The trials and tribulations of making money on the internet.

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Affiliate Programs / PPC

Experimenting with New Ads – TTZ Media

by Tom on Jun 20, 2008 • No Comments

So I signed up for a new ad service last week, TTZ Media. From what I understand it was started by John Chow of johnchow.com and actually pays quite well. It uses a pay per click business model similar to adsense, so anytime anyone clicks on the ads you make money. In some niches you can make quite a bit for each click and obviously in some you don’t make as much, but so far I feel like it’s working out much better than adsense has.

I have added it to a few of my sites so far and replaced a lot of my shoppingads.com banners with TTZ banners. So far I am pleased to say that it is working out well and I am going to add these banners to a lot more of my sites in the near future. So if you feel your site can generate some cash from banners that promote products, then check out TTZ Media.

General Information

RSS Feeds and Email Subscriptions

by Tom on May 29, 2008 • No Comments

In all honesty I never really understood RSS feeds. I always just saw them as a lame way to read a webpage without going to it. I mean why would I want to read some poorly formatted text version of a site when I can just goto the site itself and read it the way it was meant to be read… Well I still kind of feel this way, but even if I don’t really use RSS feeds that doesn’t mean that the people reading my sites don’t use them. And as I’ve found out, a lot of my readers do use my RSS feed to get the content from my site.

So here is what I’ve figured out, and it’s basically common sense but not everyone may think it will help, but trust me it does. Gather email addresses anyway you can. The easiest way I’ve found to do it for blogs is Feedburner.com they handle everything. They will take the url to your RSS feeds, give you a piece of code to put on your site, confirm email addresses and send out emails daily based on your updates to all of your subscribers. You can even tell them at what time you want the email to go out, it’s that simple and it will help you push your posts to people that may not come back to the site everyday to check for new posts.

I didn’t even think of doing this on one of my main sites, not really sure why, but as soon as I did it my conversions have gone up, I get more visitors every day and after about 3 months of allowing people to subscribe I’ve now got over 150 subscribers that get my emails every morning! If you read my previous post about my record days, this is the site I’m talking about, so it helps. You can also push affiliate links to all your subscribers and maybe get a bite or two, who knows, you’re not doing anymore work than you were doing previously with updating the site, so there’s absolutely no reason not to do this.

You can see an example of the feedburner subscription box in the upper right hand corner of this page and while you’re checking it out, why don’t you subscribe! It only takes a second and you will only get emails if we’ve updated the site here. So if you’re interested in what we’re doing here you might as well sign up, it doesn’t cost anything and you don’t have to remember to keep checking the site! Plus we’d appreciate it.

Affiliate Programs / General Information

Breaking Records!

by Tom on May 28, 2008 • 2 Comments

My previous record for a single day was back in February and it was around $185 or so over 2-3 sites (I can’t remember for sure). I was extremely happy when this happened, I’ve only been doing this stuff since last Fall and to hit almost $200 in one day already I was amazed.  This was achieved through a combination of affiliate programs over a few sites. I can’t give away all of my secrets/niches so I won’t tell you which ones, but most of the programs came from Commission Junction, Linkshare and one other affiliate network.

So after that day I figured I would drop back down to my normal daily range which is usually between $10-50 per day, but I was pleasantly surprised when the next couple days all averaged over $100 per day. So things were going well for a while and then, as I knew they would, things dropped back down to around the normal range.

So fast forward to last week while I’m on vacation. I had internet access and was updating my other sites while I was gone and it turns out one of those updates hit big! I made over $200 in one day, a new record for me! The actual number was around $203.xx and it was all from 1 of my sites!  I was ecstatic, especially since I wasn’t even doing “full”updates since I was on vacation, but either way it paid off. So now I had a new goal to reach, breaking $203 in a day, and it only took a week to do.

Yesterday currently stands as my most profitable day yet. I pulled in $215.xx in a single day on a single site! And it could even be more since Commission Junctions reporting is a little delayed I still don’t have the numbers from them. So overall, yesterday was a good day and when I have a good day it always makes me wonder how much I could be making if I spent more than an hour or so every morning updating the sites.

So with that in mind, I plan to try to update this site a lot more in the future and hopefully the things we write here will help you make some money on the internet as well. It’s not as hard as everyone thinks, but it’s also not a get rich quick scheme. It takes time to start building up money and figuring out what is working and what isn’t, which is why we’re here. We’ll try things out and let you know how they work so you don’t have to waste the time.

