Status Report

Its been a long journey since starting to make money from scratch online. How far has everyone come?

Should I place my ads in the middle? on top? on the side? footer? where?

Many people have been asking where the best place to put their ads is. I found this map of hot spots with the greatest clicks from duoblogger.com

Amazon.com affiliate vs Adsense

Today I'm gonna discuss the advantages and disadvantages of these two money making giants. The biggest difference between these two is that Adsense is a CPC program which means you get money per click that you deliver. There are lots of regulations set by Google to prevent fraudulent activities. Google does this to protect its advertisers which it depends on for money. You would be subject to review for any of your earnings and you are not allowed to promote the ads in any way.

With Amazon, you are given much more freedom. Amazon Affiliates are given this freedom because they make money on commissions and Amazon wants its publishers to promote its ad because this is how Amazon makes profit. They don't care how they you get traffic to them because in the end its the sale that makes you profit.

The perfect micro niche page

What is a micro niche? It is basically a very targeted keyword, such as "iphone app making tutorial" or "car insurance quotes california for young drivers." The advantages of creating these kinds of sites is that you are much more likely to rank higher and beat competition than using a broader keyword.

A micro niche site is usually only one page because there is not much content for such a specific keyword. This means that creating these pages is very easy and simple; it doesn't require complex code or programs.

One disadvantage of micro niches is the amount of domains you need for each page. If a micro niche is poorly researched, you could end up losing money on domain name hosting costs. You would need one domain name per niche unless you use subdomains; but subdomains somewhat defeat the purpose of micro niches because they cause your site to be less targeted and rank lower for the specific niche.

Overall, micro niches are currently the best way for any new internet marketer to start a career. Once you become an expert at creating these pages, you can move on to another and keep adding more passive income to your revenue. Eventually, you'll gain enough experience with SEO and web designing to be able to create a much larger project that can earn way more income.

When you get a good amount of cash saved up, its time to invest in greater and more profitable ventures. You can check out my other articles for methods of using your investment to get more money. However, you may just choose to stick with this current method; many people have made lots of money this way.

How to successfully advertise on facebook

Facebook's advertising is very different from the typical cpa advertising giants such as google. Facebook allows much greater targeted traffic due to the fact that facebook itself is a social networking site that has all the information about every user, including age, gender, location, school, etc. The key to being successful is very precise targeting.

1. Know your target
Research exactly what audience you are looking to cater to. You should make categories such as age and gender.

2. Set your budget wisely
Start off with a small budget and see how it goes. It is important to set a budget for your ads for record keeping purposes so that you can later see what amount is best. There is always a point where adding more money to the budget will cause minimum increase in revenue. This brings me to my next point.

3. Analyze the efficiency
Make sure you closely examine how your ad is doing during the first initial stages of setting it up. This is the most crucial part because you might find that your ad isn't working and lose lots of money.

How making money online has evolved over the years

Years ago you could get relatively large revenues on pay per click ad programs. It wasn't surprising to get $5 per click for a hot niche like electronics which were able to pay for it because of the large profits they made.

More people realized the money to be made online and competition skyrocketed; as the amount of websites advertising increased, the price per click and per thousand impressions declined.

Webmasters who wanted to make more money found a way. They saw that they could directly advertise products with companies such as clickbank and commission juntion. This required more work to monetize and was not simply just copy and pasting code, but is more efficient than adsense in terms of profit.

Money making video

I found a video that demonstrates money making online for those of you readers out there that find it hard to follow text.

Beware of online money making scams

There are alot of scams out there that make money by tricking people into thinking they can actually make money. For example, some advertisers like Pennysaver have ads which tell you that you can make easy income by filling in surveys but really all they send you is a bunch of packets.

Save Money

Chances are... the reason you're here is the high price of everything, especially gas.
Here's a way to save money.

Niche Keywords

Niche keywords is where all the money at. Not just one niche keyword, you'll need a lot. If you had a list of 1000 good niche keywords, they can consistently bring in a constant flow of cash. To find these keywords, think of something common, such as music. Then break it down to maybe hiphop music and rock music, etc. You can then break that down to rock music cds or rock music albums. You can keep doing this and come up with a long list that should rank well in search engines since its a very specific keyword. They might get a visitor every couple days so if you have 1000, that could mean 1000 visitors a day. They key to these keywords is quantity.

Making money with date entry at home? I don't think so...

One thing that's recently caught my eye is advertisements that say you can make $X,XXX a month! Then when you click it and go to the site you see that it sells some package to get you started. Once you get it, the packet will probably be useless and from publicly available resources.

Search Engines

We all know(or should know) that search engines are an extremely important part of making money online. Once you have your site established in search engines, you'll be generating constand income from doing nothing. When you reach that point is when you can start calling yourself successful.

Heres a tool to check your ranking for search engines. Anything on page 1 is very good.
http://www.shoemoney.com/serps.php

Site info:
http://www.shoemoney.com/siteinfo.php

Why Your Blog Sucks

You heard that you can make some fast and easy money with a blog... but no one even goes to it... heres what might be wrong.

1. Your content is ripped off of other sites. Theres no unique or original content. No one wants to read a blog that just puts together a bunch of articles from other sites.

2. Your content is boring. Some people have success with personal blogs about their life, however, if your life sucks and you blog about your life, chances are your blog sucks. Choose a topic that you know a lot about and is interesting for people to read about.

3. Your layout is horrible. There are ads overlapping each other and images flashing everywhere. Its hard to find where the actual content is. The background color shouldn't be too bright and the text should be big enough to be readable but small enough to fit enough text.

4. No one knows about your blog. You need to email some friends about your blog and promote it. Don't start spamming it everywhere, though.

5. You don't update often. Once a week is not often enough. People expect blogs to be updated frequently and be on top of the news.

