Mike's Quarter - technology and cool gadgets blog » Making Money Online

2010 – new road, new challenges?

Mike — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 20:27:39 +0000

Crossroads

Another year has passed and we’re now in 2010. Here comes the part where i wish you all the best, but I’ll be short, you probably don’t have time for this. Be careful about one thing though, health is your most important asset, so don’t jeopardize it. All the other things can be achieved one way or another, if healthy.

2009 has been a good year. Personally not so much, but professionally it was perhaps the best in my life: i finished college, gained lots of experience in my field of expertise and really opened my eyes on what i want to do in the near future (at least). I can only hope 2010 will be even better. Because i believe there’s time for me to go on another path.

I was looking on the similar post I made last year, about the plans and thoughts for 2009. It was pretty obvious i didn’t have a precise target. Hopefully, that changed. I’ve given a lot of thought lately, i still have to work on details, but i believe there’s time for a change, a new challenge. I won’t get into details right now, the good part is that i have quite a lot of options and i could work on some very interesting projects this year, mainly on .com . And that’s always important, especially these days.

However,in order to succeed, i have to work on a couple of things:
- first, my people skills. I’m trying my best to study human behavior and improve my communication skills. Why? Because such skills are a must as a human being and also a must in my line of work: knowing exactly what people need in given situations is the only way to offer them the required thing and make them convert (convert may sound harsh, it’s more like helping them feel better via the means you can provide) ;
- then, my ability to focus. I talked about it in a previous post, and i still believe this is a key ingredient in order to succeed ;
- also, my ability to accept that many people are better than me in many domains and the only way to go further is by growing a team where anyone knows what has to be done, and can do it .

Last but not least, i have to set up goals. Tangible goals that can be attained and do my best in reaching them. Both professionally and personally. And i would advice you to do the same. It’s easier to see your progress in life if you can set quantifiable and traceable targets, don’t you think?

That’s about it. I’m curios on what your plans and expectations for 2010 are. Did you set your goals, or will you just go with the flow?

Photo source: here

Do you have a plan?

Mike — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 21:00:00 +0000

I haven’t been very active on this particular blog lately. I haven’t because I’ve been busy, busy building sites, projects and making money. And that’s because I realized some things in the last months, things i already knew somehow but i chose to ignore:

You won’t make any money of you spend your time reading blogs, forums, articles, books, etc.
You won’t make any money by simply blogging, without a purpose
You won’t make any money by being active on twitter, facebook, stumbleupon and other similar websites
You won’t make any money if you don’t have a plan

hard work is the most important ingredient

And I for one have one, thus I’m currently focusing most of my spare time (because i also have a 9 to 5 job, but hopefully not for long) on different sites and projects. The plan is simple: find a niche, write the proper content, get the visitors from search engines (luckily for me, that’s what i do best ), offer them products they would need and love to buy. And then copy this tactic again and again and again. Does it work? Definitely!

I’m not saying you don’t have to read stuff, especially if you’re a beginner. However, as a friend of mine told me a couple of years ago, everyone can learn the theory, but only practice can make the difference.

So, my advice is pretty simple. Get to work. If you want to know how, what Ben, Court or Griz have to say would really help (these are blogs I recommend, because they offer real useful ideas and practices, and not the ordinary crap you’ll get on 90%+of the blogs available online). Just remember to put the things you’ll learn there in practice !

Focus and better organize your time

Mike — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 10:09:56 +0000

This post addresses some of the problems every one will face sooner or later when trying to make money online. I for one try to get pass them and i often fail, but from now one I’m going to try a lot harder because all these are time eating non-efficient habits that hurt our activity a lot.

It’s very important to focus and try to organize your time when working online. You should make yourself a schedule, a daily schedule, where you should write the things you plan doing that particular day. Try to pick realistic time plans for those things and live an extra error margin, just not too big.

