Posted August 18th, 2008
I’m back at work now after a week and a half off while we were moving house, and so I’m back on a normal Internet connection! Unfortunately it’s been a busy day in the office today so not much time to really get back into reading through my RSS feeds, checking on my sites etc. Also, hopefully our home broadband connection is being turned on tomorrow… so fingers crossed that goes without a problem.
As long as all goes well this week then I hope to get a post or two up here by the weekend, as well as work on my sites.
In terms of meeting this month’s goals, I think that is highly unlikely, at least in the making money online goals. It looks like it’s going to be a really really poor month (looking like around 10% of last month at the moment 
), but you never know what could happen in the next couple of weeks…
So, hopefully normal service will resume shortly and I can try and get back some momentum.
Posted in General
Posted August 10th, 2008
Actually, no, i’ll stick with the same goals, but… it’s going to be a bit harder going because I moved house on Friday and, as well as being in a totally new city, we have limited internet connectivity for up to 2 weeks. Ouch! This might sound stupid but it honestly didn’t dawn on me until yesterday that it’s going to be hard work getting things sorted for the next week or so, not to mention exploring our new surroundings, getting a feel for the place etc. And that added to the fact that we’ll hardly have any internet access has made me realise that maybe, just maybe, it might be a tad more difficult than I thought to achieve my online goals this month.
It’s obviously going to be harder to post here very often over the next week or two (has anyone tried using WP Admin from their Blackberry before?!), let alone work on other sites/projects, but we’ll see how it goes.
Rest assured, as soon as we’re settled and back online, i’ll re-double my efforts to try and make up for the lost time, i’ll keep the same goals in place, it will just be more of a challenge that’s all!
Tags: Goals Posted in General
Posted August 3rd, 2008
I’ve been thinking lately that it’s about time I set myself some goals to aim for both in making money online and for this blog. The reasons for this are quite simple… 1) I think it will be motivating to be working towards something; 2) It will be a great way to track my progress, so I can look back when I’m a millionaire (stop laughing!) and see how far I’ve come.
I’ve never really formally set goals for myself before, so I want to try this out and start with some fairly modest goals for the month of August and see how I get on.
Online Earning Goals for August
Last month I thought wasn’t too bad at all for money earned online, but as I mentioned in my July Earnings post a large portion of that was from a cashback site (Greasy Palm) that, although very good for some quick cash, I’m not sure whether you could sustain any decent income from it following the initial spate of higher paying offers available. Keeping this in mind I’m actually going to set my August earnings goal to £50 ($98.70), less than what I managed to earn last month.
Although I will keep doing offers on this cashback site (and any other decent ones I can find), I would like to see my affiliate and adsense income make up a bigger percentage of this months total income. I’m still working on a few affiliate/adsense sites which are slowly but steadily starting to increase in traffic, so hopefully this will happen naturally.
Blog Goals for August
I really would like to build this blog into not only a journal of the things I am doing to make money online, but also as a helpful resource for others who are just starting out and need help to kick things off. I know there are plenty of blogs out there with tons of information on this subject, but I’d like to bring everything that I think would be helpful to a newbie into one place and try to have almost a step-by-step guide with plenty of specific details at each stage, which will walk anyone, no matter how technically minded (or not…), through what they need to do to get started.
This month I want to start this off with a couple of beginner articles with all the information I can find and links to some of the best resources out there, the ones that I’ve personally found the most helpful.
With regards to numbers, I’m still very low on the stats at the moment, but this month I want to start to go about changing that. Here are the goals:
- RSS Subscribers
Of course, getting massive amounts of people reading your RSS feed is one of the main things most bloggers are looking for. At the moment my feedburner account says I have a whopping 6 readers, so by the end of the month my aim is to have at least 20. I know what you’re thinking, “he’s crazy, no-one can get THAT many people to subscribe in just one month”, but I’ll give it my best shot anyway.
- Unique Visitors
Another highly regarded metric, and probably more important in my eyes as these are actually how many unique people are browsing on your site. Google Analytics tells me that I had 155 visits last month, or an average of 5 per day. Based on that, I’m going to set this goal at 250 visitors.
- Page Views
Again, Google Analytics says I had 349 page views last month. I’m not too impressed with that as it means that the average number of pages a visitor reads is only 2.25. I’m going to look into some ways of making the site more “sticky” and try and give people some reasons to stick around a bit longer. Hopefully this will also help with the RSS numbers.
I think that will do for this month. I’ll be a happy chappy if at least some of these can be met, but I’ll work hard and see how it goes.