6. You're writing for the wrong audience. If your blog is about engineering, you might not want to use slang terms and simple sentences. On the other hand, if your topic is about your personal life, you might want to make it easy to read and understand.

7. You make up stories. At first you might attract a bunch of attention but then people find out your story isn't credible by any trustworthy sources. You need to have sources that don't exaggerate facts. Your source should not be what some random guy on posted on his blog.

8. You don't respond to your readers. Your loyal readers give valuable feedback about your blog that you can use to make it better. Don't have the mindset of my blog my rules. After all, the blog was created for your readers not you.

9. You don't spend enough time on your blog. A blog needs to be regularly maintained. Not just posting regularly. You also want to change around the design or layout once in a while so that readers see that your blog is fresh and innovative.

10. You don't have passion for your blog. Some people just make a blog because they had a sudden urge to make one, but then they lose interest and only update to make money off of blogging. Readers will detect when your blog no longer has that spark that makes it unique. The key to keeping the passion for your blog is to pick a interesting topic to begin with that you enjoy. If your topic right now is something that you have no interest in, change it before its too late.

Thanks for reading this post and I hope that this helps you in creating a successful blog, or at least one that doesn't suck.

Various things that you can do to make money online

Content is always something that people are lazy to produce. Money can be made by creating content for others if you know what to do.

You can write articles or poems.

You can design websites.

You can take photos or produce your own images.

You can code and make scripts for people.

You can make software to sell.

You can produce videos.

Now you might get a couple dollars for a piece, but to fully maximize your profit you might want to add some watermarks that link to your site or something. If you design a bunch of website templates and give them for free, you could quickly get hundreds of back links to your site. The same applies to other content.

You can also purchase content in large quantities that offer resale rights and resell them to people for profit.

10 Things that Hurt your SEO

1. Too much html and not enough content.

2. Duplicate content copied from another site.

3. Having hundreds of outbound links on your site.

4. Having too much content about things that are unrelated to your keywords.

5. Spamming your whole page with keywords.

6. Content that is machine generated and doesn't make sense.

7. Putting keywords on your meta-tag but not your page.

8. Having hidden text.

9. Trying to cloak your website.

10. Too much confusing dynamic content that can confuse the search engine spider.

A Little Secret to Getting Cheap Keywords

For those of you who use Adwords or Yahoo to advertise your products, you'll notice that you might have to pay more than $1 per click for some competitive keywords.

However there is a way to get these keywords for cheap and in a perfect world, you probably wouldn't get them, however, people make mistakes and that is where this little secret comes in to play.

Ever misspell a word when searching? It happens a lot.

Now you can generate typos for free for your keywords. The keywords are cheap because they're not even words but people who make a typo will see it and you get a potential customer for cheap.
Free Typo Generator

More Free E-Books

E-books to help you build traffic and content for your site:
They are targeted at those who want to improve the SEO of their site.

I've have two of them available at
http://bofia.linkpage.frih.net/Volume1SoftwareLibrary.pdf
http://bofia.linkpage.frih.net/Volume2SoftwareLibrary.pdf

13 Things that will Improve your Income

1. Don't depend on one area to make all your money. You want to be an affiliate as well as show ads on your site so that you have more than one source of income.

2. Make more than one site as well. As you should have figured out by now, the key to making money online is through websites.

3. Don't get lazy. This means you should always try to get more traffic whenever possible.

4. Constantly keep your sites updated.

5. Doing little things while your site is little will have a large effect later on.

6. Don't be afraid to test new things such as a new layout or ad placement.

7. Make sure your visitors find exactly what they're looking for right away or they will leave.

8. Make sure that you visitors leave satisfied and they'll soon be coming back with friends.

9. Don't make a habit of doing temporary things to make money such as buying a link. You should be using your time finding permanent and reliable things that make you money.

10. Instead of milking a site for all its worth with ads everywhere, just make new sites.

11. Buy software that helps you automate tedious tasks. It's worth the money.

12. Buy some books about making money that have good reviews. Don't buy the ones that promise you money but have no reliable proof.

13. Don't stop trying to increase your income when you are making a decent amount. Your ways of generating income can fail anytime when your dealing with online money making.

How to Effectively Market a Product

Marketing is a skill that not many have but will always be the core skill needed in any business. Whether you have a product or not, marketing will always make money.

To successfully market a product and sell it, you need to get the basic steps.

1. Build a personal relationship with your potential customers or at least make them think that you are different from the other millions of people trying to sell them things.

2. Before trying to sell a big product, start with small ones so that you earn the trust of customers.

3. The product that you sell can be expensive, but it must be of good quality. You'll get free advertising from your customers who tell their friends if you spent the time to perfect your product. One angry customer could be the loss of many sales.

4. Make the customer feel like they need your product. Make it so they think they're missing out on a whole lot without your product.

5. Target the right group of customers. You want to advertise to the group that is most likely to buy from you. For example, you put a sports commercial on a sports channel.

6. Marketing is not done overnight, its done slowly and planned out.

You'll find that no matter what type of advertising you apply this to, your marketing skills will always be useful.

Ways to Get Good Inbound Links

Having many inbound links to your site is a must to make any money. At first you might think its easy but its harder than you think to get good ones.

1. Write articles and submit them to http://www.goarticles.com/ and http://www.ezinearticles.com/ with a link to your site. These sites have good rank and will boost your rank a lot.

2. Submit your site to directories. It takes time to get put on the directories but if you take the time to do them correctly and pick the right category, you should expect a inbound link to be made eventually. Here is a good free directory listing sorted by page rank.

3. Put your link in your signature and post in forums. Careful not to spam though.

4. Post content to social bookmarking sites such as digg.com and del.icio.us. If you're lucky, then you'll get a bunch of traffic if your content makes it to the front page and you're set.