Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Easy Ways to Make Money Online

Are their easy ways to make money online?

As far as I can see there is always work required if you want to make money online!

Sure it is easy to create a blog with Blogger, but you need visitors to visit the blog if you are going to make money.

It is also very easy to add Google adsense to your site but again without visitors your blog will not make you any money.

Traffic to a blog is crucial!

Getting Traffic to your site will inevitably require work. This includes listing your site on submission directories for one way links. The same has to be done for the blogs RSS Feeds.

The layout of the site is also very important, whether you are trying to make money via affiliates or adsense. To optimize the site and make any form of meaningful money will require time and effort.

Content is also of the essence. Even if you only want visitors to come to your site to click google ads the content is crucial. Search engines such as Yahoo, Google etc no longer base their rankings solely on meta tags, they now have a far more refined search that picks out the most relevant sites for content relating to the visitors search query. Therefore if you want your site to be the one the visitor and the search engine selects then you need quality and unique content.

Of course you can play the numbers game and start up as many blogs as possible skirting over the various web 2.0 issues but are you going to get rich by doing that. My guess is no!

The moral to this post is that in order to create a blog that is going to bring in some extra money you are going to need to put in time and effort. There is no way round this fact. Of course as you become successful you can pay people to write articles or look for advertising etc, but I fear this is a little way down the line.

Ways to Make Money Online for Free

This is where I am going to write about other ways to make money online for free, other than with Google Adsense etc. I will update this page every time I find a new method of earning some extra money; after all it all counts.



Get Paid to click Ads


The first method I have tried is very simple in deed, all you have to do is view a website for 30 seconds and after that time expires, you are credited with $0.01. Of course this is not much money, but if you do it once a day for around an hour or so it will soon build up.

Getting paid $0.01 is not the only benefit of Bux.to as you also get commission for referrals. So the key is to get as many people as you can to sign up via you and get paid for their clicking as well as your own!

There are quit a few sites that pay to click, but the site that keeps on cropping up is Bux.to so I will use them to start generating a bit of income. The main thing about Bux.to is that they are proven, having already paid Lot's of members money. These figure range from 2-5 figures!

You can visit their forum to find out some of the Bux.to success stories.
Get paid by AlertPay.

Blogger Tips

I found two sites in particular that I am going to use to help me improve this blog they are:

Tips for New Bloggers
Blogger Tips and Tricks
I will add more useful sites as and when I find them.

Bloggers Tribe

The idea behind Bloggers-Tribe is to describe a relatively computer ileterate's journey and effort to try and make money from blogging.

I will try and share each step of my journey towards making money from nothing.

If I can do it you can too. I will try and read as many of the experts blogs as possible, put into practice what they advise and then share what I find works here on Blog Addick.

The questions I am asking myself are:

Can you make money blogging online?
What are the different ways to make money through a blog?
How do you generate traffic through the blog?
I will update and add to these questions as I come face-to-face with more.

Adsense - The Easy Way to Start Making Money Online

Adsense has got to be the easiest way to start making money from a blogger blog!

The best thing with Blogger is that adsense is set up for you once you have registered for an account and picked your Blog name.

Although many expert bloggers choose wordpress as their Blog tool of choice, I have decided to go with Blogger as it is free and very simple to start with.

A very simple and basic equation that I found on Problogger is that:

Adsense Revenue = Traffic Levels + High Paying Ads + Relevant Ads + Optimally Positioned and Designed Ads

Here are a few things to remember when you are adding adsense to your Blog:


When looking to implement Adsense into your site remember to keep it simple.

Simple Blogs make more money from Adsense - Fact!

Look at other adsense advertisers, click on a adsense links to get idea's from other sites and users.

Position of Ads - The great thing about the Adsense programme is that you the freedom to choose the best position for your ads. Positioning is a key element to an ads success, make sure that visitors to your blog can see the advert; underneath your heading or on the top right of the page is usually a very visual and successful place to locate them.

