08-May-2008
How To Make Money Doing Nothing
| I was looking through my affiliate stats with the FriendFinder Group, which is now actually owned by the Penthouse Media Group, and I see that I'm making money by doing nothing! Since I first signed up with this group I've earned some very respectable money, and it has always been paid out on time. What I'm noticing now is that I'm making money by other peoples' efforts. These are people I have introduced into the program as affiliates. I get 10% of what they earn. Now what I like about the FriendFinder Group is that, when you sign as an affiliate, you are able to promote about 27 different websites. There is something for all interests. Plus, and I think this is important, the individual programs are worldwide. As examples, I have recently had checks for $320.15 from their Adult FriendFinder website - and I'm still talking about what other people have earned me. But I have also affiliates making me money with other varied sites within this group as well. These are a few amounts I have outstanding at today's date (the total being $185.67): Alt.com* $7.13The above illustrates the varied nature of the websites that affiliates can promote, there are also many others. The amounts shown, remember, do not include the money I have made from promoting the sites myself on my blogs. I feel that if we are Blogging then we have, in most cases, international readers and it is limiting if we only promote programs which are for the country that we live in. Think worldwide and the potential, with something like the FriendFinder Group, is enormous. And it's especially good if a percentage of the money you make is not purely by our own efforts. I learnt a long time ago that it's not necessarily what you do yourself that makes you money, it's also what you get others to do. And this applies to lots of affiliate style programs. As well as 'selling' the products yourself introduce others as affiliates and you'll increase your earnings no end. Regarding the FriendFinder Group, as I call them, they have good back up and excellent varied forms of promotional material. They are a professional organisation with millions of members - but don't let this put you off - there are billions of people in the world! Good luck, Mike. Labels: Adult Friend Finder, Friend Finder Group |
06-May-2008
Use Link Bait, Set The Trap, Count The Money
 Strewth! I was looking at a couple of SEO websites and saw that one of them offers to create a Link Bait campaign for other sites. Seems a good idea, but then I noticed the price - $9,950. And there are no refunds!It shows the money making potential if you have the guts to ask for it - and have a knowledge of the subject, of course. Putting this aside Link Baiting is something that we should all try - though sometimes we do this without actually realising that this is what we are doing. To put it as simply as possible Link Bait is creating a post that others will want to visit again and/or will want to share the post with others. In other words it's a post that will attract a lot of links. The post may be just text or perhaps a video, a web tool or an image. What it has to do is create a lot of interest and so create a viral effect bringing you lots of incoming links. It's about creating a buzz. There are a myriad ways of doing this. The standard advice is to do this is by: Being Newsworthy: Release or create an important piece of news or something that your specific niche will be desperate to read - probably something they haven't heard about before. Become a ground breaker. Being Funny: Humour (or humor to those in the USA) is what makes the Internet go round - a funny cartoon, picture, video or story. Being Controversial: Yes, upset a few people, take an opposing viewpoint from the norm, go into a rage or rant and, before you know what has happened, the subject is being talked about on other sites and forums (with those important links to what you have written). Being Resourceful: Simply tell others where to get specific things relative to your niche. A nice long list should bring links in return. Or provide any other resource or reference. There are lots and lots more ways if you put your mind to the subject. Once the Bait has been laid do everything possible to promote your post - and know how you are going to go about this prior to publishing. It's no good laying bait without a trap. Think: Social Networking, Blog Comments, Help From Blogging Friends, Keywords - make the post Keyword Rich (include the Keyword(s) within the title), Relevant Outward Links within the post (this may encourage a return link), Forums and so on. As with most things in successful Blogging, Link Baiting takes effort and planning but the dividends can be amazing. Link Bait = Inward Links = More Visitors = More Money (Income) Good luck, Mike. Labels: Link Bait, Link Baiting, links, making money |
04-May-2008
Images Make Me Money
 I know I have written about the Power of Images before but, just to emphasise the point, on one of my celebrity blogs I have now had over a quarter of a million Google Image referrals in the 336 days since I started this particular blog. And, of course, this was starting from blank.As you will see from the stats on the left Google Images have now overtaken the standard Google as my top search engine referrals. The stats also show the power of Google when compared to the other search engines. Though Yahoo, for example, pulls in about 20 hits a day this is a very small percentage when compared to Google's combined totals. The other thing that this stresses, of course, is how reliant the blog is on Google for search engine referrals. I hope I don't inadvertently fall out with them in any way! You may recall in my post Be Careful Of The Search Engine Censors I have had a problem in this direction previously - and through no fault of my own.  The message from all of this must be: (1) to use images whenever possible and (2) always look for alternative ways to gain traffic. Good luck, Mike. Insider Hot News Videos: News on video - from Entertainment to World News. Labels: blog, celebrity blogs, Images, Referrals |
02-May-2008
A Money Making Look At April
