed on this page and one or two more - like free DNS tools - and a little time you could provide them a service they'd pay a lot of money for.

17. Start your own country: Whoa! yes, you're reading it right. If you've heard of Sealand (what is Sealand) you'll know that starting your own country is not that far fetched. Once you have your own WhackyCountry you can apply for a .wc (yuk) TLD. Sell millions of domains. Keep some for yourself. Ever wanted a Google.___?

18. Perform domain services for businesses and then send them a proforma (even if they've never heard of you). Explain that it's free this time but you'll gladly keep acting for them for a small fee. For example, there are thousands of big businesses whose half-wit webmasters/ developers didn't put in a redirect from the non-www to the www versions of their sites (or vice-versa). One entrepreneur made a few thousands just from pointing out to businesses how they were losing hundreds of customers every year who were landing on http://xxx-companyname.com and finding nothing there.

I'll talk about domain opportunities some more on this page when I get a chance.


Buying and selling internet businesses

19. Many sites runs on "auto-pilot". A common price these sell for in site-for-sale forums is 12-24 months' worth of net earnings (silly price, but it's true). Provided you don't mess the site up you can recover your capital in as little as 12 months and then ... sell the site to recover your capital again. Double your capital every year. 100% return. Sack your stockbrokers. It really is a crazy world!

20. Site flipping doesn't require as much capital and expertise as many people believe. Like property flipping, Buffalo Walking Service - why do only dogs get to have fun?you buy one that needs a bit of TLC. Do it up, then sell it on for a whacking great profit. And, the beauty is you never have to deal with tenants!

21. How about cornering a little market? There are DMOZ categories with grandfathered sites (sites that have been listed for many years) which aren't being updated. If you can pick up a few sites in the same category and merge their content suddenly you "own" that niche. That opens a lot of possibilities.

The rest of the 101 to come later.

How to Make Article Marketing Works Well for You

Article marketing can drive free traffic to your website or help your online business gains more exposure. The process of article marketing isn't complicated. First, you write articles related to your website or business, submit them to large article directories and sites, the directories and sites owners will then review and publish your articles. The visitors read your articles, then click your website link in the author bio and you'll get free targeted traffic.

To achieve good result with article marketing, your articles must be interesting enough to attract many visitors to read them and the content of your articles will encourage the readers to click on your website link in the author bio. This blog post will provide some effective tips that will help you achieve good result in article marketing.

Good Title
The title of your article must be attention-grabbing. The title has to be compelling and concerned to a particular interest of your targeted visitors in order to grab your targeted visitors attention. The title will make people want to know more information just by reading it.

One way that can help you in writing good article title is by studying what information your visitors want. You can also browse on the large article directories such as ezinearticles.com and articledasboard.com to find articles related to your niche. See what titles grab your attention and you will get the idea on how to write good article titles.

Helpful Content
The body of your articles is also important. You need to deliver some good information in the body of your article to make your readers happy and keep on reading the content until the end. If you have an impressive title but fail to deliver it in the body content, then most likely the readers will close the article page and look for another article that isn't written by you.

Don't Make Your Article Looks Boring
Your article needs to be organized well. Make use of bullets or numbers often to emphasis important points. Each of your paragraphs shouldn't be too long as these could possibly make your readers feel bored. Use more simple words for easier understand. And make sure there are no grammar and spelling errors.

Don't Tell the Whole Story
The ultimate goal of article marketing is to send the readers from the article pages to your website or online store so that you will get free traffic and make more money online. So, make sure your articles don’t tell everything. Yes, you need to provide some good information in your articles, but the articles shouldn't reveal everything. Make the readers feel that if they want more information, they will need to click on your website link in the author bio. Let say your article title is ‘How to Make Money Online with Google AdSense’. You can write this author bio to entice the readers to visit your website after finished reading your article.

Do you like to know how to build an AdSense website that makes money? I make a steady income with AdSense and I can show you how to build an effective AdSense site in my website at http:www.mywebsite.com.

Review Your Article
After you finish writing an article, read it over and see whether you can understand it. If there is any sentence that you think will confuse the readers, then you should re-read it. Check to see if you have missed one or two important points. If you do have omitted something, add them in. Also, you may want to add anything new into the article. In that case, you can go to relevant forums and news sites to get new information where you can add it to your article.

