Using Overture to Your Advantage

There is much competition for keywords now since search engines are the main source of traffic for most people. Ranking highly on search engines could be the difference between making a couple bucks a day and making full time income. I'll show you how to find popular keywords with low competition and avoid high competition keywords with low popularity.

First go to http://inventory.overture.com/.

That site basically tells you how many searches average are made each month for a keyword.

Now you can either pick a niche that you know about to see how many searches there are or just pick something that is popular such as "mp3" or "lose weight".

Now look at search terms that won't be too common and search them in google with quotes around them.

If you find a keyword that is searched for commonly but only like like 1000 results, thats a gold mine right there. You can make a website about that term and if you know what you're doing with SEO, you can rank #1 easily.

It might take a while to find a good keyword but once you find one, you can make a lot of money. You'll get hundreds of clicks from the search engines for free.

On the site that you make, you should make it something like, your-keyword-here.com. You can either link to affiliate products and try to sell something or put ads there. It's important that whatever you put on the page, it has to be relevant or else people will just go back and check the next ranking website.

For starters who don't know much about SEO you can look for keywords that only have maybe 200-300 results and make a site custom optimized for that term. You will very likely rank first because there is low competition. Repeat this with ten terms and ten sites and you'll be making a steady income.

For experts with bigger budgets, you might want to try a popular keyword with maybe 10,000 results. You'll get much more traffic for one site but you'll to maximize your SEO and get backlinks to rank highly.

There are millions of possible keywords and its only a matter of time before a juicy keyword starts getting more competition. Get a head start now.

You can find good keywords for free but once you start making some money, you might want to get Ad Word Analyzer. You can also just get it if your too lazy to do work manually want to start making money now.

Easy Ways to Make Fast Money

The key to making money is to sell digital products. Digital products can include ebooks, guides, software, and content. To get started you should first create your own product. If you don't want to do this, don't worry, I'll discuss this topic later in this post.

Creating your own product

-You should first decide what people want. You want to find a crowd that needs something. The crowd has a problem or question to be solved. Make sure the crowd is big or desperate so that you get the maximum number of sales.

-You design a product that caters to these people's needs. If people want to lose fat, you design some kind of guide to lose weight. If people are trying to improve their talking skills, then you write an ebook about just that.

-You market this product. The key to getting the most sales and making money fast is making sure your product is the current trend. Losing weight is always a trend however you may have too many competitors. You have to make sure that when you advertise it, you advertise it to the people that are looking for a solution, not just on random places.

-Your product will start earning you cash. You just have to sit back and watch as your checks come in the mail.

For those who don't want to create their own product.

-There are many sites out there and authors who don't have the time or skills to sell their product. They may be the masters of their art, but a total novice at selling their product.

-This is where you come in. You help them sell their product and usually get over 50% commission. The reason the commission is so high is because the product is digital and unlimited copies can be distributed at no cost.

-Marketing the product is simple finding out what people want and delivering it to them.

-You can find more information and get the detailed strategies for marketing here. You'll learn all the marketing strategies about how to find a hungry crowd that wants to buy products that you deliver. I give the package a 10/10. It even has a free website set up for you so that you barely have to do any work to start earning money.

Things to avoid when you want to make money online

There are many legit ways to make money online however there are also people on the internet that want to make money by taking your money or using you.

13 kinds of scams that probably won't make you any money:

1. Sites that enter you in your contest in exchange for your personal info such as address and email. They either sell the information or use it to send you advertising. Most of the time you enter it and you don't win anything.

2. Some sites advertise that you can make $100+ a day doing online surveys. These are usually scams and most of the time they want to send you some kind of packet to get you started for $40.

3. Any sites that are too good to be true. You won't find free money online.

4. Sites that offer you a way to get rich quick. Getting rich takes time and work. The only people that get rich quick are the scammers if you believe them and buy their expensive guide.

5. Contrary to popular belief, most of the time, you do need experience to make money online. If you don't what you're doing, it's unlikely you'll make any cash.

6. Sites that want you to send in some money in exchange for the information. Most of the time the only information you get is information you can find publicly.

7. Don't trust guarantees that sound too good. Lots of guarantees will say that you will make a bunch of money but the only evidence you have is the author's testimonies.

8. Sites that say you don't have to do any work. There is no way that you can make money by just sitting there or else everyone would be making money.

9. Sites that try to sell some secret that no one knows yet. These secrets are either old, illegal, or non-working.

10. There are some legit sites that pay you to read emails or do surveys, but believe me, it doesn't pay well. Some of these sites that I've tried pay like 1/10 of a cent for one email or ad. You're lucky to make $1/day with these.

11. A lot programs called HYIPs(High Yield Investment Programs) are scams. I don't know why people don't realize that money doesn't come out of nowhere and even you do make a little money, it means someone else loses theirs.

