How To Make Money Online Using Niche Content Websites Part 2

How To Make Money Online Using Niche Content Websites Part 2

The Importance Of Keyword Click Through Prices For most niche content sites AdSense and/or Chitika will be the main monetization strategy. These programs pay on a per click basis and click through prices are calculated based on advertiser demand. The golden mix is to find a niche with few well established content sites but a lot of advertisers competing to find customers. This means click through prices will be high but the market is not likely to stay untapped for long and likely a bunch of competing content sites will pop up. In fact you may never find this combination.

A more likely scenario is a niche where there are high click prices because of lots of advertisers and a few well established content sites or moderate to low keyword prices but almost no competition. How you can succeed in these situations is to be better at search engine optimization than any of the other sites. If your site pulls more traffic you get more clicks. The situation you want to avoid is a niche with few advertisers so low click through prices. No matter how much traffic you get and much you dominate a niche, if there are no advertisers paying to use Google AdWords you won’t get any AdSense income or it will be 10 cents a day from the one advertiser with no competition. Bear in mind however that there are general advertisements, for example Chitika can show cameras, computers and other electronic products that may appeal to a general audience and produce enough click throughs to make it worthwhile. This is a risky venture though since your niche is not relevant to your monetization method, the amount of income you earn will like be very random and inconsistent.

Underachieving Due To Low Entry Barriers If you have read Perry Marshall’s Renaissance Club Newsletter you will know about two online marketing strategies he discusses, one called ‘underachiever’ and the other ‘overachiever’. Note - if you haven’t signed up for the special offer to try Perry’s marketing newsletter it’s still available and you still get the Definitive Guide to Google AdWords, five marketing reports and five audio CDs thrown in just for trying out the membership for one month at $29.95 - check it out here for more information.
Overachiever Overachieving is when you dominate a niche, become an expert and “go deep” by offering more than just one product or service. You may offer seminars, audio recordings, DVD video classes and a whole host of additional materials that make the lifetime value of a loyal customer a lot more than a once off purchase or text link ad click. This method means you can afford to compete by making a loss on the sale of your first product or lead capturing method because the value over time of that conversion is much higher. I’d say Perry’s offer that I mentioned above is a loss leader (overachiever) strategy too, he can’t be making money shipping off all these CDs and reports at such a low price and paying out affiliate commissions - but he knows that the 5% of customers that become fans and purchase everything he produces will spend hundreds to even thousands of dollars over time.

Underachiever Niche content website building is an underachiever strategy. Profitable niches rarely stay uncompetitive for long and as niche content site building becomes popular you are going to be fighting with others for niches. Underachieving is when you deliberately choose to lightly skim a niche, perhaps by selling an ebook to a market that currently is not satisfied. Niche content sites service a unique niche with basic information and generate advertising income as a side effect, there is no intention to further capitalize on the audience. The idea of course is to rinse and repeat, building up a portfolio of profitable niches. The problem here is that you must keep working to find new niches to replace those that become too competitive to fight for.

For those that can manage a lot of sites and in fact enjoy the variety that comes from building sites on such an array of different topics, the niche content site strategy can work well. If you can build a really large portfolio, competitive action won’t impact you significantly because it will take a long time erode your entire income stream. Remember though that it’s not true passive income forever since you will need to replenish your portfolio with new niches if you want this strategy to work for you long term.

In my mind however a better way to go about this is to treat niche content site building as an education and research tool. Learn what it takes to get free traffic to a site from search engines. Learn how to optimize sites, find profitable niches and build content quickly. When you stumble across a niche with unexpectedly high demand and return consider switching your strategy from underachiever to overachiever. Start collecting email addresses to build a list. Get an ebook written, find affiliate products to sell, create a membership service, record screencasts to build information products, and “go deep” in the marketplace. Become the expert in that niche so you can own it and depend on it for long term income despite competitor actions.

Leverage Your Previous Hard Work I’m sure you will find that many of the weird and wonderful niches you come across are already serviced by hobbyist sites, very unprofessional, perhaps hosted on free hosts with designs created in Frontpage or even (shudder) Microsoft Word. They usually have low PageRank but due to lack of competition will show up as top results in search engines. A quick search and easy technique to surpass these sites in the search engines is to leverage one of your already successful, high PageRanked sites.

Most online marketers have a site that they devote the majority of their time to, likely a blog or their main business project. This site enjoys good, hard-earned traffic and has lots of backlinks that were built up over time. Using this site as a tool to promote another site is an advantage, especially in the niche content market.
For example this blog is my main site. If I built a niche content site I would link to it from the sidebar that is on every page giving the niche site lots of valuable backlinks, PageRank points and helping it to very quickly enter the search engine indexes. In fact I’d hazard a guess that a site-wide link from this blog alone would vault a niche content site to the top of the results for it’s niche without much other work on SEO. There might be some sandbox issues initially, and true the relevancy of the links would not be very good, but given the competition likely doesn’t even know what SEO is and your carefully researched niche is small and untapped, the advantage is significant. Having a powerful site to leverage is a big helping hand for a niche content site marketer.

