The media mix: how to make money from paid-for media content

What will people pay for online? The received wisdom is not very much, if anything at all. But there are beginning to be chinks in the "no-pay" armour, led by better-targeted services like Apple's iTunes and paid-for iPhone apps.

But for media companies especially, there is still no guaranteed business model for making money from their content, be it music, video or information. Look at the newspaper business, which after embracing the free, ad-supported model online is now putting pay walls in place. The former proponent of free news online, Rupert Murdoch, now proposes that his News Corporation introduce pay walls for all of his papers – including The Sun and The Times – to be in place sometime next year, essentially following a model he inherited from Dow Jones when he purchased the Wall Street Journal.

Apple's iTunes has proved that some people do pay for music, and some will watch an advertisement before seeing an online video. And witness the success of online TV site hulu.com in the US, which offers TV shows from the biggest broadcasters online supported by advertisements.

But moving online users accustomed to "free" access is not proving easy. And there is a big gap between the amount of money being earned online versus offline. How that gap is going to be filled is still unclear. "For a lot of legacy media companies it's a question of how quickly they are willing to move from the old model to the new, digital model, because for most of them it means a significant drop in revenues – at least initially," says Tudor Aw, media partner at KPMG.

The most pertinent advice seems to be: build a large audience of users with a free-access principle supported by advertising and sponsorship and then find ways to charge for added-value services.

This is what online music service Spotify is all about. The music website acts like a sort of online radio station, offering "free" music if users listen to advertisements. Spotify chief executive Daniel Ek says that the plan is to move online music lovers away from pirated music into a "legal environment" as a first step. "Younger users, especially, are used to downloading illegal content, and they are comfortable with sharing content with their friends," says Ek. "They are happy to spend $10 a month on World of Warcraft (the online game) but they won't spend anything at all on music unless it is a concert ticket or something unique."

The key to how much can might be charged users is directly linked to how attractive, accessible and relevant the product or service is to a particular audience, or digital tribe. In fact, KPMG has identified twenty attributes that the consultancy calls "digital value propositions" that include attributes such as "compelling content", "convenience", "choice", etc.

In the case of Spotify, Ek believes that he will only make Spotify's business model work if he appeals his users by packaging a good online music experience, supported by advertising, combined with unique paid-for products and services like Spotify's premium, ad-free subscription, plus other paid-for items, including tickets to live concerts and special CD sets. ". "If you look at the two sides of my business in isolation, the ad-supported side and the subscription or premium side, they don't work. That's because the [average] revenue per user (ARPU) is high enough on the subscription side, but there is not enough of the ad-supported side, where there is a lot of traffic but not enough revenue," explains Ek. "Only [by combining the two] and adding ticketing and other things can you get the volume as well as the revenues."

A big part of creating enough revenue is creating an attractive online proposition and putting it where users are congregating. ITV's The X Factor is a prime example. On television, the talent show attracts upwards of 14 million viewers, but now it is also attracting a substantial online audience – principally on Facebook and Twitter. Nearly 865,000 Facebook users have become fans of X Factor on the social network site and the number is expected to hit 1 million by the end of the series. All of these fans receive the updated X Factor content in their Facebook live feeds, and some 30,000 Facebook fans have also added an application to say which contestant they support. ITV has also created a "supporter" called Twibbon on Twitter, which has been downloaded on to 11,000 Twitter profile pictures. The company says this exposes the X Factor brand to around 840,000 Twitter users.

"We are taking a lesson from Facebook and going for scale," says Ben Ayers, social media manager at ITV.com. "Rather than obsessing on making money from fans we should obsess about building the relationship and building scale. That's the way agile web businesses work, and that is a lesson we should learn. I know the end game is to make money. But as we get to know our fans we will learn more about what they want."

Meanwhile, advertising through big search engines and online advertising suppliers such as Google is also getting more sophisticated, both on the web and on mobile phones, with better tracking and targeting tools that deliver more relevant adverts – which brands are willing to pay more for.

"The key to monetisation is customer insight," says Jay Fulcher,chief executive of Ooyala, a service that manages online video streaming and counts Arsenal football club as a client. "We have built an engine that tracks how consumers interact with content so we can personalise their experience and target the ads."

Google and Channel 4 in the UK are hoping to capitalise on a recent deal that will put all the broadcaster's TV shows on Google once they have aired on the TV, with Channel 4 responsible for selling the advertising using Google's highly developed web analytics.

Meanwhile, FremantleMedia is exploring sponsorship deals to pay for creating original programming for the web. A recent online drama called Freak had more than 1m views on MySpace, and was sponsored by Red Bull and Pearl , a feminine hygiene product. The community for the drama was very active, with more than 9,000 original music tracks being submitted by MySpace users for use in the drama. "This wasn't like a sponsored bumper on TV, it – it was about social engagement with the audience," says Claire Tavernier, senior executive vice-president of FMX Worldwide, the digital unit of FremantleMedia. The drama, about a teenage girl who feels sheis a social outcast fits well with the target audience for Red Bull, which is seen as edgy, young and about taking risks.

Tavernier admits that Freak will not be a "significant contributor" to FremantleMedia's profit, but that the brands were pleased, as was MySpace. "This was a good learning experience, but I am sure there won't be enough funding from sponsorship to fund a lot of online content creation," says Tavernier. "It will have to be a mix of subscription and micropayments and free with ads and sponsors. That is the mixed business model that we all should aim for."

TARP Money For Jobs?

Clipped from online.wsj.com

WASHINGTON -- Democrats have begun to hash out how to pay for a mix of unemployment benefits, state aid, tax credits and other incentives they hope will turn around the country's surging unemployment rate.

Funding for the initiatives would come from two sources. For job creation, the principal target would be a pot of more than $150 billion that was set aside last year to bail out the tottering financial system. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Thursday that she would like to tap the Troubled Asset Relief Program fund to pay for any "investments that we have in jobs."
Read more at online.wsj.com

Brian Wingfield says:

There is probably no better way for Democrats to solidify Republican opposition than to use the TARP funds for job creation. (Then again, the GOP has been fairly well entrenched against many Democratic initiatives this year.) But this will draw the ire of even moderate Democrats.

TARP was created in October 2008 for the purpose of stabilizing the financial system. Since then--and not just because of the Obama White House's initiatives--it has transmogrified into a variety of rescue efforts for the economy. Maybe this was the best thing to do, maybe it wasn't, but it wasn't TARP's original intent--and that was the fear that many lawmakers had when they approved it.

Treasury Secretary Geithner has the authority to extend TARP until October of next year, and he'll probably do it. No sense in forking over any ammunition to fight an economic downturn prematurely, he'll argue.

But don't expect the Obama administration to hand out cash for everyone who needs a bailout. For one thing, it wouldn't be prudent, as Bush 41 might say. But secondly, TARP is not a slush fund--it's a lending authority. And the idea is for the government to make money on the funds it's lending out. (Or at least most of it.)

Don't make these money mistakes

Bangalore: Everyone keeps telling you how you invest your money and advices you against letting it sit in the bank. But that doesn't mean you blindly invest it.

According to financial consultant Marzee Kerawala, the biggest mistake people make when investing is to believe the advertisement completely, reports iDiva. "Don't base your decision on that alone. Investment options need to be studied before you put in your money," he says.


