How Adsense Works – Crash Course:
Google Adsense is one of the most widely known programs for publishers to make money around. Basically Google has Adwords where advertisers log in and bid on keywords to display their URL. Publishers then display Google Adsense on their website and the highest paying bids from advertisers show up in the ads (just like the Adsense ads on this website).
How to Make Money with Adsense:
First you need to have a website before you can sign up for Adsense. So go sign up for a HostGator webhosting account, install Wordpress blogging software and get a website up and running, then sign up for an account here. It will take 2 – 3 days on average to get approved, but it may take a little longer on occasion.
After you get approved you can log in and start creating ads. As you create your ads, I highly suggest you create channels to keep track of your clicks for that individual ad. That way you can determine which units are performing best and adjust accordingly.
Where should you place your Adsense?
Google created this heat map which shows generally where most visitors eyes go:
I’ve found that placing the ads within content are also the best performing as they are right near visitors eyes.
What colors should you use?
Again, based on personal testing I’ve found using a white background on my web sites and white background on the color of the ads works best. For the title of the ad / URL I use the same color that the headings / URL links are elsewhere on the website. Then I keep the text the same color. I’ve found that the better you blend the ad unit the better it performs, but again this can be different for everyone so test everything.
You can only make money with traffic
Now that you’ve read through this first list of items and know how to get Adsense, place Adsense units and which colors you should use you’ll probably want to know how to make money now right? Well like most things online it all comes down to traffic. You truly need to have traffic to earn money online. You can do this by writing great content, commenting on other blogs, optimizing your blog for SEO and sticking with a subject your passionate about.
Tagged: Ad Colors, Ad Placement, Google Adsense
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My eBay Story:
One of the first ways I got started earning money online was by buying and selling collectibles. In my case, I was in junior high school when Pokemon cards were all the rage (remember those?) so what I would do is go to the local Wizards of the Coast store (I believe they are now defunct) and buy single packs of Pokemon cards and then list them on eBay and sell them for a profit. I did this for most of the summer and earned about $1,000 – not bad for a junior high school student right?
Well you might be saying to yourself, “That’s great Chris, but Pokemon cards aren’t popular anymore now so what can I do?” Well sure enough when I did quit selling the cards I moved onto my next niche. I was always a fan of the original Nintendo Entertainment System from the 1980’s having played hours upon hours of it myself, so I decided I would try making money by buying bulk lots of NES games and reselling them individually. Sure enough this strategy worked, and it worked because people that bought games from me came to eBay because they simply wanted a single game and JUST that game. I made it easy for them because what I did was buy bulk lots from people that probably had all of the games sitting in an attic and occasionally I’d get rare games that I could resell for more than the entire lot cost!
Make Money on eBay:
This is called arbitrage and it’s still done on eBay to this day and you could go out and do it right now. What I suggest if you’re going to do this is to start with a market that you’re familiar with and passionate about. By the time I finished my eBay NES escapades of buying and selling games online I could tell you exactly what the price of a game would sell for so I could look at a bulk lot, add the prices together and determine if it would be worth my time to buy it or not.
I’m sure you could still do the same thing and the side bonus is that if you attempt this in a market you enjoy than you can keep some of the collectibles for your own personal collection.
Tagged: Arbitrage, eBay
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We already know that it’s possible to make money as an affiliate by promoting other companies products or making your own; however, another solution is to make money by creating your own affiliate program. If you run your own affiliate network you’ll become the middle man and you’ll earn money based on the difference between what advertisers will pay you for leads and what you can pay affiliates for those leads.
One of the biggest hurdles you’ll face to this approach is acquiring affiliates and advertisers. So what I suggest is that if you decide to build your own affiliate network you should try doing so by selling one of your own products (or multiple products) through the affiliate network. This way you’ll be able to focus on acquiring affiliates to help sell your products while you can work on bringing on more advertisers. The advertisers will be attracted to the number of affiliates you have and the revenue that they can push, otherwise why would they work with a company has no affiliates?
If you have settled on the idea of running your own affiliate network you’ll need software that can run everything. One of the best companies I can recommend that provides the back end necessary for running your own affiliate network is Has Offers. They offer a custom system that runs even better than many other affiliate networks. There is full support for sub id’s, tracking codes and anything else you’d expect from a traditional affiliate marketing network. I actually have a friend that works there as well.