Conclusion You will be surprised by what type of niches you can dig up. Often the most bizarre topics have real followings. Everything from how to raise turtles, where to find the best secondhand clothes, how to do magic tricks, how to snowboard, learning to cook vegetarian - and these are mainstream topics already well catered to. It’s your job to find the obscure, to think outside of your box and find markets that you would personally never consider being a part of yourself. Thankfully the search engines are full of keyphrases and all you have to do is get out there and research. Browse Wikipedia, follow the external links and expand your horizons. You may find some very profitable niches that no one else has thought of.


Please click here for read How To Make Money Online Using Niche Content Websites Part 1

Copy From : http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com

The 80/20 Of Search Engine Marketing - Part 2

The 80/20 Of Search Engine Marketing - Part 2

In The 80/20 Of Search Engine Marketing - Part 1 I covered the first four of the Top 8 Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Techniques as explained by Brad Fallon. The first four methods were applicable to On-Page SEO, techniques you can manually apply to your website internally. The remaining four that I am about to discuss cover Off-Page SEO, which in my mind is a lot more difficult to control since you are dealing with external variables.

As I mentioned in part one, these techniques come from a special seminar recording that I received as part of my welcome package for joining Perry Marshall’s Renaissance Club.
Off Page SEO

If you are at all familiar with search engine optimization you are probably more interested in Off-Page techniques. With a bit of study and practice you can quickly grasp the most important On-Page variables to play with on your website. There is always more you can do of course, but as long as we are talking 80/20 rules there are only a handful of really important On-Page things and most of them were covered in part one of this article series.

Off-Page SEO in my mind is more important than On-Page. You can get your On-Page content perfectly optimized but without any good Off-Page SEO your On-Page efforts are wasted. No website can be a success in natural search engine results unless there are links flowing into it. This is what Off-Page SEO is all about, getting good quality links coming through.

Quite frankly I don’t believe there are any consistent, easy and affordable ways to conduct Off-Page SEO, and that is why I was so interested to hear what Brad was going to cover in his presentation. To be honest I wasn’t blown away by his comments. It didn’t cover anything new to me but I have been reading about SEO for a number of years, including some of Brad’s other materials, but it did reaffirm what I currently practice in my own Off-Page SEO activities and it’s always good to be reminded of what is smart practice.

Let’s go through the final four of the Top 8 Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Techniques so you can also do a mental check list and be certain you are following what the experts do.

5. Links and PageRank
Brad mumbled this first point out but later it was clarified that he said links. Really his Off-Page SEO technique discussion was more of a gradual break down than a top 4 list, with each point flowing into the next (which you will see is mimicked in this article) so the first place to logically start is links.

Links to your site is the most important Off-Page SEO technique. Simple but true. Incoming links are what determines your natural search engine placement. Yes all the On-Page SEO techniques will influence the variables but the links will determine the strength of your web pages to compete for the top places in search engine results pages. The more strength, the higher in the search engines your web pages will be. Nuff said.

PageRank
If you read my blog you should be well and truly familiar with PageRank. Most of my SEO posts are laden with the term but just in case you don’t know about PageRank head over and read this article to get yourself introduced to the topic - PageRank Explained - Keeping SEO Simple - this is one of my most popular articles and it should answer your basic questions.

Brad Fallon did not do anything more than a basic introduction to PageRank but he did make one interesting comment that I think is worth repeating. He gave a typical scenario of a person conducting search engine marketing for a website (or a company hired to do so), which usually starts with submitting to directories and hunting around for link exchange partners. Not exactly the most effective means of SEO because you tend to get low quality and low PageRank incoming links.
Brad went on to note the perils of over optimizing, which often happens when techniques like low quality link exchanges and free directories are over used, generating thousands duplicate anchor text incoming links from sites with low PageRank. He stated that the search engines don’t reward these techniques well, but strangely enough these are often considered the foundations of SEO campaigning but don’t lead to great results.

What Is A Good SEO Plan?
A more sound search engine marketing strategy is all about quality over quantity. Get your site listed in the best directories - DMOZ (the open directory project) and Yahoo! - and then slowly, but consistently build incoming links from good relevant sites. This pattern is considered more natural and hence is rewarded with better organic search engine results. Yes it takes longer and you better be a patient bunny, but it will lead to better results in the long term. It’s all about spending your time finding the 20% of links that will give you the 80% of results.
Brad pointed out that 1000 low quality and low PageRank backlinks generated in a short period of time will not be nearly as good as a handful of high PageRank incoming links added over many months. The emphasis is on oh-na-tur-al. Don’t follow the crowd and exchange links with anybody and everyone that comes asking for a link (perhaps I should drop my link exchange practices for this blog?) and don’t spend all your time asking for links from any site you can find that is remotely relevant to yours.

How To Get High Quality Links
It can be especially difficult for a commercial site with no interesting content (for example, nothing but sales pages) to get quality incoming links. No self-respecting, high PageRank site will have a good reason (besides money) to link to a site that is just selling something. Okay yes Apple will probably have no problems getting quality links to its iPod pages but that’s obviously not a position most businesses enjoy.

