Posts tagged: Making Money

Making Money online DAY 12

October 22, 2011, by No comments yet

Day 12: First online income…

Well I checked the Adsense earnings for the bestfootballgoals site and so far I have earnt a easy £3+ which isn’t bad considering the domain only cost 99cents. Today we will start to look at how to increase the amount of traffic going to the site.

There are many theories about different traffic methods/types, just today I have read at least 10 different views on Google and what the Panda update has meant. There are several traffic methods that we can use, personally I am a great fan of social traffic. Nothing better than letting other people do the work for me! Without me going on too much, lets get started!

Keyword/Article Generation

Many people spend hours working on keywords, I personally believe that it is better to allow google to tell you which keywords you should be using…

Once you start to get visitors from Google it becomes a lot easier to decide on the titles for new articles. In Statpress have a look at the Last Search Terms, and try and write another article with each one in the title. For example these are some of the last search terms bestfootballgoals is ranking for, please remember I have not done any SEO stuff at all.

  • football penalty drills – #7 in Google
  • football penalty kick drills – #2 in Google

I will be writing an article for the site called Football Penalty Kick Drills now… Thats what google thinks my site is about, so I will add it.

Images and Copyright – Staying Legal…

Something that I do not believe is ever covered properly is the use of images on your site. Not paying attention to this can cause you big legal problems, in some cases this can run into thousands of dollars (yeah I don’t agree with it but thats life).

Basically the golden rule of images is if you do not know who owns it, do not use it. With this restriction it may feel like you are stuck, however there are easy solutions…

  • Take a photo with your own camera, or create a graphic yourself in photoshop, you then own the copyright.
  • There are free stock photo sites that allow you to use images Royalty free, my favourite is Stock Exchange here http://rfurl.net/sxc and another is here http://rfurl.net/pdi
  • If my first options fail, I head on over to the Public Domain image sites page on wikipedia here which has close to 100 sources of images to use: http://rfurl.net/wpd

Remember to check the specific terms of each site, generally the US Government cannot own copyright to anything however in the UK there is Crown copyright for government images. Hopefully with these resources you have a good library of images to use across

Note: Before you are tempted to just use images check out this blog post by a company that was sued: http://blog.webcopyplus.com/2011/02/14/legal-lesson-learned-copywriter-pays-4000-for-10-photo/


Youtube…

Well we created our youtube account days ago, now it is time to put this to use, it’s so easy to create a video now that it is untrue. It is so easy that even youtube has got in on the act providing loads of awsome tools free for you! I will demonstrate one of the tools here, however I would recommend that you spend time to try out all the different tools avaliable.

  1. First of all we need to find some images to use in our video, to prevent future copyright issues I recommend that you look on free stock photo websites like http://sxc.hu/
  2. Goto the Youtube Create sction at http://rfurl.net/yc
  3. Pick a tool, for this demonstration I will use Stupeflix – the only restriction in this tool is that the video has to be under 1 minute long.
  4. Click the upload button to add the images you found into the tool.
  5. Click the sound button to add a sound track to the video
  6. Click the More button to add title slides (text slides between images)
  7. Click the more button to add transition effects between the slides.
  8. When you are done click the Publish to youtube button.
  9. Select YouTube (FREE) in the list and click Export.
  10. Allow Stupeflix access to your YouTube account… Wait for the video to be made.
  11. Goto your youtube account menu (click down arrow next to your username at the top of the page) and goto your videos.
  12. Find the new video in the list and click Edit, edit the title and description and put your website link at the end of the description.
  13. Pick some Tags and change the video category. Click Save Changes.
  14. You now have your first youtube video… Check it out!

The video is here…

The video for Best Football Goals is here, it took me under 5 minutes to make…

Note: Personally although this method is good, when i use videos I like to go even further. If you have $47 to spare I would recommend you have a look at these pre-made ready to use animated video backgrounds (http://rfurl.net/vidbg) which you can use with something like windows movie maker. They also come with sound loops which you can also use in your videos. I will cover this in a post for you guys later!