Among the five mistakes that people commonly make are:

Unaffordable investments: "Don't bite off more than you can chew," says Kerawala. Whether it's the stock market, equity, mutual funds, insurance, gold or any other form of investment, make sure you have enough money to carry forward the investment. Insurance requires you to keep paying a premium for a long time.

No clear objective: Understand what you want the investment to give you. If you want to save on tax, look for specific investment options that offer this facility. "People often invest in shares looking for quick results, but it's not always possible. The market is so volatile, you may have to bear losses before you can make any money," says Kerawala.

Jumping in without research: If you don't understand your options, you are simply gambling with your money. Research not only the options available to you but also the market and company you want to put your money into. Regret is something you may be able to live with, but bankruptcy is not.

Unrealistic expectations: Be realistic. "A short-term investment will never give you 60-70 per cent returns instantly," says Kerawala. Be prepared to lose money or get low returns. Pay attention not only to what the investment will give you but also the disadvantages you may have to face.

Impatience: Don't get impatient to get your money back. "Investments take time to show results," says Jayshree Parikh, a financial consultant. This holds true for both short-term and long-term investments. Don't get greedy. Patience is the key to good investing.

The Makers of Money

A businessman of my acquaintance once interrupted a conversation about economic cycles to proclaim, “Good times, bad times, it doesn’t matter. I always make money.” His company had the balance sheet to back up this claim, and as the old saying goes, it ain’t boasting if you can do it. I’ve often reflected on that conversation over the years, because it helped me to understand something important about the struggle between the public and private sectors.

Every nation has a mixture of rich people, poor people, and some form of middle class. There is some degree of circulation between these economic groups. A poor worker might earn enough to advance into the lower middle class, while a middle-class professional could become rich… or suffer a reversal of fortune that leaves him in poverty. This basic situation exists under every form of government, from free-market capitalism to fascist dictatorships. What changes under different systems is the composition of the upper class, and the size of the lower and middle classes.

Collectivists sell their politics with a promise of “equality,” generally understood by their audience as a promise to redistribute the wealth of the rich to improve the lives of the poor… but this is a lie. The upper class in a communist, fascist, or socialist government is fantastically wealthy. Most of the “redistribution” comes at the expense of the middle class, which shrinks as the lower class grows. Every form of collectivist government, including twenty-first century American socialism, declares war on the middle class, or tries to lure them into submission with promises of benefits.

The middle class provides most of the funding for Big Government, and feels the pinch of high taxes more than rich people, who can often find ways to avoid them. A ten percent loss of income hits people struggling to make car payments much harder than it hits millionaires. The middle class inevitably grows tired of being milked for funding, responds quickly to economic downturns that compromise its lifestyle, and has enough voting power to destroy political parties.

Socialists love to posture as enemies of the rich, but in truth, the upper class is not usually a big obstacle to their plans. They are happy to cooperate willingly, if they see advantages to gaining the favor of a command economy. They can profit from government policies that hurt smaller competitors much more than they hurt the biggest of the big dogs, or restrict access to markets where they already dominate.

The rich often find themselves rewarded with official power under a collectivist government, smoothy transitioning from respected businessmen into honored members of the ruling Party, or government consultants. Sometimes the upper class finds the thrill of power, and the indulgence of their ego, well worth a few million lost in the rusty gears of a contracting statist economy. If worst comes to worst, the collectivists know that the rich are a small group with little voting power, easily overwhelmed at the polls by an aroused population.

The desperately poor are generally reliable supporters of socialist politics. Someone who pays no taxes will understandably tend to support endless expansion of government benefits. Eventually, members of the working poor may come to realize their own prospects suffer when too much economic damage is sustained by those who employ them. It follows that high rates of long-term unemployment will generally increase the size of the dependency class, which produces more political rewards for statists who promise hefty government benefits… and extracting resources from the economy to pay for those benefits causes the economy to contract further, producing more unemployment. Unemployment is a malignant tumor.

Who are the rich? With a few trust-fund, sports, and Hollywood exceptions, the rich are people like that businessman of my acquaintance: they always make money. It has been said that if you gathered all the money in America into a single pot, then divided it evenly between every citizen, in a few years the same people would be rich and poor again. No matter how limited or activist the government might be, the same people tend to end up at the top. The most dramatic changes occur in the middle and lower classes… the people who don’t always make money. They can’t evade higher taxes, or turn draconian government regulations to their advantage. They depend on economic growth to produce jobs for them, or create the conditions necessary for them to launch profitable small businesses.

Collectivist politicians have much to gain by increasing the size of the dependency class. The fundamental political purpose of State-controlled health care is to transform much of the middle class into the lower class. The economic damage from spending trillions of dollars on a monstrous new government program in the middle of a recession is a feature, not a bug. A middle class dependent on the benevolence of the State for its health care will become less troublesome, less independent, and less able to begin the climb into the upper class through small business formation. Fewer small businesses means fewer working poor rising into the middle class.

To liberals who are not politicians, but involved citizens who sincerely care about their less fortunate neighbors, I would say that the temptation to redistribute from the rich to the poor is the tragic pursuit of a mirage. You will never draw real blood from the makers of money, and even if you could, it would never be enough to purchase “social justice.” Redistribution always slides from the middle class to the poor… and the result is, inevitably, more poverty plus a smaller middle class. Look at how the stock market fluctuates under the current Administration, while unemployment remains high. The markets can adjust and recover, because they are filled with people who always find ways to make money. When circumstances force those people to employ strategies that do not promote job growth and capital formation, the livelihood of the middle class suffers, and the ambitions of the working poor drop dead.

Lose $80 on a Netbook With $180 Times Reader Subscription

You've gotta spend money to make money, at least according to the New York Times. The paper has entered the hardware subsidization business, offering $100 off the Samsung Go with $180 Times Reader subscription. [NYT via Business Wire via Engadget]


Send an email to Mark Wilson, the author of this post, at mark@gizmodo.com.

3 Ways to Make More Money with Amazon’s Affiliate Program This Christmas

In that post post I posted a version of the following chart of my Amazon Associates earnings:


In the previous version of the chart I didn’t highlight the holiday seasons but I did want to point it out explicitly now as we are currently in one of the key times of year if you’re an Amazon affiliate (or for many other affiliate programs).

As you’ll see in the chart – all but one of the 4th Quarters that I’ve been promoting Amazon have been record periods for me. From what I can see – while the economy is certainly down at the moment – this current quarter looks like being yet another record for me.

I post this chart for one reason and it is this….

If you’re going to promote Amazon this Christmas – you’ve got to start now. The buying season has started. Yesterday I saw a big day of sales on Amazon and the kinds of products being bought indicate to me that much of it is gift buying.

In the coming week we’re going to see Christmas shopping start in earnest with some of the post Thanksgiving sales that stores like Amazon put on. As a blogger – you need to be positioning yourself to capitalise on this buying.

