Novel Ideas for Making Money Online

Make Money Using Humor

Humor can get you a lot of traffic and make money for you in the process. Check out the "Buy My Stupid Ebook" site below for a great example of how to create an Adsense site dressed up as a very funny one page sales letter.


Click Here to see the entire site.

Make Money Using Viral Applets

Dane Carlson from Business Opportunities Weblog created this widget (see below) using Technorati's API. Carlson's widget will figure out your sites worth by using the same ratio of dollars per links on technorati that AOL/Time Warner used to purchase WeblogsInc. Tristan Louis ran some data and came up with a number value for each link you have pointing to your site. Depending on whether Aol paid Weblogs Inc $25 million, $30 million or $40 million (real price not released but assumed to be in this range.) then each link to your site would be worth $564.64 (25m), $677.57 (30m) or $903.42 (40m). I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for someone to come along and offer you this kind of money but it does give the blogospere a yardstick to work from.

You have probably seen the widget on lots of sites as it appeals to a lot of people - just how well do I stack up against others online?

From a viral marketing standpoint Carlson has a winner. By creating this widget he gets a lot of traffic from curiosity seekers and backlinks from all the sites who use the widget.





Generate Traffic by Creating a Free Tool

People love using tools online. If you can think of something that people would like to know hire a code monkey and offer the world a free tool. Internet marketers love comparing their sites with everybody else's sites. Who has more traffic? Who has the most backlinks? Who ranks better in the SERP's? Who has a higher PageRank? Where can I find a niche? You can finds tools to answer all these questions. If there is something you want to know but can't find a tool then have someone build it and offer it to the world to use for free. This is a great way to drive traffic.

I found Website Grader recently and it's a prime example of what I'm talking about.

Website Grader is a free seo tool that measures the marketing effectiveness of a website. It provides a score that incorporates things like website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. It also provides some basic advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective.

It's a pretty cool tool and gives you a lengthy report on how your site compares with others from a marketing point of view. You get a rank between 1-100 the higher number the better. How they arrive at the final number is not exactly clear but since I scored an 83 I'll let it slide. They did mention that my blog isn't sufficiently dummed down for most readers...

Readability Level : Advanced Degree (PhD)
This score measures the approximate level of education necessary to read and understand the web page content. In most cases, the content should be made to be simple so that a majority of the target audience can understand it.

This is a criticism? John Chow's blog has a readability level of a grade 5 student and this is just tickety boo according to them. Bastards!

Here is my score summary - if you don't understand it you probably don't have the required PhD.

Click to Enlarge

Here is the link again if you are interested in checking out your ranking.

Website Grader

Before I leave here is another site you should take a look at if you want some humorous ideas. Spanklin

Have a great weekend

Grizzly

The Easiest Way to Make Money with a Blog

After "How do I get Traffic?" the next most popular question I get is "What's the easiest way to make money using blogs?"

The answer is simple ... Google Adsense.

Most of you know this already and I don't mean to insult you but a lot of people don't really know how to make the most of Adsense and complain about making pennies a day.

I received an email the other day from a fellow blogger and internet marketer who basically asked for proof that I made over $8.00 a day from Adsense on this blog. (Update - As of March 2008, this blog is averaging $100 per day with Adsense)

Read his letter;

Hi Grizzly,

I read your "Common Blogging Mistakes" article and find it difficult to believe that you make as much adsense profit as you claim. My blog has twice the traffic and I am lucky to pull in $2 a day. It doesn't seem that snippets would cause Google to send me poorer ads, my posts have the same keywords as yours. I know some others who also target make money online ads and they are the same as me. Ilike your posts and agree with most things but have to disagree with this.

Sincerely C.M. (Name withheld by request)

He was referring to my use of single posts on my home page. I had stated that I get better adsense ads by using a single post rather than snippets. A single post is more targeted to a particular keyword as well as related long tail keywords and results in a higher quality score. Snippets are great for readability and style perhaps but they are dis-jointed when it comes to the Google Bot - too many unrelated keywords on one page and hence a lower quality score as far as Adsense goes.