Unfortunately I don’t have a full-proof method for gaining quality links other than what I have already written about before and what is repeated over and over again all over the Internet - Content is King. The better the content the better the backlinks. Of course you can’t expect quality backlinks to come immediately unless you are willing to buy them. You need to slowly build up an audience that will eventually lead you to enjoy some exposure in the eyes of the quality sites and quality backlinks will come. The best thing is that links from one popular site tends to give you exposure to the owners of other popular sites and momentum will build.
If you need a practical example of how to get high quality backlinks using content read the second part of this article - Smarter Online Marketing. This article explains how one of my blog articles enjoyed some major exposure around the web resulting in lots of links.
In the case of commercial sites the same rules hold true, content will bring in links and visitors. With a commercial site the secret sauce is great content that is tightly aligned with your target market. Whitepapers, articles, free reports, resources, anything and everything you can come up with that will bring your market to your site. If you have just launched a new site put together a whiz-bang whitepaper, it doesn’t have to be too long, just a few pages of really really good stuff and make it available on your site for free.

Once you have the resources on your site you just need to get out there and tell everyone. At the moment one of the best ways is to comment on blogs and forums where your target market congregate. As I mentioned above, if one popular site owner reads your whitepaper, thinks it’s great and tells her audience, your job may be done already. This alone may bring in hundreds of backlinks and definitely lots of real visitors. It’s not easy but good content will lead to good results - it’s almost guaranteed!

6. Page Reputation
Back to the wisdom of Brad Fallon. Page Reputation is a relatively new concept in the eyes of the web public and has been gaining more and more credence as an important SEO consideration. In a nutshell reputation refers to the value of the sites linking to your site and the value of the links linking to the sites linking to your site. Confusing isn’t it!

Every website has a reputation value and incoming links determine that reputation, however it’s not about the number of incoming links but the quality and reputation of the sites that link. The reputation of a mainstream news site, for example CNN, is quite high and will have incoming links from other high reputation sites. If you get a link from CNN then your reputation will rise. Basically it’s measure of a site’s value based on the network of sites linking to that site going back multiple levels of the network.

That’s about as far as my understanding of the concept goes and in my mind ties right back in with the quality over quantity theory.

7. Anchor Text
Number three in the Off-Page SEO technique list is anchor text. Anchor text is the text used to link to your site and like your internal linking structure, your external link text is very important but often harder to manipulate. You don’t decide how people link to your site, all you can do is encourage people to link in a certain way.

This issue is all about your keywords. First you have to know what keywords you want people to use to link to your pages and then you need to figure out ways to make sure people use those keywords. For the basic link exchanges you usually communicate with the person providing you with a link and stipulate what anchor text to use. However most of the valuable links will come in response to you writing some good content and it will be quite random, the linking person won’t approach you to ask how they should link to you, they will just slap up a link as they feel appropriate.

In most cases people linking to your pages will use the title of your article, or part of the title, as the anchor text and as such you need to be extra careful when deciding how to name your articles. Yes usability and marketing comes first - you want to grab the attention of human beings with a tempting title, but if you can get some good keywords in there too you will be killing two birds with one stone. Other areas to consider are your name (now don’t go changing your name just for SEO!) and your website’s title as these are often used as anchor text.
I wouldn’t stress about external anchor text too much otherwise you can become bogged down in little details. Often the people linking to you will use completely random text that means absolutely nothing (for example - visit Entrepreneur’s Journey - click here - “click here” is not good anchor text) but at least will bring in human visitors. Just stay consciously aware of the importance of keywords in anchor text whenever you produce new content.

8. Link Popularity
Lastly Brad noted link popularity as the final point in his top 8 SEO technique list. Link popularity is all about the numbers, not the quality. This is purely how many incoming links there are to your website.

The one interesting point Brad mentioned in this section of his presentation was the difference between Google and Yahoo! regarding the top variables in their algorithms.
Google - 1.Title Tags, 2.PageRank and 3.PageRepYahoo! - 1.Title Tags, 2.Keyword Density and 3.Link Popularity

Now I can’t verify that in any manner but it does make for some interesting discussion. This shows that Google cares more about quality and Yahoo! cares more about quantity, but I’m sure there is a lot more to it than that. I’ll leave it up to you to test this theory on your sites.
Link Relevancy and ‘Do Keywords In Domain Names Matter?’

Before I wrap this article up I want to make one comment regarding how relevant backlinks have to be and whether keywords in domain names matter. Brad made some interesting comments about these topics.

My assumption was that relevancy meant that the pages your incoming links come from should be relevant to a pretty high degree, for example, Entrepreneur’s Journey would appreciate links from business, marketing, SEO and entrepreneurship sites but universities, sports clubs and cooking sites would not be relevant. Brad stated that Google’s relevancy scope is quite wide, as wide as the top categories in the DMOZ directory. A site that on first inspection may not be relevant may actually in fact offer some relevancy even if the connection is obscure or drilled down (is every link from a blog relevant to a blog simply because they all belong in the “blog” category? I think not). It’s a hard thing to judge given that determining whether a result (say a search engine ranking increase) has a direct correlation to a single backlink is next to impossible.
What was really interesting and actually makes total sense is what Brad said about domain names. One of the age old questions in SEO is whether keywords in your domain name are important. Brad straight out said that the Google algorithms do not consider keywords in the domain name, however when people link to you they often use your domain name and if your keywords are in your domain name then the anchor text people use to link to you will contain your keywords. In a round about way, yes, keywords in domain names matter.
Conclusion

There you have it, the top 8 search engine optimization techniques as presented by Brad Fallon, one of the web’s most respected search engine marketers, along with lots of additional commentary thrown in from yours truly. For some people there won’t have been much new material but what these two articles do provide is a solid list of the 80/20 variables that you should work on if your organic search engine results are business critical. For solopreneurs with little time on you hands knowing what the key two-to-three things you need to worry about makes for efficient business.