Design of Ads - Google also alows you to choose the color scheme for your adverts. It is usually wise to make the ads blend in nicely with your blog so that they don't look too ugly.

Make sure that the adverts are relevant to the information on your Blog. Remember though, once a visitor has clicked an ad, they are lost to another site!

Once you have positioned your ads, start to work on improving the traffic to your site. Remember content is as important as SEO (search engine optimisation) these days. I will go into trying to generate traffic in a separate post once I have started to try and drive traffic to this site.

Ads vary in the amount they pay, search the web to find the best paying adverts. Forum's may be a good place to start. I will go into this once I have tried to ascertain the information myself.

Try new things - If a position of an ad isn't generating any clicks then try various other one's. Don't be afraid to mess around with your adverts until you find a formula that works.

Block ads that have no relevance. It is possible to block adverts that are not relevant to the content on your site, I have not had to do this yet but I am told it is quite simple.
If you have any other tips or advice that you feel is crucial to running a successful adsense campaign add them below.

One ebook that I have been told to buy over and over again is Rob Benwell's blogging to the bank 3.0. If you have any feedback on this book let me know.

Friday, November 21, 2008

Traffic Travis

Traffic Travis is the one tool that I have purchased to date to enhance the SEO of my Blog.

There are two forms of download for Traffic Travis:

1. Free Download
2. Pro Download

I personally started with the free version but found that although it was very useful to find out lots of information regarding Keywords, it didn't allow me to do the competition analysis.

There are a few reasons that I have found Traffic Travis a very useful tool. I must admit that I hate parting with money but once I had the free version and had reached my limits with it, I really wanted to expand and continue to progress.

As a novice to Blogging I love the fact that every time you click on one of the Traffic Travis categories you can watch a clear instructional video explaining the step in detail. These short videos can be viewed every time if you so wish (especially if you are like me and forget what you did the last time).

Traffic Travis Pro (which is the one that I am looking at on my computer as a reference while I write this post) has six main categories with a number of sub-categories when you open it up.

These are:

1. Keyword Tools with Keyword finder and Keyword Sorter as sub-categories.
2. Search engine tools with Position/Ranking, Top sites for keywords, Backlinks to site and Project report as the sub-categories.
3. PPC Analysis with Keywords/Details, Top Sites for Keywords, Most Popular Keywords and Website Keyword list as the sub-categories.
4. Page Analysis which analyses your Website.
5. Settings - General and Internet connection.
6. Useful Resource - These are resources that they guys at Traffic Travis recommend such as Matt Cutt's Blog, SEO Book etc.

As I said earlier in this post, I have found Traffic Travis really useful and therefore purchased the pro version. The best thing about this SEO tool is that you can simply download the free version and then upgrade to the Pro version if you like it and need it.

Ways to Generate Traffic and Make Money Online

If I or anyone else for that matter, is going to make money online then we are going to have to generate traffic to our sites or Blogs.

The other point is that small amounts of traffic won't suffice either; to make lot's of money we will need to generate massive amounts of through traffic.

I have been reading many blogs on the subject and come up with some sort of a plan to begin my traffic generation to this blog.

1. Directory Submission

By submitting this Blog to various directory's I will be able to generate lot's of one way links, which in turn should significantly improve the Blog's Search Engine rankings.

I am going to use a tool to submit my blog to the different directories, it still takes time to do but should be worth it once I see the site being recognised. The tool is called Directory Submitter and can be downloaded for free.

I will add more method's to my list once I have submitted Blog Addick to all of the sites featured in Directory Submitter (350 I think).

I'm back from submitting this Blog to the 350 sites, some worked and were for free, others required a fee to submit. The submissions did prove to be rather time consuming but should help to push the blog up the rankings (fingers crossed).

2. RSS Feed

The next thing I have done is create an RSS feed. I have done this using feedburner, it is very easy to do you can visit the feedburner site here.

The idea behind an RSS Feed is to allow visitors to sign up and be notified of any updates or new posts to your blog.

As with submitting your blog with directroy submitter it is also an idea to submit your feed to various feed directories and aggregators.