8 Ways You can Make Money from Affsphere.com

Recently, Anik Singal from Affiliate Classroom Inc has officially released a new and unique article directory. Anik named this article directory Affsphere.com.

Affsphere.com isn't another ordinary article directory. It is an article directory that pays people to submit content. When you sign up and start submitting articles in Affsphere, you will earn ad credits where you can exchange for AdSense ads and affiliate links place on your article pages. You can also choose to use your ad credits to buy banner advertising on Affsphere. So, all the articles you published on Affsphere can earn you AdSense revenue, Affiliate commission and free traffic.

Anik put together two short videos to help you get started in Affsphere. The first video is here. It introduces Affsphere and explains how it works.

The second video can be access here. It demonstrates 8 ways to make money with Affsphere.

Thursday Teleclass: How to Make Good Monthly Income with Membership Programs

Matt Bacak & Joe Lavery will be holding a live teleseminar training call on Thursday, August, 28th at 9pm EST. The training is all about how to build a membership business that will make you lucrative monthly income. The call is free and you can join it from the below link:

http://www.musthavemarketing.com/mmi/weird.php

Once you have joined, you will receive the teleseminar dial-in details and access code for attending the training.

This will be an exciting teletraining because Matt will be giving you brand new information of profiting online with membership programs. Also you will get a free info product for attending the teleclass.

More Earning Opportunities in Smorty.com

Smorty has been in business for sometime. It is another pay-per-post blog network where any blogger can get involved and make money by publishing paid post on their blog.

It seems that Smorty is doing well; it's blog network is growing bigger and bigger and attracting more advertisers to pay bloggers in the network for writing paid post.

Recently, Smorty has introduced another income stream to bloggers. It is called Digxa mini store link advertising. The name may sound weire to you but it actually works quite simple.

When you join Smorty and opt to make money with their Digxa mini store link advertising system, you will be instructed to place a code on your blog. Then, the system will automatically find suitable keywords in the content of your blog and underline those keywords. If a visitor points the mouse over an underline keyword, a mini store banner will showcase a few products. If the visitor clicks on a product link, you will earn a share of advertising revenue.

Learn more about Smorty here.

The Criteria of Good Affiliate Marketing Programs

Clickbank has more than 10,000 affiliate programs, Commission Junction listed Top Fortune 500 companies with thousands of affiliate programs available, LinkShare also offers affiliate programs close to few thousands and there are still several other big affiliate networks offers plenty of affiliate programs.

Wow.... so many affiliate programs, how to choose the good programs that are effective for you to make money online with affiliate marketing?

Choosing the right affiliate marketing programs to use is critical to your success. This article will let you know what criteria to look for when making the choice of which programs to use:

The Affiliate Program is High quality
Always look for programs that are backed up by a reliable company or backed up a trustworthy team specializing in the industry. These quality affiliate programs generally offer products or services that sell well. But to make sure they are really offering good products, you should do some research and investigation. Check the affiliate product and services to see whether they offer good value, is most of the customers satisfied with them, how long the programs have existed. This way you will ensure the programs you are joining are credible.

The Affiliate Product is Great in Demand
You will want to promote affiliate products that have consistent demand. A product with good market demand is easier to sell and once you have developed an effective Internet marketing plan that will market it to mass audience, the product will make you good money for long term.

The Affiliate Program Pays High Commissions
Many affiliate programs reward affiliates by sharing a percentage of commission for each sale generated by the affiliates. So, when choosing affiliate programs, you should struggle to find the programs that pay high percentage of affiliate commission.

Affiliate programs usually offer either digital products or physical products. For digital / information products, you should only participate in the affiliate program if it offers commission at least 50%. Whereas for physical products, look for those that offer at least 10%.

The Affiliate Marketing Program Offers Good Support
This is an important criteria you should also look for when making the choice of which affiliate program to use if you're a beginner. There are a lot of programs that will offer their system and leave you to your own devices without much support.

If you just begun in affiliate marketing with limited knowledge, avoid these types. The affiliate programs that offer sufficient information, guide and affiliate support are the ones that suit you. You will appreciate this extra feature in case you encounter problem in affiliate marketing.

Get Paid to Host Content

is basically an article management website. It offers a pretty new way for webmasters and blog owners to make extra money online.