WordPress Security

Well I just got email offering to sell me a WordPress Security Guide for only $40, it had some pretty nice copy playing on peoples fear of loosing their work. However it assumed that the person reading it was pretty naive…

We have already covered how to backup your wordpress install which I would recommend everyone does on a regular basis. In addition there are some basic steps you can take to ensure that your website stays secure.

  1. Make sure you are using a secure cPanel username and password, and try and access this from only a computer you own.
  2. Make sure your email that you use with wordpress is secure so that people can’t reset your password.
  3. Make sure you have the latest version of WordPress installed.
  4. Set your display name to be different from your Username (Goto Users->Your Profile on the menu).
  5. Make sure you use a password that has both lower and upper case letters, numbers and is not in any dictionary.
  6. Make sure you google the name of any plugins you use to see what people are saying about them, and keep the number of plugins you use to a minimum. Where possible try to use plugins from the official wordpress directory and not from random places online.
  7. If something requires that you add html or change the code of your website make sure you understand what and why.
  8. If you are using free theme’s from outside the wordpress official search function (such as http://wptmp.com) make sure you check the code for any eval statements or encrypted code.

Summary

Today’s post has been cut down a bit, I am planning to introduce a new tool to you guys, however I still have to do some final modifications to it before I feel it is fit to release. This is coming, and will be worth the wait. In the meantime I will not delay the Challenge because of it.

Let’s get back on track, Day 13 will follow in the next 24 hours…
 


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!
 


Making Money online DAY 8

October 18, 2011, by No comments yet

Day 8: Stats, Questions and answers…

As I had to take yesterday off, Day 8 is being released now, and Day 9 will then be released towards this evening. Because I originally planned to make each day’s task around 1 – 2 hours long I feel it is unfair to add to your workload here. Instead I will take this opportunity to answer some common questions, and go over the basics of statistics.

We’ll look at Statistics and what they really mean, and then I will answer questions after that.

Statistics

What is the use of having install Statspress if you do not understand what it tells you. Here I will give a quick explanation of each section in the menu.

When you click on Statspess V in the menu you are given an overview of your visitors. We are interested in the Visitor and Page view rows, and the Yesterday and Today columns.

A Visitor is a computer that has opened your website, and is tracked by what is known as the IP address.

A Page view is created when a visitor views a page of your website, or moves from one page to another.

In addition to this we have the Last search terms, which tells us what people have typed into a search engine to find us. From these we can also help develop new article titles or keywords to target.


If we look at the menu we have a Visitors option, this will tell us how many people are looking at each page and on which day. We can then work out what people like (or are finding most) and allow us to develop more articles like that.

We then have the Views option which is similar to the visitors option but tells us how many times each page is viewed (useful for if people keep going back to the same page)…

The next menu option to pay attention to is Referrers. This tells us where our visitors were before they found our site… And is useful for telling if your twitter, facebook, youtube marketing is paying off or not. It also is useful to find people that linked to our site as well.

Questions

Q) I was thinking about how we put a link to our advertise here page in the footer of the blog and I thought that is not a very visible place for the link if we want people to see it. Can you explain your logic for putting the link in the footer and why not someplace where people will notice it easier? I mean if we are trying to monetize our blog with this method why hide it in the footer? I am sure you have your reasons though so I was hoping to understand it better.

A) It is just one income stream, and one of the lower converting ones. However we do add 2 banner adverts which show on every page advertising this page if there are no other adverts in the system.

Also by linking to this on every page we show search engines that it is an important page on our site. Try typing “advertise best football goals” (without quotes) into google and see what you find…

——————-

Q) I have a question about setting up the facebook page. This has to be attached to a personal account – doesn’t it?
Do you make the personal account one you use just for this, that is for your websites? Or would you attach it to one you use for your family and friends?

A) No it doesn’t. The way I showed it you can create a facebook page without having to create a facebook account. Because of this you can create a facebook page for your site without breaking Facebook Terms of Use which prohibits you from having more than one account. To create a page without creating a facebook account goto http://rfurl.net/fbpages and click Create Page.

——————-

Q) I’m approaching the part where I’ll have to write 25 articles and I had a question : Are you repeating yourself from time to time between articles? I don’t mean an exact copy, but the same kind of ideas / tips

Also, if I would go about delegating this work, having someone to write stuff for me, do you care he that person write something too similar to what’s already on your site?

