Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Free Ways To Make cash Online
Regardless of whether you are operating an online or offline business, it's important that you reduce your costs, thereby increasing your profits. Although advertising is an investment in your business and not an expense (if done correctly), you should be on the lookout for free methods of marketing, and free ways to make money online.Once the sales start to roll in, you can then invest some of your profits into paid methods of advertising. Let's focus on some of the free afor now.1. Article marketing is probably the most effective free way to make money online (and my favourite). Writing articles does take up a lot of time, but I feel that there's nothing more satisfying than creating quality content that can help people solve a problem.Once you submit your article to the article directories, you will begin to get targeted traffic from people that are interested in what you have to say. Web masters and ezine publishers will also pick up your article to use on their site or in their newsletter, which will give you even greater free exposure. Don't forget to research keywords and place them in your article. This will enable your article to rank well in the search engines (more free traffic).2. Blogging is also an excellent way to drive free traffic to your web site. You can set up a blog for free at Blogger.com, add regular content, link to your main site, and promote affiliate products. Make sure that you "ping" your blog every time you add content. This will alert the blog directories that you have made a new post, which will bring in the traffic. The search engines love blogs because of the fresh, regular content. So if you are consistent with this method, you will be getting picked up by the search engines more and more.3. SEO (search engine optimization) is simply the on-page and off-page optimization of a web site. You optimize the content on your site by placing well-researched keyword phrases that target the right audience. With off-page strategies, the idea is to get tons of back-links to your site (from article submitting and a linking campaign) so that you rank well in the search engines. If you can get on page 1 of the search results for your keywords, you will get massive amounts of free traffic.4. Forum participation gives you the opportunity to ask questions, learn, and also to help other people. If you have a link to your web site in your signature file, not only does this give you back-links to your site, but it also allows people to click through to your site. Make sure that you contribute useful information, rather than blatant advertising.5. Linking is a campaign of creating links pointing back to your site. One-way links are much better than reciprocal links in terms of ranking with the search engines. So apart from submitting articles with your link in it, you can submit your URL to link directories either manually or with submitter services or software. Or you can approach high-traffic web sites that are related to your niche and ask if they will link to you. The benefit to them is that they have useful content and links to offer their customers. So it's win-win for both of your businesses.6. Traffic Exchange sites allow you to surf members' web sites in exchange for advertising credits. These credits give you views or visitors to your site. The best use of traffic exchanges is to promote your own compelling lead-capture page to get opt-in subscribers. If your page is short and attention-grabbing, you will get more people signing up to your offer, rather than losing them with a long sales page. Once you build your list, you can follow up until you make the sale, and then consolidate that with back-end sales.Free ways to cash money online usually involve more time and effort. But if you work these methods on a consistent basis, the long term results are often better than the paid methods. And you'll also increase your bottom-line profits by reducing your advertising costs.
Free Ways To Make cash Online
Regardless of whether you are operating an online or offline business, it's important that you reduce your costs, thereby increasing your profits. Although advertising is an investment in your business and not an expense (if done correctly), you should be on the lookout for free methods of marketing, and free ways to make money online.Once the sales start to roll in, you can then invest some of your profits into paid methods of advertising. Let's focus on some of the free afor now.1. Article marketing is probably the most effective free way to make money online (and my favourite). Writing articles does take up a lot of time, but I feel that there's nothing more satisfying than creating quality content that can help people solve a problem.Once you submit your article to the article directories, you will begin to get targeted traffic from people that are interested in what you have to say. Web masters and ezine publishers will also pick up your article to use on their site or in their newsletter, which will give you even greater free exposure. Don't forget to research keywords and place them in your article. This will enable your article to rank well in the search engines (more free traffic).2. Blogging is also an excellent way to drive free traffic to your web site. You can set up a blog for free at Blogger.com, add regular content, link to your main site, and promote affiliate products. Make sure that you "ping" your blog every time you add content. This will alert the blog directories that you have made a new post, which will bring in the traffic. The search engines love blogs because of the fresh, regular content. So if you are consistent with this method, you will be getting picked up by the search engines more and more.3. SEO (search engine optimization) is simply the on-page and off-page optimization of a web site. You optimize the content on your site by placing well-researched keyword phrases that target the right audience. With off-page strategies, the idea is to get tons of back-links to your site (from article submitting and a linking campaign) so that you rank well in the search engines. If you can get on page 1 of the search results for your keywords, you will get massive amounts of free traffic.4. Forum participation gives you the opportunity to ask questions, learn, and also to help other people. If you have a link to your web site in your signature file, not only does this give you back-links to your site, but it also allows people to click through to your site. Make sure that you contribute useful information, rather than blatant advertising.5. Linking is a campaign of creating links pointing back to your site. One-way links are much better than reciprocal links in terms of ranking with the search engines. So apart from submitting articles with your link in it, you can submit your URL to link directories either manually or with submitter services or software. Or you can approach high-traffic web sites that are related to your niche and ask if they will link to you. The benefit to them is that they have useful content and links to offer their customers. So it's win-win for both of your businesses.6. Traffic Exchange sites allow you to surf members' web sites in exchange for advertising credits. These credits give you views or visitors to your site. The best use of traffic exchanges is to promote your own compelling lead-capture page to get opt-in subscribers. If your page is short and attention-grabbing, you will get more people signing up to your offer, rather than losing them with a long sales page. Once you build your list, you can follow up until you make the sale, and then consolidate that with back-end sales.Free ways to cash money online usually involve more time and effort. But if you work these methods on a consistent basis, the long term results are often better than the paid methods. And you'll also increase your bottom-line profits by reducing your advertising costs.
How to Make Cash Writing Short Articles without a Website
You certainly can. In fact, you can even make money without a website or autoresponder. With nothing more than a computer, word processor, and an Internet connection you can make money writing articles. The key to making money is consistency. You have to write articles every day. Each article should have between 350 and 500 words and will include a resource box with 2 to 3 links. To begin, go to ClickBank or Commission Junction and register with them if you don’t already have affiliate accounts with them. Then, visit their marketplace and select 3 or 4 popular products that are related to an area that you can write about. Make sure that the products that you select are good, high quality items that are selling well. Write 1 to 3 articles every day related to the products that you have chosen. This sounds more difficult than it actually is. It's really pretty easy. Look for articles on the Internet that are relating to your niche, then rewrite them in your own words. Never copy another author’s work, it is illegal and carries severe penalties. Get the main ideas and put them into your own words. Using this technique, you can write an article in 10 to 15 minutes. Submit each of your articles to 5 or 10 of the largest article directories. Make sure that your articles contain 3 affiliate links in the resource box. You can use the same affiliate links with every article but change the order that they appear. Sometimes make link 1 the first link, and sometimes add it as the third. Many people will just click on the first link. By varying their placement, all of your links will be on top part of the time. Using this technique, money may begin to trickle in after 4 to 6 weeks. However, after 6 months, you may begin to make money every week. And after a year, you could be making some very nice money almost every day. Do you want to learn more about making money online? Get my free ebook on how make money every day!