Webmasters and blog owners can participate in Host My Post article distribution and earn some extra bucks for adding fresh content onto their website and blog.

There are hundreds of articles divided into a list of categories inside the Host-my-post.com. You are welcome to publish any of these articles that are relevant to your site or blog. Each article that you take and put it on your site will earn you points. The points can be then converted into real cash.

It takes only a few steps to get started in Host-my-post.com:

1. Sign up to become a publisher of Host-my-post.com
2. Create an article section on your site if you don't already have one
3. Submit your site to Host-my-post.com for approval
4. Once approved, you can start using any relevant content and publishing them on your site to earn point.
5. The points can be turned into real cash or used for advertising your websites in Host-my-post-.com network.

Free Ways to Increase Your Blog Traffic

1) Comment on Blogs
Look for large traffic Blogs in your niche, visit them and leave your comments on their blogs posts. You may use blog search engine like www.blogsearchengine.com, www.google.com/blogsearch and www.searchengineblog.com to find blogs in your niche.

2) Submit Articles
Write articles that are related to your blog and submit them to popular article directories such as ezinearticles.com, Isnare.com, Articledashboard.com, Articlealley.com and goarticle.com. Quality articles may drive you a lot of free targeted traffic.

3) Participate in Community Forums
Use google to search for forums that are related to your blog. Look for forums that has over 10,000 members and read the rules of the forums to see whether you can promote your blogs and websites in your signature. Join forums that allow you to add a link to your blog in the signature and start participating in discussion. You can ask questions, answer other members questions and post your articles, ideas and thought in the forums.

4) Submit Your Blog to Directories
This isn't working to me but some bloggers claim that they gain a good amount of traffic from their listings in directories.

5) Post Often
You can lose traffic if you seldom update you blog, try to make it at least 5 posts per week. This not only will maintain your traffic but possibly attract more readers.

6) Write about Blogging
Write helpful and quality articles related to blogging can attract other bloggers link to your articles and gain may be truckload of free traffic.

7) Post Breaking News
If your found a breaking news of your niche very earlier, post it to your blog. It may give your blog's traffic a boost.

8) Social Bookmarking
Bookmark you blog posts in the large social bookmarking sites like Netscape.com, Digg.com, Simply and Reddit.com.

9) Run a Contest
Start a contest on your blog. Think about the prizes that people really want. It will create a viral effect and bring in new visitors.

10) On-page Optimization
Make sure your blog's title tag and description tag contain your targeted keywords. When you have posted plenty of quality blog post and done a lot of blog promotion, don't be surprise to see your blog ranks top 10 in Google and get free search engine traffic daily.

Google Devalues Paid Links

After reading about the paid links issue in Matt Cutts blog and Digitalpoint Forum. It seems that paid links will no longer useful for Google SEO in the future as Google is going to change their ranking algorithm to make sure that paid backlinks will have not effect to Google ranking. Google now tries to figure out how to separate paid links from natural links and they also allow anyone to report paid links to help them distinguish paid links and natural links.

Furthermore, Google will take action against on websites that contains a lot of paid links. And for websites and bloggers that sell text links, here's what Matt Cutts, Head of Google's webspam team advices:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/hidden-links
" If you want to sell a link, you should at least provide machine-readable disclosure for paid links by making your link in a way that doesn’t affect search engines. There’s a ton of ways to do that. For example, you could make a paid link go through a redirect where the redirect url is robot’ed out using robots.txt. You could also use the rel=nofollow attribute."

Google will make SEO harder. If you frequently buy paid links to boost your Google ranking and PR, I think you should stop now to avoid your site or blog penalized by Google.

Payments to webmasters and bloggers for a text link appears on their sites and blogs are definitely considered as paid links. For paid directory listings, there are still no clear specifications whether they are seen as paid links. In my opinion, they will not be considered as paid links since Google and Yahoo also have their own directories accepting paid listings. Can we report them paid links? For blog sponsor posts from reviewme.com and Payperpost.com, they are likely to be treated as paid links as well since one of the goals of Google is to stop people from using unnatural backlinks that can artificially boost up their websites ranking. The devaluation of paid links by Google will sure affect the ways webmasters make money online in the future.

To get traffic from Google and make money from your website and blog, I think the best ways now is to make sure the majority of your links are natural, continue to grow natural and relevant inbound links and update your website or blog often with unique and useful content.