Link Sales

Text-Link-Ads Experiment #1 Results

by Tom on May 9, 2008 • No Comments

I know it’s been a long time since either of us have posted on this blog, but I wanted to get some decent results before posting and I’ve been working on building up what I currently have going instead of diving into anything else.

Text-link-ads is a website that sells links for you. You submit a site, they approve it, and then they add it to their directory and people can buy links based on the price that the site sets for you. Since I added it back in February I have had 2 advertisers that have bought links on one of my sites for the past 3 months (Feb., April, May) and as of right now I just had another link sold on that same site as well as a link sold on one of my other sites. I have been paid at the end of every month via paypal for the links that were purchased on my sites and never had any problems.

So basically what I’m telling you is that if you have a successful website or blog, definitely put text-link-ads somewhere on your site. If you don’t sell any links nothing will appear on your site, no advertisements, nothing, so nobody will even know.

Affiliate Programs

eBay Moves Away From Commission Junction

by Tom on May 9, 2008 • No Comments

So last month eBay announced that they were dropping their affiliate program through Commission Junction and starting their own. I just wanted to give you a first hand look at what I’ve noticed after moving my sites from Commission Junction over to the eBay Publishers Network (EPN).

A drop off in sales is exactly what I’ve noticed. I know it could to due to many different things and not just the switch, but ever since I moved to the EPN I don’t get nearly has many conversions. I used to make at least something every single day, but now I’m lucky if I see something once a week! I don’t know what’s going on, if it’s a cookie issue, site issue, eBay issue or what, but I don’t like it. What I do like, however, is the interface and the reporting. Lots of good detailed reporting that is easy to go through and analyze. Obviously it’s tailored to eBay and not a million different affiliates like CJ, but it’s definitely a great tool.

So my recommendation to anyone that uses eBay through Commission Junction right now is to wait as long as you possibly can to move your sites over. They extended the deadline to June 1st so you have a little bit of time still to maximize your profits. And like I said, the drop off in sales could be due to a number of issues and not just the switch to EPN, but I didn’t really change anything on my sites so who knows.

Affiliate Programs / General Information

eBay Affiliate Experiment with BANS

by Tom on Feb 20, 2008 • No Comments

So if you haven’t heard of BANS or Build a Niche Store, it is basically a software/script that creates a storefront completely based on eBay links. It uses Commission Junctions affiliate program with eBay to give you commissions per sale. So basically you find a niche, purchase and setup BANS, tell the software what category to use on eBay to populate the store and that’s it. The software will automatically pull the sub-categories from eBay and populate the website with all the auctions that can be found under it. The idea here is to find a good niche, as always, once you’ve found that, the software basically does the rest. It has many good tools for SEO and to help your site gain some popularity. Some niches will produce sales as soon as you set them up and others will take some work. I purchased the software last week and have since setup 2 BANS sites. 1 of the site is based off of another site I have and gets most of it’s traffic (for right now) from that site. They are both in the same niche but cater to different parts of the niche. The other site I set up doesn’t seem to be doing as well, but I’m not going to give up yet, so we’ll see. In less than a week of setting up the 1st site, it has yet to make a sale, but I have a feeling that will change soon. So I will keep everyone updated on how this experiment is working out.

Affiliate Programs / General Information / PPC / SEO

Best Day So Far

by Tom on Feb 15, 2008 • No Comments

I just wanted to make a post about my best day so far, which was yesterday. Most of the money was made on one site, which was started at the end of December. I think I found a pretty good, unsaturated niche with a lot of potential for making money. It has only been averaging around 500-1000 hits a day, but I’m offering something that people will come back for daily, which is what you want to do. If you can gain loyal visitors that will continue to come back and use your site, then you’ll have that steady income for awhile. Now yesterday was in no way a ground breaking number, but being the best single day I’ve had so far.

For all of my sites I only spent about $8 on advertising through adwords and msn adcenter yesterday and profited ~$140. In one day for only about an hours worth of work updating all the sites in the morning isn’t bad. Hopefully this number will continue to grow and I can monetize this new site a little better to maybe pull a little more cash out of it, but I’ll keep everyone updated.