A) There will always be some overlap if your site is targeted at a specific topic/niche. However each article has a unique point. If you want to delegate the work ensure that the writter is providing unique content and give them article titles to write for.

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Q) quick question, how many people should we follow per day and for how many days?

A) I would personally say to follow between 30 – 50 people a day (which is around 3-4 minutes of running Tweet Attacks. And this is something that is done long term so keep doing it for as long as you keep the site running!

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Q)  Not sure i understand. In Tweetattack you can find people to follow based on categories? But don´t they need to follow you to be able to read your messages? Or you men they do if the page looks interesting?

A) You can people to follow based on your topic. If your twitter looks interesting and they are interested they will follow you back. Generally 10% of the people you follow will follow you back.

——————

Q) I cannot use clickbank as I do not have 3 credit cards

A) There is a rumour that you need 3 credit cards to signup to clickbank. This is wrong.

To stop people from making a clickbank account to buy stuff for themselves with a discount ClickBank has a rule where 5 different people need to buy using your affiliate link and using at least 3 different credit cards (so like 1 credit card for each person that buys something). Until this happens clickbank will not make any payments to you, however selling 5 things isn’t that difficult as you will see next week!

——————-

Q) I am struggling to find good keywords…

A) Keywords are useful, but I think they are very over-rated… Just think if you work on your keywords and get them to #1 in google. Google then just changes its ranking, all your work is gone…

Now if you look at social, once a user likes your site, the site stays with that user and Google can’t take that away from you. For now concentrate on the challenge, I have not done any keyword research as it is not important at this stage…
 


Making Money online DAY 7

October 16, 2011, by No comments yet

Day 7: Drunken Rambles and Twitter Traffic…

First of all I would like to apologise for any typos in this post. I am fresh home for the clubs and have probably had to0 much to drink (I love Fireball Whisky – its a whisky with a cinnamon twist!)…

Today I will be talking you through several things, hopefully I do not get in trouble for giving too much in this post but meh, I blame the drink! I have also started using a short url service for my links as I would like to track how many people are clicking, on what and from where to help me improve the future posts in the challenge. If it is an affiliate link I will state that it is.

My Fair Affiliate Link Policy

When you click on an affiliate link I may earn a commission, this does not affect the amount you pay, or your need to pay. 99% of the services I am using in this challenge are free, some may offer a paid upgrade however that is completely at your discresion and not required for the challenge (unless specified). Occasionally it may be that I have arranged a special deal with the owner/provider of that service; in this case the only way you may get the deal is to use my affiliate link or referral code. I will always try to state if that is the case.

I am not here to make money from the challenge, I am here to get you making money from the challenge. I do spend around 6-8 hours (or more) working on every single post in the challenge, and would appreciate you using my affiliate links as this also helps me calculate how many people are actively following the challenge. And hopefully once you have started earning you may see the value in upgrading on some of the services.

The Mindset…

Tonight I’ve spent out with some good friends, however I decided that I should share with you some basics behind my mindset.

1. Believe that you deserve every $ that you earn, unless you believe you deserve it you will never earn to your full potential. You are not getting money for nothing, you are getting and deserve money because you are taking action to get it. If other people do not want to take action, they do not deserve it…

2. Respect yourself, I know how easy it is to spend money, how easy it is to just sit there working to earn that money. With money comes a good life, but if you forget your life then money will get you nothing. I came home alone tonight; this is partly because I intended to write this post, and partly because the thrill is in the chase.

3. Dedication. Even though I have stumbled home, I have done my 50 situps, and 50 pressups before I have got into bed (yes I am writting this in bed)… I know that sometimes it seems like a lot of work, but you rarely get anything for nothing… If you do not want something enough you will never get it!

Now with that out of the way… Today we are going look at how we can leverage the power of twitter.

How we can use Twitter…

Twitter is easily the second (if not the most) influential social network around, and we have out account all the way from Day 1. Now that we have our site with some decent content it is time to look at building up our traffic…

Personally though all of this can be done manually, that takes time and dedication, and I like things done for me. That is the reason I am going to introduce you to two new tools, that both are free (though a professional upgrade is avaliable).


