Internet Gangsters

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

So, here we are. You have your site all set up and you are ready to take over the internet, but you cant do that without content. Content is king. How do you write engaging content you ask? Well, you could rip off from other sites, which is generally a bad idea and frowned upon by your fellow interneters, so instead maybe let those other sites serve as an inspiration for your writing. Ultimately this is the sort of stuff that will make or break your site, since once visitors come, you need to provide them with a reason to stay. Depending on what your website is about, there is usually some static information about that topic that you can use as reliable subject matter.

For the sake of this article lets assume, you have a site about Scuba diving. There are several different static content pages you could add to your site. Something like common scuba locations would be good, since all new scuba-ers are going to be looking for good places to dive. You could also have a page on how to get certified, because that sort of information does not change too frequently; also good for SEO due to the general keywords in a How-To article.  Also maybe something like general saftey procedures for scuba.  As you can see, this is all good general information related to the topic.  It is static and will provide you a good starting ground for your posts on whatever.  If at first you are not seeing the type of traffic you are looking for don’t give up.  Generating traffic is not an easy thing to do for a beginner, especially if you have a difficult niche.  Remember not to get discouraged because this is one of those areas where persistence pays off.