General Information

Who Accounts For Ad-Clicks?

by Tom on Feb 15, 2008 • No Comments

According to a study done by Starcom USA, 6% of people account for 50% of ad-clicks and banner clicks on the internet. They claim that it’s mostly users between the ages of 25-44 who live in a household with an income of $40,000 or less. These people are apparently more likely to click on ads about gambling, auctions and career services… It’s an interesting read and not too long so I figured you guys might want to check it out. Now if you create a site that doesn’t rely on banner ads to bring in revenue this wouldn’t apply to you, since if a person doesn’t know they are clicking an affiliate link/ad it’s not really the same.

source: Starcom MediaVest Group

General Information / Link Sales

Adbrite – In Addition To or A Replacement For Adsense

by Tom on Feb 13, 2008 • No Comments


If you’re just getting into this internet money making game you probably have an idea of what Google Adsense is. It’s those ads you see on millions of pages throughout the world wide web. They base what ads they show on the content of your site. So if you’re writing about flying fish or other sea life, you are going to end up with ads about sea life on your site. This gives the readers a reason to click. It would make no sense to show ads about midget wrestling on a site about fish would it? well I guess it depends on what the midgets are doing with fish, but usually that’s not the case.

So what is Adbrite? Adbrite is also a company that does the same kinds of ads that Google Adsense does plus a lot more. They will display text ads based on the content of your website as well as try to sell banner space via their marketplace for you. So it’s similar to text-link-ads which I wrote about the other day, only with banners. But that isn’t all they offer. Unlike adsense you can also do inline advertising with Adbrite. Inline ads are ads that appear as links within your content, but usually they appear with a double underline and when rolled over a small advertisement comes up and when someone clicks that, you get paid. Again this is all done automatically by Adbrite by placing a small piece of code on your site.

Another cool feature that I use a lot on my sites is InVideo and BritePics. What these do is take a video or picture that you have designated and allows you to put an ad right in the video or image. It doesn’t really interfere with the object you attach it to, it displays the ad in a drop down at the top that disappears after about 3 seconds. So it’s non-intrusive and doesn’t get in the way of the actual video/picture. Here is an example of a working ad using BritePic. It’s a picture of two midgets playing golf with the advertisements setup for the keywords, midget and golf.

So as you can see the ad appears just above the image for a few seconds then disappears. It can be brought back if you roll over the little menu at the top. I’ve also embedded the optional menu bar from adbrite at the bottom which allows your readers to embed the same image on their site. You can also set images up to be clickable in order to resize, it’s all very simple.

So if you don’t want to use Adsense for whatever reason, maybe Adsense denied you because of the content of your site, or something like that. Or you just want to try some of these other cool ways of advertising while still using Adsense, then give Adbrite a try.

General Information / PPC

Build Traffic Using PPC or Pay-Per-Click

by Tom on Feb 11, 2008 • No Comments

ppc pay-per-click

If you’ve ever been on Google or Yahoo you have no doubt seen the “Sponsored Ads” on the top and right side of every single search results screen. I’m sure you’ve wondered how you can get your website there, well the beauty of it is anyone can, if you’re willing to pay. The sponsored ads on these search engines are what we call PPC or Pay Per Click ads and obviously you must pay for them, but how much you pay is determined by how much other people are paying. The main ones that I use are Google Adwords and MSN Adcenter, although I would also recommend Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) service although I have no direct experience with them a lot of people do.

This is by far the easiest way to get traffic to a new site while you’re adding content. Now remember your ad placement on the side/top is determined by how much you are willing to spend vs. how much your keyword competitors are willing to spend. Say for example you have a site dedicated to bologna, you love bologna and everything about it and you want people to know. So you decide you’re going to pay for some ads on google using adwords. So you go in and setup your campaign using the keyword “bologna”. Now just from going to google and searching for “bologna” I can tell you that you’re price per click is not going to be very expensive, nor does it have to be since you’re only competing with 3 other people that are paying for ads. So in this case you could probably only spend .01 cent per click and have your ad at the bottom of the 3 ads on the first page. First page is key, even if you’re not the first ad to appear on the right, at least make sure you’re on the first page or it’s really not worth it.

Now if you had a site dedicated to “cell phones” and you want to get noticed for the search term “cell phones” on Google, it’s going to cost you a lot more since there are a lot of companies out there buying for the top spot/first page on the sponsored ads for cell phones. This could cost you a lot more than .01 cents a click, probably upwards of .50-1.00 per click depending on where you want to be in the results (these numbers are just my estimates based on sites I’ve setup campaigns for using similar keywords). And at .50 cents a click those could ad up quite fast if you’re not careful.