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
How to make money on your news content website
Forget what you might have heard: Journalists can earn money publishing online. Here are some tips from OJR readers.
This article is designed to help journalists learn how to make extra money, or even a full-time wage, by publishing independently online. It is not intended to provide an online revenue model for established news organizations. Heck, they've got business managers. They shouldn't need a wiki to show them what to do.
Content websites typically earn money through one of four ways:
Commissions / Affiliate links
Advertising networks
Selling your own ads
Paid content
Sponsorships/Grants
Once you have ads on your site, you will want to compute the eCPM (effective cost per thousand impressions) of revenue that each ad type is earning for you. You calculate eCPM by taking the total amount generated by an ad (or ad type), diving it by the number of pages on which that ad (or ad type) appears, then multiplying by 1,000. Let eCPM data help you decide which advertising type, layout and position work best for you.
Commissions / Affiliate linksAffiliate programs, such as Amazon.com's Associates Program, provided the first ways for early solo and small Web publishers to make a few bucks on their websites. In these programs, an online retailer will pay you, the publisher, a percentage on sales made after customers click through from your website to the retailer's site. Links can include traditional banner ads, search forms and links to individual products.
Because you only earn money when sales are made, affiliate programs will work best for you if your site's readers are consistently looking to make high-priced purchases -- for example, if you run a product review site. If you're interested in affiliate program, browse through merchant directories like Commission Junction and LinkShare to find retailers that offer products that fit your site's topic and audience.
Once registered with a merchant's program, you can create an ad or product link on your site using a snippet of Web code downloaded from the retailer. Some merchants go further and allow you to create virtual storefronts that match the design of your site, but where the retailer still handles all the inventory and commerce. Be careful setting up such arrangements -- unless you want customers coming to you for return and refund questions instead of to the retailer.
You'll want to note what percentage of a sale the retailer pays back to you, as well as the length of time after a sale that you get credit for the purchase. Some retailers limit credit to sales made on the initial click-through, but others will give credit for any sales made within a day or so. Also, some retailers will pay a commission on purchases you personally make after clicking your own links; others may kick you out of the program for doing that. Check a retailer's affiliate agreement and shop around for what you consider the best deal before putting links on your site.
Many publishers have found that links to individual products return more commissions than banner ads going to a retailer's home page. But the additional money those links earn might not be enough to justify the extra time that selecting and maintaining them requires.
Advertising networksMost news websites earn the bulk of their money through advertising. But you don't need a sales staff to attract advertisers to your site. Ad networks can handle the sale and display of ads on your site. All you need do is drop a few lines of code into your Web pages where you want the ads to appear.
The most popular ad network for independent publishers is Google's AdSense program. AdSense is a "pay per click" (PPC) program, where you earn money each time one of your readers clicks on a Google-served ad. Since you earn money on clicks, rather than completed sales, PPC ad networks can provide a more reliable source of income for sites whose readers are not looking to make a purchase right away. Other notable PPC ad networks include the Yahoo! Publisher Network and Ad Voyager.
Most PPC ads are text, but some PPC networks also sell image and Flash ads. Ads are sold and displayed based on an auction system, where advertisers bid on selected keywords and phrases that appear on network websites. The ad network looks for webpages displaying its ad code, then matches what it determines the content of a webpage to be with the most appropriate keywords and phrases that advertisers have bid upon. The network then automatically weighs several factors in determining which ads to serve on the page, including the value of those bids; advertisers' remaining budgets for those bids; what percentage of readers have clicked on those ads in the past; and, in Google's case, the percentage of those readers who have made a purchase or read a designated number of pages on the advertiser's site.
Google's "Smart Pricing" program will adjust the amount paid to you for each click based on your readers' track record of making a purchase, or viewing a certain number of pages, on that particular advertiser's website. So if your site attracts motivated buyers, you remain in the best position to earn money.
Whatever you do, do not even think about clicking the ads on your site, or encouraging your readers to do the same. All PPC ad networks prohibit click fraud, and will boot from their program any publisher found to be inflating their number of clicks. Even well-intentioned discussion board participants can get a publisher booted from the program by encouraging other readers to click the ads to support the site. Google, for example, has suggested publishers concerned about their readers' conduct add this disclaimer to their site:
"Your postings to this site may not include incentives of any kind for other users to click on ads which are displayed on the site. This includes encouraging other readers to click on the ads or to visit the advertisers' sites, as well as drawing any undue attention to the ads. This activity is strictly prohibited in order to avoid potential inflation of advertiser costs."
If you don't think PPC ad networks will work for you because your site's target audience is defined by demographics, such as geography or a religious or political affiliation -- don't worry. Traditional ad networks such as BlogAds provide an alternative to the PPC networks. BlogAds sells its ads on a more traditional site-targeted model. Advertisers do not bid on keywords or phrases, but instead pay for their ads to be displayed a certain number of times on selected websites or groups of websites. BlogAds has become especially popular on political blogs, where advertisers can buy across a group of liberal or conservative weblogs.
Design to maximize online ad revenue
Since PPC ad networks target their ads primarily by topic, rather than geography or demographics, that makes these networks work better with niche topic websites than with sites that target their readers by geography or other demographics, such as gender, education, income or political affiliation.
For the system to work well for you, the PPC network's spiders must be able to determine a topic for each of your webpages and then must match keywords or phrases that advertisers have bid upon. That means the advantage goes to websites where each page covers a distinct and easily identifiable subject. So if you have a blog that covers a mishmash of topics on a single URL, you won't elicit the targeted ads that lead to high-paying clicks.
If you want to use PPC ad networks, organize your content to limit individual URLs to a specific topic. Break long blogs into individual entries. Archive old posts and stories by subject matter, not just by date and author. Stay active on discussion boards, keeping threads on topic and directing folks to more relevant pages should they stray toward other subjects. Use keywords in headlines, decks and URLs whenever possible. And spell out keywords, phrases and proper names on first reference, rather than using acronyms throughout the piece. (See, old fashioned copy editing rules *can* help you make money!)
Well-organized pages on individual topics also show up better in search engine results, attracting Web surfers curious about a specific keyword, who are more likely to click on a targeted ad. Publishers who create evergreen articles that are likely to attract a high number of links and clicks over time will do best in attracting search engine traffic to their ad-supported webpages. If you publish time-sensitive articles, which are not likely to have a long-enough shelf life to attract significant search engine traffic, consider swapping out or archiving articles on the same topic to a single URL, so that URL can get linked to and picked up in search results.
Where you place ads on a page affects how many of your users see them, and click. According to recent Google research, top performing ad formats include:
Large box ads placed in the middle of your main content column;
Skyscraper ads placed in a left-side column;
Leaderboard ads placed at the top and the bottom of the main content column.Customize the ads' colors to match the background, type and navigational colors of your site, too, to eliminate "banner blindness" and maximize their visibility to your readers.