You’ll understand more from the example: let’s say you plan to set up a new site today on a niche you already studied. You have to buy a domain, set up a CMS (WordPress rules here), add a theme and the plugins, write at least 5 posts on previous researched keywords and also write another 3 to 5 posts for directory submissions (like ezine or goarticles) . All these should not take you more than half a day:

30 minutes to find the domain and register it
another 30 minutes to install WordPress + themes +plugins (i advice you to have a premade folder with all the things needed so you just copy that one and start the other things).
1 hour for setting the blog and making minor modification on the theme and plugins (you’d actually require a lot less then this) .
3 hours for writing the content – you should write informative 500+ words posts that provide value for your readers. 3 hours means ~40 minutes per article, but if you’re familiar with the topic you will be able to write those a lot faster.
1.5 hours to rewrite the previous articles so they will be unique for the submissions.
All these total around 6 hours, so there’s enough time left in your day for other things also. I for one do this a lot faster, as i can set up everything in just 3-4 hours if i know the niche.

It’s important that during all this time you focus on the job and give up distractions like:

messaging programs, twitter, etc (especially if you use popups these will cut down productivity a lot as you will always get distracted by some things your friends say to you via these programs)
socializing programs (facebook, myspace, hi5) – these are the biggest time consuming aps online and they won’t pay the bills (except some cases, but that’s another story)
e-mails (if possible, turn your outlook off when working and only check it once every couple of hours)
don’t and i repeat DON’T check your stats and your earnings more than once a DAY . I would even advice you not to check them more than once a week for the new sites. Just make a strategy for your content and link building activities and stick to it. You should start checking stats only when you already have traffic in order to see if you can optimize some posts to rank better for some particular keywords (so only a couple fo moths or so).

There would be many things to add here. The important part to remember is that everyone should make their own schedule but should try to divide time between work and other kind of activities as best as possible. When it’s time to work, we work as hard as we can, when it’s time to have fun we enjoy it as much as possible and so on. Am i right or what? I’m looking for your feedback in this matter .

Online Store CMS – episode 2

Mike — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 09:49:57 +0000

After the previous post about an online CMS store, i took some time to search for the best existing software i could use. Here are the best 3 i’ve found, not necessarily in the posted order, with the pros and the cons. And you can read the conclusions at the end.

Joomla + Virtuemart (link)

Joomla has gone a lot better since the last time i wanted to use it, in 2006. This combination allows you to make something more than just a store, as with the help of the various components developed by 3rd parties, you can put together a site with almost everything you want: forum, news section, galleries, community, shop, etc. The code is a lot cleaner, there are fewer bugs, it is a little easier to customize (although you still need to get familiar with its specific coding) and you can find great premium themes for a fee from here or here.

Pros:

decent code, not so hard to customize
cheap (the backbone is free, but some of the good components and plugins are not)
has an affiliate component
you can find great themes for it
tons of components for almost everything you need

Cons

there still are a couple of bugs
making the site bullet-proof from the SEO point of view requires hard coding
does not have a multiple shops solution like the one i want (there are some tries, but i can’t seem to make them work as needed)

Magento Commerce (link)

Magento seems to be the thing right now. It’s a pretty new eCommerce dedicated solution with great looks, functionality and standard compliant code. But unfortunatelly, being new makes it lack some critical features i need.

Pros

new solution with an emerging community
clean code, nice template system that allows you to fully customize you front-end
lots of useful features, like multi-shops and filters for your products
free and Open Source

Cons

Severe duplicate problem. Developers say they will look into it, but they don’t say when
lack of working critical modules: content integration, affiliates, multiple shops with multiple owners, etc
because the platform it’s new, if you need specific plugins doing specific things, you will have to develop them yourself. Thus, Advanced PHP+SQL knowledge is required
few quality themes available, but you can still make your own theme pretty easy

x-Cart (link)

xCart is the professional eCommerce solution that comes with everything i need. From the short time i spent with their demo, they seem to have all the modules required, thus allowing me to set up the shop i want. But…

Pros

it’s simple: has everything i need

Cons

it’s pricey. A full solution will set me up around $1000 per license. That’s $1000 for every shop, and since i want a couple of shops, that’s a little too expensive for me, unfortunately
not the best looking and modern admin interface
no content integration plugins
not really satisfied with the premium themes available for it. And developing a custom theme for each shop would once again set me up lots of bucks