Tool 1: Get More Followers…

There’s no point using twitter, if no one is going see our tweets. Our first step today is to learn how to get more followers. To help with this I have found some free software that will help us do this.

  1. Goto http://rfurl.net/tweetattacks
  2. Click to close the page, it will show a box offering you a special offer. Click Cancel to stop it closing and accept this offer. This is the free software that we want to use.
  3. Click Open as we want to install this software once it is downloaded. When it finishes downloading we want to copy the files out of the zip to our desktop.
  4. Open Setup and go through the process just clicking Next at each stage.
  5. Find the Tweet Attacks icon on your Desktop and click it to open it.
  6. You need to register, enter your name and email address and click activate. Wait for the email to arrive to confirm your activation (usually takes minutes…). Click the confirmation link…
  7. Open Tweet Attacks again, it will say an update is avaliable. Click Update Now and let it do it’s stuff…
  8. Goto the Manage menu, and select Twitter Accounts. Enter your twitter username, and password. Click Save and Close.
  9. Goto the Switch Module menu and select Account Statistics. In the left menu click Reload Accounts, and then Update Statistics.
  10. Goto the Switch Module menu, and click Follow/Unfollow. Select your username in the Account list, then in the Task menu select Follow from search result. In the Parameter enter a keyword related to your niche (I used football). Click Start Tasks to start following people related to your keyword, let it run a couple of minutes and then click Stop.
  11. This is something you need to do over the next few days…

The video is here…

Note If you know how to limit how many people are followed at one time in the free version feel free to let me know and I’ll update the post!

How to Automate Tweets…

I like being able to set a site up, and leave it to run itself whilst I do more important things. One of the best free tools you will find online for twitter allows you to schedule you tweets in advance. When you combine this with the ability to schedule posts in wordpress you have an all round winner. I don’t think any more explaination is needed here.

Whats even better is you can add as many twitter accounts with the same account on this website making it a one stop twitter manager.

  1. Goto http://rfurl.net/autotweet (or if you don’t want to use my affiliate link google SocialOomph).
  2. Click Register, fill in your details, do the captcha and click Register.
  3. Goto your email and find the confirmation email, open the confirmation link to confirm your account.
  4. Sign up their email list if you want to get sales emails… Or click Login and enter your username and password, and click Login.
  5. Goto Social Accounts on the menu, Add New Accounts, and then click Add Twitter. Login to twitter or click Authorize when asked. Click Authorize App.
  6. Click Save when you arrive back at the SocialOomph website to save your account.
  7. Goto Scheduled Updates on the menu and then click Schedule New Update.
  8. Enter the update you want to post, it must be shorter than 140 characters. Once you have done this you specify when you want the tweet to be posted; either by x amount of time after the last tweet, or by putting in a date and time.
  9. You need to schedule at least one tweet for every post you have schedule in wordpress… In addition also add some other tweets at appropiate times such as “It’s great to be home, work today was crazy!” to be posted in the evening etc…

The video showing you how to do this is here…

I have only touched on the power of SocialOomph here, if you have spare time have a look at some of the other features that you can use!!!

 


Making Money online DAY 6

October 13, 2011, by No comments yet

Day 6 & 7: Content Creation

This weekend write and schedule one post a day for the next 25 days. If you need to remind yourself how to schedule a post please see Day 2 here.


 


Making Money online DAY 5

October 12, 2011, by No comments yet

Day 5: Easy but Often forgotten money… (Includes Day 4: Part 2)



Now that we have the profile of our user, and a list of problems that the user may have it is time to start to think about how we can put the solutions in front of the user. Personally I use really advanced software for this which controls all my websites in a single place, however for our small site I’ve found something a lot simpler.

I am not an expert in this new plugin so if you know more than me, feel free to add your comments however I have spent the past week using it to try it out. Part 2 of Day 4 covers how to set this up, and how we can add our first Income Stream to our website.

Today involves installing our Ad Management software, joining our first affiliate network, creating our first sales page, and configuring our Ad Management software for this… Sounds like a lot so lets get started!

Install the Simple Ads Manager

The software is a plugin called Simple Ads Manager, when talking about ad’s the place the ad is shown is normally called a zone. Whilst the ad itself is called a creative and belongs to an ad campaign.