A few people have emailed me questioning the validity of Brad Fallon and I can say one thing only - Jay Abraham would not have selected him as the presenter on search engine optimization if he wasn’t the real deal. If you don’t have any confidence in Jay Abraham then perhaps you need to start studying business and marketing.

**Copy From : http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com/
The Auther : Yaro Starak

The 80/20 Of Search Engine Marketing - Part 1

The 80/20 Of Search Engine Marketing - Part 1

I joined Perry Marshall’s Renaissance Club to get my copy of the Definitive Guide To Google AdWords at the discounted rate, however I’ve started to realize there is a lot more value in it than just the AdWords eBook, which I guess makes sense since Perry wants people to stay subscribed to his club, so he must keep dishing out good stuff.

Just this morning I had a listen to one of the CDs you receive when you first join the club. This one was with Brad Fallon, the search engine optimization (SEO) expert. It formed the third part of the Jay Abraham’s Power To Profits seminar series that was completed earlier this year with Perry, Brad and Ken McCarthy. You get this CD, titled “The 8 Essential Things You REALLY Need to Know About Search Engine Optimization“, when you first join Perry’s club, along with the two other CDs that make up the seminar.

Who Is Brad Fallon?
You have probably noticed Brad Fallon’s name, his free e-course and SEO product, Stomping The Search Engines, pop up in the yellow boxes on this blog lately. This is because I know Brad is the real deal after reading his material and listening to his audio and I feel confident recommending him to you as one of a handful of SEO experts that I trust. Much of my understanding of SEO, in particular about sitemaps, has come from Brad. He also has the credentials to back up his products, having grown his business My Wedding Favours from brand new in January 2004 to about $700,000 per month operation 15 months later, mostly thanks to his position in the search engines (his site is number one for most of his key phrases, including “wedding favors“).

As a result of his success with his online store he went on to teach others how to get great results in natural search engine rankings. The audio CD I just listened to had some fantastic materials on the 80/20 of SEO activities we should all be doing. Brad’s skills have come from testing things on his websites and research - lots of real life testing to see what works and what doesn’t. Perhaps more importantly he knows what might be sound SEO practice but falls into the 80% of activities that only have 20% impact on your search engine performance, so shouldn’t be prioritized, and the 20% of activities that have the greatest impact that you need to devote most of your time to.
The 80/20 Rule For Search Engine Marketing

When I say 80/20, I mean the 20% of activities that account for the 80% of results you get. In this case it’s the 20% of things you should spend the most time regarding optimizing your website to get the 80% of results in search engines. Wasting time with the other 80% that produces 20% of the results is obviously not a good idea. If you are at all familiar with this principle, and you will be if you read my blog regularly since I reference to it a lot, then you know that the 80/20 equation is not a strict mathematical rule but definitely is something that every business should heed.

There are very few variables in any organisation that account for the majority of results. When I say variables I mean anything from people, marketing methods, customers, infrastructure, systems, suppliers, products, pricing points, seasons - anything and everything, can usually fit nicely into a 80/20 relationship. In this case I am discussing the 80/20 of search engine optimization techniques - these are the activities that you should spend the majority of your time on.

The Top 8 Search Engine Optimization Techniques
I’m going to list the top 8 techniques that Brad discussed in the seminar. Bear in mind that I’m only going to briefly review them since it wouldn’t be fair to Brad, Perry or any of the guys selling this stuff if I simply reposted all their materials. The fact is I couldn’t do it anyway, it would take a 50 page post to cover everything Brad discussed in the audio CD. If you are interested in having a listen to this CD I suggest you try Perry’s Renaissance Club.
Brad broke down his top 8 list into two categories - On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO. On-Page refers to things you can do to your website, Off-Page refers to the things that happen to your website from other sites (usually talking about incoming links from other sites). Let’s start with On-Page since you can action these items immediately and test results.
On-Page SEO

1. Title Tags
If you are at all familiar with SEO then I’m sure you would have seen this one coming. The fact is, and this has been proven time and time again, what you put in your title tags is the most influential variable to determine how your pages show up in natural (organic) search results.
Brad gave an excellent example of how he played with slight changes to the title tag of his Wedding Favors home page causing a dramatic change to his search engine result page (SERP) placement. He was sitting at number 2 on Google and was testing methods to get his site into number 1. With Google you can make a change to your title tags and within 24-36 hours you will see the results. His results were often quite dramatic, dropping to number 9, then completely gone, and finally finding the combination of title tag phrases that resulted in a number one ranking. He now owns the number one ranking in Google and Yahoo!.

