I am pumped!

Ever since I started this article writing experiment, my Adsense has only been going up and up. It’s really encouraging for me to keep pumping out the articles. I am up to 14 articles now on Infobarrel with another one waiting to be approved. The goal of 50 by the end of September still seems a long way away!

I have been using the links (maximum of two) to link to my own sites, my hubs on Hubpages or other Infobarrel articles. I have really been following any particular formula. I have seen some people writing an article on Infobarrel and then linking it to a similar article on Hubpages. I think it is better to continually mix it up with different things and find out what is best.

Another point is that I see too many people using keyword tools, getting ranked for those keywords and then being disappointed when they don’t get the search traffic (and income) that they expected. The keyword tools are really only a guide. Hubpages is a great place to experiment. I have been surprised how some articles have done really well, while others have been pretty lack luster.

I remember hearing some time ago a tip from a stock investor – keep buying more stock that is going up in value and sell off anything that is going down. I think the same advice can be applied to the internet. Write articles on hubpages, doing some keyword research. Throw a lot out there and then see which ones stick.

If you find something doing well, write some related articles on Infobarrel. If it keeps bringing in money, promote it more by getting links – writing an ezine article, start a blogger blog or even buy a domain for the niche. Next find some affiliate programs that are relevant to that topic. Rinse and repeat and of course experiment with different topics. Try to think outside the box a little and not follow everyone else’s ideas for articles and niches.

List building -why didn’t I start earlier?

I just joined Aweber to build an email list for a new website I just started. I had read about creating lists ever since I started making websites. I messed around with some free newsletter programs, but never took it too seriously.

I have just created a couple of new lists for a couple of different websites. After adding the sign-up form to my site, within hours, I had people signing up.

Aweber has an RSS to mail feature so you can put in your RSS feed for your website and create a newsletter automatically, which should work well on my Japan job site. I also finally completed a guide to living in Japan which I am planning to sell on the site and put some links into the newsletter to promote it.

I don’t know why I didn’t implement it earlier! I guess one of the reasons was the perceived expense of around $20 a month. I thought I could do it all for free. If I had of implemented it earlier, I would probably have thousands of subscribers now. I have been so reliant on money from Adsense for such a long time, and while it is one of the easiest ways to make money online, it is perhaps one of the least effective. I am sure you have read all of the reasons before – people need to click away from your site to make money.

Aweber has some good tracking and reporting functions, allowing you to do split testing on the different styles of forms. It also feels good to see that people want to receive more information from you and they are happy to give you their details.

The next step of course is creating or finding a product that your list is interested in.

Way overpriced internet marketing products

It seems to me that internet marketers are really testing the waters as to how much they can charge for their products.

I listened to a podcast with a “Social Media guru” and it was mildly interesting and I later got an email promoting their product. I didn’t really have much intention to buy, but I wanted to see what they were selling it for. I gasped when I saw the price – $2,497, or four easy payments of $697.

Of course the program is “limited” to the first 200 people, before the “doors are closed”. I don’t plan on shelling out $2000 to learn about Twitter and YouTube, so in honesty I can’t really comment on whether the program is worth the money.

I think learning about social media is important and it is a good way to promote your business, but to me I think it is something that is pretty easy to learn by yourself.

There has been so much written lately about twitter and how to make money from twitter, yet twitter the company is struggling to find a successful revenue model.

I have participated in the 30 Day Challenge which is a free course and you can get a pretty good idea from completing what these kinds of programs are all about. The fact is, like with the 30DC most people start these programs with good intentions, only a few go on to complete the whole challenge.

Make money through dating sites

Even though there are some good free dating sites now available, there is still money to be made in dating. I am making over $2000 a year through a partnership I have on my Tokyo website, without spending any time dealing with the site or any money marketing it. My Tokyo site is a travel website, but the audience seems to also like the dating part of the website. It is totally managed by a company I have partnered with and revenue seems to be growing nicely. The partner is World Friends Networks and they are looking to expand their business.

I am offering $100 to anyone who would like to also become a partner with World Friends. I am willing to pay anyone $100 who is accepted into the network. You will need to have an established website with some traffic. WorldFriends sets up a dating site on a subdomain on your site. They try to integrate the design, so it looks like it is running on your own website, so it can also help get return visitors.

They pay quarterly and are prompt with their payments.

Update: I just realized that it now costs $500 to join the program. They have changed the policy since I joined. If you do have the traffic, I do believe it is a good revenue source, but I personally don’t believe in having to pay to join up to a program, even if it does take some time to get set up. I will leave up to people to decide if they want to go through.

Ads in feeds with Bidvertiser

I recently signed up with BidVertiser and it has taken me a bit of time to get around to start implementing the code. There are just so many advertising options lately. They have various advertising options, including Google like ads.

They now also allow you to put ads in your RSS feed. They support Feedburner which makes life easy for most bloggers. I don’t expect I will make much from this new potential source of income, but as they say every little bit helps.

My affiliate strategy

I don’t read webmaster forums as much as I use to, but I occasionally go back and take a peak at what people are talking about. I had a look at the affiliate marketing section of Webmasterworld the other day and not surprisingly people were bagging CJ.