In Simple Ads Manager the place the ad is shown is called a Place, and the Ads are called Zones (don’t ask my why)… What we will do now is install Simple Ad’s Manager, add a page on our site offering to sell advertising, and then set up a default ad to advertise this page if no other ads are avaliable. I am also going to give you a few default ad’s to use.

  1. Log into your WordPress dashboard
  2. Click Plugins, then click Add New.
  3. Enter “Simple Ads Manager” and click Search
  4. Click Details and make sure that the Author is “minimus” as there is another plugin by nearly the same name. If it is click Install Now.
  5. Click Activate Plugin.
  6. A new option will appear on the left menu called “Ads”


Joining our first affiliate network: Clickbank…

Now this is where everyone else goes sign up here, copy this code here, and you are done… I’m special because I am different and I am going to try and explain it so you understand exactly what we are doing.

An affiliate is someone (or a company) that makes their money through getting paid commission for selling someone else’s product or service. Generally the more affiliates that promote or market that persons product, the more money the person makes.

Finding these affiliates willing to promote their product was a big problem, however the solution was simple. A “middleman” was developed called an affiliate network which is like a meeting place for affiliates and product/service providers. This allows affiliates to sign up to view and promote a list of products/services that are listed on the network by their creators.

Clickbank is Instant Automatic Approval so you can start promoting offers immediately without having to be approved! You do not have to do this for every site you create, and should only do this if you do not already have a ClickBank account!

To get started…

  1. Watch the video for an explanation of how Affiliate Networks Work…
  2. Goto http://www.clickbank.com
  3. Click on Sign Up
  4. Fill in the details, pick a unique username for yourself. Read and Accept the Terms and click create account.
  5. Goto your email and find the confirmation email from ClickBank, open the link.
  6. Go back to your email and copy your confirmation code from the ClickBank email. Go back to the clickbank you opened, paste this code in the confirmation code box, type in the confirmation code and click Confirm.
  7. Important - ClickBank will automatically generate a password for you and show it to you now, write it down in a safe place or memorise it. If you lose your username you will lose anything you have earned in that account! I have also changed the password from the one shown in the video…


FULL DISCLOSURE DISCLAIMER
 Clickbank does not run a refferal program for new affiliates, I will not earn a single penny from your signing up to this affiliate network.


Our First sales page…

Now we have our Clickbank account I will show you just how simple it is to add multiple streams of income to your website in one go. Many people do not bother to do this, it takes 10 minutes and you only have to get one person to buy from either method to be in profit. Easy but often forgotten money…

  1. Open your WordPress dashboard.
  2. Click Pages, Add New.
  3. Enter the title “Advertise Here” – (I use this so people looking for sites to advertise on in google can find us)
  4. Untick the “Show this page in Menus” tick box
  5. Start writing your page content  – (I have included my example below for you, please write your own version of it)
  6. Goto http://ClickBank.com, and click Marketplace on the top right. Enter “banner” into the search box and click search.
  7. You can decide which product you want to promote, or if you want to promote a design service instead. Personally I am promoting Easy Banner Creator.
  8. Click promote next to the product/service. It will open a new window. In the Account Nickname box type your username, for Tracking ID type “ap” (for Advertising Page) and click create. Copy the domain it gives you in the top box.
  9. Go back to your Advertise Here page, and add a comment saying something along the lines of “If you do not have any banners to advertise with already, I recommend you use Easy Banner Creator here to make professional looking banners“. Select the text “Easy Banner Creator” and click the Hyperlink (Insert/Edit Link) button on the editor toolbar (looks like a paperclip). Paste the link from Clickbank into the URL box, tick open in a new window, and click Add Link.
  10. Finish writing your advertise page telling them to email you (include your email address) if they are interested in advertising. Click Publish to add the page to the site.
  11. Now we want to add a link to the advertising page in the footer of everypage the same way we did for the Privacy Policy. Click Appearance, then click Editor. Select the footer in the file list that appears on the right.
  12. Now you want to look for  where you added the Privacy Policy code and insert the following code between the </a> and the <br />. After you have done this check your site to make sure the Advertise link is on every page.