Keep in mind I only suggest that you try this if your main goal is to make Adsense income. I completely agree that using snippets is a better system if you are building a large and loyal readership and it allows you to cover many topics giving more choices to your viewer.

I don't like showing screenshots as it is overdone and can certainly be faked but in this instance I will if for no other reason than I hate being accused of lying. He didn't use that term but same difference.

Click to Enlarge.

Keep in mind that I don't consider this an Adsense site as people actually read stuff on here - well occasionally. My niche sites are far more optimized for Adsense in the sense that I more or less encourage the reader to click on the ads or affiliate links by giving such general info that they don't find what they are looking for. Here I make a feeble attempt at actually giving people what they want... or at least think I do. If I am inept at least it's not on purpose.

I have over 200 niche sites now and the vast majority don't make this kind of income from Adsense but 25 of them are in this ballpark. This adds up each month and is how I earn a decent buck online. Don't be discouraged when starting out as it will take you some time to build up your blogs - usually 6 months before you start to see some real results but in time you will find you have a nice little business going. Patience is the keyword here.

I have recently changed my look up top as the previous layout was more in tune to attaining Adsense clicks. Old habits die hard - make the reader search for real content while making ads and affiliate links easy to find. My content is now up top on this blog and two things have happened; my Adsense revenue has dropped and my page views have increased. Not surprising as more people are sticking around and reading more posts.

I won't go into more detail on Adsense as I have covered the topic several times elsewhere on here. I just wanted to clarify a few things to any doubters out there.

Simple Lead Generation Marketing

There are other easy ways to make income using your blog - notably getting paid for leads. This is different than affiliate sales in that your referral doesn't have to buy anything - just sign up to a mailing list or a free report. Finding programs that are reputable and that will actually pay you can be tough but I have found one that is quite profitable considering I don't do a thing other than post a link on this blog. I have talked about Project Payday before - it's a legitimate program that shows you how to make money with freebie sites (IFW's). (note; Americans and Canadians Only) I personaly don't care for it as it is time consuming and a little too much like work but it does make money. I like their affiliate program though and recommend it to others as an easy way to make a few bucks by simply referring leads to the site.

Here is a screen shot of my recent commissions from Project Payday.

Click To Enlarge.

As you can see it has a 26% conversion rate which is pretty high - 1 out of every 4 people will sign up. In case you are wondering I have been paid twice already directly to my Paypal account. Sign up, get your link and post a blurb on your site.
That's about as simple as it gets. ( March 2008 - Update, $2400 so far)

On a final note I received an email from Russell Brunson recently. He is looking to hire a webdesigner. See below. Just thought I would post it as some of you may be interested.

Hey Grizzly

Are you or someone you know a webdesigner? We are looking to hire
a webdesigner at DotComSecrets.com.

You need to have html and css skills. Either know SEO, or have the
desire to learn it from us.

You MUST be willing to relocate to Boise Idaho.

This job is an awesome opportunity to learn internet marketing from
some of the best in the world. Work with me and my staff, and make
a lot of money doing it.

If you qualify, and could relocate to Boise, please send me an
email with your resume, and samples of your work to:

jobs@dotcomsecrets.com

Thanks
Russell Brunson

2404 Bank Dr. Suite 101 Boise, Idaho 83705

Till next time,

Grizzly

Common Blogging Mistakes - Part 2

I didn't finish my rambling yesterday as I was interrupted by a golf game so I thought I would pick up my train of thought today. I've received a number of emails since yesterday asking about the effects changing a blog's title and/or layout would have on existing traffic. This is a good question and it has several possible answers.

I want to use one blog in particular as an example and I hope Ester won't mind. She has a wonderful daily diary style blog called "My Daily Thoughts" and she has asked if she should change the title to "My Days in my Mind" which is her URL title.