 So that's four months of 2008 finished with. A third of the year gone, wonder if you are a third of the way to your targets or objectives - obviously you've set some!Though I'm not a stats mad person I do look at how things are going generally at the end of each month. So I know things such as: 24.6% of visitors to this particular blog come direct whereas 42.9% arrive via Google. I also see that Web Dosh referred the most readers from other blogs (thanks John). It's strange that two of my most read posts are from March and June of last year: Lots Of Ways On How To Make Money and How To Make Money With Chain Letters. For some reason the keywords within them show up high on Google. Could it also be those two magic words 'how to'? This is one of the advantages of building lots of posts on varying subjects. Some of them will appeal to the search engines and to searchers in general. As for keywords this blogs top five are: Money Making Blog, Voxant, Zlio, Mike Perry and Money Making Blogs. My own money making for April was 'satisfactory'. One thing I have noticed though is that AdSense commission is down and this is because the clicks per impressions percentage has dropped quite a bit. Not too sure why this is - maybe I need to shuffle things around a little or, perhaps, it's the much hyped (or at least it is in the UK) supposed possible recession. Personally I think if you tell people about something enough they will start to believe it, whether it's accurate or not. One of the things we mustn't do in business (and money making with blogs is a business) is to see what's in the media and start to use this as excuses for not achieving our objectives. Most difficulties can be overcome. It just means we might have to make changes and try differing approaches. So far this month (May) I've had payments from Google, Voxant and CC Bill. So that's a good start. Recession? What recession! Good luck for May, Mike. P.S. John has sent me an email saying his Proven Earners Carnival is up and running. Labels: AdSense, blog, Mike Perry, money making, money making blogs, Voxant |
30-Apr-2008
If You Don't Ask You Don't (Always) Get
 Years ago I managed a sales team and one of the slogans we had was 'If you don't tell you don't sell' which is similar to life in general when we could say, 'If you don't ask you don't get'.And this, of course, also applies to blogging! So when you've written, what you think is a stonking good post, why not ask other bloggers to link to it by puting a footnote at the end of the post. Better still give them the link to copy. It's always best to make life easy for people - we can all be a lazy lot. So you could maybe have a box something like this: The HTML isn't too difficult for such a form and I've given an example of this below, which created the box I used above. This can easily be adapted for your own use by: (1) Entering your URL (of your blog or post) instead of where mine is and (2) Entering the name of your blog or post where Mikes Money Making Mission is entered. Other things you can also alter are: (a) rows="4". You can have any amount of rows (going downwards) to suit what you are including within the box and the same goes for (b) cols="46". This is the width you want your box. I use 46 because this fits about right for the width of this blog's posts. My apologies to all of you HTML experts for my basic explanation but I hope this will be of use to newbies. But the real point of the post is : Ask and see if this brings more links to your blog or an individual post. Good luck, Mike. |
28-Apr-2008
Money Making: Quite Easily Done
 I was asked if I would do anything different if I was just about to start my very first money making blog.I think the main two things I would have done, the very first day, are: (1) I would have got myself a .com URL instead of sticking with the .blogspot address. One of the reasons I didn't do this, at the time, was because I wanted to see if I could make money from blogging without spending any myself. In other words I wanted to make money from nothing. It was a self imposed challenge. Now that I have proved to my own satisfaction that this can be done I wish I had spent about $10 and got myself a .com. It definitely sounds and looks more professional. Personally I'm quite happy with my blogs being hosted on Blogger and, as you may well know, there are options to purchase a .com and still host the blog on Blogger. (2) The second thing I would have done straight away is to get myself another template and not stick to Blogger's standard layouts. There are lots of places where you can get alternative templates for free, such as at FinalSense for example. This won't give you an 'exclusive' template but they have lots to choose from. Make sure, if it is for Blogger, that it is an XML design so that it is compatible with the up to date version of Blogger. Switching to a new template is very easy to do, though you will most likely have to update the side columns all over again. Also it's useful learning a bit of basic HTML so that you can tweak your template if necessary. Following these two things it's back to that old chestnut of publishing good content - that people want to read. Yes, I know I keep saying this but you can have the flashiest template, an interesting .com address but without quality content the blog won't make money. It's substance that matters. I can illustrate this by saying that my biggest earning blog still uses a .blogspot URL. Though it's content that is important (1) and (2) above might just have given me an extra edge that would have made the blog more acceptable to mainstream websites. I guess to sum up: make the blog look as good as you can, have a suitable .com and publish content of value. Q.E.D. (quod erat demonstrandum - or some say Quite Easily Done). Good luck, Mike YouGov: Complete surveys and polls for payment - genuine company. Labels: money making, money making blogs |
25-Apr-2008
Grade Your Money Making With The Website Grader
