Posts tagged: Email

Making Money online DAY 11

October 22, 2011, by No comments yet

Day 11: Multiple Income Streams…

Now I’ve said it before and I will say it again, multiple income streams are good, in fact I like redundancy all round. And my number 1 argument for not focusing on SEO is that Google can (and has) in the past made a single change which may put your site on page 100…

Same with income, I prefer to look at many different methods rather than relying on just one. In Day 10 we covered some techniques, the original plan for today was to increase the range of techniques, however I am slightly concerned about information overload. To this end I have edited today’s post to focus on other stuff, and will then be introducing 1 moneytization method per day from now on instead of trying to do it all at once.

Competition

The winner of the first Crashed Challenge was radomly selected by Random.org at midnight Sunday 5th June. They have replied to my email and their articles will be heading their way soon. Maybe they will make themselves known here, however I will leave that up to them…

A little rant…

One of the questions I am getting asked a lot is how I deal with SEO. As I am getting sick of explaining it I am including it here. For those that have wondered I do not like SEO, I do not believe in SEO, and I think SEO is totally volatile. Recently I have known people that have lost 100′s of sites from Google Rankings on page one, and with that the majority of their income. Just overnight these people have losts hundreds and in some cases, thousands of dollars from their income.

Whilst I am aware that having good SEO may make you money, it is easier to start without looking at seo. All the marketing efforts we will be covering will indirectly affect SEO, and increase our rankings. However I will not specifically look at how to improve rankings through SEO methods for at least the first 60 days of building a site…

In addition some people are getting rejected from MaxBounty, the reasons for this I’ve heard include fake phone numbers and using blogger/blogspot instead of your own domain. If you are doing the challenge you should have your own domain and hosting. And there is no reason at all for a fake phone number, sure they call you, but that call is 99% to make sure the number is you.

Money Stats…

I am aware of 5 people that have made money from their Crashed Challenge sites! Including at least two who have earnt through MaxBounty, if you have not joined MaxBounty follow the instructions in Day 9: The Magic Money Tree…

Unfollow…

Now on twitter we are limited to how many people we can follow, and we want to save it for people that are following us. Now I tend to say that people that do not follow you back after 2 – 3 days after you have followed them it is likely that they won’t. Therefore I will unfollow anyone that has not followed back after this period to allow me to follow other people instead that may follow back.

The free version of Tweet Attacks that we downloaded allows us to do this easily and this is how its done…

  1. Run Tweet Attacks
  2. Update your account statistics as you would normally (Switch Module->Account Statistics->Click Update Statistics.
  3. Goto the Follow/Unfollow module
  4. Select your account in the list of accounts, then in the Task list select the Unfollow task.
  5. If you want to add a follow task to replace the people you unfollow feel free.
  6. Click Start.

The video is here…

Amazon (& Clickbank) Money

Now there are so many ways to make money from Amazon I barely know where to begin! I guess its best to start with the simpliest methods so we will look at how we can use reviews to make Amazon Money… I should probably say here that this method also works amazingly for other Clickbank and Plimus products.


Basically all you do is write your own review for the product and add it to your blog with a link to the product at the end. However it gets even easier, and I want to introduce you to a new plugin that is an amazing help for Amazon marketing.

  1. Goto your dashboard, and click Plugins.
  2. In the search box enter Amazon and click search.
  3. You want to find the plugin “WordPress-Amazon-Associate” in the list, click install and then activate.
  4. Click goto settings.
  5. Untick the Active box for any amazon sites where you do not have an associate account (or sign up to them as each country has its own affiliate program).
  6. You then need to log into your amazon account. In the left it will have your tracking ID. You need to copy this into the settings for the amazon plugin where it says Associate Tag. Do this for each country you want to support
  7. You then need to goto Amazon Web Services at http://rfurl.net/aws and create a free account. Once you have done this Login.
  8. Click the Account link at the top of the page, and goto Security Credentials. Scroll down to the Access Keys section…
  9. You need to copy the Public Key to the plugin settings page, and then click Show and copy your Secret Key to the Secret Key box on the plugin settings page.
  10. Click Validate Credentials to make sure you have done this right, and then click Update Settings.

The video for this is here:

The Best Books For Technique…

Now we’ve got Amazon configured to work with our site, it is time to put it to good use. Just so long as someone arrives at Amazon after clicking one of our links, we get commission on whatever they buy. The easiest way to do this I find is to add a “Best Books For…” post with some colourful and interesting looking titles from that topic. Also I’ve found when people are searching in general they will use the “best books for” phrase in Google.