Here’s three things that you should do:

1. Get People in the Door – Amazon optimizes its site brilliantly to convert people into buyers who enter the site – so your goal is to get people in the door and let Amazon do its job of converting people. This doesn’t mean just linking to anything – you want to keep your links into the store relevant – but if you’re going to do some reviews or promotions of Amazon products – now’s the time
2. Watch What Amazon is Promoting – at this time of year Amazon puts on a variety of sales and runs specials on many products. Keep an eye on products in your niche, watch for what they are promoting and when they promote something relevant to your industry – take advantage of that opportunity to point it out to your readers.
3. Run Christmas Related Posts – this is a great time of the year to put together a few posts that highlight lists of products related to your readers. 10 Stocking Stuffers for Photographers will be a post on DPS in the coming week (based upon this question that I asked my readers). You don’t want to let this kind of thing over run your blog but a few fun posts like this both gets people in the door at Amazon but also gets them thinking about buying and in the buying mood.

There are plenty more tips in my previous post on making money with Amazon Associates Program (and the followup post) but those are three that I think are particularly relevant for this time of year.

How and Why to Make Goldman Pay

By now everyone, even the NY Times front page, has noticed the huge multi-billion dollar profits posted by Goldman Sachs and others in the financial sector. Naturally, at a time when everyone else is hurting, the instinct is to stop them or make them pay the money back to the government. The first question is "Why should they?" The usual answer is because we bailed out the finance industry, and they shouldnt make such huge profits on the backs of the taxpayers. I am sympathetic to this argument on simple fairness grounds, but it is important to answer a second question: "If we hit them with a huge payment, are we cutting off our nose to spite our face?"

My answer to the first question is that there is plenty of reason to think that it is entirely wrong that the financial sector runs off with such huge piles of money. And my answer to the second is that even if the financial sector were to quit doing what they are doing because of new taxes, there is good reason to believe we might be better off rather than worse.

First, to the extent that they are relying on taxpayer money, there is a prima facie case for taking the money back. We didn't bail them out so they could make profits - though I doubt that a smaller level of profits would have provoked such negative reaction - and so long as their profits are less than the amount the taxpayers pumped into them either directly or indirectly (and so far they are) then I feel on perfectly good moral ground taking the money back.

But there is a bigger case than that to be made - the truly obscene levels of profits in the investment banking industry have ballooned since the financial deregulation that happened at the end of the Clinton Administration (Gramm-Leach-Bliley). There is no question that the deregulation allowed huge gains and improvements in efficiency that could never have been gained before. For the investment bankers and their clients it was clearly a great thing. But here is the rub: that group - investment bankers and their clients - are all of them in the upper 5% of the income distribution. And this 5% is the only group in the whole economy that saw sustained income gains over the past decade.

So, what we had is a reform that increased income markedly but most of us didn't get any of the increase. What we DID get was much higher risk and volatility, which is a polite way of saying we are taking the hit for the economic crash of 2008-09. Most of us could only gain from the financial boon by having a stock portfolio, but those arent looking to great right now. Even with the recent increases, we have only recouped 50% of the losses since the crash began. I, for one, would be very happy with less efficiency but more stability. Unlike investment bankers, I don't make money on a down market just as easily as an up market. (In the interest of honesty, I used to be one of them - In a previous incarnation I was a bond trader - I was in charge of one of the largest traded portfolios in the UK gilt market back in the mid-1980's) It is not at all obvious to me that the bottom 90% of the income distribution would be worse off today if we had never done the reforms of 1999, had forgone the GDP increases that resulted, and had a somewhat less efficient financial sector.

So, how to get the money back? I think it would be a great thing to have another income tax bracket in the USA. Why not just tax those guys at 50% on income over $5 or 10 million? Sure, they would try to evade the tax by moving income offshore but we have an IRS - we could pay to chase them down if they try anything fishy. OH NO, they will say. We cant possibly work as hard if you take half our money over $5 million! Fine. Don't. But I will bet that the Goldmanites will scramble just as hard for $8 billion as they did for $16 billion.

But lets face it, that isn't going to happen with our current crop of politicians. (Its socialism!!) So how about a windfall profits tax? Or even a permanent tax on federally backed too-big-to-fail financial institutions? After all, there is clearly a well defined logic to this last idea: If we are all on the hook if they mess up, then they should contribute to the Treasury in return. We economists call that "internalizing the externality." That is, if their activities have a costly undesirable side effect that doesn't show up on their books - and this would seem to be the case here - then the cure is to find a way to make those costs come back to them, so they act according to society's cost/benefit calculation rather than their own private one.

And finally, some advice for those of them who don't like it and throw the inevitable hissy fit: Dont let the door hit you on the way out. We have plenty of people lined up who would love to have your job.

Banks Finding "Sneaky Ways" to Make Money out of Public - Which? Report

UK-based Which? has recently released a report, and according to its banks all over the country are finding "sneaky ways" to make more and more money out of the unsuspecting public, including charging unexplained fees. Which? has been quick to assert that the rate on authorized bank overdrafts is currently at its highest level since the 1990s.

Recent official figures shared by the Bank of England have revealed that the current average rate of overdraft is 18.96%, but many big and renowned banks have been known to charge more. Owing to a major Supreme Court ruling, the number of unauthorized overdrafts has fallen considerably, and Which? has now accused banks of unnecessarily raising rates on authorized overdrafts to make up for the difference which has appeared as a result.

"It is like a balloon", shared Phil Jones of Which? "When you push in one part, it comes out in another. So we see that the banks are consistently taking sneaky ways tomake money out of people".

The whole country is now eagerly waiting for a Supreme Court judgment, post which millions of bank customers will be in line for payout worth a whopping 6 Billion Pounds. The ruling is awaited on whether or not the Office for Fair Trading can investigate the legality of unusually high overdrafts charges which have not been authorized.

(Via TopNews United Kingdom)

How To Make Money From Your Own Finance-Related Blog

In this modern era most internet users are familiar with blogs because whichever subjects you may be interested in, you are bound to have come across several niche-specific blogs. However in this article I want to talk about how you can make money from your own blog, and finance-related blogs in particular.

Financial blogs are very popular because they can incorporate a wide range of different subjects such as stock market investing, saving, mortgages, loans, credit cards, forex trading, etc. Therefore you are unlikely to run out of things to talk about.

The trick is to pick a subject in this very large niche that you are most interested in. This will ensure that you don't end up getting bored with your blog and giving it up altogether. If you are still constantly adding content to your blog in several years time, it is highly likely that you will be making a decent amount of money at that point, because you will have hundreds of pages of content showing up in the search engines.

So how can you make money from your blog?

Well there are three main ways. The easiest way is simply to add pay-per-click ads to your blog, either in the header or sidebars, or within the actual content itself. Most people use Google Adsense but there are other programs you can use. The great thing about this method is that you earn money every time a visitor clicks on one of these ads, so your profits really start building up once you start getting a decent amount of traffic, particular in the finance niche where advertisers are prepared to pay several dollars per click in some instances.

An alternative way to make money is to sell advertising space directly to specific advertisers. This will usually generate additional income because you don't have to share your revenue with a third-party network. However you do have to actively find these advertisers yourself.

The final method is to use your blog to sell products and services as an affiliate. In other words sell other people's products and earn a commission for each sale that you generate. This can be highly lucrative, particularly in the finance blog because there are lots of different offers you can promote such as trading courses, bank accounts, mortgages, loans, credit cards, etc.