 If you are one of those who likes analysing your website there is a free tool that may be of interest. It's called the Website Grader.It's easy to use, just enter your URL and within a few minutes a report will come tumbling out - well it'll be on the screen anyway. I found out that you can use the tool without actually entering your email address - this appears optional. You get lots of info including a grade out of 100. The blog I checked gave me 90 out of 100 which meant the blog scores higher than 90% of the thousands of websites evaluated. Their algorithm supposedly works on 50+ variables including search engine date, website structure, approximate traffic and so on. After this it checks many things and gives you the info they found. For instance on the blog I entered it reported that I hadn't completed the metadata i.e. page description and meta keywords. This is something I should correct. There is a link for more info on metadata. It also looks at the main directories to see if the website/blog is on the likes of DMOZ, Yahoo! Directory and ZoomInfo. Other things covered include: Images, Last Google Crawl Date, Traffic Rank, Inbound Links, Google Indexed Pages, Posts Dugg, del.icio.us bookmarks and there is also a Keyword Grader and lots more besides. As I've written before I think sometimes it's possible to get too deep into stats and the like but there may be something on the Website Grader that could be beneficial - if you've got a spare 5-10 minutes that is. Good luck, Mike. P.S. John has informed me that he has another Proven Earners Carnival up and running. Labels: blog, money making, Website Grader |
23-Apr-2008
Synonyms For Higher Rankings
 I was reading an article about how to optimize for Google on news.stepforth.com and realised there was something I wasn't always doing regarding keywords.The article suggests that the body text should also contain synonyms of your chosen keywords. The reason being that Google will use these synonyms to tie in the overall relevance of your page for your main target phrases. To find synonyms you can, of course, use a thesaurus but a better way is by searching on Google itself to find what they feel are the right similar words to use. For example if your chosen keyword is, say, marriage then enter into Google ~marriage and then hit search. Now look through the results and notice any words that have been made bold. For our example you will see: love and wedding on the first page. As Google considers these related (to marriage) the idea is, therefore, to include these synonyms within whatever you are writing. Doing this may help with the odds of getting slightly higher in the rankings. There is obviously a lot more to keywords than just this but it's worth giving synonyms some thought when writing posts. Good luck, Mike. Other interesting blogs: Celebrity Insider - Photos & News / Insider Hot News Videos / Konnie Huq / CelebTease.com - over 18's only / How To Make Money |
20-Apr-2008
ReviewStream For A Small Money Stream
 As there are all sorts of people who arrive at this blog, with different money making needs, here is something that'll earn you a little money, but not massive amounts.I heard about this program from John at Web-Dosh. I must admit I hadn't come across it before this. The website is ReviewStream. It's all about writing reviews. Nothing new there you might say, but they can be about almost anything, you'll see the list of subjects on their website. As far as I can see the reviews don't have to be very long, so you could probably knock out a few quite quickly. Here's an example of one I wrote in a few minutes: Heathrow: Terminal 5. Okay, the nitty gritty. You don't get a lot for writing them. At the moment it's just $2 per review plus 10c for every 'vote' you receive. This doesn't sound a lot but what if you wrote say three a day for five days a week that would be $120 a month, $1440 a year. Which is probably more than a lot of people are making from new blogs. The reviews have to be approved and this take about 72 hours. As for payment, this is made via PayPal once you have over $50. Note that you have to request the payment, it's not made automatically. And that's it, other than there is a 1% commission for referring new members - this is as a percentage of the amount that they make. Again not a lot but every little helps. I don't think I'll do a lot with them myself, though I will try to get to the $50 payout figure to test that it all works okay. ReviewStream: It depends on what sort of income you are aiming for. Perhaps it could be a useful revenue source while building a new blog. Good luck, Mike. Free Adult Website. Make big money with a free adult products website. Over 18's only. Labels: Money, money making, Review Stream, ReviewStream |
18-Apr-2008
Be Careful Of The Search Engine Censors
 Be careful as to what readers' write in your comments.This is my reason for saying this. As I've written previously I like to experiment with different blogs and try various things out. In doing so, a while back, I started a basic blog about a British television presenter Konnie Huq. It never really took off as she wasn't in the news very much. The blog averaged only about 125 visitors a day. These mostly arrived from the Google search engine as the blog was always on the front page for keywords "Konnie Huq" and various other combinations. Everything ticked over okay and I only updated the posts once in a while. Then 10 days ago the blog had over 4000 visitors in 24 hours. "Great," you might think but a strange thing happened. The blog no longer appeared on the Google search engine's first page, or the second, or the third. In fact I couldn't find it on the search engine. To my own satisfaction I believe I have discovered as to why this was. These 4000+ visitors left over 80 comments and most of them were from China. They were upset because Konnie Huq was chosen to carry the Olympic torch in London but spoke out about 'human rights' in China and the Tibet issue. Most of the Chinese were furious at what she had said and the comments they left were racist, threatening and generally awful. And I believe this is why the blog was no longer on the Google search first page. I left the comments initially thinking that these said more about the writers than anything I could have said myself. And I don't really believe in censorship (within certain parameters). However, seeing my problem with Google I eventually removed the offending comments. Guess what? The blog is now back on the Google first page in 8th position! Okay it was previously higher but the removal of the comments did the trick. And that's why I said, at the beginning of this post, to be careful as to what is written within comments on your blog. There are forms of censorship and control all around us! Good luck, Mike. Labels: blog, censorship, Konnie Huq |