Entries Tagged 'Making Money' ↓

In poking about the world of affiliate programs and scripts I’ve discovered that there are people who make a good living off them. I was surprised by how sites that are nothing more than affiliates links can thrive.

I’m not talking about websites that build a site around affiliate links and have an attractive design. Nor the evil bottom feeders who think referral log spamming is a tolerable form of advertising.

Some seem to thrive by having domain names like goddamnedcheap.com, decent navigation menus and somehow getting Google to index their sites (sometimes they are masters of mod_rewrite). So instead of “Gerbil Breeding for Millions at Amazon” you’ll see “Goddamned Cheap Gerbil Breeding for Millions.” No reason Bezos shouldn’t share his wealth; the sites aren’t costing the buyer an extra penny. I’m surprised that it works. And wonder how long it will as Google refines things and the search engine business fragments.

Some dump lots of public domain text into their pages. To say there’s nothing special about it is being kind. But googlebot sees it as content. Some of them have been downloading and adding DMOZ but I gather the useful of that strategy is fading. (I’d often thought about adding one section of DMOZ here but don’t want to offend Google, DMOZ load time can be awful so I thought I’d save myself a wait if nobody else.)

Others are just stockpiles to hundreds (thousands) or products, coupons, services, all sorts of crap. Possibly one of the reasons Yahoo’s search may depreciate lots and lots of external links.

Again, I’m not knocking these guys. They aren’t cheating anybody. Mostly I’m startled to learn how well it has worked. If their current tactics fail maybe they’ll go into the SEO business.

Originally posted 2004-03-04 16:33:39. Republished by Old Post Promoter

My memory is less sturdy though less well connected than a spider’s web. If I’ve already made part of this meta-entry, well, you’ll just have to chalk it up to the writer’s encroaching dotage.

I regret the increasing clutter as I experiment with various means to getting my website to help me pay the bills. My six weblogs exist for my and possibly your entertainment. My sometimes alluded to monetary damnation has led me to exploit their limited commercial possibilities.

First I added the text ads common to many websites and weblogs. My slender recompense was more than enough to prompt me to add other things. Much of the clutter is links to Amazon. Much of my free time has been focused on refining them. I’m surprised I’ve found time at all to post in the weblogs.

The results are mixed. Some days I awake to discover that my time has brought me 43 cents. Other days I find that someone who went to Amazon because I listed a photo book of pretty men bought a power saw while there. Since he was visiting on my click that brought me ten bucks. (I seem to make more money that way than from people buying the Sam Carson photo book though many people seem quite taken by it.)

Yesterday I became an All Posters affiliate; hence the “posters and magnets” box. If that doesn’t justify its space in a month I’ll cast it into oblivion.

In a way I feel as if I were like someone who solicited your companionship only for you to discover that I invited you to drop by the house so I could sucker you into an MLM scheme.

Yeah, I know I don’t need to apologize for the distracting if sometimes appealing images. I wanted to do so anyway.

Originally posted 2004-04-10 09:52:56. Republished by Old Post Promoter

After expressing fear about the requirement for an annual renewal (or the script stops working, it isn’t just a lack of updates) I decided that the Associate Engine was the best way for me to implement being an Amazon Associate for now.

Whatever my maintaining six weblogs may seem to imply I really don’t have lots of time to spend on the site. Otherwise I’d probably have gone with Mr. Rat’s Amazon Products Feed. (Though the APF is free the price difference isn’t as large for the less htaccess able of us since the APF mod for htaccess is a third party product costing $50).

The Associate Engine has so much built in that it was too damn easy for me to incorporate the products lists as includes through AE’s script parameters. The Amazon Products Feed seemed to be fighting me.

One of the biggest selling points for me was that the out-of-the-box Associate Engine store is better than a person with minimal CSS and HTML skills like myself create myself. (Neither script is really CSS friendly.) In a ten-day test with a two-week key the Associate Engine pretty much paid for itself.

Still if I had the time and skill I probably would’ve gone for Mr. Rat’s script because expire-ware inspires fear.

There are a number of open source solutions for coping with AWS. They mostly seem, as is the case with much open source work, forgotten. Since Amazon’s Web Service’s are given the capricious changes I felt I’d really be more secure knowing that there was a developer with an economic incentive to keep his clients happy.