Well, that’s about it. I deliberately left osCommerce out of the box because i tried to use it a couple of years ago and got so messed up with its stupid coding that i said i will never again use that thing once more…

In the end, the conclusions are simple: none of the existing CMS are perfect, everyone comes with it’s pros and cons. In the end, perhaps the best solution for having what i want is to fins someone develop me a custom solution for me… But, i already knew that from the start

Oh, and here are a couple of the projects i’m working on lately: a local site about trains (in Romanian) and a Black Friday sales site i’m experiencing with. And one of a friend, about Dacia SUV.

Recommended Clickbank Tools

Mike — Sat, 10 May 2008 09:10:54 +0000

I was experimenting with ClickBank this week and i found that the system is not so simple to use. It’s not nanophysics either but you have to read a couple of guides to get the things going. That’s why i started looking for a couple of tools that would help me as an affiliate. And here’s what i found.

Affiliate Cloner

This little programs resolves the following problems:

how to protect your affiliate link
how to link directly to a ClickBank order page

The first one i find very important as it stops the buyers from depriving you of the sales by cutting your affiliate name from the link. More details about this here: Affiliate cloner

easyClickMate

This one seems highly recommended as it help you overcome some of the restrictions of the ClickBank system:

You have no knowledge of your affiliates
All affiliate Urls are directed to just one page
It is possible for an affiliate to lose out on his commission if a site visitor replaces his nickname.

More details about this here: easyClickMate

ClickBank Storefronts

ClickBank storefronts display the products in the ClickBank Marketplace together with a search facility. Every product is encoded with your affiliate nickname so that you receive commission for every purchase.

You can use it on your landing pages to provide alternative options for your buyers from the same domain. And it is really easy to use.

More details about storefronts on this article from ClickBankguide.

That’s about it. If you know other useful software please share.

PS: None of the links above contain affiliate codes, so this is by no means a commercial post

Clickbank turns its face to Romania once more

Mike — Tue, 06 May 2008 07:20:42 +0000

Clickbank has not been accepting Romanian (fellows from my country that is) publishers in the last years. That always bugged me as i saw lots of good opportunities of making affiliate sales driven away, as i could not become a member. But now, things have once again changed.

You can once more make an Account on Clickbank if you’re from Romania. Or at least i could this morning… I say once more cause Clickbank used to accept my fellow countrymen years ago, but they were involved into lots of fraudulous operations, mostly carding. And that lead to almost all the accounts from this country being banned or suspended.

But now, we’re back once again. Hopefully to stay this time. So all i can say is… go sell something now

2000$ Monthly Work max 2 Hrs/day

Mike — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 08:01:56 +0000

Yesterday i saw a thread on DP with an interesting title: 2000$ Monthly Work max 2 Hrs/day| Payments In paypal. So i clicked and asked for more details, in order to find the "brilliant" get rich over night solution. I ended up with a reply praising this service: My search funds.

OK, what’s this about? It’s a get payed to search toolbar, like lots of others out there, that uses Ask in the back. And that is supposed to get you money, like 3 or 4 cents per search…. Hmmm, OK… The guy claimed that you could earn up to 70$ a day by making around 700 searches a day, and that should take you less than two hours. But… i might ask, how many hours would it take the guys from My search funds to ban me for spamming? Lucky guess: under 24.

On the other hand, i don’t need Ask. I don’t use Ask, i never focused on Ask, although it is the third or fourth most used search engine in USA. But for those who like it, using this toolbar might be a good way to get some bucks. Not much though… I reckon around $50 a month at most. Oh, one more thing: it only works on IE7 and Mozilla. So for Stevie’s fans, though luck

Whats the conclusion of this no sense post? Simple: what seems to be to good to be true almost every-time isn’t. I’m sure you were expecting for a miraculous solution to get rich in this thread, but these things simply don’t exist. So, enough with the Richie Rich dreams. Get back to work!

TNX – Is TNX worth it or what?