The other thing that feedburner does is a PingShot; automatically notifying various directories and aggregators when you publish new material to your blog/feed.

There is a great list of RSS feeds and pings at Tips for New Bloggers; you can visit the relevant page here: RSS feeds and Pings. This is the next thing that I am going to do, I am going to trawl through the list and submit my RSS feed to the various directories.

When you have registered your feed with feedburner, make sure that you add feedburner on your blogger settings.

You can do this by:

* Clicking settings for the relevant blog.
* Selecting site feed from the menu.
* Where it says Post Feed Redirect URL you have to enter your feedburner feed address. E.g. the feed address for this site is http://feeds.feedburner.com/BloggersTribe

In addition to submitting my feed to all of the sites listed on Tips for New Bloggers I have also downloaded a RSS Submit Software called Allscoop RSS Submit Pro you can download it for free. Just follow the instructions to submit your blog to a few more search engines.

3. Bookmark

Give your visitors the option to bookmark your site or each individual post. Social Networking sites such as Digg, Stumbleupon, Twitter as well as many others have become very important in driving huge amounts of traffic through the most successful site.

A great site that you can use to bookmark each individual post yourself (as the webmaster) is Onlywire it's a free service, all you need to do is promote the the onlywire site by displaying a bookmark and share button on your site.

I have read a free ebook that is recommended as an essential read on a number of highly regarded sites including Carl Ocab who tips it as a vital part of social networking to drive traffic to your site. I found the book very informative and have used it to get a better understanding of Web 2.0 which has become an integral part of owning a successful Blog/site. Click the book title to download your Free copy of the Authority Black Book.

Search Engine Optimization - Introduction

For all of you fellow bloggers beginning a journey out there here is a brief description of SEO or Search Engine Optimization and why it is so important.

Search Engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN provide Blogs with a great source to generate huge volumes of traffic. There is enormous amounts of traffic to be sourced from search engines.

SEO is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a website or in this case a Blog from Search Engines via organic search results. This allows readers to find high quality websites that are discussing products, topics, events etc that the reader wishes to find out about.

SEO is so important because the higher a website ranks, the more visitors it will generate from the Search Engine.

So if you are trying to make money from a blog via adsense or affiliate programmes you really need to nail the SEO side of things. Equally imprtant if you are trying to discuss a topic that you are passionate about, you want and need visitors to your blog so SEO is no less important.

Blogs suit Search Engines and can rank very nicely due to the fact that they are usually updated frequently, targeting "niche" topics, have a interlinking structure and the ability to generate links from other blogs and bloggers etc. There are many ways that blogs can be enhanced effecting where the blog ends up indexed and ranked. These techniques are referred to as Search Engine Optimization (or SEO).

Now I just need to discover how to optimize this Blog for the search engines initially.

What seems to be highlighted over and over again by everyone is that keywords are no longer the be-all and end-all of SEO; nowadays content also plays a crucial role.

I read a post on Problogger by Darren Rowse who recommended Aaron Wall's SEO book as a valuable resource. My aim is to emulate what the successful bloggers out there have done!

I have found that Traffic Travis is a very useful free tool (I personally upgraded to the pro version after trying the free version). You can read about Traffic Travis here.

I will write a number of articles on various forms of SEO as I go along, I will then add a list at the bottom of this page to be easily directed to relevant pages:

SEO Tool pages on this blog:

* Traffic Travis

Easy Ways to Make Money Online

Are their easy ways to make money online?

As far as I can see there is always work required if you want to make money online!

Sure it is easy to create a blog with Blogger, but you need visitors to visit the blog if you are going to make money.

It is also very easy to add Google adsense to your site but again without visitors your blog will not make you any money.

Traffic to a blog is crucial!

Getting Traffic to your site will inevitably require work. This includes listing your site on submission directories for one way links. The same has to be done for the blogs RSS Feeds.

The layout of the site is also very important, whether you are trying to make money via affiliates or adsense. To optimize the site and make any form of meaningful money will require time and effort.