So as you can see there are several ways you can make money from running your own finance-related blog. I personally prefer the affiliate marketing model, but it's worth testing each method out to see which is the most profitable method for you because every blog is different.

How Mozilla Makes Money and Why It Had Better Start Exploring Other Options.

A post on ZDNet today took me back to when I first considered how web browsers like Firefox made their money.

Many believe that Mozilla, known generally as an “open source” alternative to the likes of Internet Explorer, survives and thrives off donations. That is not the case. While the Mozilla Foundation does accept donations, Firefox , Thunderbird, Seamonkey and it’s other products are part of The Mozilla Corporation.

The Mozilla Corporation is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation and unlike the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, the Mozilla Corporation is a taxable entity. It reinvests some or all of its profits back into the Mozilla projects. The Mozilla Corporation’s stated aim is to work towards the Mozilla Foundation’s public benefit to “promote choice and innovation on the Internet.

So how does it make money. In one word, Google. Mozilla makes money by partnering with the likes of Google who pay Mozilla a publicly undisclosed amount for each Google search query made from Firefox by a user, reportedly between $50 to $100 million a year.

Hence why you’ll find Google as Firefox’s default search engine on its default homepage, and top right search bar.

Mozilla’s predecessor, Netscape, was also available for free but did not have the benefit (at the time) of a paying search partnership.

It’s unclear whether Mozilla has another revenue-generating option from within the browser itself, but what is for certain is that according to audited PDF of Mozilla’s financial results approximately 91% and 94% of Mozilla’s revenue for 2008 and 2007, respectively, came from Google.

With Google now promoting their own browser (and OS), Mozillaneeds to get thinking fast and exploring other revenue earning options. Of course, if Microsoft were to step in and offer Mozilla a hefty sum to replace Google as default search engine, then things might just get very interesting indeed.

Five Ways to Use (Green) Data to Make Money

If you put an energy meter inside a home and show people total usage in real time, a miraculous thing happens: they use about 10 percent less energy. The simple act of placing data in front of people changes their behavior. Data makes people smarter and inspires them to make small changes to save money and energy. You can use this powerful tool in business not only to cut costs, but to drive innovation and revenues.

Some are calling this phenomenon the "Prius effect," referring to how people respond when they see real-time fuel-efficiency data while driving the popular Toyota hybrid. As the described it, the Prius effect "can change driving in startling ways, making drivers conscious of their driving habits, then adjusting them to compete for better mileage." Similarly, making footprint data more accessible to those managers that can do something about it can create real value. As they say, you can't manage what you don't measure. It's amazing how often I hear that phrase — and how often people need to hear it. Tech leaders will tell you that one of the best possible solutions to the rapid increase in energy use and cost in data centers is simple: Add the power bill to the CIO's budget!

You can put your green data to use in five ways that will help your bottom line:

1. Saving money — a lot of it. As we've seen, if you give your operational people information on resource use, they will be inspired to find ways to cut back.
2. Driving internal competition. Share footprint data broadly and transparently and you'll see how badly people like to win. When PepsiCo Chicago ran a floor-by-floor energy reduction competition, the results were staggering. In one three-month period, electricity use dropped 17% (and paper use 22%). Energy use on the winning floor plummeted 31%. Factory heads at a number of companies have told me that they'd rather miss their financial targets than their green or energy goals — it's just too embarrassing to be at the bottom of the list.
3. Answering your customers' pressing questions. Wal-Mart, along with many other companies, is asking suppliers and vendors very tough questions about their environmental and social impacts. Those that can gather their data and tell the best story will get the most shelf space and mind space (see my previous post on Wal-Mart's eco-ratings for more on this point).
4. Prioritizing initiatives. Resources remain very tight — you don't want to spend money on the wrong things. With all the pressure to go green, it's easy to get lost in the weeds and pursue avenues that may not yield the most benefit. When companies really look at their full value-chain impacts, they're very often surprised at the results. Green leader Stonyfield Farm discovered that 95% of the ecological damage from its packaging occurred during production and distribution. So the company has made light-weighting (which is what it sounds like) the top priority — use less stuff and the footprint goes down. Stonyfield has made the deliberate choice to not use a recyclable, yet heavier, plastic; this counterintuitive and seemingly non-green choice makes the most environmental and fiscal sense given the real data.

5. Finding new market openings and focusing innovation. Procter & Gamble went through a similar lifecycle exercise and made a similar discovery about its laundry products. The vast majority of energy use was not in sourcing, production, or distribution, but in the use of the detergent in homes. And the majority of that was not the washing machine turning, but heating the water. This insight led to Tide Coldwater, a reformulated product to help customers wash in cool water, using less energy and saving money. Coldwater is one of P&G's seven original "sustainable innovation products" that generated $2 billion in sales in the first year.

Operating your business without environmental and social metrics leaves part of your management "dashboard" blank. How well can you run your company without complete information? But don't worry — you're not that far behind if you don't have a perfect handle on your value-chain footprint, or even your direct impacts. It's getting easier and easier to gather this data, and you can accomplish a great deal with even "back of the envelope" calculations.

Invest and make money from Yamaha Gold

LONDON (Commodity Online): Is it worth buying Yamaha (NYSE:AUY)? SmarTrend, a proprietary pattern recognition system, called an uptrend for Yamana Gold on November 06, 2009 at $11.96. Since then, Yamana Gold has returned 10.1% as of today's recent price of $13.17.

SmarTrend called an Uptrend for Yamana Gold (NYSE:AUY) on July 20, 2009 at $9.74. Since then, Yamana Gold has returned 24.7% as of today's recent price of $12.15.

Following is an analysis on Yamaha Gold, published in Commodity Online sometime back:

Even as analysts have been predicting a rash of takeovers within the gold sector, as strong gold prices have helped larger miners raise funds, there are some biggies who are actually shutting the door and bolting it. Like Yamana Gold which has actually cut back on its assets, a concept that runs counter to the general thinking in the gold sector that more is better.

For the junior players, their slow number continues to play, given that the aftershocks of last year’s resource selloff and tight credit markets have kept valuations very low.

Rather than add projects, the Toronto-based company agreed in June to sell three of its higher-cost mines in Brazil and Honduras to exploration company Aura Minerals for about $200-million to focus instead mining and discovering more “high-quality”, low-cost ounces at its other properties spread throughout Latin America.

Chief executive Peter Marrone, who built the company into a mid-tier player through a series of takeovers in 2006 and 2007, has shut the door on further acquisitions, saying the company’s current assets are more attractive than anything on the market.”It is not part of our strategic plan,” Marrone said. “We’ve outlined what the growth plan of the company is and we’re going to continue with that growth plan. It is completely organic.”

The company has also backed away from its past prediction of reaching 2 million ounces of annual production by 2012, a boast that used to be standard in its news releases. Indeed, its outlook seems a lot more modest now, with expected output of about 1.2 million ounces this year, down from previous forecasts of 1.3 million to 1.4 million.

How to make money in this market.

It's really easy:



1) Find companies with declining earnings growth and buy: ANF for example would be a nice example

2) Find companies that are downgraded. The dip is a chance to put new money to work.

3) Buy cult stocks. APPL and AMZN. There is always a greater fool you can sell them to.

