Monthly Archives: April 2009

How Not to Make Money Online

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It may be useful to recount a few things that I have learned thus far in my “make money online” journey. Let’s call this part one of what will be an ongoing series of how not to make money online.

I realized pretty early on that the fastest way I could make money online was by starting a site or blog that sold something. Since I had nothing of my own to sell I went looking for a product. I found a forum site, the warrior forum, where many of the denizens promoted digital products from the clickbank marketplace. Clickbank, in case you don’t know, is a large mall of mostly info-products. (If you found this article by typing “click bank scam” into google please keep reading.)

Clickbank carries lots of ebooks especially in the make money online area. Because these products, once they are finished, don’t really have any production or shipping costs, they offer high commissions. Someone’s latest ebook on how to make money flipping websites or whatever might sell for $47 with a 50% commission. So you’d get about $23.50 in commission for each sale.

I took one look at this and thought it was perfect. I didn’t know which ebook I should sell so I just picked a popular one. It was called Google Something and it promised to show you how to make $500 a day through google. Since I had actually read the book I didn’t know how to promote it. I ended up just making up a positive review.

I didn’t know how to rank organically for anything so I set up a PPC, pay per click, campaign. I paid around $60 for traffic and sold two copies of Google Something for a grand total commission of $47 meaning I was down $13 for my efforts.

Sounds reasonable right? Where’s the clickbank scam in that? Well, I decided, since I was losing money, to suspend my campaign and re-think my strategy. I figured once I got my check from clickbank that I’d get to work thinking of something else. Only I never got my check from clickbank. It seems that they have a policy whereby they only cut youa check after you have consummated five different sales. Well, I had only made two sales. Irritated, I simply forgot about clickbank. I got busy with other things in life and many months went by.

After some times, I had decided it was time to give this “make money online” thing another try. I thought clickbank deserved another try. I logged into my account for the first time in months. My total balance was $0. I had lost my $47. What had happened was since I had not logged into my account in some time, clickbank charged me to hold onto my commission. They took $10 every two weeks until my commission total reached $0. For my two sales, I would get nothing. So I was now out $60 for my efforts.

Perhaps not a clickbank scam, but an unfortunate reality. Nevertheless, I decided to give clickbank another try. I picked another ebook, this one about curing panic attacks and setup another blog to promote it. After learning the hard lesson with PPC, I wrote articles to generate traffic to my blog for free. Within a week or so, I had made a sale. I was stoked. But since I had not gotten five sales yet, my commission continued to sit there. I wrote more articles, but made no more sales. Where people not panicking any more?

Then, about ten days after the ebook sale, I logged into my account to find that the customer had returned his ebook. I suppose he had had a panic attack. Commissions were back to $0. I was no out about 40 hours and $60 and had nothing to show for it. So I started to re-think once again.

It was at this point that I realized the major problem with clickbank: All the stuff is crap. It’s a giant mall of digital trash. The ebooks there are frequently returned because the purchasers are frequently unsatisfied… And that is the continuing catch with clickbank.

If you think some guy can cure your panic attacks or make you a million dollars for the low, low price of $47, you are bound to be disappointed and destined to return your crap. I decided at that point, that I simply was not worth my time to sell crap. Sure, I might be able to make a few dollars (though I had done nothing thus far but lose $60) but it seemed unsustainable. I didn’t want to sell junk and that’s what for sale at clickbank.

Now, I believe in making money online and high commissions are nice but clickbank is simply rife with problems. Besides the crap factor is the fact that everyone you try to sell to already has a clickbank account so your commissions are always endanger of being hijacked. And unless you want to spend $47 or can get a review copy, how do you find a non-crap thing to sell? I couldn’t figure out how to do it.

I own blogs today that sell stuff, and I believe info-products can be great products, but I don’t sell any clickbank stuff. It’s too much of a hassle.

So, where does that leave you. If you’re making good money selling clickbank stuff, good for you. If you are just getting into the make money online game and are looking for a product to promote, I’d recommend you stay away from clickbank. Find a solid product to promote, that’s my advice. I firmly believe that promoting clickbank products is a good example of how not to make money online.

How to Make a Part Time Income Blogging

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In my last post, which was written many moons ago, I talked about How to Make a Full Time Income Blogging and after a split second of deliberation I realized that was entirely too ambitious a goal. My revised and more achievable strategy with Paycheck Blogging will be to make something more inline with a part time income.

After some thinking and reading throughout the blogosphere I realized that it was just unrealistic to think that I could make a full time income — something more than $3000 a month — off one blog in any short amount of time. I thought that I knew a great deal about blogging and the “make money blogging” world. I realized there is a lot that I don’t know.

First, I have realized that in order to make a significant income blogging that you need a significant level of traffic. This can be achieved in a few ways but essentially it boils down to social traffic and search traffic. Social traffic is achieved through links from social websites like Digg or through no-follow comments on popular blogs like JohnChow.com. Search traffic comes from search engines, namely Google, and is more difficult to capture.

Right now I am only getting the occasional visitor, like a handful a month. But, that is perfectly understandable; I only had one post on the blog. But I have come to realize that I will need at least one thousand unique daily visitors (UVs) if I am even going to reach my goal of earning a part time income with Paycheck Blogging.