During this process Brad recommended that you optimize for only two to three key phrases per page. The keyphrases that start the title tag (the ones on the left) have the most power, so should be selected very carefully. His example was interesting because it showed how his three key phrases for his homepage were adjusted to create a number one ranking for all three of his phrases (Wedding Favors - Wedding Party Favors - Bridal Shower Favors). It wasn’t very complicated, just moving words around and seeing what happened. Not rocket science, just practical testing. I have since added an entry to my ‘to-do’ list for BetterEdit.com to start testing title phrases again.

2. Keyword Density
Keyword density was listed the second most important on-page factor in the 80/20 of SEO activities. Keyword density is the percentage of times your keywords appear on a given page. There is no strict rule or percentage to aim for but Brad offered a very sound practice to determine what works - copy what your competitors do. Search for your key phrases, the phrases you want to show up for in the search engines and see what the current top result site’s keyword density is.

To do this Brad gave away this fantastic little gem of a resource - go to this website - http://www.ranks.nl/ and use it to test out the keyword density of your competitors pages and your pages. See how the number one site handles their keyword density - how often in title tags, heading tags, alt tags, body content and other areas of their site certain keyword phrases appear and then copy their techniques. Once you have your on-page keyword density equal or better than your competitors then all you have to do is worry about your off-page SEO to beat them (and test test test!).

3. Site Structure
Site structure covers the way your site is linked together internally. Brad didn’t talk too much about this and I know why - he’d need a full seminar just to explain all the different things you can work on! However I think there is one really important thing to mention regarding site structure and I know Brad would agree with me - it’s your sitemap - whether you have one to begin with and how you structure it. My suggestion is you do Brad’s free e-course that covers a lot on site structure and in particular sitemaps. It’s free so there is no reason why you shouldn’t do it.

4. Internal Links
You have to remember that Google treats each webpage as a single page, not as a part of a website, so when it comes to linking to your own pages it’s very important you take great care to optimize your keyword linking methods. The beauty of this technique is that you can control it, it’s an on-page technique that in lets you add backlinks to your own pages (What is a backlink and why should you care? Read this - The Backlink FAQ and this - Monitoring Your Backlinks - How Popular Is Your Website?).

The two most important things to consider is how you anchor your internal links (what phrases you use to link) and that you take advantage of all the opportunities to link your pages together. Make use of a footer by linking to all your most important pages using the appropriate anchor text keyword phrase (especially your sitemap) and make sure your navigation structure links with keywords, not just blanket statements like “click here”.

Two words of warning with this - don’t forget about usability and don’t over optimize. Brad mentioned that Google recently added technology to their algorithms that penalizes sites that appear to be over optimizing. This is usually indicated by too much use of a particular keyphrase, for example always using the exact same word or phrase to link to one page in your site and all incoming links from other sites are also use the same phrase. To avoid the penalty just mix up your phrases a bit and, leading to the other warning to watch out for - usability -keep it human, use phrases that humans will understand. Afterall your goal with all this SEO is to get humans to your site and there is no point if they can’t figure out how to navigate to what they want because your linking text is all the same or poorly labeled.

Off-Page Search Engine Optimization in Part 2
That’s it for the on-page SEO tips. In part two of this series I’ll go through the final 4 tips Brad Fallon mentioned regarding off-page SEO and then you will have a complete picture of the top 8 most important search engine optimization factors. Part two will be posted in the next couple of days.

Part 2 is now available - The 80/20 Of Search Engine Marketing - Part 2


**Copy From : http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com/
The Auther : Yaro Starak

How I Make Money Online Part 4 - Blogging

How I Make Money Online Part 4 - Blogging

Back in August 2005 I wrote a three part series of blog posts about how I have made money online. This was one of my first pillar article series and forms one of the foundation content pillars that this blog was built on (my business timeline and typical day in my life articles were other foundation pieces I wrote in 2005, during this blog’s early days). These article types are concepts that are crucial to a blog’s growth during the first few months and are part of the methodology I teach in Blog Traffic School (and yes, the course is still coming, the mentoring program will be released first though).
I thought it was about time I updated my how I make money online series since I now make a significant proportion of my income from blogging. I was asked in my last post were I revealed that I made $6549.52 from blogging in March to break down specifically how I did it, so in this post I will explain the particulars for you.

How I Make Money Blogging - Video Explanation
I’ve explained how I monetize this blog in a 23 minute screencast video. It’s a 60MB video or 10MB audio only download, so I recommend this only for my broadband readers. If you have problems with the video I suggest you wait for it to download completely rather than watch it streaming.

Click the graphic below to open the video in a new window.

If you like the video and want to see more screencast presentations like this, stay tuned for my blog mentoring program as I will be using screencasts throughout the program.
March 2007 Income Breakdown
I maintain a monthly income spreadsheet, which lists revenues generated from my blogs and websites. Here is a snapshot from March, minus some private data that is not appropriate for release to the public.
As you can see, the income comes from Text-Link-Ads.com, ReviewMe.com, private text link campaigns, private banner campaigns, affiliate sales and a sprinkling of AdSense.
AdSense Income

The AdSense income of $875.46 does not come from my blogs. This money is generated from a network of mini bike site forum communities, which I purchased late last year and manage with a business partner, Robert Kingston. The sites were purchased using money I generated from blogging and my Internet business, which is one way I reinvest my profits and diversify my income streams. We plan to add blogs to the bike sites later in the year.