Then keep an eye on your ads to make sure that they remain relevant to your site. To a reader, ads -- like anything else on your pages -- are part of the content of your website. If an ad network fails to deliver consistently relevant ads, dump it and try something else. Respect your readers by not bombarding them with irrelevant advertising and they will respect you by continuing to read your site.
Think twice before installing pop-up, pop-under and screen "take-over" ads, too. Many readers steer clear of sites that block their access to the content they're looking for with aggressive advertising. Keep your website a safe haven for these ad-weary readers and you can build its audience over time.
How much traffic do you need?
With advertising, the more readers you have and page views you serve, the more money you can make. But how much traffic do you need to make a living from your website?
To make $36,500 a year, you'd need to earn $100 a day on your site (plus whatever expenses you incur). Let's assume your site is attractive to advertisers and earns $10 in ad revenue for every thousand page views. That would mean you'd need to serve 10,000 page views a day to meet this target. (And more if your site earns less than $10 per thousand page views.)
How can you attract that much traffic? If you are writing one article a day on subjects that will be out of date within 24 hours, it's going to be tough. You'll need to attract nearly 10,000 views each day for that's day article, since few people will bother reading your old, out-of-date work. If you write a fair number of "evergreen" features, which keep attracting page views long after they are written, you'll find the task much easier. If your site naturally deals with "perishable" news content, at least publish each day's new news to the same URL, overwriting or pushing down the old content, so that URL can build the in-bound links and search engine traffic that will help you attract new readers you need each day.
Reader-contributed content can also help you meet your page view goals. Well-managed, thoughtfully organized discussion boards and wikis can add dozens of new content pages a day to your site, with much less effort on your part than writing that many original articles.
Selling your own adsIf you don't want to share your ad revenue with a network, or if your site isn't the type to do well with PPC ads, you might consider selling space directly to advertisers.
First, you will need solid information about your site's visitors. Ultimately, what you are selling to advertisers is access to your readers, so you'd better know how many, and who, they are. A traffic tracking service like Google Analytics can provide accurate trafiic data that filters out hon-human traffic like search engine spiders and automated robots (which can account for up to 90 percent of a site's overall traffic). Make Money also provides reader tracking, along with some crude demographic information about your site's readers.
You should also consider conducting a survey of your readers, to get more detailed information about their demographics and behavior. SurveyMonkey provides easy-to-use tools to set up such surveys.
Once you have advertisers, you will need a system to serve and manage ads, such as OpenAds, as well as system to invoice your advertisers, such as Blinksale or PayPal. (PayPal's invoicing system does not require your advertisers to have a PayPal account, just a credit card.)
Set up a page on your site, linked from the header or footer, that provides data about your site's traffic and visitors, as well as a list of available ad packages. You might also provide a well-designed PDF version of the same data, as decision-makers often prefer "hard copy" versions of this information. (If you need free software to convert Word documents to PDFs, OpenOffice does this with a single mouse click.)
If your advertising page does not generate enough leads to support your site, you'll need to make cold calls to potential advertisers, via e-mail, phone or in person. You'll have the best luck with smaller businesses that do not place ads through agencies, but where the owner makes his or her own ad decisions.
Paid contentGiven the variety and depth of information available on the Web, you have to provide truly unique content of high value to specific readers to get those readers to pay for it. The fact that a paid journalist wrote an article for you does not mean it's worth paying for to a reader. Detail-oriented publications such as Consumer Reports and Cook's Illustrated have had success selling the results of their independent testing online. And, of course, porn sites have been earning big bucks from paid content since the Web's earliest days. But general-interest publications, such as the Los Angeles Times, have found that walling off content to paid subscribers has generated less revenue than the company could have earned by selling advertising on freely available pages.
If you are certain that your content is unique and valuable enough that readers would be willing to pay for it, you'll need to select a way to handle payments from your readers. The system could be as easy as asking readers mail you a check in exchange for your putting them on e-mail content distribution list -- a method which offers the advantage of not requiring any advanced Web server security set-up. Or you could restrict access to certain folders on your website to readers whom you assign log-ins after they buy a subscription. Such restrictions are relatively easy to set up on Apache webservers. Payment can be handled manually via postal mail or phone, or automatically through an e-commerce storefront. (Many Web hosting packages include e-commerce storefronts.)
Sponsorships/GrantsSupporting a website through sponsorship or grants requires the least technical skill of these options, but the most interpersonal skills. You'll need to play the role of a salesperson, in addition to journalist and editor, in convincing a individual or organization to give you money to put up your site.
In either case, you'll need to identify individuals, or individuals within organizations, who might be willing to commit their money, or their organization's money, to your site. You'll need to make a written proposal, and often, an in-person pitch, and follow through until you secure your funding. Grants typically require a more structured application process than sponsorships, which can be sold through a formal solicitation or over drinks at the dinner table, depending upon whom you are working with.
This article is designed to help journalists learn how to make extra money, or even a full-time wage, by publishing independently online. It is not intended to provide an online revenue model for established news organizations. Heck, they've got business managers. They shouldn't need a wiki to show them what to do.
Content websites typically earn money through one of four ways:
Commissions / Affiliate links
Advertising networks
Selling your own ads
Paid content
Sponsorships/Grants
Once you have ads on your site, you will want to compute the eCPM (effective cost per thousand impressions) of revenue that each ad type is earning for you. You calculate eCPM by taking the total amount generated by an ad (or ad type), diving it by the number of pages on which that ad (or ad type) appears, then multiplying by 1,000. Let eCPM data help you decide which advertising type, layout and position work best for you.
Commissions / Affiliate linksAffiliate programs, such as Amazon.com's Associates Program, provided the first ways for early solo and small Web publishers to make a few bucks on their websites. In these programs, an online retailer will pay you, the publisher, a percentage on sales made after customers click through from your website to the retailer's site. Links can include traditional banner ads, search forms and links to individual products.
Because you only earn money when sales are made, affiliate programs will work best for you if your site's readers are consistently looking to make high-priced purchases -- for example, if you run a product review site. If you're interested in affiliate program, browse through merchant directories like Commission Junction and LinkShare to find retailers that offer products that fit your site's topic and audience.
Once registered with a merchant's program, you can create an ad or product link on your site using a snippet of Web code downloaded from the retailer. Some merchants go further and allow you to create virtual storefronts that match the design of your site, but where the retailer still handles all the inventory and commerce. Be careful setting up such arrangements -- unless you want customers coming to you for return and refund questions instead of to the retailer.
You'll want to note what percentage of a sale the retailer pays back to you, as well as the length of time after a sale that you get credit for the purchase. Some retailers limit credit to sales made on the initial click-through, but others will give credit for any sales made within a day or so. Also, some retailers will pay a commission on purchases you personally make after clicking your own links; others may kick you out of the program for doing that. Check a retailer's affiliate agreement and shop around for what you consider the best deal before putting links on your site.
