Internet Gangsters

I just read an interesting article over at Tech Crunch about online ad growth grinding to a halt and at first it had me a little worried, but after I read what they were getting at, it didn’t bother me as much. The article is really short so head over there and read it really quickly, it’s more charts than words. First of all the article is only dealing with the 4 large companies, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL and we all know that you don’t rely on one type of ad on your websites to pull in the cash. Not to mention that the economy all of the world is in a steady decline right now and therefore not everyone can be pulling record profits like the oil companies. If you look at the graphs in the article, these companies are still growing, just not as much as they had the previous year. With everything that is going on right now in the world, I think any growth for a company is good.

Now I don’t rely on internet marketing and advertising as my sole source of income, if I did I would barely be able to afford the cost of cable internet every month, ha! While I do make a fair amount, I haven’t seen any decrease lately in sales due to anything outside of the time of year (my niche is a spring/fall type niche). Recently I’ve actually seen an increase in sales and income, but this could be due to the revamp of my site and the focus on SEO, but none the less, this proves that if you still work at it you will be able to pull money.

So don’t worry when you see articles like this one stating that internet advertising is in decline, focus on what you are doing and don’t stop working at it. Things will get better around the world and industries will thrive again, so why not get in on it now when other people are getting away from it.

source: Tech Crunch

Wordpress is an amazing tool if you want to start up a content driven website without having the knowledge to code something on your own. Actually, even if you do know how to code it’s a simple, quick and easy way to manage a website.

Wordpress can be used in two ways,

1. You can setup a free blog at Wordpress.com which will give you a web address of http://yourblog.wordpress.com, which you can have any domain forwarded to. This will allow you to have free hosting for your blog if you don’t want to spend the money right away.

2. You can download the Wordpress software from Wordpress.org and install it on your own hosting server. This will give you full control over all aspects of your new site. This is the method that I would recommend.

Once you have the Wordpress site setup and ready to go, before writing any content at all, figure out how you want to go about getting traffic to your site. At this point you should not be focused on making money, it will only discourage you when you don’t. You should already have some idea about what the site will focus on, since I’m assuming you either bought a domain or registered a free blog based on the topic you will be writing about. This article is obviously focused on bringing organic traffic to your new website using SEO and a few effective plugins for Wordpress.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

So, you found your way to IG somehow, you started reading some of our articles and now you are saying to yourself…how do I get started? Well the first thing you have to do is pick a niche. Now, this sounds signifigantly easier than it actually is. What you are gunning for here is an under-saturated area that you are confident you know enough about to actually drive traffic to a worthwhile site. Unless you are just reposting 100% Ebay links, which in theory works too, but is not what we are talking about for the sake of this article.. Anyways, pick something. Anything. For the sake of this article we are going to pick used guitars. So, say I want to hawk some used guitars via Ebay, generate some coin on adsense and try and create a foothold for myself on the internet. Now, you need a domain. A .com works best for obvious reasons, but if you cant find anything that ends it .com it is alright to use .net, .org and .info. I’d stay away from .biz because people are going to assume its a business. After that, you are going to want to install Wordpress, or any other blogging/CMS software you want. Next you are going to want to sign up for Google’s Adsense, which will give you a few cents everytime someone clicks on one of their links. Shopping Ads is also a nice and easy place to get some Ebay auctions on your website without too much work. If you are interested in a more indepth program, you can sign up for Commision Junction, which is, for the most part, the status quo for this type of stuff. After you get all of this stuff set up, you are almost ready to go! All you need now is some content. Part 2 of Getting Started will be all about writing valuable and engaging content and keeping people coming back to your site. Check back soon for the second part of the article, where we will talk all about your website on guitars.

If you’ve ever asked yourself that question, I’m here to try to answer that for you with a little help from Google. Google has done a great job of doing this work for you, they have a nice “heat map” of what areas of a webpage perform the best with advertisements. But keep in mind different things will work for different sites. Personally I have found that on a blog where a lot of people comment I have good luck placing a 250×250 ad right below the article on the article landing page (not the homepage). So the ad is placed between the end of the article and the comment box. This works well if you get a lot of comments as people will finish the article and be right there to click on your ad. Just make sure those ads pertain to what the site is about or people won’t even look twice.

I have also read that the upper left hand section of a page is what is looked at most. This is usually where a company or website’s logo is found, but if that is the most looked at part of the site I say put an ad up there or at least put an ad underneath your logo. Nothing too big and obtrusive though, it will just push people away.

Take a look at the “heat map” that Google provides.

This shows that the best placement for ads is directly above the content on the webpage, in the middle. The darker the orange box the better the placement for ads. So as you can see ads that are placed above the “fold” (what the user sees before having to scroll down) usually perform a lot better than ads placed towards the bottom of the page. And the obvious emphasis is on the left had side of the page, so this is where you should focus your highest paying ads to if you’re using an affiliate program and if you’re using adsense, just put the code over there somewhere.

As I mentioned above this may not be the best placement for ALL sites, so make sure you experiment with where your ads are placed on a page and find out what works best for you. Most of the publisher programs like adsense, have the ability to track specific ad units that you place on your page, so make sure you utilize those to determine exactly which ads are getting you the most clicks so you don’t change something that was doing well.