Tags: Goals, make money online Posted in General, Goals
Posted August 2nd, 2008
I’m quite pleased that I can already do a post like this, I didn’t really think I’d make much money online (if any) by this time so it’s quite nice to have made a little bit.
There’s not really much adsense/affiliate earnings just yet as I don’t yet have any one site that I can say is 100% complete, although I do have a bunch of site which I’ve been working on and have started getting traffic and the odd AdSense click or eBay lead.
It’s been a good month for PepperJam earnings mainly because of their blogger incentive bonus, but I’ve also managed one referral (woohoo!).
As you will probably notice I also added some ads to the sidebar and header of this blog. This was mainly a response to being approached about advertising, but I had been considering doing it anyway. I’d like to take this opportunity to say thanks to Market Leverage for being the first advertisers on this blog! So… thanks Market Leverage!
Apart from the above, I’ve also found Get-Paid-To (GPT) or “cashback” type websites can be an easy and fun way to earn a bit of cash online. I was contemplating not including this in my earnings post as it’s not the sort of thing I was thinking about when I started my “make money online” journey, but then I thought “well it IS money earned online, so why not?”. I know that I probably couldn’t earn a massive amount from this income stream, and it may not be possible to sustain a decent level of earnings every month (I’ll let you know how I do as time goes on…), but I do think it can be something that you can spend a couple of spare hours on during the month and make a little additional cash with. The site I signed up with and have used so far is Greasy Palm. This is a UK site, so is perfect for me, but I know there are plenty of these types of sites out there and plan to check some more out in August!
I didn’t have much in the way of expenses. I already have a hosting account which I can host unlimited domains on so no expense there. I bought 10 .info domains as GoDaddy had a sale on those, and this is what I’ve been building some of my sites on.
So, here’s the rundown of my online earnings this month. Drum roll please…. 
- Greasy Palm (cashback / GPT site) - £44.47 ($87.78)
This has been quite a fun way to earn some quick cash. Once you’ve signed up for the site you can find tons of (free in many cases) offers you can sign up for and get cashback. There is actually £59.47 in my Greasy Palm account but I did have to deposit £15 total in a couple of gaming sites to get some of the cashback (those sites gave a combined cashback of £32.50 - so I made £17.50 and got to have a bit of fun playing some games for money!).
- PepperJam Network - £18.74 ($37.00)
This great affiliate network not only has some really good affiliate programs available but also has some great ways to earn extra cash that I took advantage of last month. Apart from a $10 signup bonus I got just for joining them, I also got $20 in bonuses for blogging about their services. I also managed to get one referral through this site which I’m pretty pleased about.
- Direct Advertising - £10.13 ($20.00)
As you can no doubt tell I added some ads to the sidebar and site header, this was because I had an enquiry regarding advertising here. I didn’t think I’d get any advertising on this blog just yet so I’m happy about this as well.
- Affiliate Earnings - £0.65 ($1.28)
The only affiliate program that earned me anything last month was the eBay one. I’ve started setting up a few sites using my own mashup script (still in development… hopefully I can release something here in August), and one site in particular has been getting some clicks through to ebay items and a few people have gone on to make an eBay purchase. It’s only been low value items so far hence the low earnings, but hopefully this can get better this month.
- AdSense - £0.60 ($1.19)
Again, not really much to shout about but it’s still more than nothing . The Adsense earnings this month were from a few clicks on a couple of sites.
“Grand” Total = £74.59 ($147.25)
Expenses = £7.50 ($14.80)
Total Profit = £67.09 ($132.45)
Well, I don’t think that’s too bad at this early stage. If I could make at least this amount every month until the end of the year I think I would still class that as a relatively successful 6 months.
Next post… my make money online and blog goals! Keep an eye out for that one in the next day or so.
Tags: Earnings, make money online Posted in Earnings, General
Posted July 29th, 2008
I’ve been thinking for a little while now about putting in-text ads on some of my new sites. I didn’t spend too much time looking for who to use before I came across Kontera, as they seem to be one of the most popular out there.
So, I signed up and as soon as my account had been approved I applied the code to a couple of pages. Now, while I do like these ads and think they could probably be a good compliment to affiliate links and adsense, I have one issue with Kontera… it just takes soooo long to actually show the links on my pages. It can take 10 seconds or more before any of the text is turned into links. Now maybe that’s not so much of a problem, but it does bug me a little bit and I wonder whether that delay can mean missed clicks.