This is the same basic idea with all the big PPC publishers. The idea is that you set a specific price you want to spend per click, then you set a maximum price you’re willing to spend per day/week/month and then you sit back and let the search terms do the work for you. This is a great way to bring in visitors if you know that you’ll be able to get clicks on your ads or be able to generate sales with your affiliate programs. At first you probably won’t see too many conversions until you get more content (if it’s a new site) but you should see a definite improvement.

As I said before I don’t have any experience with Yahoo Publisher so I cannot comment on how well it works, but I have read that it is very good and I am going to look into getting into it. Currently I am using Google Adwords along with MSN Adcenter for my PPC campaigns. I have found that Google Adwords generates more clicks but it seems like MSN Adcenter brings in more conversions. People must use MSN when they are looking to buy something specifically, where as everyone uses Google so people could be searching for anything at anytime. The key is to turn paid clicks into conversions. There’s no sense in paying for ads if you’re not going to get anything in return.

General Information / Link Building / Link Sales

Text-Link-Ads Have Been Approved

by Tom on Feb 11, 2008 • No Comments

text-link-ads

A little update on my text-link-ads.com experiment. I guess I should have read the emails they were sending me a little more carefully before I started to write them off as not being able to sell ads for my site, but I received an email today saying that the site I setup was approved at that ads should start appearing on my site soon. They have set the price at $15/mo for the site I sent them, which is totally fine by me. Everyone always wants more, but you have to start somewhere. Now if I would have done this a few months ago when the site was really hot I’m sure I would have made more money, but oh well you live and learn. So this is good news, I’ll keep everyone updated on whether or not anyone decides to buy an ad on the site.

On a side note, I tried to get my forum approved by the site and they denied me right out of the box. They didn’t even say “yes, until further approval” it was just flat out “nope” and they review sites every Monday and would look at it again… riiight, we’ll see about that. The forum gets more hits than the site that got approved and I would place the links as the 2nd post of every thread page so I don’t understand the problem, but we’ll see, maybe they will approve it at a later date.

So at this point I’m going to have to recommend text-link-ads , but we’ll see how the actual sales go.

Affiliate Programs / General Information

Experimenting With PopShops And CJ/LinkShare

by Tom on Feb 10, 2008 • No Comments

popshops

So in my random forum searching today I came across a few people asking about a site called PopShops. I had never heard of it before, which doesn’t mean a whole lot since I just recently got into the affiliate programs, but it sounded interesting. It’s a site that links up to your Commission Junction, LinkShare.com and a few other affiliate websites and it allows you to create “stores” using the products that you can promote through the affiliate programs.

So recently I started a site using a method that pulls auctions from eBay and displays them on a page and when people click the eBay auctions you will get a commission based on the final eBay costs of a winning bid. I will write a more in depth post about this method and what software/scripts I’ve been using soon, but I just wanted to give you an idea of what the site currently does. So this site that I decided to experiment with PopShops on has recently been getting a lot more hits than last month but not many conversions with eBay. So I felt like it needed a little change so that it didn’t just look like I was pushing eBay ads since obviously people weren’t buying this product from eBay.

So that is the basic background of the site and what I’ve started adding to it to make it seem more like an actual store rather than a blog with eBay auctions. Pop Shops offers 3 different packages that give you different options. First there is a free option, which allows you to setup 10 “stores” and gives you javascript as a way to implement the code on your page, which isn’t very SEO friendly, but if you have good content outside of the products it could work for you and not cost anything up front. The 2nd option is $5/mo which is the one I opted for. This one gives you an unlimited amount of stores you can setup and gives you more options for the code, like PHP, HTML, and ASP. These methods will help with SEO since the actual text from the product descriptions will be visible to the search engine crawlers. This option also removes the “Powered by PopShops” link that will appear at the bottom of your “store” module on your page. This and the SEO friendly code were the 2 big reasons I opted to pay for the software rather than use the free one. If people know the products are strictly affiliate links they are less likely to click them, so let them find out after they have already clicked the link. There is also the Autofeed option which allows you to create a ton of pages automatically based on similar products you’ve already chosen. I haven’t really played around with this aspect of it yet, but I’m sure I will soon. The third option gives you XML feeds as well as another SEO tool that you can read about on the site and it costs $30/mo.

I don’t have too much to report yet as far as how click throughs have done since implementing the new software, but I will keep everyone updated on what happens with this. I’m really impressed with the whole setup they have going on and would highly recommend you at least try out the free version if you want to run some sort of affiliate store.

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