If you have php skills there’s a wealth of ways to sell on Amazon. Those of us who aren’t wizards with XML and XSLT are forced to be more pragmatic.

Amazon Products Feed

Associate Engine

AWS applications

Originally posted 2004-03-25 16:35:30. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Author: Michel Richer

How To Succeed With An Affiliate Program

by: Michel Richer

Affiliate Program have exploded on the internet. Thousand of people join them every day. Amazon.com is probably the best example of such phenomenal success.

If the affiliate program is so popular and so widely available and booming like mushroom…Why do most affiliate have a hard time making $100 per month ? And some never see have receive a check ? It’s probably because they are not effective in their marketing campaign or doing noting at all.

But some affiliates are making big bucks. They are the one with an income of ($100,000 and over per year). There is also a big majority who still make a good income (around $10 000 to $75 000 a year). Of course the vast majority of affiliate will never make that much money. They fail miserably.

So what is wrong with them ?

THEY DON’T SET GOALS

Most people fail at anything because most people don’t have a clear vision of where they are heading. They don’t take the time to learn and experiment. They give up too easily.

Yes, it feels “unproductive” to prepare and set up a system… But it’s how the successful succeed.

The solution? Planning and learning.

CHOOSING THE RIGHT AFFILIATE PROGRAM

Choosing the best companies is an art in itself. Choose affiliate program that are already successful and well established like SFI. Choose the one that offer good training and good marketing aids.

Successful affiliates select the best companies. They use new ideas and creativity to attract customers. They never give up.

DEVELOP A GOOD WEBSITE

Lot’s of people don’t know how to design a website. Or don’t have the money to hire a webmaster. Even the ones who can design a website. They design poor content or poor design. Produce low value gateway pages. They use free web hosting. They don’t master the search engine.

The solution? Take what you know, what you love, and turn it into a Theme-Based Content Site. Attract highly targeted, interested customers, provide solid value through content, then refer them to your affiliated merchants.

DRIVING TRAFFIC

Having lot’s of traffic to your website is a big challenge. But it is essential to be successful. Or at least to make a reasonable amount of money.

You have to make your site “search engine friendly”. You need content for the search engine to spider your website.

You need to know how your webpage is index and how well it is ranked on the SE to better perform.

Use every marketing method to drive traffic.

a.. PPC Campaign b.. Linking Strategy c.. Writing Articles d.. Ezine Publishing e.. Newsletter f.. Banner Advertising g.. Viral Marketing (EBooks, Freeware etc.) h.. Offline as well. (Business Cards, Flyers, Radio Spots etc.)

CONCLUSION

Affiliate Program are great. You can really make a substantial income at almost no cost. This is the simplest way to start a business. You can really succeed if you keep learning and experimenting.

————————- Copyright © Michel Richer

PERMISSIONS TO REPUBLISH: This article may be republished in its entirety free of charge, electronically or in print, provided it appears with the included copyright and author’s resource box with live website link.

http://hombyz.com

About the author: About The Author ******************************­­ Michel Richer, The Internet Business Specialist Can Help You Build A Successfull Internet Business That Can Generate Massive Profit !!!

Start Your Own Internet Business for FREE – Visit Now http://hombyz.com/homebusiness­­.htm

Originally posted 2005-03-23 11:47:50. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Optimizing Google Adsense For Better Performance and More Money!

Author: Martin Lemieux

So you want to make money with Google Adsense? I don’t blame you, who doesn’t want residual income! This article will show you how to better optimize Google Adsense to make more money from your web site(s).

Before we get into it, learn more about Google Adsense here: http://www.google.com/services/adsense_tour/

First and foremost is: Positioning

Where you position your Adsense link boxes and banner ads is extremely important. Trying to make money from the bottom of your pages within your website just won’t cut it. You need to add your Adsense links right in the heart of your template or right in the heart of your content. I would personally suggest both actually.

Adding Adsense in the heart of your template:

Continue reading →

Originally posted 2005-07-06 12:15:09. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Now, I didn’t much care, still don’t. But it you are hestitant or curious here’s a great online tool for previewing what Google’s AdSense might look like for you.

If you’re thinking about becoming a Google Adsense publisher, and want to see exactly what types of ads show up on your pages, use this free service to find out.