Then I came across this post about Infolinks. Paul seemed very impressed by Infolinks so I figured I’d give them a try and signed up. Yesterday my Infolinks account was accepted and so I swapped the Kontera code with the Infolinks code on the pages I’d had it applied on. The first thing I noticed is that the links are applied extremely quickly, within about 1 second (so much faster than Kontera). The only trade-off as far as I can see so far is that when putting the mouse cursor over a link the ads take a little while to load (about 1 second) compared with Kontera’s ads which show instantly when you hover over a link. Both solutions seem to offer relevant ads for the keywords they link from, so apart from the speed there doesn’t seem to be too much else between them.
From my limited experience of both systems so far, I am definitely going to be trying Infolinks ahead of Kontera. I think that the fact that all the links appear very quickly after the page has loaded is so much better and I hope will lead to more clicks than if I was using Kontera. You never know, I might find that they don’t convert very well and then maybe i’ll give Kontera a try.
Do you have experience with in-text ads? Care to share your thoughts?
Tags: Affiliate Marketing, In-Text Ads, infolinks, kontera Posted in Affiliate Marketing, In-Text Ads
Posted July 27th, 2008
As many are no doubt aware Google has just completed their latest page rank update. As a result of this update this site has been dumped down from a PR 1 to PR 0. Now, i’m not too upset by this (although it would be nice to at least have kept the 1…) as I know the blog is new and has still got a long way to go so PR 0 is probably fair. I am, however, slightly surprised as I have had the PR 1 for a good while now, and before I started this blog the domain c-online.co.uk was just sitting there for a good few years not really being used for anything except the occasional script/site testing.
So, not really sure why I was given the PR 1 in the first place, but I do think it’s strange that now the domain is being used and the site is being updated fairly regularly, and is getting some visitors, Google have decided to take it away.
Anyone else had any weird/good/bad PR changes after this update?
Tags: google, page rank, pr Posted in General, SEO
Posted July 26th, 2008
I’ve noticed a growing trend lately of blog contests in the make money online blogosphere. The most common one i’m seeing is basically where in return for performing some action (ie. subscribing to the blog’s RSS feed, blogging about the contest, signing up to a partner site etc.) readers are given a number of entries into the contest to win various prizes.
Here are a couple of examples of contests going on at the moment:
- Enkay Blog
This contest (as some others that i’ve seen are) is sponsored by Market Leverage. This one is giving away a great first prize, an Asus EEE PC Ultra Portable Laptop. The runner up prizes aren’t too bad either, a $50 AMEX Rewards card and three 2GB USB Pens. The contest ends on August 4th.This one has caught my interest a little bit because it just so happens that i’ve developed somewhat of an obsession with getting myself one of these ultra portable laptops
- Zak Show
Although Zak isn’t giving away an EEE PC, he does still have some very worthwhile prizes on offer. First prize is $50 cash and 2000 EntreCard Credits, so that kind of thing could be extremely useful to someone like me who is still trying to get a foothold in this community. Runner up prizes are $30 cash + 1200 EC, $20 + 800 EC, and finally a free professional logo design. The contest ends on August 15th.
From what I can see, these blog contests can definitely benefit everyone involved. The blog running the contest gets some new readers/subscribers, some link love (from posts about their contest - such as this one I guess…) and general exposure, as well as generating some activity from readers and hopefully going some way to building more of an interactive community.
The sponsor (in Enkay Blog’s example, Market Leverage) gets some new business through the incentivised signups and more links back to them. Not exactly free advertising as they’re stumping up the cash for the prizes, but probably more effective than just buying an ad space on someone’s side bar.
Finally, the readers who take part in the contest obviously give themselves a chance of winning some great prizes, but also I think it’s quite fun to join in with and may draw them into reading more of the blog, and visiting regularly, and joining in with the conversations, giving them a sense that they are part of the community.
So there you have it, I definitely think that blog contests are a potentially powerful thing to run for blog owners, and also a bit of fun for readers. I’d definitely consider running a similar contest here at some point… but i’ll maybe wait until i’ve been around here for a bit longer and have built my traffic up a bit more
Tags: Contests, prizes Posted in Contests
Posted July 23rd, 2008
This is a follow on to my last post about where to get good quality content for your affiliate sites.
These are a couple of tools I’ve found which I think could be very useful if you are using free articles, or content from sites such as Wikipedia, to check how similar your pages are to others.
- Similar Page Checker by webconfs.com
This tool allows you to compare two pages and gives you a percentage of how similar they are. So if, for example, you’ve taken a Wikipedia article and modified it with some of your own writing (or even mashed it up with free content from elsewhere I guess…), you can check your new page against Wikipedia’s page to see how similar they are.