Many publishers have found that links to individual products return more commissions than banner ads going to a retailer's home page. But the additional money those links earn might not be enough to justify the extra time that selecting and maintaining them requires.
Advertising networksMost news websites earn the bulk of their money through advertising. But you don't need a sales staff to attract advertisers to your site. Ad networks can handle the sale and display of ads on your site. All you need do is drop a few lines of code into your Web pages where you want the ads to appear.
The most popular ad network for independent publishers is Google's AdSense program. AdSense is a "pay per click" (PPC) program, where you earn money each time one of your readers clicks on a Google-served ad. Since you earn money on clicks, rather than completed sales, PPC ad networks can provide a more reliable source of income for sites whose readers are not looking to make a purchase right away. Other notable PPC ad networks include the Yahoo! Publisher Network and Ad Voyager.
Most PPC ads are text, but some PPC networks also sell image and Flash ads. Ads are sold and displayed based on an auction system, where advertisers bid on selected keywords and phrases that appear on network websites. The ad network looks for webpages displaying its ad code, then matches what it determines the content of a webpage to be with the most appropriate keywords and phrases that advertisers have bid upon. The network then automatically weighs several factors in determining which ads to serve on the page, including the value of those bids; advertisers' remaining budgets for those bids; what percentage of readers have clicked on those ads in the past; and, in Google's case, the percentage of those readers who have made a purchase or read a designated number of pages on the advertiser's site.
Google's "Smart Pricing" program will adjust the amount paid to you for each click based on your readers' track record of making a purchase, or viewing a certain number of pages, on that particular advertiser's website. So if your site attracts motivated buyers, you remain in the best position to earn money.
Whatever you do, do not even think about clicking the ads on your site, or encouraging your readers to do the same. All PPC ad networks prohibit click fraud, and will boot from their program any publisher found to be inflating their number of clicks. Even well-intentioned discussion board participants can get a publisher booted from the program by encouraging other readers to click the ads to support the site. Google, for example, has suggested publishers concerned about their readers' conduct add this disclaimer to their site:
"Your postings to this site may not include incentives of any kind for other users to click on ads which are displayed on the site. This includes encouraging other readers to click on the ads or to visit the advertisers' sites, as well as drawing any undue attention to the ads. This activity is strictly prohibited in order to avoid potential inflation of advertiser costs."
If you don't think PPC ad networks will work for you because your site's target audience is defined by demographics, such as geography or a religious or political affiliation -- don't worry. Traditional ad networks such as BlogAds provide an alternative to the PPC networks. BlogAds sells its ads on a more traditional site-targeted model. Advertisers do not bid on keywords or phrases, but instead pay for their ads to be displayed a certain number of times on selected websites or groups of websites. BlogAds has become especially popular on political blogs, where advertisers can buy across a group of liberal or conservative weblogs.
Design to maximize online ad revenue
Since PPC ad networks target their ads primarily by topic, rather than geography or demographics, that makes these networks work better with niche topic websites than with sites that target their readers by geography or other demographics, such as gender, education, income or political affiliation.
For the system to work well for you, the PPC network's spiders must be able to determine a topic for each of your webpages and then must match keywords or phrases that advertisers have bid upon. That means the advantage goes to websites where each page covers a distinct and easily identifiable subject. So if you have a blog that covers a mishmash of topics on a single URL, you won't elicit the targeted ads that lead to high-paying clicks.
If you want to use PPC ad networks, organize your content to limit individual URLs to a specific topic. Break long blogs into individual entries. Archive old posts and stories by subject matter, not just by date and author. Stay active on discussion boards, keeping threads on topic and directing folks to more relevant pages should they stray toward other subjects. Use keywords in headlines, decks and URLs whenever possible. And spell out keywords, phrases and proper names on first reference, rather than using acronyms throughout the piece. (See, old fashioned copy editing rules *can* help you make money!)
Well-organized pages on individual topics also show up better in search engine results, attracting Web surfers curious about a specific keyword, who are more likely to click on a targeted ad. Publishers who create evergreen articles that are likely to attract a high number of links and clicks over time will do best in attracting search engine traffic to their ad-supported webpages. If you publish time-sensitive articles, which are not likely to have a long-enough shelf life to attract significant search engine traffic, consider swapping out or archiving articles on the same topic to a single URL, so that URL can get linked to and picked up in search results.
Where you place ads on a page affects how many of your users see them, and click. According to recent Google research, top performing ad formats include:
Large box ads placed in the middle of your main content column;
Skyscraper ads placed in a left-side column;
Leaderboard ads placed at the top and the bottom of the main content column.Customize the ads' colors to match the background, type and navigational colors of your site, too, to eliminate "banner blindness" and maximize their visibility to your readers.
Then keep an eye on your ads to make sure that they remain relevant to your site. To a reader, ads -- like anything else on your pages -- are part of the content of your website. If an ad network fails to deliver consistently relevant ads, dump it and try something else. Respect your readers by not bombarding them with irrelevant advertising and they will respect you by continuing to read your site.
Think twice before installing pop-up, pop-under and screen "take-over" ads, too. Many readers steer clear of sites that block their access to the content they're looking for with aggressive advertising. Keep your website a safe haven for these ad-weary readers and you can build its audience over time.
How much traffic do you need?
With advertising, the more readers you have and page views you serve, the more money you can make. But how much traffic do you need to make a living from your website?
To make $36,500 a year, you'd need to earn $100 a day on your site (plus whatever expenses you incur). Let's assume your site is attractive to advertisers and earns $10 in ad revenue for every thousand page views. That would mean you'd need to serve 10,000 page views a day to meet this target. (And more if your site earns less than $10 per thousand page views.)
How can you attract that much traffic? If you are writing one article a day on subjects that will be out of date within 24 hours, it's going to be tough. You'll need to attract nearly 10,000 views each day for that's day article, since few people will bother reading your old, out-of-date work. If you write a fair number of "evergreen" features, which keep attracting page views long after they are written, you'll find the task much easier. If your site naturally deals with "perishable" news content, at least publish each day's new news to the same URL, overwriting or pushing down the old content, so that URL can build the in-bound links and search engine traffic that will help you attract new readers you need each day.
Reader-contributed content can also help you meet your page view goals. Well-managed, thoughtfully organized discussion boards and wikis can add dozens of new content pages a day to your site, with much less effort on your part than writing that many original articles.
Selling your own adsIf you don't want to share your ad revenue with a network, or if your site isn't the type to do well with PPC ads, you might consider selling space directly to advertisers.
First, you will need solid information about your site's visitors. Ultimately, what you are selling to advertisers is access to your readers, so you'd better know how many, and who, they are. A traffic tracking service like Google Analytics can provide accurate trafiic data that filters out hon-human traffic like search engine spiders and automated robots (which can account for up to 90 percent of a site's overall traffic). Make Money also provides reader tracking, along with some crude demographic information about your site's readers.
You should also consider conducting a survey of your readers, to get more detailed information about their demographics and behavior. SurveyMonkey provides easy-to-use tools to set up such surveys.