The first thing I should mention is that you will certainly see a drop in traffic whenever you change your blog title. This is assuming that you were receiving hits from people searching for your original title. In Ester's case if people were typing in "My Daily Thoughts" in the search engines to find her then changing her title will have a negative effect. I am only guessing however that she probably doesn't get a lot of traffic - I could be wrong though - from people searching for those keywords.

Blog's like Ester's are a challenge to optimize for traffic. They are a pleasure to read when one finds them but are not the sort of thing that people actively search for on the search engines. Diary style journals typically have wide ranging subject matter and attract a readership based on the author's writing style and likability factor rather than a particular subject matter. Search Engine Optimization is based almost exclusively on subject matter and not aesthetics. Now having said that the search engines will index Ester's blog for lots and lots of terms stemming from her post titles and this, I think is where the traffic will come from. Changing her Blog title at this point is not likely to effect her greatly but I should add that changing it to "My Days in my Mind" is not going to benefit her in the long run anymore than her original title from an SEO perspective. The new title is not likely to be searched for anymore than the original.

If I was to optimize her blog for her I would probably zero in on the Personal development niche and use a title like "My Daily Thoughts - A Road to Personal Development" or "My Daily Thoughts in Search of Self-Fulfillment". The point is to include relevant keywords that are searched for in the search engines. This will eventually bring in relevant traffic that she doesn't get presently and it will not negate any traffic she is currently receiving as her original keywords are still being used.

Let me use my blog as an example of how I target keywords using my blog title.
When I started this blog I had a goal in mind - I wanted to take a completely free service such as Blogger and use a free hosting platform (blogspot.com) and see if it was possible to attain page 1 ranking for a highly competitive keyword - "Make Money Online". To do this I had to identify my intended audience and then decide on my best course of action.

I chose to target internet marketing beginners as I believe they are terribly under served online except as potential customers. There are very few quality sites that provide real step by step instructions for beginners using blogs in the field of internet marketing. Even fewer that provide this information for free. I chose to use a free service and host not because this is the best method but because I wanted to show beginners that they can make money online without spending a single dime. This blog has not cost me a single penny so far and it has made me several thousands of dollars over the past 9 months - the majority of it acquired with adsense.

That was the goal I set out to achieve and while I haven't made page 1 yet I am making steady progress. This morning I ranked number 39 out of 200,000,000 sites indexed for "Make Money Online". Number 16 out of 140,000,000 for "How to Make Money Online". These are from Google.ca (Canada) and my ranking will be a page or two lower on Google.com (USA). A side note: you will rank differently on Google depending on which country the search is instigated in.

Now when I started this blog I chose to use "Make Money for Beginners" as my blog title and managed to get these terms for my URL as well. I didn't bother targeting "Make Money Online" at first as this would have been over reaching. When you start out pick keywords that can be attained in a short period of time. By attained I mean ranking on page 1 of the SERP's. I took over top spot for "Make Money for Beginners" in just over a month after start up. This was relatively easy as there are only 2.5 million competing sites for this term. Are there a lot of searches for this term... not really, maybe 10 - 20 per week but it was a good starting point.

The term allowed me to add more keywords as I gained PR and something I call Google Bot Attraction. What this is I can't explain aside from saying that if the Google Bot was human it likes some sites more than others and tends to crawl favorite sites a lot more than less favored sites. Page rank has some effect on this but there has to be other factors as well based on my experience. If I had to guess I suspect quality content is one such factor. This PR2 blog gets crawled more than several PR4 websites I have and my posts usually draw traffic from Google within an hour after posting. Yesterday's post was indexed about 15 minutes after I posted it. For whatever reason the Google bot likes this blog and zooms in and out frequently.

After three months I noticed that I was getting crawled frequently and I changed my Blog title to "Make Money Online for Beginners". The effect was quite rapid. Within a few days I found that I went from page 3 for the term all the way to top spot on page 1 on Google. I also held onto top spot for the previous term "Make Money for Beginners". Pretty cool I thought. I recently added the words "How to" to my title and sure enough I got top spot the following day for "How to Make Money Online for Beginners" as well. Now I can't say that I get a ton of traffic for these exact terms as most people don't add "for Beginners" to the query. However by adding the "Online" and "How to" terms I noticed that my blog moved up drastically in the SERP's for the terms "How to Make Money Online" and "Make Money Online" which are both found in my Title. Although I haven't made page 1 yet I am seeing 20 - 30 visitors a day now for my primary keyword "Make Money Online" and I can only guess what kind of traffic page 1 will bring.