Testadsense

Originally posted 2004-05-02 07:30:56. Republished by Old Post Promoter

There’s Gold in Your Website’s Server Log

By Stephen Bucaro

Many Webmasters have never bothered to view their website’s server log. Ignoring your server log is like flying with a blind pilot. You may still be cruising along, but you have no idea where you are or where you’re headed. If your website is on a free host, you probably don’t have access to the server log. However, if you pay for your web host, or if you own the server, you almost always have some access to the server log.

In this article, you’ll learn what kind of information a typical server log provides, how to analyze that information, and how to use that information to steer your website in a direction for growth and success.

The actual data in the server log is just that, data. Data is of little use without an application to compile, categorize, analyze, and turn it into useful information. The power of server log analysis software varies depending upon the web host, and it’s not related to how much you pay for hosting service. I have seen some very low budget web hosts with powerful server log analysis software, and some expensive web hosts that provide only a limited utility.

The importance of the server log analysis software is second only to up-time reliabilty when it comes to web hosts. A web server log can tell you who is visiting your web site, where they’re coming from, what operating system and web browser they’re using, what pages of your website they are viewing, and much more. A smart webmaster performs a regular monthly analysis of the valuable information contained in the server log.

Hits

Some webmasters brag about the number of “hits” their website receives, but hits themselves are not important. For example, when a search engine spiders your website, it generates a hit for every page it visits. There are ways to generate millions of hits on a website without anyone ever actually viewing a single page.

The important statistics are “page view hits” and “unique visitors”. Server log analysis software should tell you how many times each page was viewed. Anaylyzing the popularity of individual pages tells you where to place your most important advertisements, and what kind of new content you should add to your website.

The king of all statistics is the number of unique visitors your web site receives. When it comes to selling advertising or joining the most exclusive affiliate programs, a high number of unique visitors each month is the statistic that gets respect.

Good analysis software will tell you how many pages each visitor viewed and how long they stayed on your website. The goal is to develop content that gets your visitors to stay longer, a quality sometimes referred to as “stickiness”.

A statistic related to hits is “bandwidth”. This is a complicated statistic because you want more visitors and that causes bandwidth to go up. On the other hand, high bandwidth consumption makes your website repond slower (and most web hosts charge extra for bandwidth beyond a certain limit). What you want is to design your web pages so they use bandwidth efficiently, and you want to be on the lookout for people who are stealing your bandwidth (usually by linking to images on your web site).

Referrers

Good server log analysis software will provide you with the URLs of the webpages that people clicked on to get to your website. This is extremely valuable information. If you are receiving a high volume of traffic from another website, you can almost consider that website to be your business partner. It would be to your advantage to find ways to make your website more useful to the referring website. For example, learn what the topic of the referring website is and place more related content on your website.

One common method of aiding referrers is to place a reciprocal link on your website. However, don’t bother placing the reciprocal link on a “links” page with hundreds of other links (a link farm). If you can’t provide an honest reciprocal link, it’s better to do nothing. An honest reciprocal link might be a page containing a review of the referrer’s website, and that page should contain only a few other links.

Search Strings

Good server log analysis software will provide you with the keywords and search strings people entered at a search site to find your website. One way to get more traffic to your website is to provide more content related to the top keywords. If getting more traffic is your single goal, there are websites that will provide you with a list of the current most popular keywords entered into search engines. Then you can provide more content related to those keywords. This gets involved with the subject of “Search Engine Optimization” (SEO).

SEO is a science in itself, covered in other articles, but I will reveal a secret trick as an example of SEO tactics. Starting with a top keyword, generate every possible misspelling of that keyword and place those at the top of your webpage with the text color the same as the webpage background. (Note: I don’t use that trick or any other SEO tricks myself because if you get caught the search engines will penalize your website.)

Platform and User Agent Good server log analysis software will tell you which operating systems and which browser brands and versions people are using to access your website. At the time of this writing, the most common operating system is Windows XP and the most common browser is Internet Explorer version 6. However, you will find a wide range of operating systems and browsers accessing you website. Unfortunately, they are not all compatible.