Content is also of the essence. Even if you only want visitors to come to your site to click google ads the content is crucial. Search engines such as Yahoo, Google etc no longer base their rankings solely on meta tags, they now have a far more refined search that picks out the most relevant sites for content relating to the visitors search query. Therefore if you want your site to be the one the visitor and the search engine selects then you need quality and unique content.

Of course you can play the numbers game and start up as many blogs as possible skirting over the various web 2.0 issues but are you going to get rich by doing that. My guess is no!

The moral to this post is that in order to create a blog that is going to bring in some extra money you are going to need to put in time and effort. There is no way round this fact. Of course as you become successful you can pay people to write articles or look for advertising etc, but I fear this is a little way down the line.

Adsense Ready Sites

I've just started to read a few articles on Adsense Ready Sites and the question is:

To Buy or Not To Buy!

There have got to be advantages and disadvantages with regards to buying a pack of these ready made sites.

Could these ready made sites provide us with an easy formula to make money online? Or are they just another form of corner-cutting that will ultimately lead to making someone else a lot of money instead?

Disadvantages

I have already discussed that google is looking for unique quality content to send it's visitors to. If you are buying websites that give no guarantee of being unique and are duplicated all over the web, then how are you going to get traffic to your site?

Search engines will pick up on duplicate content and will not feature the site very highly or will not feature the site at all. To earn money through adsense you need clicks, to get clicks you need traffic and so on. As far as I am concerned Search engines are currently a vital part of the traffic generating model, so you need to keep them happy with quality content.

The other issue I foresee is; can you guarantee that the site and content are legal. Many articles on the web have copyright's which of course means that you cannot use it. How are we to know if the entire site that we have just purchased is not a copy of an existing site. If our sites are copies of existing sites then, once we upload the site and content we will be breaking the law.

Advantages

As far as I can see it is possible to buy packs of websites that guarantee unique content. If this is the case then it would be a dream to be able to pay for 10,50,100 or 150 sites that were ready made. I suspect ,like anything in life, that you would have to pay through the nose for premium content sites. I am a great believer in getting what you pay for; if you pay very little for something then the likelihood is that the quality will not be there.

Conclusion

As far as I can see Adsense Ready Sites would be a good idea if you can guarantee unique quality content. The question I keep asking myself is, why if someone has produced 150 sites with unique quality content, that will bring in a significant residual income from adsense, why would they sell them?

I personally believe that it is a far better method to create blogs one at a time. Pick a subject that you are interested in, get the site looking how you want to, do all the steps to generate traffic, incorporate google adsense into the blog or site and then update the blog once a week or month.

Of course this means work, as I haven't found a work free route yet, then my opinion is that putting work in initially is the only way forward.

How to make Money Online

Is it all in the Title?

I have just read a very interesting article about how to make money online using adsense. The article suggested that the title of a post plays a huge part towards the amount of traffic that will find it's way to your site.

This post will provide me with first hand evidence whether or not the post title does indeed generate more traffic or not!

The article went on to say that, a post entitled "How to make Money Online" generated twice as much money as a more descriptive article Heading. I'm not sure that you should be starting every post "How to make money online" as that would become rather dull. However if your not particularly interested in keeping the attention of your reader then it could be the perfect way to lure visitors to your site.

The other issue is that there must be literally thousands of posts entitled "How to make money online" so the odds are that you will be down the list on that particular search. The competition will be fierce so you better make sure that your SEO etc is all up to scratch.

You can read my ongoing article on Ways to Generate traffic and Make Money online to help optimize your blog.

The other issue with the headline is the relevance to the adsense ads. Of course there are many adverts related to "how to make money online" which will pay very well and will probably be clicked very often. The more out-there the post heading the less likely google is likely to find a relevant advert; if an advert is not relevant to the reason your visitor searched and found your site via the search engine, then why on earth would they want to click the ad. Very simple Eh!

As with all of my other stuff I will keep you up to date with any results I get from any of the discussed topics.