Buying and selling websites is a completely different topic, one I have discussed previously on this blog (see How To Buy A Website And Flip It For Profit). I will discuss what is going on with this project in a future post.

Text Link Brokers and ReviewMe
Text-Link-Ads, as many bloggers know, is a great service, especially when your blog is well established. My inventory is always sold out despite the fact that I have raised the price recently (I emailed Text-Link-Ads and asked them to increase the price). In March I made $560.02 from Text-Link-Ads. I also make on average around $75-$125 per month in affiliate referrals to the text-link-ads service ($25 per sign-up). In March the affiliate income was $75.
I made $176.37 from another text link brokering service, LinkWorth. The links appear on the mini bike forums, so this income does not come directly from this blog.

ReviewMe.com charges $250 per review on this blog and the other blog I operate, SmallBusinessBranding.com. I receive 50% of the income, so $125 per review. I don’t take every review offered, only the ones that I feel capable of writing something about of value to my readers and I have time to research and produce. I average about three reviews per month across the two blogs and in March the income was $375.

Direct Advertising Sales
I make a large chunk of my monthly income from selling banners and text links directly to sponsors. In March I earned $750 for direct sales of text links on both blogs. Banner revenue was $300, however the main banner sponsor, GetResponse, is booked in for six months so I did not realize that income this month and received the money as a large payment at the end of last year.

Affiliate Income
Affiliate income is the most significant source of revenue I have for my blogs. In March I generated $3354.87 in affiliate commissions. This was larger than usual because a few big once off payments came through. Generally though because affiliate programs pay out erratically, I can count on around $1000 - $3000 in affiliate commissions each month.
Some affiliate income is recursive, which means the money comes in from sales I may have referred months or years ago because I referred people to subscription sites. Some of the continuity affiliate programs I promote include:

AWeber
GetResponse
1shoppingcart/MarketersChoice
Rich Schefren Coaching Program
Russel Brunson’s Dot Com Secrets
Perry Marshall’s Renaissance Club

There’s one cheque I receive for $30 that I have no idea what it’s for. It just says “affiliate center” on it and so far it’s come through twice. If you have seen The Secret you know about the guy who intents cheques to come to him in the mail, and how he goes on to explain that they just started coming. Originally I was like “yeah, sure, random cheques in the mail hey” but now I know what he’s talking about :-).

You will note that every affiliate program listed above closely relates to the topic of this blog, I currently use or used previously and can blog about with some authority. They are all relevant, which is key in successful affiliate marketing.

Outside of the recursive programs, I also affiliate sell the following products:
Butterfly Marketing - Mike Filsaime
Butterfly Marketing Manuscript - Mike Filsaime
Product Launch Formula - Jeff Walker
SEOBook - Aaron Wall
Definitive Guide To Google AdWords - Perry Marshall

Again, I own every product listed above and have either written reviews about them or mentioned them in blog posts. I know these products, they have directly or indirectly made me money, I can write about them with an honest opinion and some of the readers of this blog benefit from buying them too because they are in a similar situation to me.

When they were still available, I made sales of Stompernet and Pipeline Profits (a large chunk of March’s affiliate revenues came from Pipeline Profit commissions). Other significant Internet product launches contribute to my affiliate income as well.

There are some other products and services I promote that are not listed above, including conferences and seminars, ebooks and courses. Whenever I feel I can adequately review something, it’s relevant to an article I’m producing or something I am personally involved with, I will promote with my affiliate link.

Blog Monetization Strategies
As you can see, to make money from blogging you can dip into many different income streams. That’s a good thing because you diversify and reduce your risk. If one income source tanks in a month you don’t suddenly have no money coming in. The entire Internet would have to be down for your money to dry up completely.

The one downside is that you need to maintain different advertising systems, but as is the case with my situation, I focus on building recursive and low maintenance options and reduce my dependence on any income stream that requires significant ongoing labor. I could just use AdSense across all my sites but I’d probably earn about 10% of what I currently make, so it pays to take some time testing different money making techniques.

Of course it’s a good idea to keep blogging every month, that is a labor activity, but chances are you enjoy it (as I do) if you are in the blogging game to begin with. By testing different monetization methods I’ve been able to come up with methods that suit my blogging style and work well enough that I can earn a full time income working part time blogging.

Thanking Sponsors

Before I end this article I want to send some thanks to the sponsors of this blog since they are responsible for a significant proportion of the financial rewards I receive from blogging. In no particular order, a big shout out and thank you to:

WebBizIdeas
GoBigNetwork
GetResponse
Venture Capital Update
PreCharge
Free Business Cards
WordPress Tutorials
Project Management
Business Coaching
Blog Design
Internet Marketing With Gobala Krishnan
Online Marketing
Cash Advances
Lead Generation
Audio Conferencing

Also thanks to all the past sponsors of my blogs. If you want to be like these sponsors please check out the advertising page.