Mike — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 09:45:41 +0000

I’m not one of those persons more ethical than the pope, who are 100% against buying paid links. That’s why i decided to take a look at TNX, a service that allows webmasters to buy and sell links quite easily and for great prices. It has created quite a buzz in the last months, as you can see from the evolution of their Alexa ranking.

I have to say i wasn’t too confident in this service, but i still applied for an account. I liked the fact that it was pretty easy to make this account, i just had to complete a bunch of fields and then login. Great. Now, once you’re logged in, you get in front of a quite intuitive administration panel. There are different options for Advertisers, Publishers and Referrers, but we won’t get into too many details here.

On TNX, everything depends on TNX-points. They are the monetary unit inside the system that allows you to buy other links. A newcomer for the service might not like the fact that he gets NO points to start the game. But he can go on this Thread on DP and get 5000 free points in just a couple of hours. Or buy the points. Or even better, just add sites in the system and wait for the points to come in.

Adding a site requires quite a lot of code to be inserted inside your theme, so you might need a little bit of technical knowledge. But it shouldn’t be that hard after all… TNX does not have strict rules for sites acceptance in their network, like a certain number of indexed pages or Alexa ranking. That doesn’t mean every site gets in. But as long as you have a decent site with lots of indexed pages, you can earn you quite a lot of TNX moola.

Now let’s say you managed to get some points. I for one, added an older site with like 1000 indexed pages and got around 50.000 points in around one week. I then had two choices: to exchange them for money (at a rate of around $7.8 per 10.000 points) or use them to promote my own sites. I decided to give each service a try. I turned 10.000 points into money, and i got payed via Paypal in like 3 working days. And then i turned my attention on buying some good links.

First, you have to set a campaign, then wait for it to be approved. And then you’ll see the links coming out. Now, i had like 40.000 points to invest. For that, i could get anything between 40.000 PR0 links, which are sold for 1 point each per month and 8 PR7 links, which cost 5000 points. Remember, these prices are per month. Pretty good ay? With that in mind, i decided to throw in some campaigns. You can choose from several categories in order to keep your links as relevant as possible. But remember, we’re talking about an automated process so don’t get you expectations too high on relevancy.

The TNX network has over 15K sites enrolled already, but unfortunately only like 3000 are in English. Once you chose your categories, you can select the PRs of the links you need and the number of Yahoo IBLs the sites have. That’s quite a great thing, as it allows you to screen only the sites you really want. Once you’ve decided on these options, press Finish and wait for the campaign to be approved.

In a couple of days you’ll see links appearing in your Campaigns Administration Panel. Now, i recommend you take each of them and look for a couple of things: relevancy, the position in the site where it is placed, the overall quality of the site, the number of outgoing links on the page, etc. If you don’t like something about a link, you can just delete it instantly and the TNX points will be refunded for you. I consider this screening process a must if you are going to use TNX properly and don’t want to attract any flags from Google. Look only for links that are placed somehow near or inside the content and that don’t have a Paid Link or Advertisement flag above them.

I for one, got like 200 links in the first week towards a site, and screened them to around 80. But come on, 80 PR0-3 decent links for 40.000 points (which equal around $30) is quite a bargain, don’t you think? Now i tend to believe them when they say TNX is a great way to reach N1 position in SERPs.

OK, that’s it. I hope i didn’t bore you, but i really wanted to write an objective opinion about the service. If you think the TNX Service is what you need, then you can sign in for free here . I do believe the service offers value to the link buying market, as long as it is used properly and you carefully screen the links you buy. What do you think?

Google slaps affiliates and advertisers

Mike — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 09:17:34 +0000

As you are probably aware, Google came out with a punch in the stomach for advertisers at the beginning of this month. And by that i mean a serious slap to anyone using direct-linking or different dynamic insertion techniques on their landing pages. Were you one of them?

For most advertisers, that meant ruin. Keywords that used to cost like $0.05 – $0.20 and had great CTR, are now over $10. Campaigns with great Quality scores were cut from the root. Make your own math here… How and why did Google do this?