4) Buy luxury retail. The fat cats on Wall Street are making free $ and they are spending it at Tiffany's

5) Buy a bank, leverage it to buy a bunch of other banks, and when it fails extort the taxpayer.

6) Buy stocks with high P/E ratios. Valutaions are meaningless. Party like it's 1999 or 2007

7) Avoid stocks in important industries. Refiners are a value trap. The fact that they often trade at less than book is no bargain.

8) Get on Goldman Sach's insider huddle list. You get the info first and can front run. WHo careas about the SEC?

9) Use insider information and buy blatant options days before major announcements. The SEC can't be bothered with investigating crimes. They've got luncheons to attend.

10) Get on Goldman Sach's trading team. They've made money a stunning 99.9 % of the trading days this year. Shamelessly. Now that's doing God's work. While you're there say hllo to Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and any leperchaun's you will see there. And pick that needle out of the haystack there too.



11) Threaten the government that our last vital industry (the financial services industry) will destroy the economy if we don't borrow trillions of dollars from our children and grandchildren to keep the above party going After all, we've got a FIRE to keep going here!!!



12) Do the opposite of what I do. Do not short sell overvalued stocks in overcapacitised industries like retail, finance, or insurance. Fighting free money from the government is a fool's game.

13) Do the opposite of what makes sense. Think a stock is overvalued? So do thousands of other common sense investors. Don't short it. Buy it. It's going higher until it squeezes each and every one of the shorts out.

14) Think a stock is undervalued and has a great future? Don't bother. Without a direct subsidy of cheap money from the government, nobody can get affordable financing. We are in business to reward the inneficient and punish innovation.



15) As unemployment rises...buy more stocks. As long as the fundamentals are bad, remember the Fed's moral hazard is in full play. Bad fundamentals means more borrowed government money on the backs of our children to keep this swell party going in the hopes we all feel rich and start spending money again.



16) Vote Democrat. They're in bed with Wall Street.



17) Vote Republica. They're in bed with Wall Street.



They just change the sheets when the door revolves.



Welcome to America 2009. I idn't make any money this year...did you? Only if you did the opposite of me.

Make Money Online - Free Home Business Kit Teaches Online Google Success

To make money online there are several rules you must follow, you should also have an amount of patience and time to spare. However, if you are willing to spend a little time and invest in some useful knowledge its likely that you will succeed.

When we talk about making money online there are various ways in which you can do this, many use Ebay to generate full time incomes selling popular products. The only trouble is with this is that you need a constant supply of popular products which you can get cheap to make a profit. This is not always easy done and there is massive competition so the profit will probably be very low.

In the real world, charities need to spend money to make it

The charity funding debate is in the spotlight - hallelujah! Let's air this question of need and how we as a nation fill it. We should take an issue such as face-to-face fund-raising and look at all sides of this ''coin'' - realising, of course, that coins have three sides, not just two.

What are the three sides of face-to-face fund-raising? Well, there is the disgruntled public side. That's the view of the person who is - very reasonably - outraged that part of a donation might go somewhere other than the end cause. Why weren't they told of this cost of fund-raising? If they don't have a real stake in this, who does?

Then there is the view of charities using this revenue approach. That's the perspective that is - also reasonably - passionate about finding new supporters and smart enough to know that ongoing, long-term funding is vital for those their organisation serves. They are ordinary people managing extraordinary feats on the smell of the proverbial oily rag.

Finally, like the ridged side of the coin joining the two faces, there is the industry standpoint that is - very reasonably - divided on face-to-face fund-raising: effective tool or damaging to people's views on giving?

Why are all stances reasonable and how can they be reconciled?

It is understandable the community feels aggrieved. The Centre for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Studies undertook the Giving Australia study in 2005. We spoke with groups nationwide about their charity views and heard generous, caring voices wondering why charities couldn't be completely volunteer-run. Figures such as 10 per cent were the most that people felt should go on fund-raising and administration.

Then someone in the group would point out that the charity where they volunteered had taken huge strides when it employed some specialists. The zeroes in its annual income multiplied. Add more focus and firepower and you get more results, they said. More research, more people off the street. So the group came to think you might have to spend some money to make some. But they were rightfully cranky about not being told the real cost of raising funds. Charities, they said, are woeful communicators.

It is understandable that charities are embracing face-to-face fund-raising if it is working for them. For some, this newer approach has revolutionised their income.

People seldom give spontaneously. We know from Giving Australia that people who plan their giving donate four times as much as those who don't. Thoughtful giving and signing up for a monthly donation has to be planned.

Charities told us that people think any spending to make money is squandering. The reality is - no matter how generous we might be after a tsunami or bushfire - most Australians give because someone asks them to. We are brimful of good intentions but it takes a prompt for most of us to turn that into good action. Should that be someone on a street corner? Maybe - if they stick to the Fund-raising Institute Australia code, if they are ''quality controlled'' so they are true advocates for the community good, even if it is across a few different charities. Personally, I can't agree with the commission angle - they are doing a job and should be paid but not on commission; this method might breed pressure. Giving should be joyful, not guilt-filled.

In that vein, we need to invest cheerfully in a good result for the causes we care about. That means some of my donation will go to making the charity strong and able to do its job, not just to the pointy end of the business.

Just as I don't want a half-good electrician wiring my house, I don't want a half-good charity looking after the causes close to my heart. I want a strong, efficient but, more importantly, effective organisation, properly staffed - but hopefully still with more volunteers than paid staff. I want it to make a real and continuing difference, one that is not likely to go down the gurgler because it lacks sustainable funding.

That means agreeing to pay those who can win those funds, whether that is on staff or through a good consultant. I am happy to let the charity look after how my donation is spent to ultimately help the cause. I am extra pleased if they are transparent about where the different parts of my dollar go.

To sum up: there is charity utopia - and there is Australia in 2009. In the ideal world, everyone would keep what they need and the rest would flow magically to those who could do with it. No greasing of overseas officials' palms, no costs of getting dollars to where they can make a difference, no payment to backpackers to raise charity funds, just a seamless compassion pipeline.

Life - and the charity pipeline - isn't like that. Australians are generous, we help a mate, but our taxes and our donations still aren't touching all the deep needs and opportunities out there. In that climate, we will face new ways of being asked to support. If we don't like them, we should speak out. We should demand transparency. In return, we should understand the other side of the coin. Maybe with that understanding, more of us might join those who add more of their coin to their favourite charities each month. It could be our own personal compassion pipeline.

Dr Wendy Scaife is a senior research fellow in the Australian Centre for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Studies at Queensland University of Technology.

Why You Can’t Make Money Blogging

I was a little surprised this morning when, after I’d given a talk on business blogging, a seminar attendee asked if I’d seen the Newsweek article this week on why it’s impossible to make money with blogs.

“Guess I’ll give it all back, then,” was my off-the-cuff answer.

But out of curiosity, I picked the mag up on the way back to my room. If you haven’t seen it, Daniel Lyons, a talented blogger known for two years as “Fake Steve Jobs,” has an editorial that explains why none of us can make money blogging.
Big traffic, no money

Fake Steve Jobs’ best month came with a traffic spike. His actual identity was revealed in the New York Times, sending more than a half-million people to his site in a single day.