Just remember that running your own affiliate network is a lot of work and you will have better odds of success if you already have experience as an affiliate promoting projects or experience as an affiliate manager.
Try out HasOffers for the backend software
Tagged: Affiliate Marketing, Affiliate Network, Has Offers
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Selling eBooks is a great way to make money online. By creating and selling your own eBook you can benefit from the low cost of digital distribution and they’re easy to sell online. You could create an eBook and put it online for sale in a single day; however, there are numerous other things that are important to keep in mind that can help you have more success:
1. You need to have people to sell your eBook to
There are a few ways you can find customers to sell your eBook too. One way to do that is to build a successful blog and sell the eBook to your readers after you’ve built up an online following.
2. You can get other webmasters to help you sell it
You can contact other bloggers or website owners that are in a niche related to your own and get them to help sell your product in exchange for a portion of the revenue. One of the best ways to do that is by creating your product and listing it for sale through E-Junkie as you can sign up affiliates to sell your product easily.
3. Find a place to sell it online
As I mentioned above E-Junkie is a digital goods distribution platform and they make it very easy to sell products like eBooks online. I have an account with them now and I only have to pay $5 a month to sell products and they handle all of the payment processing / W-9 account information for affiliates which is fantastic.
Sign up for E-Junkie here
The other option is to sell it through ClickBank.com. They have a huge marketplace of products and a ton of affiliates that are available to help sell the product.
Wrap Up:
In either case, the key is to make sure that the product you create is around a subject you’re knowledgeable about and passionate enough to create a great product.
Tagged: Affiliate Marketing, ClickBank, E-Junkie, eBook
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What is Affiliate Marketing:
Affiliate marketing involves selling a product, service, lead, etc. to a customer and in turn you get paid a commission for that sale. So you act as a middle man between the customer and the retailer. Nearly every single major company offers an affiliate program because paying a percentage of the sale doesn’t matter when they get guaranteed money from something.
Affiliate Networks:
There are numerous affiliate networks around that you can work with to promote product offers. Here are just a couple that I’ve worked with before:
Market Leverage
Motive Interactive
Commission Junction
In addition to affiliate networks you can also simply choose to work directly with the retailer. The best example of this is Amazon.com’s Associates Program. In fact this was one of my biggest earners in 2009 at over $40,000 in commissions. You could also choose to create your own affiliate program if you really wanted to.
How to Sell Products:
One of the easiest ways to sell products via an affiliate program is to simply link to products on your own blog or website. When a visitor clicks the link and buys the product you earn some money.
Another very common way is to pay for traffic from Google Adwords and drive the traffic to a landing page where you promote an advertisers offer. Of course this is a simplification of the process but all you need to do is pick a niche, build out a mini site with a landing page and send traffic to it via PPC.
Tagged: Affiliate Marketing, featured
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Here at Money Making Ideas I like to try anything and everything to earn money online regardless of whether I think it won’t work, so when I first heard about Cash Crate I had to try them out.
What is Cash Crate?
Basically Cash Crate pays you money to complete offers from advertisers and these can range from 50 cents for completing a survey or up to $100 for signing up for DirecTV. If you are getting a $100 and already planned to sign up for DirecTV why not do it? Here’s a list of some of the other higher payouts:
What I did was wrote a review of a local business for a website that I assume is trying to compete with Yelp! I was paid 50 cents and got to share my opinion on a good experience I had with a business so perhaps it will help someone else decide to use them as well and the earnings already showed up in my account.
Referral Program:
Part of why Cash Crate is so successful (and why they even came up on my radar in the first place) is because they have a very good referral program:
As of this posting I’m a brand new member, but if you do sign up you should join through me via this link:
Sign up for Cash Crate
Note: I published this post as the very first blog entry here on April 15th 2010 so if you come to this review at a later date you can see my life time earnings via this graph below:
Tagged: Cash Crate, featured
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Welcome to Money Making Ideas. This blog is focused on sharing any and all ideas on how to make money. I discuss different programs that you can make money from and outline what you can do to earn money by using these.
My favorites list is one you should visit in case you’re looking for the programs that I believe should work the best.
I also run another blog where I outline how I make money on the internet, so be sure to check out that one as well.
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