Internet Gangsters

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

One of the keys to getting your website higher on the search engine results is to have a lot of other sites linking back to you, but how are you supposed to get links without paying a lot of money? Submit your site to free directories, that’s how. Directories are sites that basically just have a ton of categories full of links, just like the yellow pages in a phone book. Yahoo has one of the best directories, but it’s not free to get your site entered and they usually won’t accept sites that are straight up affiliate sites. If you have some cash, there are a bunch of good paying directory sites that you can find out there, but this post is about the FREE directories out there that will accept your site no matter what. Yes these directories probably will not get you too many hits from people actually clicking your link in them, but what they will do is give you one-way links that the search engines will see, and this is key.

Search engine ranking is determined by a lot of different factors; keywords, links in, popularity, etc. So once you’ve made sure your site is up to par with it’s keywords and all the SEO you can do on your own, it’s time to move on to building links that point to your site and the easiest way to do this is free directories. Link Rain has an incredible list of over 500 free directories that you can submit your site to. Link Rain itself is a directory that you must pay to get into and is for legitimate sites. So you can always go that route as well and pay them to get your site listed, or you can go down this list and start adding your site to a few directories everyday.

By doing this the search engines will see more and more links in to your site and it will help you move up higher on the results pages for whatever keywords you are trying to get higher with. Also, make sure when you submit to these directories, your titles and descriptions contain the keyword you are working towards. For example, if you have a site that sells purple dildos and you want to rank higher when someone searches for “purple dildos” or “adult fun toys” then you want to make sure that you put those words in your description that you submit to the directories. And if you can put it in the link and title as well. Anywhere you put those keywords is going to help. But don’t write a description that talks about “leather and lace” if you’re not trying to help your search results for those terms, it’s pretty common sense.

For you lazy people out there, there is another option. You can pay someone else to submit your site to hundreds of free directories for fairly cheap. Check out places like Digital Point to find someone who will do this for you. But the one thing is, don’t expect to see instant results. You won’t start seeing an influx of traffic until the search engines have had time to crawl all those directories, so expect to wait a few months before you start seeing more search engine traffic generated from these new inbound links. Remember, nobody got rich overnight (other than winning the lottery) so making money on the internet will take some time and effort, don’t expect instant riches. But just think, every link you build back to your page could bring 5 more people, so in the time it takes to build 10 links you could have brought 50 more people to your site over time.

So I decided to venture into the world of text-link-ads where you put a piece of code on your site and they sell links for you and then display them and in turn you get paid for the links. It seems like a good concept and the site is pretty slick and easy to use. This is my first time using them so I figured I’d start documenting my experience.

The site I am putting it on is a site that was getting about 30,000 unique hits for the past few months. It no longer gets that many hits due to it being a fan site about a movie and the movie as since come out. I still receive roughly 3,000 unique hits a day of people that are just now finding the site, so it still does very well. I have placed the code in the upper left corner of the content area of the page in the left sidebar so we’ll see how it does. The code was installed yesterday and nothing has appeared yet, although they say this is normal and that I should start seeing paid links within a week. So all we can do now is wait and I will keep you posted on what sort of results I see with this new program.

Click Here To Join Text-link-ads yourself and try it out, let us know your results.

For those of you out there who are so very anxious to combine your love for internet money making and the fantastic browser Firefox, this post is most certinly for you. I am going to show you some of the plug-ins and resources we here at IG use to spend less time hunting for information and more time learning from information.

1.) SEOQuake

What this wonderful toolbar does is provides you will all that information you would spend a good 10-15 minutes hunting for about any website on the internet. The toolbar sits right under your address bar, or wherever you decide to place it and gives you a plethora of valuable information for the budding internet entrepreneur. Information starts at, but is not limited to: Google PageRank and Index Number, Yahoo Links and LinkDomain, the MSN Index, Alexa Rank, the site IP, easy access to the Whois information, Link Density, Incoming and Outgoing links, and a ton more. There are so many options for this toolbar its almost ridiculous.

2.) Web Developer

This hot little piece of code lets you pretty much tear down any website on the internet. You can turn off CSS, add your own custom CSS, disable links, disable images, show borders around tables, view rulers, delete session cookies and buttloads more. A fantastic tool for any web-savvy individual.

3.) MetaTags

Pretty self-explanitory, MetaTags shows you all of the meta-information for any given page. It also can show you MIME type and charset, DTD, root tag, and XML namespace, last modification time, referrer and more. However it does not stop there, arguably the best part about MetaTags is the built in automated search engine submission tool.

4.) EzSidebar

Now, assuming you have a few different plugins installed, your interface can get pretty disgusting looking. While numbers everywhere might be good for impressing your parents or your girlfriend, it most certinly get get annoying when trying to browse. Enter EzSidebar. This little bugger lets you detach your sidebar, and anything that might live within it. No more StumbleUpon, WebDeveloper, ForecastFox bars crowding up your browser, they can now be added to the sidebar, detached and dragged wherever your little heart desires.

5.) StumbleUpon

Chances are, if you are reading this blog you are already going to be aware of this gem. Not only is it the absolute best way to kill time when you have run out of websites to read, but it is a great way to make sure that others are going to see your website. StumbleUpon is a tiny little addon that sits in the bottom corner of your browser with 3 icons (once configured) and lets you sit endlessly entertained. It works by showing you webpages based on your interests that have also been given good ratings by others who like similar things. StumbleUpon has won countless awards, and once you download and install it, you will see why.

6.) BlogRovr

BlogRovr is a neat little application that will fetch posts related to what you are browsing from blogs all around the internet. Rovr sits in the background and pays attention to that knitting pattern you are researching and will go hunt for other knitting related articles through the blogs you tell it to. They then pop up as headlines in the sizeable tray. From there you can either click and read just a summary or Ctrl+click to open the post in a new window. More of an information hoarder then a handy tool, BlogRovr is a great way to find trusted information about any particular topic.

These plugins are just a few that I would consider worthwhile. If you see something I missed, let me know!