His payout? For that half-million-visitor day, about a hundred dollars in AdSense earnings. For the entire month, he made $1,039.81.

Not quite what he was hoping for when he became a celebrity blogger and earned an impressive amount of attention and notoriety.

So if Fake Steve Jobs can’t monetize a blog, the rest of us are doomed, right? He worked hard, he created quality content, he had a terrific angle that went nicely viral. He was at the pinnacle, and he’s broke. So we will be too.

It must be true, he said it in Newsweek.

I learned the hard way: while blogs can do many wonderful things, making huge amounts of money isn’t one of them.

The expert weighs in

The article then tapped another source for a little expert credibility, Paul Verna, an analyst with eMarketer.

Verna’s take was that the real issue was “the lack of a clear business model that can generate substantial revenues.”

Verna’s on the right track, but we’re still a long way from the core problem.

If your business model is “I want to make money on the Internet,” you’re not going to get very far. The Internet is profoundly indifferent to your desire to make money with it.

Please notice that this does not mean that “there is no possible viable business model for any blog, other than a few fortunate exceptions that prove the rule,” which was the conclusion Lyons reached.

It just means that Fake Steve Jobs didn’t come up with a working business model, so he didn’t make any money.
Blogs are not television

I’ll confess, I have no idea how to monetize Fake Steve Jobs. His readers aren’t coming to his site to solve any kind of real-world problem, other than “how can I kill 10 minutes before my boss gets back from lunch?”

Television networks produce entertainment. They either make money from advertising or, for premium cable channels, from subscriptions.

If you want to watch Lost, you have to watch ads. Tivo dented that model considerably, but it still works well enough for now.

Advertising can work on some content web sites, but it usually works best when the reader is coming to the site to figure out a solution to a problem. If an ad presents a relevant solution to that problem, the ad can be effective.

For a complex bunch of reasons, advertising isn’t especially effective on most blogs. Unless there’s a terrific message-to-market match, ads on blogs tend to underperform wildly.
If you want to make money in the real world, solve real problems

Too bad Lyons wasn’t a Copyblogger reader. He might have seen Brian’s post about the smartest monetization strategies for blogs and content sites, and why advertising is no longer on that list.

It’s not about trends in advertising or trends in the blogosphere. It’s about returning to a fundamental marketing truth.

If you don’t offer customers something they dearly want, whether it’s to gain some great pleasure or escape some great pain, you’re not going to make any money.

People do want entertainment and relief from boredom, but selling pure entertainment online is tricky. Right now the expectation on the web is that entertainment is free. You’ll have to get creative to escape that context, the same way musicians had to get creative to make a living when free music sharing became the norm.
It’s time for online business to grow up

For a long time, we believed that “online was different,” and that we didn’t need to accept any of the normal rules of business. We’d put something on the web and Magic Internet Dust would come along and make up for our total absence of business knowledge.

“Leap, and the net will appear,” was the mantra.

That sort of worked for awhile, but it doesn’t work now. If you don’t have a solid understanding of who your market is, how they’ll find you, and what problems you solve for them, it’s now “Leap, and the floor will appear.”

So focus on what does work now, and has always worked.

Provide value. Solve actual problems. Uncover what’s bugging people and fix it for them.

The real Steve Jobs sells beautiful, easy-to-use, loveable tools that make his customers’ lives better. If Fake Steve Jobs wanted to make money, he would have had to do some work to figure out how he could do the same.

Make Money From Home

A quick look at any internet-based job search results, be it on craigslist or on another job site, will reveal a host of job offers enticing you to make money from home quickly and easily, raking in hundreds of dollars a day with just an email account and some quick thinking. Even the newspaper classifieds have been filled with these ads, offering at-home data processing jobs or money-by-email offers. Though a very few of these make money from home ads are legitimate, the grand share of them are scams. How do I know this? Because I was caught up in one of them myself.And believe me it was nothing but a Scam.

Though the old envelope-stuffing or pyramid schemes have died out for the most part, these online make money from home schemes have quickly replaced them. They’re nothing but enticing, offering good, easy money from the comfort of your own home and keyboard. I was home from college for a few weeks and had a lot of time to kill before going back to school. I was pretty close to broke, so making money from home seemed like a great idea. I replied to one of the job postings, inquiring about the position and sending in my resume for the company’s review.

I received a quick reply, which told me that I had been approved and that I would be processing all sorts of orders from home, all I needed was an email address. The email was vague on what sort of work I would be doing, which should have roused my suspicions. It did, but not enough to make me stop reading. The email said the only thing I had to do was complete a seven dollar payment to the company via PayPal to verify that I was serious about the application and to cover the cost of sending me my “training materials.” This should have set off an alarm as well. Imagine, you apply to work at a company, they agree to hire you, but ask you for a $10 bill first. Still excited about my luck, I paid my money. In return, I received a MS Word file detailing how to propagate the scam, putting up job postings, offering the job processing orders, and then receiving money from the suckers who replied to the posting. You can only imagine how I felt ,I was wild to say the least. Scaming other people isnt my idear of a nice way to make money from home.

After a lot of badgering, the guy who scammed me eventually refunded my payment. A quick Google search revealed that the scam is pretty well known,which by the way is a great way to check most online business opportunitys just a quick google search just last week saved me again when I got a very professional email from yahoo, only to find out it was the newest scam going around and that I should have realized that it was too good to be true. If you really want to make money from home, stay away from these scams and look for postings which look for freelance writing, editing, or design. If anybody wants you to pay money in order to take a job you’re going to get scammed without a second thought.

Just take the time to either bluid your own idear online or take the time to look into what your getting into before you start sending money out.

This article on Make Money From Home was written by Jaws Truely

How to make money on your news content website

Forget what you might have heard: Journalists can earn money publishing online. Here are some tips from OJR readers.

This article is designed to help journalists learn how to make extra money, or even a full-time wage, by publishing independently online. It is not intended to provide an online revenue model for established news organizations. Heck, they've got business managers. They shouldn't need a wiki to show them what to do.

Content websites typically earn money through one of four ways:

* Commissions / Affiliate links
* Advertising networks
* Selling your own ads
* Paid content
* Sponsorships/Grants

Once you have ads on your site, you will want to compute the eCPM (effective cost per thousand impressions) of revenue that each ad type is earning for you. You calculate eCPM by taking the total amount generated by an ad (or ad type), diving it by the number of pages on which that ad (or ad type) appears, then multiplying by 1,000. Let eCPM data help you decide which advertising type, layout and position work best for you.

Commissions / Affiliate links
Affiliate programs, such as Amazon.com's Associates Program, provided the first ways for early solo and small Web publishers to make a few bucks on their websites. In these programs, an online retailer will pay you, the publisher, a percentage on sales made after customers click through from your website to the retailer's site. Links can include traditional banner ads, search forms and links to individual products.

Because you only earn money when sales are made, affiliate programs will work best for you if your site's readers are consistently looking to make high-priced purchases -- for example, if you run a product review site. If you're interested in affiliate program, browse through merchant directories like Commission Junction and LinkShare to find retailers that offer products that fit your site's topic and audience.