 - <a href=”/advertise-here”>Advertise</a>

The sample text I use is avaliable here http://www.bestfootballgoals.info/advertise-here, PLEASE use this only as a reference and rewrite it yourself for the best benefit!

How to configure WordPress Simple Ads Manager…

Now we want to get it ready to use, and add our first (often forgotten) method of monetizing our site, this is simply to add the ability for people to advertise on your site… I was going create some lush banners but cannot find my photoshop cd, I will add these as a resource at a later date…

We start by adding a new page detailing our offer:

  1. Save these two images (right click on the following addresses and click Save Target as…) http://crashedchallenge.info/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/468×60.jpg and http://crashedchallenge.info/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/300×250.jpg
  2. Login to your WordPress Dashboard
  3. Click Ads on the menu
  4. Click Add New Place.
  5. Enter the name (at the top of the page) “Top Banner Spot”, make sure the size is 468 x 60. Click upload and select the image you just downloaded called 468×60.jpg. In the target box enter “http://www.yourwebsite.com/advertise-here”.
  6. Scroll down the page, and where it says Codes in the Code before box enter “<center><p>” and the code after box enter “</p></center>”. Scroll up and click the Save button on the right.
  7. Click on New Place in the Ads menu on the left. Enter the name “Bottom Banner Spot”, make sure the size is 300×250. Click upload and select the image you just downloaded called 300×250.jpg. In the target box enter “http://www.yoursite.com/advertise-here”.
  8. Scroll down the page and where it says Codes in the code before box enter “<center>” and the code after box enter “</center>”. Scroll up and click the Save button on the right.
  9. In the Ads menu click on Settings.
  10. In the Ads Place before content select “Top Banner Spot”, tick both the boxes after this Allow ads place… and Allow using predefined…
  11. In the Ads Place after content select “Bottom Banner Spot”, tick both the boxes after this Allow ads place… and Allow usng predefined…
  12. Scroll down and click Save Changes…

The video for this is here…

If you have better graphics skills feel free to upload your own images instead of the ones I have supplied.

Summary

Today we have just started moneytizing our site and I have shared a money method that 99% of Internet Marketers do not do. Back many years ago it used to be very common, now though people get so distracted by advanced stuff they forget tried and tested basics.
 


Making Money online DAY 3

October 10, 2011, by No comments yet

Day 3: Loose Ends…

We are coming along, just 2 days ago we had nothing, now we have our blog, with 2 pages of unique content. Social Networking accounts ready to use… It’s nearly time to start thinking about money however there are a few loose ends to tie up first.

Today is going be the last day we spend any time doing any major onsite stuff for the next week, and I will introduce a few nifty tricks which I like.

  • How to check Google Indexing
  • Google Webmaster Tools
  • Site Statistics
  • Youtube video plugin
  • Scheduling Posts

How to check your Google Indexing

One of the most basic things you can do online is to check if your website is included in Google. Generally the more pages you have included in google the more chance there is of gaining traffic.

  1. Goto http://www.google.com
  2. Enter “site:www.yourwebsitedomain.com” into the search box and click search
  3. It’ll tell you how many pages are included on google, or give you nothing found if Google hasn’t found you yet.

This is how it looks for bestfootballgoals.info. I’ve not submitted the site or anything, however I do have a link to the site both from this blog and BHW which may have affected the speed with which it has been indexed.

Google Webmaster Tools

Google has a set of tools which will tell you more about how Google see’s your website, and what Google thinks it is about. Even though you can add multiple websites you own into one Google account I personally will create a new Webmaster tools account for each website. This prevents Google from seeing that a lot of websites are owned by a single person and automatically thinking that they can’t be quality because of this. When you add your website you have to confirm that you own it, and I cover how to do this below.