Once you have advertisers, you will need a system to serve and manage ads, such as OpenAds, as well as system to invoice your advertisers, such as Blinksale or PayPal. (PayPal's invoicing system does not require your advertisers to have a PayPal account, just a credit card.)
Set up a page on your site, linked from the header or footer, that provides data about your site's traffic and visitors, as well as a list of available ad packages. You might also provide a well-designed PDF version of the same data, as decision-makers often prefer "hard copy" versions of this information. (If you need free software to convert Word documents to PDFs, OpenOffice does this with a single mouse click.)
If your advertising page does not generate enough leads to support your site, you'll need to make cold calls to potential advertisers, via e-mail, phone or in person. You'll have the best luck with smaller businesses that do not place ads through agencies, but where the owner makes his or her own ad decisions.
Paid contentGiven the variety and depth of information available on the Web, you have to provide truly unique content of high value to specific readers to get those readers to pay for it. The fact that a paid journalist wrote an article for you does not mean it's worth paying for to a reader. Detail-oriented publications such as Consumer Reports and Cook's Illustrated have had success selling the results of their independent testing online. And, of course, porn sites have been earning big bucks from paid content since the Web's earliest days. But general-interest publications, such as the Los Angeles Times, have found that walling off content to paid subscribers has generated less revenue than the company could have earned by selling advertising on freely available pages.
If you are certain that your content is unique and valuable enough that readers would be willing to pay for it, you'll need to select a way to handle payments from your readers. The system could be as easy as asking readers mail you a check in exchange for your putting them on e-mail content distribution list -- a method which offers the advantage of not requiring any advanced Web server security set-up. Or you could restrict access to certain folders on your website to readers whom you assign log-ins after they buy a subscription. Such restrictions are relatively easy to set up on Apache webservers. Payment can be handled manually via postal mail or phone, or automatically through an e-commerce storefront. (Many Web hosting packages include e-commerce storefronts.)
Sponsorships/GrantsSupporting a website through sponsorship or grants requires the least technical skill of these options, but the most interpersonal skills. You'll need to play the role of a salesperson, in addition to journalist and editor, in convincing a individual or organization to give you money to put up your site.
In either case, you'll need to identify individuals, or individuals within organizations, who might be willing to commit their money, or their organization's money, to your site. You'll need to make a written proposal, and often, an in-person pitch, and follow through until you secure your funding. Grants typically require a more structured application process than sponsorships, which can be sold through a formal solicitation or over drinks at the dinner table, depending upon whom you are working with.
3 Easy Steps to a Million Dollar Title
The three steps to a million dollar title are:
1) The type of article you write is very important in acquiring readers. ‘How to’ articles are
always very popular. Make sure your readers know it is a ‘How to’ article. Do not use a
general term for your title such as, ‘Beautify your House’. Be specific and use descriptive
words. A much better title would be, ‘Three Easy Steps To Have the Most Beautiful House
On the Block’. Use terms like, 3 steps to… or 3 Techniques for… or 10 Ways to…
2) Certain words and phrases naturally attract attention. Make sure you use at least some of
them in your title. Some of these attention-getting words are: free, secret, sex, million dollar,
big, profit, and money. Of course, there are many others. One easy way to find them is to
look at your junk email file. Search among the subject lines to see which ones jump out at
you and write them down. Consider using some of those same words for your title.
3) Research keywords that people are currently using in their Internet searches. This is
important because it tells you what people are interested in today. If your title satisfies that
interest, you will attract readers. There are several websites that provide this sort of up-todate
information.
1) The type of article you write is very important in acquiring readers. ‘How to’ articles are
always very popular. Make sure your readers know it is a ‘How to’ article. Do not use a
general term for your title such as, ‘Beautify your House’. Be specific and use descriptive
words. A much better title would be, ‘Three Easy Steps To Have the Most Beautiful House
On the Block’. Use terms like, 3 steps to… or 3 Techniques for… or 10 Ways to…
2) Certain words and phrases naturally attract attention. Make sure you use at least some of
them in your title. Some of these attention-getting words are: free, secret, sex, million dollar,
big, profit, and money. Of course, there are many others. One easy way to find them is to
look at your junk email file. Search among the subject lines to see which ones jump out at
you and write them down. Consider using some of those same words for your title.
3) Research keywords that people are currently using in their Internet searches. This is
important because it tells you what people are interested in today. If your title satisfies that
interest, you will attract readers. There are several websites that provide this sort of up-todate
information.
How to Make Money From Your Website
Now that you've created a website, how do you make money from it? There are at least two ways in which sites can make money:
Advertising Revenue
Selling Goods and Services
I shall deal with the second case, "Selling goods and services", in another article. In this article, I will address the issue of how your site can actually make money from advertising.
Making Money From Advertising
If you look at many websites, you will probably notice that there are banner advertisements displayed on most pages. If you are a newcomer to the scene, you might think that you must either be a company or that your site must be famous before you can get advertisers, just as it is the case in hardcopy publications.
In reality, anyone with a website can get advertisers. While it is true that if your site is well-known, you may get companies contacting you to offer to advertise on your site, you can get advertising revenue even if you are just starting out and your site is relatively unknown.
The way to do this is to join as an "affiliate" of various sites, either directly, or through an affiliate network. An affiliate network is simply an intermediary where you can select from a variety of advertisers.
Payment Schemes
Before joining any program, you should probably be aware of the different payment schemes available.
Pay Per Impression (CPM)
Here, you are paid according to the number of times the advertiser's banner is displayed on your site. The amount you earn is typically calculated based on the number of thousand impressions of the banner (impressions = number of times the banner is displayed), often abbreviated CPM (cost per thousand, with the M being the Latin numeral for thousand). That is, $5 CPM means that you get paid $5 for 1,000 displays of the banner. In general, the amount paid is usually small, but it is easy to earn since everytime a visitor loads the page, you earn. This is known as a "high conversion rate". Needless to say, this method will allow you to automatically earn more if your site attracts a lot of visitors.
Pay Per Click (PPC)
When you are paid per click, you are only paid when visitors click the advertiser's banner on your site. The amount paid is usually higher than the pay per impression scheme. Whether you get a high conversion rate here depends on the banner (whether it attracts people to click it), although in general, it has a higher conversion rate than the pay per sale method. A high traffic site will probably enjoy a higher click rate than a lower traffic site, although you will probably get better results if your banners are carefully selected to suit the target audience of your site.
Pay Per Sale or Lead
While you will probably get the highest payment rates with this method, it has the lowest conversion rate of the three schemes. You will only earn if your visitors click through the banner and either purchase an item from the advertiser or take some other prescribed action (eg, sign up for a service). Like the Pay Per Click method, you get much better results if you carefully select your advertisers to suit the target audience of your site.
In general, to avoid wasting resources in issuing cheques for very small amounts, advertisers will usually accrue the amount owing to you until it reaches a certain level (such as $25) before they pay you.