Once registered with a merchant's program, you can create an ad or product link on your site using a snippet of Web code downloaded from the retailer. Some merchants go further and allow you to create virtual storefronts that match the design of your site, but where the retailer still handles all the inventory and commerce. Be careful setting up such arrangements -- unless you want customers coming to you for return and refund questions instead of to the retailer.

You'll want to note what percentage of a sale the retailer pays back to you, as well as the length of time after a sale that you get credit for the purchase. Some retailers limit credit to sales made on the initial click-through, but others will give credit for any sales made within a day or so. Also, some retailers will pay a commission on purchases you personally make after clicking your own links; others may kick you out of the program for doing that. Check a retailer's affiliate agreement and shop around for what you consider the best deal before putting links on your site.

Many publishers have found that links to individual products return more commissions than banner ads going to a retailer's home page. But the additional money those links earn might not be enough to justify the extra time that selecting and maintaining them requires.

Advertising networks
Most news websites earn the bulk of their money through advertising. But you don't need a sales staff to attract advertisers to your site. Ad networks can handle the sale and display of ads on your site. All you need do is drop a few lines of code into your Web pages where you want the ads to appear.

The most popular ad network for independent publishers is Google's AdSense program. AdSense is a "pay per click" (PPC) program, where you earn money each time one of your readers clicks on a Google-served ad. Since you earn money on clicks, rather than completed sales, PPC ad networks can provide a more reliable source of income for sites whose readers are not looking to make a purchase right away. Other notable PPC ad networks include the Yahoo! Publisher Network and Ad Voyager.

Most PPC ads are text, but some PPC networks also sell image and Flash ads. Ads are sold and displayed based on an auction system, where advertisers bid on selected keywords and phrases that appear on network websites. The ad network looks for webpages displaying its ad code, then matches what it determines the content of a webpage to be with the most appropriate keywords and phrases that advertisers have bid upon. The network then automatically weighs several factors in determining which ads to serve on the page, including the value of those bids; advertisers' remaining budgets for those bids; what percentage of readers have clicked on those ads in the past; and, in Google's case, the percentage of those readers who have made a purchase or read a designated number of pages on the advertiser's site.

Google's "Smart Pricing" program will adjust the amount paid to you for each click based on your readers' track record of making a purchase, or viewing a certain number of pages, on that particular advertiser's website. So if your site attracts motivated buyers, you remain in the best position to earn money.

Whatever you do, do not even think about clicking the ads on your site, or encouraging your readers to do the same. All PPC ad networks prohibit click fraud, and will boot from their program any publisher found to be inflating their number of clicks. Even well-intentioned discussion board participants can get a publisher booted from the program by encouraging other readers to click the ads to support the site. Google, for example, has suggested publishers concerned about their readers' conduct add this disclaimer to their site:

"Your postings to this site may not include incentives of any kind for other users to click on ads which are displayed on the site. This includes encouraging other readers to click on the ads or to visit the advertisers' sites, as well as drawing any undue attention to the ads. This activity is strictly prohibited in order to avoid potential inflation of advertiser costs."

If you don't think PPC ad networks will work for you because your site's target audience is defined by demographics, such as geography or a religious or political affiliation -- don't worry. Traditional ad networks such as BlogAds provide an alternative to the PPC networks. BlogAds sells its ads on a more traditional site-targeted model. Advertisers do not bid on keywords or phrases, but instead pay for their ads to be displayed a certain number of times on selected websites or groups of websites. BlogAds has become especially popular on political blogs, where advertisers can buy across a group of liberal or conservative weblogs.

Design to maximize online ad revenue

Since PPC ad networks target their ads primarily by topic, rather than geography or demographics, that makes these networks work better with niche topic websites than with sites that target their readers by geography or other demographics, such as gender, education, income or political affiliation.

For the system to work well for you, the PPC network's spiders must be able to determine a topic for each of your webpages and then must match keywords or phrases that advertisers have bid upon. That means the advantage goes to websites where each page covers a distinct and easily identifiable subject. So if you have a blog that covers a mishmash of topics on a single URL, you won't elicit the targeted ads that lead to high-paying clicks.

If you want to use PPC ad networks, organize your content to limit individual URLs to a specific topic. Break long blogs into individual entries. Archive old posts and stories by subject matter, not just by date and author. Stay active on discussion boards, keeping threads on topic and directing folks to more relevant pages should they stray toward other subjects. Use keywords in headlines, decks and URLs whenever possible. And spell out keywords, phrases and proper names on first reference, rather than using acronyms throughout the piece. (See, old fashioned copy editing rules *can* help you make money!)

Well-organized pages on individual topics also show up better in search engine results, attracting Web surfers curious about a specific keyword, who are more likely to click on a targeted ad. Publishers who create evergreen articles that are likely to attract a high number of links and clicks over time will do best in attracting search engine traffic to their ad-supported webpages. If you publish time-sensitive articles, which are not likely to have a long-enough shelf life to attract significant search engine traffic, consider swapping out or archiving articles on the same topic to a single URL, so that URL can get linked to and picked up in search results.

Where you place ads on a page affects how many of your users see them, and click. According to recent Google research, top performing ad formats include:

* Large box ads placed in the middle of your main content column;
* Skyscraper ads placed in a left-side column;
* Leaderboard ads placed at the top and the bottom of the main content column.

Customize the ads' colors to match the background, type and navigational colors of your site, too, to eliminate "banner blindness" and maximize their visibility to your readers.

Then keep an eye on your ads to make sure that they remain relevant to your site. To a reader, ads -- like anything else on your pages -- are part of the content of your website. If an ad network fails to deliver consistently relevant ads, dump it and try something else. Respect your readers by not bombarding them with irrelevant advertising and they will respect you by continuing to read your site.

Think twice before installing pop-up, pop-under and screen "take-over" ads, too. Many readers steer clear of sites that block their access to the content they're looking for with aggressive advertising. Keep your website a safe haven for these ad-weary readers and you can build its audience over time.

How much traffic do you need?

With advertising, the more readers you have and page views you serve, the more money you can make. But how much traffic do you need to make a living from your website?

To make $36,500 a year, you'd need to earn $100 a day on your site (plus whatever expenses you incur). Let's assume your site is attractive to advertisers and earns $10 in ad revenue for every thousand page views. That would mean you'd need to serve 10,000 page views a day to meet this target. (And more if your site earns less than $10 per thousand page views.)

How can you attract that much traffic? If you are writing one article a day on subjects that will be out of date within 24 hours, it's going to be tough. You'll need to attract nearly 10,000 views each day for that's day article, since few people will bother reading your old, out-of-date work. If you write a fair number of "evergreen" features, which keep attracting page views long after they are written, you'll find the task much easier. If your site naturally deals with "perishable" news content, at least publish each day's new news to the same URL, overwriting or pushing down the old content, so that URL can build the in-bound links and search engine traffic that will help you attract new readers you need each day.

Reader-contributed content can also help you meet your page view goals. Well-managed, thoughtfully organized discussion boards and wikis can add dozens of new content pages a day to your site, with much less effort on your part than writing that many original articles.

Selling your own ads
If you don't want to share your ad revenue with a network, or if your site isn't the type to do well with PPC ads, you might consider selling space directly to advertisers.