Hopefully the lower the percentage, the less likely you will be penalised by Google for duplicate content.
- Copyscape
This tool allows you to enter your page URL, then searches for other sites which have the same/similar content. You can then click through to those sites and Copyscape will even highlight the blocks of text it sees that is the same as yours.
I can see this being useful for deciding whether to use a particular free article or not. You can stick the URL of the article into this tool and see how many others out there are using the same thing on their site.
If you have any experience of the above tools, or know of any similar ones then please post a comment.
Tags: Affiliate Marketing, affiliate sites, articles, content, duplicate content, niche sites Posted in Affiliate Marketing
Posted July 22nd, 2008
OK, so I’ve been messing around with the mechanics of how my affiliate mashup sites will work, but have come to the point where I think I need to start getting some static content (articles, info pages etc.) on to these sites too, in order to get more hits from the search engines for search terms related to my sites.
This may be obvious to most people, and I have heard the term “content is king” mentioned by pretty much every blogger I’ve read in the make money online community, but I think I was maybe slightly naive in thinking I might still get some decent traffic to my sites without having to write lengthy articles or setup a blog for each niche site.
So I’ve been looking into whether it’s possible to get some good content related to my niche for free. There are a couple of methods I’ve come across that i’m interested in:
- Free Articles
There are a number of sites where you can get your hands on articles on pretty much any subject you need. These can be used free of charge, as long as the article and byline (with any credits to the author and even any links they want to stick in there too) remains as is.
A couple of examples of sites you can get these free articles from are Articles Base and Ezine Articles, but a simple search on Google for “free articles” show that there are many other sites out there.
- Wikipedia Content
You can find articles on Wikipedia for pretty much any niche that you’re interested in. The beauty of Wikipedia content is that you can take it and modify it before putting it on your site. So you can start with the base Wikipedia content, then edit it as you like and essentially end up with some semi-unique content for your site.
Here is an excerpt from the Wikipedia license (see the full license/copyright text here):
“Wikipedia content can be copied, modified, and redistributed so long as the new version grants the same freedoms to others and acknowledges the authors of the Wikipedia article used (a direct link back to the article is generally thought to satisfy the attribution requirement).”
Out of the above two methods for gaining content, I’m leaning towards modified Wikipedia articles. This is for a couple of reasons.
- To at least have some uniqueness.
- I’ve heard that Google and other search engines can penalise heavily sites/pages that they deem to be duplicates of other pages on the web. I would imagine a direct copy of a popular article from one of the free article sites could get used by many other sites out there, and so there would be a high risk of your page being penalised as a duplicate. At least with modified Wikipedia articles you have some chance of avoiding this, if you modify it enough.
Does anyone else use either of these to get content for your affiliate sites? Do you always write your own? If so, even on niche subjects you may not be an expert on? Do you use another method/resource?
I’d love to hear any comments on this subject.
Tags: Affiliate Marketing, content, make money online, niche sites Posted in Affiliate Marketing
Posted July 18th, 2008
I’ve been looking more at the Pepperjam Network, and I think I am going to try out one of their features… PepperjamADS.
“pepperjamADS is an affiliate marketing widget that you can use to serve customized contextual ads from one or multiple Pepperjam Network advertisers at the same time. The ad units come in various shapes and sizes. You can mix and mash ads from any of your merchant partners. For instance, you can create a fashion widget by selecting various ads from multiple fashion merchants. Likewise, you can create a specific widget with ads from any one merchant.”
These ads look quite similar to Adsense ads, and apart from the Pepperjam logo in the bottom right corner they could me made to look practically identical (although I think you could get in trouble with Google if you did make them look exactly the same and used both on the same site/page). The big differences between Adsense and PepperjamADS (as far as I can see) are that; a) you choose which ads you want to be shown; and b) they are not pay-per-click, but instead you are paid whatever you would normally be paid for that particular advertiser, ie. on a sale or lead.
Pepperjam have also created this video tutorial to help you get started with PepperjamADS.
I may try a PepperjamADS unit on this blog, and i’m also going to test it out on a site or two I have setup - once I actually get round to finishing them off! I want to concentrate a little bit more on finishing off some affiliate sites and try not to get distracted by constantly tweaking code to do clever things that could wait until another time.
Don’t forget that Pepperjam are offering a $10 Sign On Bonus for All New Pepperjam Network Affiliates.
Tags: Affiliate Marketing, affiliate networks, make money online, pepperjam network, pepperjamads Posted in Affiliate Marketing