That’s it for how I make money blogging. Bear in mind I only cover a small sampling of the entire world of blog monetization methods. There are MANY more ways you can make money and it’s important that you keep testing different methods AT THE SAME TIME as you focus on producing great content. Through testing you can make more money, but I recommend you avoid investing too much energy in monetization as you can become too focused on the dollar and your own ego, which is detrimental to your blog’s health (and can be to your own health too!). Balance is key here people!


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The Auther : Yaro Starak

How I Have Made Money Online - Part 3 - Online Services and Web Hosting

How I Have Made Money Online - Part 3 - Online Services and Web Hosting

In this the installment of my series on how I have made money online I take a look at running my most successful web business, BetterEdit.com, and one of the most popular online business, web site hosting. If you missed the other parts of this series you can read them by following these links:

How I Have Made Money Online - Part 1 - eBay, Garage Sales and Card Trading
How I Have Made Money Online - Part 2 - Online Stores and Advertising
How I Make Money Online Part 4 - Blogging

A Services Web Based Business
That title sounds a bit vague but BetterEdit.com is an example of a services web based business. I’ve talked about BetterEdit.com a lot on this blog and through it and MTGParadise.com I’ve gained most of my Internet business skills.

BetterEdit provides editing and proofreading services to students and business, although presently we are moving towards focusing on only the student niche. BetterEdit is a perfect case study in creating and operating a profitable web based business. It’s too complex to discuss in detail in this article but no doubt if you subscribe to this blog and go through the archives you can get a good feel for how exactly I operate BetterEdit and have experimented with marketing to keep it growing.

A service based business often starts with the owner providing the service. I didn’t go this way although every now and then early on I was tempted since the margins are obviously a lot better when you complete the work yourself. Although I would have been doing my business a dis-service if I did do the editing since I’m not nearly good enough. I’m adequate, but compared to our current staff, not great. Consequently very shortly after starting the business I had a contract editor working for me. This format actually works great because the editor only needs to focus on what he or she does best, editing, and I can focus on client attraction and business management, certainly areas I prefer to work in.

The formula is really quite simple - find a need and satisfy it at a profit. Sure there are a lot of variables to control but when it comes down to it I found a need, hired the best people to satisfy that need and tested which marketing methods work best to find the target audience with that need. The rest is history, and ahh, the present too.

Earnings: I advertise that I make $2000 - $8000 per month from Internet business. It’s true. However note that is not gross profit, that is revenue. I have expenses and I choose to invest most of that money in growth so I don’t pocket the money myself at this stage. I can honestly say that I do generate at least $2000 in sales per month with the highest month so far peaking at just over $11000 (there is a Goods and Services Tax component, 10% to be exact). Things are growing and I’m starting to generate income from other sources, but that’s all the info you are going to get out of me for the moment.

Web Hosting
A quick (…or not so quick) note about web hosting. What an industry hosting is! Every kid is signing up to start a web hosting business, spending the $10 per month required for a reseller account and then promoting the crap out of their template designed hosting site. I was one of those kids not too many years ago.

Hosting is by far the most saturated industry online and yet I still wholeheartedly endorse anyone starting a web hosting business. Why you ask? Because you can niche your market locally and work your network contacts to get new clients. If you play your cards right and cull the not profitable pain-in-the-ass clients you have a nice income source. Most people build a website and let it sit there and for that you can collect a $50-$200 a year or more per client. Multiply that by 100 and you have a pretty good living. Plus you can market things like search engine optimisation, online marketing, domain names, PPC advertising (AdWords and Overture) and a whole host of additional services (pun not intended).

Remember too that despite the web hosting business being saturated the demand for websites is not going to stop. The Net is becoming one of the most important commerce and marketing tools around and more and more people are going to want to be a part of it. If you can service your 10 friends-of-friends word of mouth should keep you growing.

Ironically though I don’t think web hosting is a good business to market online unless you are the only player in your area. Yes nicheing your market can work, especially geographically or industry based (Brisbane’s best band hosting service for example if you are well entrenched in the music scene with contacts), but the thought of being another webhost in a sea of millions is not a prospect I liked and hence I stopped operating my business. I also hated that every client wanted a web site built for them too and that was certainly not a service I wanted to get into. However if you are a web designer then web hosting is definitely a service you should be offering for some nice recursive income.

To be successful at web hosting you must become that “reliable web hosting guy/girl” in your area that everyone refers to. Don’t expect to get random clients signing up online, that’s not an easy strategy to work since another million copycats are out there doing the same. I’m not saying it’s not possible, but you have your work cut out for you if online visitors can’t distinguish your hosting service from your competitors.