First, you will need solid information about your site's visitors. Ultimately, what you are selling to advertisers is access to your readers, so you'd better know how many, and who, they are. A traffic tracking service like Google Analytics can provide accurate trafiic data that filters out hon-human traffic like search engine spiders and automated robots (which can account for up to 90 percent of a site's overall traffic). Make Money also provides reader tracking, along with some crude demographic information about your site's readers.

You should also consider conducting a survey of your readers, to get more detailed information about their demographics and behavior. SurveyMonkey provides easy-to-use tools to set up such surveys.

Once you have advertisers, you will need a system to serve and manage ads, such as OpenAds, as well as system to invoice your advertisers, such as Blinksale or PayPal. (PayPal's invoicing system does not require your advertisers to have a PayPal account, just a credit card.)

Set up a page on your site, linked from the header or footer, that provides data about your site's traffic and visitors, as well as a list of available ad packages. You might also provide a well-designed PDF version of the same data, as decision-makers often prefer "hard copy" versions of this information. (If you need free software to convert Word documents to PDFs, OpenOffice does this with a single mouse click.)

If your advertising page does not generate enough leads to support your site, you'll need to make cold calls to potential advertisers, via e-mail, phone or in person. You'll have the best luck with smaller businesses that do not place ads through agencies, but where the owner makes his or her own ad decisions.

Paid content
Given the variety and depth of information available on the Web, you have to provide truly unique content of high value to specific readers to get those readers to pay for it. The fact that a paid journalist wrote an article for you does not mean it's worth paying for to a reader. Detail-oriented publications such as Consumer Reports and Cook's Illustrated have had success selling the results of their independent testing online. And, of course, porn sites have been earning big bucks from paid content since the Web's earliest days. But general-interest publications, such as the Los Angeles Times, have found that walling off content to paid subscribers has generated less revenue than the company could have earned by selling advertising on freely available pages.

If you are certain that your content is unique and valuable enough that readers would be willing to pay for it, you'll need to select a way to handle payments from your readers. The system could be as easy as asking readers mail you a check in exchange for your putting them on e-mail content distribution list -- a method which offers the advantage of not requiring any advanced Web server security set-up. Or you could restrict access to certain folders on your website to readers whom you assign log-ins after they buy a subscription. Such restrictions are relatively easy to set up on Apache webservers. Payment can be handled manually via postal mail or phone, or automatically through an e-commerce storefront. (Many Web hosting packages include e-commerce storefronts.)

Sponsorships/Grants
Supporting a website through sponsorship or grants requires the least technical skill of these options, but the most interpersonal skills. You'll need to play the role of a salesperson, in addition to journalist and editor, in convincing a individual or organization to give you money to put up your site.

In either case, you'll need to identify individuals, or individuals within organizations, who might be willing to commit their money, or their organization's money, to your site. You'll need to make a written proposal, and often, an in-person pitch, and follow through until you secure your funding. Grants typically require a more structured application process than sponsorships, which can be sold through a formal solicitation or over drinks at the dinner table, depending upon whom you are working with.

The University of Iowa provides some guidance and a collection of links on grant writing in general, including links to many organizations which grant funds to researchers and publishers.

Make Money Online With Web Hosting Affiliate Program

I feel that I didn’t cover article that teaches you how to make money online for quite some times. For the past few days, I more focused on blogging tips, Alexa tips, and some latest news in blogosphere, so here is another article that shows you how to make money online with web hosting affiliate program.

As we know, there are tons of web hosting companies on the internet, almost all of them provide affiliate programs and help publisher or web hosting user to earn some money online. Usually they pay various amount for a sale, it depends on your performance, if you make more sales in a month and they will pay more, the commission range from $50 to $125 per sale. In fact, I realize that it’s difficult to get even a sale if we just place a banner at the sidebar or anywhere in your blog, you won’t even get a sale no matter how big is your banner.

In order to make money online with web hosting affiliate program, you need to refer someone to sign up the web hosting under your affiliate link. You know there are many people give benefits to the people who signs up web hosting under their affiliate links, if you don’t do that and you’re out. This is fact and you have to accept.
3 Ways To Make Money Online With Web Hosting Affiliate Program

If you want to get more sales, then you need to provide something that people needs. Here are 3 ways which you can follow to boost your web hosting affiliate program’s commission.

1) Resolve Problem / Answer Inquiry
Before someone signs up the web hosting under your affiliate link, you need to answer all the queries that raised by him. From my experience, my client asked me about how to make money blogging, so I explained and covered as much blogging information as I can. Usually I’ll talk about keyword research, general SEO tips, blogging tips, traffic generation, blog monetization and the like, I’ll try to answer all the questions that asked by my client.

Of course, I’ll recommend him a web hosting which suits his needs in term of performance and budget. After that, I suggested him to sign up the web hosting under my affiliate link, I told him that I’ll provide some free services. You need to build up good relationship with your client, as well as the trust. When you gain the trust from your client, most probably you will get a sale.

2) Give Out Free Stuff / Discount
Giving out free stuff is a very common way for people to get a sale. I believe that most of the people (almost all) do want to get the best deal when they decide to purchase something else, don’t you? It goes same to me, before I decide to purchase something, I’ll first ask for discount, free stuff or free service, if I get any one of these for free, then I’ll go for it.

So be sure you give out some free stuffs such as e-book, discount, product, online tool, and the like, or you can ask your client what he wants and you purchase and give it to him, of course the price of the thing he wants will not more than your commission, otherwise you’re wasting your time and you’re losing money as well.

3) Provide Free Services
This way would be quite effective and useful. If your client doesn’t know anything and he wants to create a blog, then you can help him to setup a wordpress blog and teach him how to start posting, changing a new wordpress theme, doing some SEO works and etc, the only requirement your client needs to do is, signing up the web hosting under your affiliate link. You need to tell him you’ll provide free services for a period (says 30 days) after signing up the web hosting under your affiliate link, I’m sure he will like this offer.
Earning – Make Money Online With Web Hosting Affiliate Program

I signed up the affiliate program from 2 web hosting companies, they were Hostgator and Web Hosting Pad. The reason I chose this 2 web hosting company was because they are reliable, so I recommend it to my clients and friends. I’ll only recommend one of them depends on what my client needs.

Hostgator : I recommend Hostgator to my client if he has enough budget ($7.95 per month for 3 years plan) and needs the most reliable web hosting as I’ve experienced it and I like the performance.

Web Hosting Pad : I recommend Web Hosting Pad to my client if he has limited budget ($1.99 per month for 3 years plan), some of my clients used it and they didn’t face any problem yet in term of performance.

I’ve made 4 sales, 2 sales from Hostgator and 2 sales from Web Hosting Pad. Hostgator pays $50 per sale and Web Hosting Pad pays $75 per sale, so in total I made $250 from 4 sales. I’ll be repeating the same strategy and get more clients to sign up web hosting plan under my affiliate link.

Hostgator Affiliate Earning

Web Hosting Pad Affiliate Earning

The conclusion is that you provide something that is benefit to your client, they’ll be more likely to return the favor, such as signing web hosting plan under your affiliate link, this is also the power of healthy relationship between you and your client. Make money online can be very challenging, but once you build the trust and healthy relationship with everyone else, they will most probably help in your online business.

Did you make some money from any web hosting affiliate program? Which web hosting company and how much you’ve made?