I have never had much luck with Commission Junction. Linkshare and Shareasale are a little better. What I much prefer to do is to find an e-commerce site with an affiliate program in my niche. I give them a try and if I can make some sales and get paid I starting thinking of new ways I could use to promote their products.

I also try to make contact with their affiliate manager. I don’t bother them much, but if you have a question or a problem it is much better to be able email a particular person rather than a generic support email address.

Smaller e-commerce sites probably don’t have as much to spend on big advertising campaigns so they are more reliant on getting affiliates to promote their products. Having to go through a big third party who represents another big company just doesn’t work well.

I also don’t do any PPC campaigns so I am not competing with the original company in this area.

It does take some time to find products that convert well on your site, but once you find a couple of things that work, it is an easy way to build your passive income.

TNX Text links

Most people have already heard of Text Link Ads and Linkworth as a marketplace for selling and buying links. TNX is a new player in the market getting set to become an alternative text link broker in the space to buy links.

The process for adding sites to list in the marketplace is very straight forward. You will need to place some PHP code into your site for the links to display properly. They have a points system where you can earn points from doing various things like adding more sites to their system and purchasing links.

Currently 1000 points is between $0.63 – 1.26 depending on the number of links you buy.

The minimum purchase price for a PR7 link is $6.3 a month, which sounds to me like a bargain. The maximum price is 20 times this value. They have a fairly neat little price calculator which you can instantly calculate how many links you will get for your budget, depending on the highest page rank you select for the your links to appear on.

When you join you get free bonus points to test the effectiveness of the TNX system. They also have discounts of up to 50 per cent for SEO experts. TNX is currently running a campaign on Digital point forum where you can get free links to your site just by joining up.

They have an impressive 31,233,782 links sold and currently have 29,156 users. Not surprisingly, TNX also have an affiliate program to help you make more money from the program.

Providing content for other websites

I have been going a bit mad with Hubpages, writing more articles than I normally would with my websites. I suppose that in some way I am restricted on the themes I can write articles for on my websites and after a while it is easy to get stale.

With a site like hubpages, you can write about just about anything. It seems that there are a few “newbies” there looking to make a buck online, so it is easy to write stuff for them. Things like, getting traffic to your site, affiliate programs etc. It is also a way to get some new links to your websites and a little bit of traffic.

The question is however, how much time should you be spending basically creating content for another website. This is a difficult question. If you have a hugely popular website, you probably wouldn’t bother with trying to get traffic from a site like hubpages and would spend all of your time on your own website. If you are like most of us, you probably need to spend quite a bit of your time writing comments on other blogs, participating in forums and writing articles on other websites to get extra links and traffic.

The advantage of writing content on another site like Hubpages or Squidoo is that it will get indexed by Google very quickly and if the keywords are not too competitive, it might even be easy to rank for some long tail phrases. It’s probably a good idea not to put your best articles up on another website, but perhaps write a teaser article that links to your website to get people to click through. If you just want to make money, include plenty of affiliate links.

Unfortunately for me I haven’t made any affiliate sales yet, but I am having fun with it for now, so will stick with it for a bit more.

It’s raining, I’m bored

It has rained non-stop today and pretty much off and on the last few days, since the earthquake in Indonesia. Someone suggested here (Langkawi) that the earthquake could have upset the weather conditions.

I have done quite a bit of work today write articles and updating some sites.

I came across Deal Dot Com which looks like another simple, but interesting idea for marketing and making money on the internet. I like how these sites are launched; they are just geared towards bloggers writing about them and promoting them.

One thing I learnt from the 30 Day Challenge

Once thing which really got me thinking about the 30 Day Challenge is that if you have a new idea for a website, you don’t necessarily have to go out and purchase a new domain for it. There are services like Squidoo that allow you to set up your own one page website.

I have been working on a couple of pages the past couple of days to sell affiliate products on and to promote/build links to some of my other websites. Squidoo already has traffic and ranking, so it is possible to quickly get some good keyword rankings rather than creating a whole new website.

If your lens does well you can then consider starting up a new website. It’s a great cost-free way of testing a new market. Creating a site like this could take around 1-2 hours or even less. Create a couple of links to the site, make sure you have some affiliate links in your new web page and you can then forget about it.

You aren’t likely to get super rich from doing this, but I would be fairly confident that without doing any further work to your page you should be able to generate a couple of sales a year from your site. Hubpages is another Squidoo type clone that has been getting a bit of press recently.

I you don’t have any money to invest in your new internet business Squidoo and Hubpages are a great way to get started. Also if you have zero technical skills, these sites are very user friendly and are a great way to enter the world of affiliate marketing.

By building lots of websites, pages on these networks, blogs you are building up your “Internet Arsenal”. Sometimes blogs will work and sometimes a squidoo site will work. The important thing is to test all of these different methods.

It might seem like a lot of work, but I generally spend a few hours setting something up, put some affiliate links in and include some way to analyze traffic. Get a couple of links to the site and then forget about it. If I make some affiliate sales, I then go back and check where I was getting traffic from, add some more content and research any new affiliate programs.

You could summarize the process like this:

Idea -> Create -> Monetize -> Analyze -> Improve -> Repeat

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