Now how do I define part time income? I think a part time income goal for this blog should be $500 to $1000 a month. And the question becomes how many daily visitors will I need to achieve these numbers. I mentioned the 1000 UVs above and I think that that may be accurate for with 1000 UVs a day to the blog I can sell advertising. The problem is that search traffic seems to be more prized than the social traffic by advertisers and unfortunately search traffic takes a lot longer to get.

if I wanted this website to bring in a significant number of visitors I would need to rank highly for a term such as “make money blogging” and this seems out of my reach at the moment. Ranking on page one for a term such as that would take a lot of resources, namely time. It would take me months to reach the first page for that term and I’m not even sure how many visitors I could expect to bring in with that ranking. Regardless, it seems totally out of my reach at the moment. I have other blogs and I do not have the time, money and energy to devote to ranking Paycheck Blogging on the search engines.

Besides, I don’t have any confidence that I could rank on page one for that term even if I wanted to. That’s just the reality of my present situation. I have only been at this for six months and I am not making any significant dough as a result of my efforts.

So, what is the point of Paycheck Blogging? I intend to make money with this blog and I will detail my progress along the way. In a year I believe this site will be a useful resource for others who wish to make a part time income blogging.

For the moment, let me talk about strategy. There are several ways that I *could* make money from this blog, let’s look at each to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each approach.

Method #1 – Adsense

No doubt you know what adsense is already. If you do not then google “adsense” and come back once you’re up to speed. Here’s what I’ve learned about adsense. Adsense can be a pretty nice monetization method if you have significant search traffic that wants to click on ads and buy advertisers’ products. There are many blogs that run this type of advertising and some, like Griz’s make money online blog, make decent money. Griz seems to make more than $3000 a month from his adsense. That alone would qualify as a full time income for many people and is surely something to aspire to.

The problem is that you need a lot of search traffic in order to rake in a significant amount of money through adsense. And for this blog, it simply would take many, many months of dedicated work for me to attain those levels of search traffic. However, adsense does work well for me on other blogs in less competitive niches. However, with Paycheck Blogging I will not be utilizing adsense to monetize my traffic. It just doesn’t make sense for me.

Method #2 – Writing Paid Reviews

Another way that I could make money with this blog would be writing paid reviews for advertisers. Through sites like SponsoredReviews.com and ReviewMe.com I could sign up as a publisher and be paid by advertisers for writing paid posts about their sites, products, or services. There is a problem however with this strategy.

First, in order to write paid reviews you have to generally be willing to include a do-follow link to the advertiser’s site. A link equates to a vote for the site’s content in the eyes of google and by voting for a site you pass page rank from your site to theirs. Advertisers want the do-follow link because it helps their sites get search traffic. But, google doesn’t really care for the practice of selling page rank through sponsored reviews and it seems that the Big G will slap your site if they catch you writing paid reviews with do-follow links. And there’s the problem. The advertisers want the link but if you give it to them you can lose your site’s PR (though, obviously, not a problem for me at the moment).

This makes revenue option #2 seem less than desirable. All in all, you can’t make sustained money writing paid reviews.

Method #3 – Selling Text Links

Sites like Text-Link-Ads.com and Linkworth.com allow advertisers and publishers to find each other via a large online database. On these sites, you can sell advertising space in the form of text links. However, this method since it has the same basic flaw as method #2. The advertisers who buy text link ads want a do-follow link and it simply is not in your best interest to sell them.

Method #4 – Selling Affiliate Products

In order to make money online you need to spend a little sometimes. There are various folks out there selling some product or service claiming to help people make money online. I could recommend these products and earn a percentage of each sale. The problem with that is there are very few products that are any good. Most of the make money online products are completely useless and you won’t find me peddling them here.

Though, it is possible, should I find any worthwhile products or services in the space that actually do what they say they are going to do, that I may start to recommend products or services for commission in the future. However, I will only recommend things that I use and that make me money. And at the moment, since I don’t know of any such product, I will not be marketing affiliate offers on this site.

Are there any other methods? Fortunately, yes there is another option.

Method #5 – Selling Ad Space Direct

I’ve realized that my best bet would be to offer advertisers the option of buying space on PayCheck Blogging. Now, like the other methods, this method will take quite a bit of time. However, it has some advantages that the other methods lack.

First of all, assuming I have the traffic, I can sell others my traffic. By this I mean that I can make the links on their ads no-follow so that I am not actually voting for their sites and as such they will get no boost in the search engines. But they will get traffic from the ads. Assuming that I reach my goal of 1,000 Unique Visitors per day, I should be able to sell 125×125 ad buttons for $75 a month. By my math I could have ten such buttons on the site bringing me about $750 a month.

There are no shortage of advertisers in the make money blogging space and there’s no reason that I can not lure a few of them to advertise on this site. However, I will need the traffic and this will be a hurdle. My strategy will consist of writing a few posts a week until I have about 20 pages indexed in google. I am a patient person and I don’t mind waiting.

Once, I have 20 pages in google I will attack the social networks like Digg and StumbleUpon. I will try to bring in social traffic in mass. So I will need to write catchy, web 2.0 kinds of posts. I think I have it in me to write a few of these. Then, comment or guest write on some of the bigger blogs in town and presto – within a few months I might have my 1000 UV/day.

Now, while I grant that this is an ambitious plan, the benefits of it seem plain. Within six months or so, Paycheck Blogging could be earning me $750 a month which I can use to put towards other sites and continue to build my online income in other areas. Because, let’s face it, the $750 a month itself doesn’t really make the project that appealing. It is what I could with the extra $750 a month that has me excited.

So stay tuned, and I will continue to share how to make a part time income blogging.