I still have a few clients from my web hosting days. Occasionally I send out an invoice and collect my cheque and every now and then I get a support email with a password request or similar. Web hosting is a great business if you love the web and love dealing with customers (which I think there are maybe like 5 people in the world that do). If you can handle the support and have the tech skills to keep things running then web hosting is a good first choice Internet business or part time occupation for some extra income. Heck I’m starting to convince myself now…

Earnings: Nowadays I bring in about $1000 per year from the handful of clients I still have but they are slowly leaving me. All of them came from friends or family referrals. A few years ago I had about 10 clients paying between $50-$250 per year and I was at one point planning on growing that to 50 clients as my main business. I stopped because I got sick of building websites and doing server migrations. If you have ever had to move 10 domains from one server to the a new one you know what a nightmare it is. I enjoyed other web projects more so I stopped proactively marketing myself as a web host and yet I still get one or two new $50/year clients coming in every now and then.

*****
That concludes my roundup of how I have made money on the Internet. I’m still experimenting now with other methods and no doubt I will start another crazy business website that may or may not go anywhere (writing articles like this always gets the idea juices flowing). Note that in every method mentioned in this article series where I have made significant money it’s been because of a lot of persistent, consistent work and I’ve been lucky starting the right project at the right time. The trick is to keep trying ideas you believe in by taking action and building something.

You can read the other parts of this series here -

How I Have Made Money Online - Part 1 - eBay, Garage Sales and Card Trading
How I Have Made Money Online - Part 2 - Online Stores and Advertising
How I Make Money Online Part 4 - Blogging

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How I Have Made Money Online - Part 2 - Online Stores and Advertising

How I Have Made Money Online - Part 2 - Online Stores and Advertising

Continuing the three part series on how I have made money online today I look at operating an online shop and using advertising on a hobby website to generate an income. If you missed the first part of this series you can read it here - How I Have Made Money Online - Part 1 - eBay, Garage Sales and Card Trading

Online Store
My first online store was also focused on Magic: The Gathering and run through my Magic site. I had a captive targeted audience so it made sense to start a Magic store. I stocked my shop with product from my own collection but also started to buy cards from other sources such as players quitting the game and by buying in bulk from trading forums. I contacted wholesalers and started to sell new product which is called “sealed” product, which has not been opened yet and contains a random assortment of cards.

I never had a proper online shopping cart and instead maintained text lists on webpages. It was a hard slog maintaining the store and shipping products which had me making near-daily trips to the post office. Running the card store was my first taste of real online business — taking regular orders online including processing credit cards, buying at wholesale and selling at retail, customer support — and all the other functions that an owner-operator of a small Internet business must go through.

You can read more about my time running MTGParadise Mail Order and the events that eventually lead to its shut down in my business timeline - Part 2.
Earnings: My card store earnings were pretty good however I did not keep proper records. I considered it a hobby and the reality was that I never did take the business seriously. Unfortunately the margins for Magic product were pathetic and the labour certainly did not justify the rewards. I knew I would never make substantial income and I was already working a lot of hours to make marginal profit. The truth was I only made as much as I did because I was slowly selling my personal collection and I was “paid” in new product for my work as a reporter for Magic tournaments. If I did not have this “free” inventory my profit margins from wholesale product would not have justified running a store. Regardless of this I probably managed to sell about $200-$1000 per month in card sales, although my memory is hazy and I was also earning advertising revenue at the time.

Advertising on Websites
One of the most popular articles I have written is How to Make Money from Your Website Using Advertising. It’s popular because it’s practical and I talk about the exact steps I went through to generate a steady income from advertisements placed on one of my websites.
Advertising income is a great way to make money on the web. Finding advertisers and generating income is not the hard part of this strategy, it’s establishing a website with enough traffic to justify advertisers paying you that is difficult. I go into more detailed numbers in the above article but basically once you have a site that has a consistent 500+ unique visitors coming everyday you have the groundwork for a steady income from advertising. The best thing is that if your site is popular because it has a great community it is hard for you to lose that value. I was lucky enough to establish a geographically niched community focused on trading a commodity, Magic cards, which is a perfect recipe for a lively community and consequently an income from advertisers willing to pay to attract that audience.

If you build a popular site that doesn’t require much maintenance then advertising income can be quite passive. If you take this blog as an example I have to create new content on a regular basis to retain a readership and if I stopped updating for a long enough period of time this site would lose its popularity and consequently any income I might be making from advertising. Of course there are many ways around this which I won’t go into now but any smart business person will be thinking passive income as a long term strategy because one day they will tire of writing new content or performing whatever function they currently do to create value in their site.

My old Magic site is a good example of a formula to create almost passive income. The heart of the site was a community forum and in fact the forum received more direct hits than the actual index of the website. The forum was managed by a collection of volunteer moderators who chose to perform their function for free because they received some sort of intrinsic value - an increase in community status (moderators are “staff” and therefore in a leadership/power role within the community). New content was generated by the audience for free because they enjoyed writing about the game they played and talking about their achievements publicly. Free content and free forum maintenance left only site updates as my job, which was significant enough but took about an hour a day to maintain the status quo.

Earnings: When I first started off I brought in $30 per month from my first advertiser. I slowly added more and over about a 2 year period I generated a consistent $300 - $1000 per month through banner and email newsletter sponsorship.

*****
You can read the other parts of this series here -
How I Have Made Money Online - Part 1 - eBay, Garage Sales and Card Trading
How I Have Made Money Online - Part 3 - Online Services and Web Hosting
How I Make Money Online Part 4 - Blogging


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