Advertising Revenue
Selling Goods and Services
I shall deal with the second case, "Selling goods and services", in another article. In this article, I will address the issue of how your site can actually make money from advertising.
Making Money From Advertising
If you look at many websites, you will probably notice that there are banner advertisements displayed on most pages. If you are a newcomer to the scene, you might think that you must either be a company or that your site must be famous before you can get advertisers, just as it is the case in hardcopy publications.
In reality, anyone with a website can get advertisers. While it is true that if your site is well-known, you may get companies contacting you to offer to advertise on your site, you can get advertising revenue even if you are just starting out and your site is relatively unknown.
The way to do this is to join as an "affiliate" of various sites, either directly, or through an affiliate network. An affiliate network is simply an intermediary where you can select from a variety of advertisers.
Payment Schemes
Before joining any program, you should probably be aware of the different payment schemes available.
Pay Per Impression (CPM)
Here, you are paid according to the number of times the advertiser's banner is displayed on your site. The amount you earn is typically calculated based on the number of thousand impressions of the banner (impressions = number of times the banner is displayed), often abbreviated CPM (cost per thousand, with the M being the Latin numeral for thousand). That is, $5 CPM means that you get paid $5 for 1,000 displays of the banner. In general, the amount paid is usually small, but it is easy to earn since everytime a visitor loads the page, you earn. This is known as a "high conversion rate". Needless to say, this method will allow you to automatically earn more if your site attracts a lot of visitors.
Pay Per Click (PPC)
When you are paid per click, you are only paid when visitors click the advertiser's banner on your site. The amount paid is usually higher than the pay per impression scheme. Whether you get a high conversion rate here depends on the banner (whether it attracts people to click it), although in general, it has a higher conversion rate than the pay per sale method. A high traffic site will probably enjoy a higher click rate than a lower traffic site, although you will probably get better results if your banners are carefully selected to suit the target audience of your site.
Pay Per Sale or Lead
While you will probably get the highest payment rates with this method, it has the lowest conversion rate of the three schemes. You will only earn if your visitors click through the banner and either purchase an item from the advertiser or take some other prescribed action (eg, sign up for a service). Like the Pay Per Click method, you get much better results if you carefully select your advertisers to suit the target audience of your site.
In general, to avoid wasting resources in issuing cheques for very small amounts, advertisers will usually accrue the amount owing to you until it reaches a certain level (such as $25) before they pay you.
Arbitage Opportunties, Brokerage, Finance businesses, miscellaneous
Big bucks
76. While most webmasters use PPC to refer to Pay Per Click old timers use it jokingly to refer to P*rn (where *=o), Pills and Casinos. Those are probably the three biggest money areas on the net and have probably made more millionaires than any others. But they are very competitive and are difficult markets to er, penetrate. However, there are lots of legal, legitimate opportunities here some of which I'll expand on in due course.
Arbitrage/brokerage
77. Example of a pure arbitrage opportunity: For a while buying traffic via Google Adwords and sending that traffic to pages of little content and Google Adsense ads generated reasonable profits when done astutely. Sure, Adwords and Adsense are two sites of the same coin. But I did say you needed to be astute to recognise where the opportunities were and you need to test, test, test. There are still lots of contextual arbitrage opportunities about. Especially when you work across programs (e.g., buy traffic from MSN, sell to Yahoo).
78. There are a lot of arbitrage opportunities in the finance world as discussed below but if economics and finance talk bores you to death, there's sports arbitrage. Different online bookmakers may offer different odds on a sporting event. By taking the better odds at each bookie you could come out ahead irrespective of the actual outcome of the event. If you're really clever you could make a program to do this for you. Why don't the bookies adjust their odds based on what their competitors are offering? Because they have to balance their own books. Their prices are decided based on how their own punters are betting.
79. Hosting: You don't need to buy a lot of server hardware to provide a web hosting service. Many big hosting companies allow "reseller" accounts where you sell hosting plans to customers and the hosting company will host them all for you under your Reseller account umbrella. You get to charge customers as much as you want. Some Resellers provide value added services and charge more for these. At places like WHT you'll find that resellers sometimes sell their customers as a "bundle" i.e., you can pay some money to buy a reseller "business".
80. Related to the above is free hosting where you provide small website owners free hosting and in exchange you serve ads to all their pages to make the revenue to pay the hosting company and yourself. Early pioneers of this model are well known names like Geocities and Angelfire.
81. Being a broker can be done in a thousand different ways. There are some entrepreneurs making healthy profits just by bidding for projects on places like elance and guru (and others) and farming them out to a bank of writers/programmers they use on a regular basis.
Finance
82. Trading from home is really catching on in many parts of the world. You don't need to be an expert on stocks & shares. You can trade on commodities, currencies, lots more. Trading futures allows you to leverage even small $100 amounts of capital into huge fortunes (or bankruptcy).
83. Gambling is a far cry from trading futures but a route to riches for many. No, not the traditional horse racing type of gambling where the only long term winner is the bookmaker. I'm talking gambling against other gamblers, I'm talking the numerous ways of gambling online (search). And there are a million books and ebooks that claim to "teach you how to win".
84. HYIP, or High Yield Investment Programs are just what they say on the tin. They are also highly risky. You invests your money and you takes a chance, but some pay as much as 100% per day. How do they do it? A very few are putting your money into investments with even better rates of return. Others are simply going to keep paying out the first few customers with investments collected from later ones.... and then they go bust. Pyramid style. Maybe the ones who make the money are the ones who get in early... or actually start HYIP programs.
eBay/Amazon etc.
85. What's it with eBay? You just can't get away from them. Their bulk "dictionary purchase" of ad terms from the Google Adwords/Adsense system means you find ads for eBay no matter what you're looking for, even if it's for toenail clippings or dead pets. Whatever the reason for their success you can join the bandwagon and sell your rubbish on eBay and convert a garage of old junk to hard cash.
86. And when you've acquired a fair amount of experience with selling your own rubbish, start selling others' rubbish. How to get your hands on enough trash? Place an ad in your local paper to do house clearances, or just buy stock from wholesalers in - yes, you guessed it - eBay itself. You can get anything from unused toasters to umbilical cord containers. A lot of ebay sellers are actually shopkeepers; they buy stock new from wholesalers and sell them in eBay instead of a physical bricks and mortar shop... and make a healthy living doing so.
87. You've now got a lot of experience buying and selling in eBay. It's time to write a book or ebook on how to use ebay to generate millions. It doesn't matter that you haven't made millions yourself. People still buy these books even if it's just to learn their way about ebay which can be quite daunting for some. And you can sell it on ... you guessed!
88. Don't fancy writing? Then set yourself up as an eBay assistant. eBay itself will send you people who need help with their complicated system. And you can charge them a commission.
89. Alternatively, setup a shop to accept goods from those who can't list them themselves. Yes, a physical shop. There are lots of them springing up all in big cities. The operation is simple. You take something in from somebody, sell it on ebay and retain a percentage for all your efforts.