The point of all this is to plan things out in an achievable fashion when starting your blog. Pick your primary keyword and then use "long tail" keywords that compliment your primary keyword as a starting point. As more an more of your long tails' get indexed and achieve high ranking they boost your primary keyword ranking in the process and more importantly bring in traffic for secondary keywords related to your niche. If you only concentrate on your primary keyword you will spend a long time without any traffic at all and find it hard to ever see high rankings. Google wants to see a consistent and sustained pattern of keyword relevancy regarding your subject matter before it will reward you with high rankings.

In the past spamblogs would simply pick a popular keyword like "Lemon Laws" and then proceed to post thousands of pages of drivel using the term "Lemon Laws" over and over again in order to out "Lemon Law" the competition. This fooled Google for a time but now the algorithm wants to know why there aren't other relevant terms for the main subject in the posts. You have to include lots of relevant long tail keywords in your content now or you will be flagged and ignored.

The best way to bolster your Blog title and hence your primary keyword is the often overlooked "blog description" area. With websites this is contained in the Meta Tags and it is now ignored by Google and a few other search engines thanks to keyword stuffing abusers. It is not ignored on blogspot blogs however and is a very powerful aid for getting your secondary keywords ranked.

This is the wording used to describe your blog located right below your Blog Title. I change mine all the time when I want Google to rank me higher for recent popular searches. My Blog Title tells Google that in general this blog is about how to make money online. My description tells Google the specifics of how this is done. When I find popular subjects like "Project Payday" or "Yahoo Answers" I quickly do a little research, write a few posts and then change my description to let Google know that I cover these popular subjects and more importantly I let searchers know it too as my description is displayed in the SERP's. This works like a charm and gets me ranked well for just about any topic I choose. A word of caution though. Each time you make a change there is a delay of a few days to maybe a week that you will see a drop off in traffic as Google drops your rankings for previous terms that you have removed from your description. It usually takes a good week before your new terms are indexed and start drawing traffic.

Ok, I've rambled on enough but before I stop I just want to make a few comments on Google Page Rank and Alexa's traffic stats.

The Page Rank update is long overdue and is frequently discussed online these days. Who knows why it has been so long delayed but quite frankly it is a historical number and is not important save for a few programs like payperpost and such that require a certain page rank before accepting you in. CPA programs are the most notable ones for requiring PR before allowing you to collect leads for them. Advertisers place a lot of stock in it but they really should look at traffic instead. For most people the PR you see is quite useless. It simply shows the PR of a page the last time it was updated but it does not tell you the current PR. My PR is 2 but that was what Google deemed it almost 6 months ago. My current PR is unknown and this is the problem with pagerank in the first place. It is not fluid but static - showing only what you were and not what you are. Don't get hung up on that little green bar.

Alexa is one of the crappiest things to have invaded the online world in my opinion. People live and breathe over it and most don't understand that it is so inaccurate as to traffic that it should be ignored. The numbers it spits out are always contrary to your own traffic stats and this is for a number of reasons; it only gathers data from surfers who have the alexa toolbar installed on their browsers. 99% of all internet surfers don't have this toolbar and have never heard of Alexa. Only techies and internet marketers use it. If you have a site that attracts techies or IM'ers then you probably have a decent Alexa ranking but it still won't reflect your true numbers. If your site is about shoes then you won't have much of a ranking at all. My best niche site has over a thousand visits a day and my alexa rank is 2,000,000 and change. This blog gets about 300 - 400 visitors a day and it ranks 180,000 give or take. Go figure. While you are ignoring the little green Google bar you can just as easily ignore the little blue Alexa bar as well.

Please don't ignore me though...

Cheers

Grizzly