  1. Goto http://www.google.com/webmaster
  2. Click signup, since we already created a google account when we signed up to youtube we can sign in with this account.
  3. Click Add Site, enter your website address and click Continue.
  4. We need to verify we own the website, google gives us a file to upload however I prefer to cheat (I recommend watching the video here)… Copy the name of the file google gives us.
  5. Goto your cPanel Control Panel and click File Manager, when it loads click Create File, and paste the name google has given you in.
  6. Select the new file in the list and click Code Editor, accept defaults and click Edit.
  7. Go back to the google webmaster tools, click on the download link, click open and copy the contents of the file. Goto the Code Editor and paste the file contents, click Save File. Then click close File Editor.
  8. Go back to google webmaster tools, click the confirm link (number 3 in the list). If it works, go back in the browser and click Verify.
  9. It’ll take a few days for Webmaster Tools to become useful to us, however we can goto the Site Configuration menu, and click Settings. Then we can choose to use the www.sitename.com option in the prefered address format.
  10. The search queries, keywords, crawl stats will all help us in a couple of weeks… For now we are done with Keyword Tools.

Whilst this will be empty to start, Google will start building data on your site over the next few days and it will eventually become awsome for finding new keywords. The video is here:

Site Statistics

It’s always nice to know when you are visited, till now we’ve not had no content so there has been no need. Now we are starting to develop our content it is important that we can track what people like and where they are coming from. The easiest way is the StatPress Visitor plugin which we install now…

  1. Login to your WordPress Dashboard, click on Plugins.
  2. Click Add New, enter “StatPress” and click Search.
  3. Find “StatPress Visitor” in the list and click Install Now, and Ok.
  4. Click Activate Plugin.
  5. This adds a new option to our menu called StatPress V, click this.
  6. At the moment you will see it is blank (or 0). From now on each time someone visits your site StatPress will track which pages they look at, where they come from, and what country they are in.

The video is here:
Site Statistics

It’s always nice to know when you are visited, till now we’ve not had no content so there has been no need. Now we are starting to develop our content it is important that we can track what people like and where they are coming from. The easiest way is the StatPress Visitor plugin which we install now…

Login to your WordPress Dashboard, click on Plugins.
Click Add New, enter “StatPress” and click Search.
Find “StatPress Visitor” in the list and click Install Now, and Ok.
Click Activate Plugin.
This adds a new option to our menu called StatPress V, click this.
At the moment you will see it is blank (or 0). From now on each time someone visits your site StatPress will track which pages they look at, where they come from, and what country they are in.

The video is here:

YouTube Embed Plugin

I like things being simple, and trying to use the embed code that youtube gives us on WordPress is just agony… It hurts badly so I have my favourite alternative, the youtube Embed Plugin which is so simple even a baby could do it!

  1. Log into your WordPress dashboard
  2. Click Plugins, Add New.
  3. Enter “Youtube Embed” and click search. Find Youtube Embed in the list and click Install Now, click Ok.
  4. Click Activate Plugin, goto the Settings menu and click on the YouTube Embed option to configure some of the settings.
  5. In the Style information box enter “text-align:center;” to center the video in the post. Set Show Fullscreen Button to Yes, Show Search Box to No, set Show Annotations to No, and then click Save Changes.
  6. Scroll down to preview how the video will look.
  7. Click Posts, Add New and enter a title and select the appropiate categories.
  8. Search YouTube for a video related to your post title, to include the video in your post you just need to write the Video ID in the code shown in the video below.
  9. Click Publish, and then preview the post to make sure that the video is working.

I love this plugin as it makes YouTube so easy to use, to find out how to include a video in your blog watch the end of the video below for the code to use.

How to Schedule WordPress Posts

Wouldn’t it be amazing if you can just add a years worth of content to your site, and have wordpress publish it automatically throughout the year? Well you can, and we are going write and schedule the next 5 days posts to be published automatically.

  1. Login to your WordPress Dashboard
  2. Click Posts, Add Post.
  3. Enter the title, write your post as you normally would, and select the category.
  4. In the Publish box next to where it says Publish immediately click the Edit link.
  5. Select tommorow’s date, and a time during the day.
  6. Click Ok, and then click Schedule which will publish the post automatically on the date and time specified.
  7. Do this for 4 more posts so that we have a new post each day until the weekend…

A video demonstration is here…

Summary…

We should now have our blog loaded with 5 articles to be published over the next 5 days. Personally I normally pay an article writer to write these for me (saves me time), however if you are just getting started they are easy enough to write. Today is the last day we will be doing these basic but necessary tasks, tommorow we will be starting to Monetize. We will look at the different options we have for earning money online and how we can tie them into our blog.