How it’s simple. They introduced multiple Quality score rankings:

Overall Account Quality Score: Does your overall account perform ‘Below Average, Average, or Above Average’

Campaign & Adgroup Quality Score: ‘Below Average, Average, or Above Average’

Creative Quality Score: Landing page relevance to ad text and keyword

Lot’s of advertisers saw their campaigns go in the Poor zone over night. And all they could do is pay the prices needed. But come on, how can a x000% increase in keyword’s price be still profitable? You can read more about this problem here.

Why is even simpler. They want natural SERP rankings. That’s why they hit MFA sites, link buyings and now Affiliates. I wonder what’s next? Will they hit proper SEO made sites as well? Or what?

Of course, there were some guys unaffected by the slap. And it shouldn’t amaze us one of them was Amit Mehta. You can find out what he advices advertisers to do in order to be protected by these kinds of slaps in this article. Pay attention to what he’s saying there, he’s absolutely right.

I for one was not really affected by the slap as i run very few Adwords campaigns. But how about you?

Increase Ad Revenue and eCPM with AdsDaq

Mike — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 06:54:00 +0000

The ultimate goal of all your online marketing efforts is monetization. All the traffic in the world won’t do you much good if it doesn’t convert to paid clicks or CPM ad impressions.

I’m sure you’ve tried a bunch of advertising networks to find the best suited for your site. No matter what you’re using now, you can use AdsDaq alongside your current ads to increase your eCPM – without any real risk of losing advertising revenue.

An Open Market for Advertising

AdsDaq’s big selling point is that it is the Nasdaq for online advertising. It creates an open market so that you can sell your advertising space to advertisers at the highest possible price.

When you sign up for AdsDaq, you select what type of ad you want to show. Then, you set the CPM price you want $1, $2, $5, whatever.

Meanwhile, advertisers have created their own campaigns and designated what they are willing to pay for a certain calibre of advertising. If an advertiser is willing to pay $2 CPM for your 160×600 skyscraper… you’ll automatically display that skyscraper and get paid for the impression.

What If the Ads Aren’t Filled?

This is one of the biggest concerns with CPM marketing. An ad network can "guarantee" high CPM rates, but you might end up with a 10% fill rate. The other 90% of the time, you’re displaying ads that aren’t gaining you cash.

AdsDaq fixes that problem by allowing you to designate a backup ad. If an impression comes down the pike and AdsDaq doesn’t have an ad to serve up, it serves the backup ad. This could be any other advertising network you use – AdSense, AdBrite, TribalFusion, ValueClick, etc.

Set a High Price – It’s Win Win

This is how AdsDaq becomes win-win for you.

Let’s say one of your ad blocks is averaging $1.00 eCPM. Naturally, you want to see that go up. You can set a price of $1.50 on AdsDaq and try to sell that advertising space at a premium.

If no one wants to buy your ad block for $1.50, you automatically show the old ad – which is already getting you $1.00.

Even if you have a well-performing ad, you can list it at a premium price on AdsDaq. You might not get a great fill rate if you ask for a lot of money – but if 1% of the time you’re getting an extra 15%… that’s more than you had before.

Drawbacks

The idea is great and the system works well. I created a skyscraper ad with AdsDaq, and I’ve had it consistently filled 30-50% of the time. It’s definitely boosting the earnings I would have with my other advertiser alone.

There are, however, two drawbacks.

The first is that AdsDaq doesn’t serve non-US impressions. If a large portion of your traffic comes from outside the US, you won’t get a great fill rate with AdsDaq. Of course, that doesn’t stop you from profiting off the US visitors.

Second, you can’t set up a 468×60 banner ad. They offer some standard ad formats – skyscrapers, leaderboard, and a 300×250 block. My current theme integrates a 468 width banner, though, and I would have liked to have listed that at AdsDaq.

Aside from that, the service is great. Whether your current ads are performing well or not, AdsDaq can help you push the envelope and increase your revenue. Just set a premium price, and enjoy some extra cash.

This is a guest post from Walkere of Earn Web Cash. If you likes it, go agead and visit his site, you will find some other itneresting articles there.

Mike's Quarter - technology and cool gadgets blog » Making Money Online

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