12. Matrix scams that tell you to give $10 and make $1,000,000. These scams involve referring friends to pay you and having them refer other people to pay them. It sounds good that you make money for every person that signs under you but unless you are marketing master, you'll just be on the bottom of the pyramid.

13. Theres always some kind of catch if someone wants to give you free money online. Free money is not given out to strangers.

Designing your layout to maximize ad revenue

So you've followed my advice in my previous posts and ended up with a site that gets traffic and is a quality site. Now you need to make sure that you keep your visitors.

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Common things that scare aware potential customers and visitors include:

-Bad layout, your site is some crazy maze where the visitors can't find what they're looking for.

-Wrong colors, colors that are too bright drive visitors away. The text should contrast with the background so that it is easy to read.

-Bad navigation, there should be some kind of navigation bar that doesn't change so that the visitor can easily see all your pages instead of finding them.

-Wrong management of ads, don't clutter you site with ads so that it looks like the ads are the only content you have.

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How to successfully place ads on your site to increase click through rate:

-Blend the ads in. Most advertising programs such as Adsense allow you to customize the ad that you place so that you can match the font and colors with your site. Some people will disagree and say that you should make your ad with contrasting colors to make it more noticeable but this just annoys most visitors. It might catch the attention for a short period of time but long term it will probably scare away visitors.

-Change the ads around once in a while. If you have used the internet for long enough, your mind develops some kind of ad block that automatically just ignores what looks like ads. Usually flashing banners and similar images are filtered automatically by your mind. If you blend the ads, the reader is more likely to notice them. This only works if you have quality content to blend it with.

-Keep the ads scattered around your site. If you condense all your ads into one area, not only does your click rate suffer, your traffic will also decrease. Condensed ads all in one area make it look like your site is full of spam and ads. While your visitor is looking at your content, he/she will look around and if there are ads related to your content, your click rate is bound to increase.

-Test out different forms of ads. You never know when a different size of an ad might increase click rate. Change from wide skyscraper ads to horizontal ads and see if it makes a difference. You also might want to test out different ad forms from time to time such as switching to text only to image ads. There are also new ads offered by Adsense that are videos . You should avoid ads that pop over your site or take up the whole page.

-Most importantly, MAKE SURE THE ADS ARE RELATED TO YOUR CONTENT. No one is going to click the ads if your site is about politics and you have ads about auto insurance or financing. This is obviously the most crucial part in earning revenue from your ads. Seeing ads that aren't related will drive people away while seeing related ads will increase their chances of returning.

Making money as an affiliate

There are various affiliate programs online that will pay you commission for selling their products. These are a great way to make money online if you know how to promote it. You'll first need a website and get some traffic to it as I discussed in my previous posts. Once you make your first sales, your profit will increase exponentially as your site becomes more popular.

A great way to promote products and build traffic at the same time is to start a review site. You just list the products and promote your site. Then the users buy the products and post reviews and basically run the site for you. You can actually make a living off of affiliate programs if you know what you're doing and advertise it effectively.

I have listed some popular affiliate programs below:

ClickBank mostly sells digital products such as software or ebooks. ClickBank is a good site for starters because the sign up process is fast and doesn't require a lot of verification. You can get started right away.

Azoogle is another affiliate program which has many different things to sell. One disadvantage is that you need to get approved by a human editor before you can start selling and it could take a while depending on your application.

Amazon offers up to 8.5% commission on the sales you make for it. Amazon is a popular online store that sells all kinds of things and you can start your own store. You don't have to ship or anything, all you have to do is promote your store and you get commission for every sale. You can earn a lot of money here for selling things such as TVs or computers that can get you hundreds of dollars per sale if you are successful.

Commission Junction is a popular affiliate that gives you a percent of your sales. A variety of different items are available to promote at Commission Junction.

Maxbounty is an affiliate program for those who want to try to get commission from offers. The campaigns on the site are mainly sites that pay you when someone signs up for their service that you advertise.

Exchanging Links

Exchanging links is a common practice that webmasters take part in to increase their traffic and page rank. A link exchange is where you link to someone else's site and they link back. This increases the amount of back links to your site, which increases the page rank.

Some people think that link exchanges are cheating, but most would refer to link exchanging as a legit way to increase your traffic and also increase your ranking in search engines, however you'll want to stay from "bad neighborhoods." These are sites that have hundreds or even thousands of links on their page.

Amateur webmasters will sometimes submit their link to these pages and think that they will get hundreds of back links and increase their rank. In reality, search engines such as Google will see that the site is just a link farm and not count the site, sometimes even reducing the page rank of all the links.