90. Think building an ebay business is too much like building a normal business? If you've got the capital you can take the easy route. A lot of ebay "shop" (businesses) come up for sale in site-for-sale forums and with business brokers. The ebay username and feedback generally accompanies the business so you continue to benefit from accumulated goodwill (though the "transfer" is something that eBay may not approve of).
91. Opportunities to make money in eBay are limited only by your imagination. There's money in everything from making connections (putting people in touch with other people) to coming up with or commissioning software to make the average ebayer's life simpler or more productive (thousands of such programs already exist). There's even a business model involving just searching for and finding items that have been misspelt in the listings.
92. It's not just eBay. Any merchant big enough or third party affiliate manager program - from Commission Junction to Clickbank - has opportunities. For example, you can create an Amazon affiliate site.
Others
93. Set up a proxy (example). People seem to want to surf at work AND access sites their IT system blocks them from viewing. A proxy allows them to get around that restriction. Some proxy services get by just on the advertising (as it's easy to get enormous page views in the proxy business). A very good one will even have people paying a few dollars each. There are several ways to monetise a proxy.
94. Enjoy networking? Social networking Web 2.0 style? Make money with it. If you build up sufficient reputation in places like Digg people will start approaching you to start some buzz on their company or their new product. At one point Netscape offered top "Diggers" a sweetener os $1,000 to move over to their competing service.
95. Selling databases of parts/directory listings/modified or value added DMOZ data/ email lists. The DMOZ directory is a massive directory put together by volunteer editors. And they give away their content for free. Kind of. You can download their database and combine it with other information - like phone number and postcode from Yellow pages- to add value / enhance those listings. You could then sell the enhanced product.
96. Find jobs for your friends. An easy way into the personal recruitment business. Know a friend who's just right for a particular job? Make the connection between friend and employer and you could get up to $5,000 for a few hours work.
97. Get paid for your unused computer cycles. Is your computer sometimes on while you aren't actually sitting at it? Then it's using electricity but not performing "work". Joining a distributed computing group like SETI lets you use that computing power to help reach some worthy/unworthy goal. However, you can also use those cycles to earn money by selling them to companies who have large computing tasks then can't do completely in-house.
98. Take the cap around: Do something nice. Provide some information that helps someone, perhaps someone grieving for a lost partner. Or info on how to volunteer to help orphans in Africa, or find an internship. Make it useful. Or just make it very funny. Then stick a donation button on there for people to support your work. You'll be surprised at how well a donation button works on the right type of site. No, it won't work on this page - or any page promising to make you a millionaire.
99. Start an article directory. Giving away free articles (with embedded links) is one way for webmasters to build incoming links to their sites. For other webmasters these free articles are a great way to fill out their otherwise bare sites. Be the middleman. Popular article directories make a lot of money from the contextual ads they post on all the free articles they are displaying on their site.
100. Start a content site: The most common way webmasters earn money is probably contextual programs like YPN and Adsonar. But mainly Adsense. It's simple, quick, doesn't involve any complicated new skills. You simply put up a website with useful/informative content and some Google provided code, get a few links to the page and wait. Traffic will start flowing to it. The volume would depend on the topic and quality of content. Visitors would see ads served by Google and related to the content of the page. Each time they click on an ad you get anywhere from a few cents to several dollars. I personally know at least 20 webmasters who earn in excess of $10,000 per month this way. There are thousands of others.
The 101st method is my personal favourite because I find it hilarious:
There was this bloke who bought an email list of one million email addresses. He sent half of them a stock tip that a certain stock was going up, the other half got the same message predicting that the stock would go down. 50% of them saw him proved right. He ignored the rest and split this 50% into two groups. Half got an email with another up prediction and the other half got the same email with a down prediction. He rinsed and repeated a few times till he was left with about 15,000 people who saw him get it right several times in a row. They were obviously very impressed. He then invited them to pay $5,000 each for a seminar with him on picking stocks! :)
CONCLUSION
I make a healthy living online, and with multiple income streams (no I won't tell you how much. Remember, I'm not trying to sell you anything). I put this article together originally because friends and family kept harassing me to show them what I did for a living so they could do it too. I collected some of the ideas for things I had done myself, got some more from the thousands of site-for-sale threads (and detailed conversations I've had with those sellers), and threw some more obscure/zany ones in here for good measure.
May money just flow to you. If finances are tight right now, take heart - money happens, it's easier than you think. I feel very privileged to live in these interesting times, times full of opportunity, times where I've been able to give up my day job, work at my leisure, enjoy my kids growing up, retire decades earlier than I normally would, and spend time writing this drivel instead of running the usual rat race. God bless the Internet and Good Luck. You CAN do it.
76. While most webmasters use PPC to refer to Pay Per Click old timers use it jokingly to refer to P*rn (where *=o), Pills and Casinos. Those are probably the three biggest money areas on the net and have probably made more millionaires than any others. But they are very competitive and are difficult markets to er, penetrate. However, there are lots of legal, legitimate opportunities here some of which I'll expand on in due course.
Arbitrage/brokerage
77. Example of a pure arbitrage opportunity: For a while buying traffic via Google Adwords and sending that traffic to pages of little content and Google Adsense ads generated reasonable profits when done astutely. Sure, Adwords and Adsense are two sites of the same coin. But I did say you needed to be astute to recognise where the opportunities were and you need to test, test, test. There are still lots of contextual arbitrage opportunities about. Especially when you work across programs (e.g., buy traffic from MSN, sell to Yahoo).
78. There are a lot of arbitrage opportunities in the finance world as discussed below but if economics and finance talk bores you to death, there's sports arbitrage. Different online bookmakers may offer different odds on a sporting event. By taking the better odds at each bookie you could come out ahead irrespective of the actual outcome of the event. If you're really clever you could make a program to do this for you. Why don't the bookies adjust their odds based on what their competitors are offering? Because they have to balance their own books. Their prices are decided based on how their own punters are betting.
79. Hosting: You don't need to buy a lot of server hardware to provide a web hosting service. Many big hosting companies allow "reseller" accounts where you sell hosting plans to customers and the hosting company will host them all for you under your Reseller account umbrella. You get to charge customers as much as you want. Some Resellers provide value added services and charge more for these. At places like WHT you'll find that resellers sometimes sell their customers as a "bundle" i.e., you can pay some money to buy a reseller "business".
80. Related to the above is free hosting where you provide small website owners free hosting and in exchange you serve ads to all their pages to make the revenue to pay the hosting company and yourself. Early pioneers of this model are well known names like Geocities and Angelfire.
81. Being a broker can be done in a thousand different ways. There are some entrepreneurs making healthy profits just by bidding for projects on places like elance and guru (and others) and farming them out to a bank of writers/programmers they use on a regular basis.