For the first post I have chosen to do “Best Books for Coaches”, now lets see how we do this…

  1. Login and goto New Post.
  2. Write a title and an introduction, to what your post is about
  3. Goto Amazon.com, do a search for your subject and find 5 or 6 books that catch your eye.
  4. Now you need to copy the ISBN number, go back to your Post and click the down arrow next to the Amazon Icon, click Product Link.
  5. Click on the Product Search button, enter your ISBN for your book and click Search. Find it in the list and click Select.
  6. You need to change the Link Type to Image, and in Image Size select Medium. If you are happy click Insert.
  7. Next to the image and before the “[/” type the products title.
  8. If you like you can type a review under each product… If not just repeat this for the rest of the products you’ve found.
  9. Write a couple of sentances at the end to finish your post.
  10. Click Publish. Preview your post and make sure your links are working.

The video is here…

Note: This plugin is very very powerful, I recommend that you make a test post or page to test out what the other options are for putting amazon products on your site!

Summary

Day 11 has been a long time coming, I guess I worked too hard over the weekend and made myself ill. I apologise. Today we’ve looked at using content to moneytize the site, and how we can use tweet attacks to unfollow people on twitter.

It feels a long time since I started the challenge, and we now have 5 people earning already just from what they had done until Day 10. Now it is time to ramp it up a notch or two and increase that number, and the amounts involved!

Till Day 12 my friends…
 


Making Money online DAY 10

October 20, 2011, by No comments yet

Day 10: How to integrate money methods…

Well after all that work getting signed up to different networks yesterday I guess you all are excited to learn how we are going use them through the challenge. So many people signed up yesterday that Val couldn’t deal with them all and roped in the other Affiliate Managers to help! If you have not yet applied, please follow Day 9 and email the affiliate manager that is assigned to you in email… They all know about the Crashed Challenge and so long as you have followed all the day’s so far will approve you.

Now today we will be going back to our normal video format, as there are so many different ways to moneytize I will be splitting these over the next 3 days. Today I will cover the basics needed to get you started…

How to add Ad’s into Simple Ads Manager

Well now the moment you’ve all be waiting for, we’ll look at how to create and manage ad’s here. This requires that you have done Day 4. Then I will cover special cases such as Clickbank later on…

Previously we created two Ad Places and assigned them to show our default Advertise Here adverts and to be automatically shown at the top and bottom of content areas. Now that we have access to ad’s that may earn us more money we can add these to the site.

The Simple Ads Manager software allows to us to ad multiple Advertisements to each Ad Place, and will then automatically rotate between them based on a priority that you set. We can also configure which Ad Places are shown on which pages, so that if you want you can have even more control!

UPDATE: An important update to the Simple Ads Manager plugin has been released today! This fixes a big bug which is crucial to todays task, please back up your wordpress and then goto the plugins page. Find the Simple Ads Manager in the list, and click the Update automatically link.

Lets start by working out where and what Ad Places we want to use on different pages. For bestfootball goals I am going try the following configuration:

  • A square ad place at the top of the right sidebar above the menu -  On every page.
  • A wide-tower ad in the right sidebar below the menu’s – On every page.
  • A square content block in the top of the content area – Only on blog posts.
  • A banner at the bottom of all content areas – Only on blog posts

The first step here is to add the Ad Places into the Simple Ads Manager.

  1. Click Ads on the Menu, then click Add New Place
  2. Enter the name, and select the size of the ad place.
  3. Enter a default ad to be shown if no other ad’s are linked to the zone.
  4. Click Save to add the Ad Place to the database.
  5. Do this for all the ad places you want for your site.
  6. Go to the Ad Places list, and delete the places that you are not using to keep the list clean.

To get the alignment of the BlogContentAreaSquare you need to use the code before <div style=”float: right; margin: 4px;”> and the code after </div> to align the ad in the blog content.

To get the alignment of the SidebarBottomTower you need to use the code before <center> and the code after </center>.

We then need to rearrange our sidebar to include our two sidebar ad’s. The easiest way to do this is to use Widgets.

  1. Goto Appearance on the menu and click Widgets.
  2. Drag the Ad Place widget onto the Sidebar area, select the SidebarTop Ad Place in the list.
  3. Then drag the Recent Posts, the Categories, and the Archive plugins onto the sidebar. Add another Ad Place to the sidebar, and then select it to show the SidebarBottomTower from the list.
  4. Check your page to make sure that everything is showing properly.

Update our settings to show our new ad places.

  1.  Goto Ads-> Settings
  2. Select our BlogContentAreaSquare to show at the top of the content areas, and the BottomContentBanner to show at the bottom
  3. Click Save.