You can find link exchanges usually at forums dedicated to marketing or webmasters. There are also some sites that automate the process and let you log in and list other users who are interested in exchanging links. If you manage to get good exchanges with high ranking sites, your site will soon become a high ranking site and generate traffic and revenue. However be careful not to turn your site into a link farm and end up with hundreds of links to irrelevant or bad sites.

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas everyone!
Thanks for reading this blog! I hope this blog has been helpful to you and that you return.

Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization, commonly known as SEO, is the key to getting long term traffic to your site. You can't make money with your site without traffic. Search Engine Optimization is configuring your site so that it is more likely to appear first when people search your keyword in search engines. The key to SEO is having the right ratio of content to keyword ratio.

Let's say you want to be ranked #1 for the keyword "bananas." You'll first want to make sure that you include bananas in the keywords meta data. Then your site must have text content such as various recipes with bananas or various kinds of bananas. Make sure that you're not stuffing the keyword into every possible sentence of your site, as that might make your site indexed as spam. You'll want to emphasize the keyword on your page.

The most important thing in search engine optimization is back links. You need links on other sites that link to your site, with the anchor text as "bananas" for the maximum result. The general rule is that the more back links you have, the better. You'll want quality back links such as those from good directories and articles. For articles you might want to write about monkeys or something tied to bananas and then leave a link to you site in the article.

Starting your first website

Are you ready to start a website? A website is the first step to earning a passive income. If you are new to websites, you might want to read this post before going out and getting hosts that are unreliable.

Step 1 - Find a host.
You can find a variety of free web hosts here. A free host is recommended for those starting out. When your site gets more traffic, you want to get a more professional paid host.
Step 2 - Get a domain name
There are lots of free domains names out there such as co.nr and .tk. For a more professional looking site, you should get a .com or .net domain. These typically cost $5+/year. However there is currently an offer than can get you a 100% free domain. You can get a .biz, .com, .net, .us, or .org for free at Domain Lagoon.
Step 3 - Add content
Add content that is original and is interesting. The people who surf your site have to be interested or else they'll just close the window.
Step 4 - Get your site out there
Start telling your friends about your site. Post it in your signatures. Submit it to free directories. Exchange Links. Just make sure that you don't spam.
Step 5 - Make money
Read my previous post about making money through ads here.
You can also earn money through ads by being an affiliate. I recommend MAXBounty for finding affiliates as it manages a variety of different affiliate programs. ClickBank is another similar program.

Thanks for reading, I hope you find success with my advice.

Useful tools for webmasters

I've compiled a list of tools that would be helpful to webmasters to enhance and optimize their site.

http://www.google.com/analytics/
http://www.google.com/webmasters/
http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/
http://www.iwebtool.com/
http://www.mineralogie.uni-wuerzburg.de/freeof.html

It doesn't take hard work to make money

Innovative ideas are what makes money. In this post I'll introduce to you some examples.

Classic example: Million Dollar Homepage
The million dollar homepage sold pixels for $1 each. As the name states, there are a million pixels for sale. At the beginning, almost no one thought it would be any success. However, soon businesses realized the potential and then pixels were selling fast. The last 1,000 pixels were sold for $38,100.00 on eBay. The success of this site soon resulted in a bunch of copy cat sites that also tried to sell pixels.

The author of the million dollar homepage soon opened up a new site. Pixelotto has one million $2 pixels. The author plans to give away one million to one lucky winner, donate $100,000 to charity and then keep the rest. The pixels are still for sale.

The newest idea was the Link Experiment, which is raising one million dollars by selling links. The homepage contains 100 of the highest bidding links. The current highest link as of now is around $400. This site is a big success and it's still very early to get in and profit. The site is not is widely known so this is a good opportunity to get more traffic. For you affiliates out there, you can make a lot of money by promoting the Link Experiment. Affiliates get $15 for each sale that comes through their link. This is a hot new site and I suggest you opportunist get in the game fast.



A very new site that has emerged is WriteAbout.Us. This site is similar to the Million Dollar Link Experiment. It's very new but you should get your links in for cheap because it can takeoff at anytime. This is a great opportunity for those who don't have a high budget because currently the links are costing only $1 each.

Another very new site is the Million Dollar Text Link. This site has a unique design where there will only be one link and that spot will always cost $10. The admin of the program is a guy who's trying to raise money for college for himself and his brothers. Its a new site so you should take advantage of this opportunity.

How to Take Advantage of Christmas

The holiday seasons approaches fast and several of you may be thinking, "How can I use this as an opportunity to make my money or increase my business?" I have ideas for you guys.

1. Sell Christmas related products - this includes pretty much anything that is red, green, or white.
2. Offer some kind of limited time offer to increase traffic to your site
3. Give away some kinda of promotional guide or ebook as a "Christmas present" to promote you business.
4. Offer some kind of free service and accept donations. People are feeling more generous this time of year.
5. Design a product and convince people that it is the perfect gift. Personalized items are great if you can find a cheap place to personalize things with messages.
6. Be an affiliate and promote a site that sells Christmas gifts.
7. Don't accept donations and claim that you will donate it to a charity if you're not actually going to.

