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.
Saturday, October 24, 2009
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
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.
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.
Friday, October 23, 2009
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?
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?
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