This is all shown here…

Note: The full guide to Simple Ads Manager written by it’s developer is here http://www.simplelib.com/?p=480 for if ya wanna go further into it’s functionality. I’ve not included how to use Ad Zones as I believe this is overkill for the moment. I will instead do a Bonus post later on how you can use Ad Zones to determine which Ad Places are used on each page type.

How to choose the Ad’s to show on your blog

Generally this is where you either make, or lose money. As tempting as it may be randomly selecting adverts, putting them on your blog and then expecting readers to just click them no longer works. I’ve given you a good selection of different affiliate network types and products to choose from, and I know it can be a daunting task.


However we have got something to help us. If you remember back in Day 3 we played Guess Who, now we can put that information to use.

If you remember I split my users into two groups, the ones with no money that want to become better footballers. And the ones with money that may or may not play football that will watch it or spend money on it. Now you should have made a list of products in Day 9 that you thought may work for your blog, now is where we take that list and grab the ads for them.

Now we need to add our adverts to the Simple Ads Manager to show them on the site, in addition to controlling the priority we can also see which are being clicked on the most. I am going use a mixture of Adsense, MaxBounty CPA, and Clickbank/Plimus to deliver products that I feel my users will be interested in.

First of all Adsense…

I plan to include adsense in only a single area of the site for maximum click through rates. This area is the BlogContentAreaSquare ad place within the content and so is right in the users vision when they are reading.

  1. Log into your adsense account (http://rfurl.net/as), and goto the Adsense Setup menu.
  2. Click on Adsense for Content, select the ad size you want (I used 250×250 Square). Customize the colours if you really want to…
  3. Click continue, choose a channel (which helps you track which sites perform best) and click Continue…
  4. Click Create Ad and Get Code, select and copy this code.
  5. Go back to your Ad Places, and then click on the BlogContentAreaSquare ad place in the list.
  6. Click Add New Ad, enter a name, select Code Mode, and paste the code from Google in the Ad Code box.
  7. Set the priority to 10 as this is the only ad we will show in this area. Click Save.
  8. Click on any post or page on your site to activate the adsense code with google. For the first few times the page is shown it may show a Page cannot be Displayed error as Google will crawl your site before it enables the adsense code to run.

The video is here…

Now we want to include any Plimus/Clickbank ad’s that we have found for our site, I’ve found a really targetted product on Plimus that allows the user to watch live football games online. One of the differences of Plimus compared to other Affiliate Networks is that we have to request permission from the producer to sell any products. We will request permission for these products now.

  1. Goto http://rfurl.net/p and login.
  2. Click on Marketplace on the menu, enter your keyword and click Search.
  3. Browse the list and find the product you are interested in, click the Sellable items button to see how much it sells for, how much commission you get.
  4. Click the Grey square with the arrow next to the product title to have a look at the site and see if you would buy from it.
  5. If you are happy click the Sell Now button, and click Submit in the box that comes up.
  6. Wait. You will be emailed to be told if you been accepted or not.

The video is here…

Now lets look at if we can include any MaxBounty CPA ad’s on our site. I like CPA as its usually free to the user which means I can target nearly anyone!

  1. Goto MaxBounty and log in.
  2. Click Search Campaigns, enter a keyword and click Search.
  3. If you like the title, click on it. In the Preview Landing Page click the link to view the website that it will open. Generally if I wouldn’t buy or sign up to it I won’t add that offer to my website.
  4. If you are happy with the landing page in the Select Creative Type box select Banners. Look for banners that are the size of your Ad Places and that are attractive. Click get tracking code for the banners you want to use and copy the advert code from the window that opens.
  5. Goto Ad Places, and click the Ad Place you want to add the banner to.  Click Add New Ad, enter the campaign name as the ad name, and then paste the code for the banner you copied. Click Save
  6. Repeat this for each campaign/banner you want to add to your site.

The video is here…

 

Summary

Today’s post has been very difficult for me to write as it is a delicate topic to get the balance right. What I wanted to do was to give you the ability to earn money, yet I want to leave you with an open mind so that you can adapt the techniques for yourself. I hope that today I have achieved that, I am however concerned that covering more techniques in Day 11 may cause information overload. To that end Day 11 will look  at stuff other than Moneytization, and I will then be introducing at most 1 new moneytization method per day in future.
 