Advertisement Programs for Publishers

There are various advertising programs for website publishers that allow to place ads on your site. These programs then pay you for every click to the ad or per thousand impression. I will list the current popular programs.

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Google AdSense - Currently one of the most popular advertising programs on the net. Probably best for when your site starts to get big and generate more traffic.

Pros - Easy to set up, high paying, targeted ads, professional
Cons - $100 minimum payout, a lot of people get banned without warning for cheating, more difficult to cash out, cashes out only through check and bank fund transfer.

AdSense

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BidVertiser - Another very popular program. A alternative to AdSense and is similar to it.

Pros - Pays through Paypal and check, high paying ads, minimum payout $10 with paypal. Very customizable ads.
Cons - Not as many ads and AdSense, sometimes ads are not targeted too well.

Make money from your Website or Blog with BidVertiser

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Obeus - One of the newer publishers programs.

Pros - Pays through e-gold! Fast payout, minimum payout only $1
Cons - You only earn for ads when advertisers choose your site to be a publisher. Not as popular as other programs and you might not get any advertisers if your site generates is small and generates little traffic.

Obeus

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E-books

Interested in making money online?
I've compiled a list of e-books that are specially written to do just that:

Ultimate Wealth Package
Rich Jerk's E-book - I have personally read this e-book myself and found that it has good content.
Affiliate Project X
Google Wealth Wizard
Butterfly Marketing Manuscript

Websites

Many of you may have unsuccessfully created a site in the past with no traffic and was basically just sitting there to rot.

To run a successful site, you need:

1. Good content - information or tools that people actually need.
2. Attractive looking layout.
3. Regular updates

Things that don't work:

1. Spamming your site everywhere and filling up your site with ads.

A good way to get traffic and get more popularity is to exchange links with other sites.

Tools for webmasters:

http://www.seomoz.org/ - Gauges the popularity of your site.

High Yield Investment Programs and Investing

I have recently started to get started with online currency. The current online currency of choice by basically all investment programs is e-gold.

To get started in online investing, you should first create an e-gold account and add funds to it. There are a few ways to fund your account. The first and most reliable way is to use an exchange service to transfer funds from your bank, credit card, or other forms of credit. E-gold has a list of them here. The second way is to exchange with a private person. The following sites are popular forums where members offer exchange between a large variety of different online currencies: GoldAge, TalkGold, and MMG. The third way to get money into your account is to join some kind of "Get Paid To" program. These programs will pay you to do things such as read emails, click links, and sign up for offers. They are useful if you can't fund your e-gold account by any other way and you have $0.00. The disadvantage is that they take a while to build up some funds. The programs that I have used and paid me are GoldAge (paid to post), and Donkeymails.

After getting at least $1 into your e-gold account, a bunch of new opportunities to make money are available. The ones that you should look for are HYIPs (High Yield Investment Programs). These programs offer a high rate of interest for depositing your money. These programs are risky and may run away with your money. The best way to minimize your risk is to do research on the program. Find out where its hosted at, search about it, check out forums posts about it, and check HYIP monitor sites about it. The key to making profit is not to put all your money into one program as it can drop and disappear at any time no matter how reliable it was in the past. History repeats itself over and over and some people never learn that no program can be trusted 100%. Sites that offer 10% daily or more are the riskiest.

If you are one of few successful investors who have made lots of profits, you may want to start thinking about investing a portion into low yield investment programs. These are much more reliable than HYIPs, but they offer much lower rates.

Programs to avoid:
Matrix doubling programs - these are programs where you pay like $5 and get like $1 for every member you refer. It advertises that you can get thousands if your members refer more members and you get $1 for each in theory but it never actually works out. You will lose your money in 95% of these programs.

Poorly designed site - sites that have misspellings, grammar mistakes, and bad layout. These programs usually run by amateurs and those who can barely speak English. The risk for these programs are bigger than usual and the admin of the program is probably just out to make quick money off of you.

Game and betting sites - sites that offer games such as head/tails and state that you get 250% profit for winning. The truth is that the win rate for these programs is like 30% and you will lose your money. I have seen one of the scripts myself and saw that you can set what the win rate is.

Other sites:
There seems to be a big craze and hype about a program called AGLOCO. However, I personally don't think it will be as successful as everyone thinks. There are like hundreds of people trying to get referrals for it and unless you are willing to spend money, time, and effort, I don't think you will get very far. It's your choice and you can go ahead and join it if you want and prove me wrong.

First Post

Well, I just started this blog today for fun and this is my first post! I don't know what to do with this blog yet.