Finance
82. Trading from home is really catching on in many parts of the world. You don't need to be an expert on stocks & shares. You can trade on commodities, currencies, lots more. Trading futures allows you to leverage even small $100 amounts of capital into huge fortunes (or bankruptcy).
83. Gambling is a far cry from trading futures but a route to riches for many. No, not the traditional horse racing type of gambling where the only long term winner is the bookmaker. I'm talking gambling against other gamblers, I'm talking the numerous ways of gambling online (search). And there are a million books and ebooks that claim to "teach you how to win".
84. HYIP, or High Yield Investment Programs are just what they say on the tin. They are also highly risky. You invests your money and you takes a chance, but some pay as much as 100% per day. How do they do it? A very few are putting your money into investments with even better rates of return. Others are simply going to keep paying out the first few customers with investments collected from later ones.... and then they go bust. Pyramid style. Maybe the ones who make the money are the ones who get in early... or actually start HYIP programs.
eBay/Amazon etc.
85. What's it with eBay? You just can't get away from them. Their bulk "dictionary purchase" of ad terms from the Google Adwords/Adsense system means you find ads for eBay no matter what you're looking for, even if it's for toenail clippings or dead pets. Whatever the reason for their success you can join the bandwagon and sell your rubbish on eBay and convert a garage of old junk to hard cash.
86. And when you've acquired a fair amount of experience with selling your own rubbish, start selling others' rubbish. How to get your hands on enough trash? Place an ad in your local paper to do house clearances, or just buy stock from wholesalers in - yes, you guessed it - eBay itself. You can get anything from unused toasters to umbilical cord containers. A lot of ebay sellers are actually shopkeepers; they buy stock new from wholesalers and sell them in eBay instead of a physical bricks and mortar shop... and make a healthy living doing so.
87. You've now got a lot of experience buying and selling in eBay. It's time to write a book or ebook on how to use ebay to generate millions. It doesn't matter that you haven't made millions yourself. People still buy these books even if it's just to learn their way about ebay which can be quite daunting for some. And you can sell it on ... you guessed!
88. Don't fancy writing? Then set yourself up as an eBay assistant. eBay itself will send you people who need help with their complicated system. And you can charge them a commission.
89. Alternatively, setup a shop to accept goods from those who can't list them themselves. Yes, a physical shop. There are lots of them springing up all in big cities. The operation is simple. You take something in from somebody, sell it on ebay and retain a percentage for all your efforts.
90. Think building an ebay business is too much like building a normal business? If you've got the capital you can take the easy route. A lot of ebay "shop" (businesses) come up for sale in site-for-sale forums and with business brokers. The ebay username and feedback generally accompanies the business so you continue to benefit from accumulated goodwill (though the "transfer" is something that eBay may not approve of).
91. Opportunities to make money in eBay are limited only by your imagination. There's money in everything from making connections (putting people in touch with other people) to coming up with or commissioning software to make the average ebayer's life simpler or more productive (thousands of such programs already exist). There's even a business model involving just searching for and finding items that have been misspelt in the listings.
92. It's not just eBay. Any merchant big enough or third party affiliate manager program - from Commission Junction to Clickbank - has opportunities. For example, you can create an Amazon affiliate site.
Others
93. Set up a proxy (example). People seem to want to surf at work AND access sites their IT system blocks them from viewing. A proxy allows them to get around that restriction. Some proxy services get by just on the advertising (as it's easy to get enormous page views in the proxy business). A very good one will even have people paying a few dollars each. There are several ways to monetise a proxy.
94. Enjoy networking? Social networking Web 2.0 style? Make money with it. If you build up sufficient reputation in places like Digg people will start approaching you to start some buzz on their company or their new product. At one point Netscape offered top "Diggers" a sweetener os $1,000 to move over to their competing service.
95. Selling databases of parts/directory listings/modified or value added DMOZ data/ email lists. The DMOZ directory is a massive directory put together by volunteer editors. And they give away their content for free. Kind of. You can download their database and combine it with other information - like phone number and postcode from Yellow pages- to add value / enhance those listings. You could then sell the enhanced product.
96. Find jobs for your friends. An easy way into the personal recruitment business. Know a friend who's just right for a particular job? Make the connection between friend and employer and you could get up to $5,000 for a few hours work.
97. Get paid for your unused computer cycles. Is your computer sometimes on while you aren't actually sitting at it? Then it's using electricity but not performing "work". Joining a distributed computing group like SETI lets you use that computing power to help reach some worthy/unworthy goal. However, you can also use those cycles to earn money by selling them to companies who have large computing tasks then can't do completely in-house.
98. Take the cap around: Do something nice. Provide some information that helps someone, perhaps someone grieving for a lost partner. Or info on how to volunteer to help orphans in Africa, or find an internship. Make it useful. Or just make it very funny. Then stick a donation button on there for people to support your work. You'll be surprised at how well a donation button works on the right type of site. No, it won't work on this page - or any page promising to make you a millionaire.
99. Start an article directory. Giving away free articles (with embedded links) is one way for webmasters to build incoming links to their sites. For other webmasters these free articles are a great way to fill out their otherwise bare sites. Be the middleman. Popular article directories make a lot of money from the contextual ads they post on all the free articles they are displaying on their site.
100. Start a content site: The most common way webmasters earn money is probably contextual programs like YPN and Adsonar. But mainly Adsense. It's simple, quick, doesn't involve any complicated new skills. You simply put up a website with useful/informative content and some Google provided code, get a few links to the page and wait. Traffic will start flowing to it. The volume would depend on the topic and quality of content. Visitors would see ads served by Google and related to the content of the page. Each time they click on an ad you get anywhere from a few cents to several dollars. I personally know at least 20 webmasters who earn in excess of $10,000 per month this way. There are thousands of others.
The 101st method is my personal favourite because I find it hilarious:
There was this bloke who bought an email list of one million email addresses. He sent half of them a stock tip that a certain stock was going up, the other half got the same message predicting that the stock would go down. 50% of them saw him proved right. He ignored the rest and split this 50% into two groups. Half got an email with another up prediction and the other half got the same email with a down prediction. He rinsed and repeated a few times till he was left with about 15,000 people who saw him get it right several times in a row. They were obviously very impressed. He then invited them to pay $5,000 each for a seminar with him on picking stocks! :)
CONCLUSION
I make a healthy living online, and with multiple income streams (no I won't tell you how much. Remember, I'm not trying to sell you anything). I put this article together originally because friends and family kept harassing me to show them what I did for a living so they could do it too. I collected some of the ideas for things I had done myself, got some more from the thousands of site-for-sale threads (and detailed conversations I've had with those sellers), and threw some more obscure/zany ones in here for good measure.
May money just flow to you. If finances are tight right now, take heart - money happens, it's easier than you think. I feel very privileged to live in these interesting times, times full of opportunity, times where I've been able to give up my day job, work at my leisure, enjoy my kids growing up, retire decades earlier than I normally would, and spend time writing this drivel instead of running the usual rat race. God bless the Internet and Good Luck. You CAN do it.
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