Making Money online DAY 9

October 18, 2011, by No comments yet

Day 9: The Magic Money Tree…

One of the people doing the challenge has already made their first money online from the website they started as part of the crashed challenge. Now that we have some decent content, and are building traffic it is time that I talk to you about money so that you can turn that traffic into $$$. I was speaking with someone earlier and came up with the following formula…

$50,000/year = $4166.67/month = $138.89/day = $5.79/hour = $0.10/minute

Today’s going be a little long, however I think it is plenty worth it… We are signing up to different services to moneytize our site. And then looking at how we can use Simple Ads Manager to show the banners on our site. Today lacks videos at the moment, however I will add these later as I still have to edit them.

Also I’ve added a competition to win 10 articles for your site, check it out here.

Spam?

I hate to say it, but I hate spam. Now that we are listed in search engines we are going get automated tools leaving comments on our blogs to try and make the spammers sites more popular. Or even more cunning to try and sell you secret methods to increase your traffic or make your blog more popular. Now I am lazy and cannot be bother manually reviewing every comment so lets make it harder for the spammers.

The simpliest solution to stop this is to activate Akismet.

  1. In your Dashboard, click Plugins on the menu.
  2. Find Akismet in the list and click Activate.
  3. You then have to goto http://rfurl.net/akismet to get a license key, click get and akismet API Key. Scroll down and click Personal Site. For a personal site you can select to choose how much you page, and just slide the slider across and select $0 (free).
  4. Goto your email, and find the email from Akismet, open this and copy the API Key into the plugin settings. Click Save.

This will automatically mark suspect comments as spam, and 99.99% of the time is pretty accurate. However if you are worried about missing genuine comments it may be worth reviewing the spam list once a week.

The video is coming soon…

Affiliate CPA Marketing…

We covered what affiliate marketing was in Day 4, where we looked at getting paid a commission for each sale we make. Now however I want to introduce you to CPA (Cost Per Action) marketing, where we get paid a commission each time we get someone to do something. This may range from getting  a user to enter their email address or zip code, to getting them to download and install a software program.

There are affiliate networks dedicated to this, with varying degree’s of exclusiveness. I’ve spoken to a few of my affiliate managers, and they have agreed that if you are doing the crashed challenge you will be approved by them(so long as you havn’t already been banned!).


The first network I want to introduce you to is MaxBounty…

  1. Goto http://rfurl.net/mb (If you do not want to use my affiliate link just Google MaxBounty… However in this case their normal approval process will apply)
  2. Click Become a Publisher, fill in the details and enter your website in the Website Url box, say that you are doing the Crashed Challenge in the description and a little bit about what your site is. Select No in the “Is this account for Incentive Traffic” box.
  3. Read and Agree to the terms and conditions, and then click Submit Application.
  4. Email  your assigned affiliate manager saying that you have just signed up, you are doing the Crashed Challenge (or for a quicker response message them on AIM or Skype on their account).
  5.  Once you are approved, login and click Search Campaigns, type in the topic of your site and click search.  Make a list of products you think are related to your Niche for Day 10 tommorow.

IMPORTANT NOTICE: If you use any affiliate tracking links on social networking sites you must use a short url service such as http://bit.ly - You will get banned if you just use MaxBountys own urls as they are.

Another Affiliate Network

Just like we signed up to Clickbank, there is another Affiliate Network which is similar and having access to more offers is never bad is it?

  1. Goto http://rfurl.net/p (Not an affiliate link)
  2. Goto the Affiliates menu and click Register, then Register now.
  3. Fill in the form and click Create My Account.
  4. Confirm your email, login and have a look at the range of products on offer here. Make a list of products you think are related to your Niche for Day 10 tommorow.

Amazon Affiliate Network

The next source of income is the Amazon Affiliate Network. Generally I find that I can find something on Amazon for every single niche possible no matter how weird it is. And the best thing is that Amazon is great for upselling people into buying addition things at the same time.

  1. Goto http://rfurl.net/amazon (Not an affiliate link)
  2. Click Join now for Free, fill in the form, read and agree terms and conditions and click Sign up.
  3. Confirm email.
  4. Log in and browse for products related to your niche. Make a list of these for Day 10 tommorow.

And we can’t forget the Overrated Google Adsense…

There is yet another type of affiliate marketing known as CPC (Cost Per Click) where you get paid just for people clicking on the advert on your website. The best known and biggest is Google, and applying now you have your website is easy.

  1. Goto http://rfurl.net/as (Not an affiliate link)
  2. Click Sign Up Now
  3. Fill in your details, read the terms and conditions and click Submit Information. Usually this will be processed within 24 hours.
  4. I will cover how to add the Adsense to Simple Ads Manager in Day 10.

Summary

This is a good list to get started with, I will introduce some new networks next week, however I am trying to avoid causing information overload…

Tommorow I will cover different ways we can use these companies to make money through our sites!