The fact is, you can’t design your website to be 100 percent compatible with every operating system and web browser in use today. That would require either using only plain html (version 3) or using browser detection code and creating a dozen variations of each webpage. Use your server log’s platform and user agent data to decide which browser your web pages should to be designed to be compatible with. Your statistics will probably show that 90 percent of your website’s visitors are using the latest or the previous version of Internet Explorer.

Country Information

Good server log analysis software will tell you which countries your website visitors are located in. Analysis of the bucarotechlp.com server logs shows that visitors are located in every country, village, and hamlet on the planet. This leads to the question, should you create multiple variations of each webpage to accomodate visitors from other nations? It depends upon your business and your resources. The fact is that the language of business and commerce across the planet is English, and I receive frequent email, in English, from all over the planet.

Important Ways to Use Server Log Information

Website Design

Remember when the typical website had a gray background and a single image in the middle of the page? Today, that would be below the standard for a kids website on AOL. Does your server log “platform” and “user agent” statistics tell you that most of the visitors to your website are using Windows XP with Internet Explorer Version 6, while your website is designed for Windows 95 and Internet Explorer Version 4? Can you afford to be presenting a website that looks outdated?

I think it’s a mistake to design a website that requires your visitors to have the latest bleeding-edge technology. On the other hand, if the rest of the web is using ASP (Active Server Pages) to generate custom webpages on-the-fly that use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to create webpages that resemble slick magazine pages and DHTML (Dynamic HTML) to provide interactivity, it might be time for you to investigate those technologies.

If your website is a business site or E-commerce site, the visual style and technical level of your website reflects the quality of your business or service. To determine the proper visual style and technology level of your website requires you to monitor three things.

1. Your competitors. You want to look as in-style as they do, but avoid following them down the road to bloated plugins (Macromedia Flash). 2. The portion of your audience using broad band Internet Access. Less than half of U.S. Make sure your webpages load within 20 seconds over a 56kbps modem connection. 2. Your server log platform and user agent statistics. Your web pages need to be designed to be compatible with the current most popular operating system and web browser version.

Webhost Performance

Web hosts provide two basic kinds of service, shared hosting and dedicated hosting. If your website is on a shared host, there may be hundreds of other websites sharing the same computer as your website. This limits the performance of your website. Many web host providers use “bandwidth throttling” to prevent one website from hogging all the available bandwidth.

As your website grows and attracts increasing traffic, it will need more of the host computers processor time and more bandwidth. Monitor your server log hits, and bandwidth statistics. At some point, your website may hit a performance wall and you may need to move to a higher grade of hosting, or a different web host company to continue growth.

When moving to a different web host company, don’t trust the specifications they provide. Check several different web host directories that let visitors rate web hosts. If several different web host directories have many users that give a web host company a high rating, that’s the company you want to trust with your website.

Website Topic

As you analyze certain website server statistics (for example, “page view hits”, and “top search engine keywords”) and make adjustments, you may find the content of your website drifting away from your original intent. At some point, you may have to decide, Am I going to chase traffic and change the topic of my website, or am I more interested in focusing on the topic of my choice?

If the original objective of your website was to make money above all else, then let your visitors steer your website’s content. There’s nothing wrong with that. Everybody’s got to make a living. But, if the original objective of your website was to be a resource on a subject that you are passionate about, then you may need to reassess the content of your website.

I would reccommend having the best of both worlds. Stick to content related to the subject of your website, but delineate a wide enough scope of the topic so that when your server statistics point out an opportunity to increase traffic, you have rules to guide you.

In this article you learned some of the types of information you can mine from your web server log and some powerful ways to use that information to steer your website in a direction for growth and success. If you are one of those webmasters who has never bothered to view their website’s server log, you now know that you have been overlooking some gold nuggets.

———————————————————- Resource Box: Copyright(C) Bucaro TecHelp. To learn how to maintain your computer and use it more effectively to design a Web site and make money on the Web visit bucarotechelp.com To subscribe to Bucaro TecHelp Newsletter visit http://bucarotechelp.com/search/000800.asp ———————————————————-

About the author: To learn how to maintain your computer and use it more effectively to design a Web site and make money on the Web visit bucarotechelp.com To subscribe to Bucaro TecHelp Newsletter visit http://bucarotechelp.com/search/000800.asp

Originally posted 2004-08-30 16:31:31. Republished by Old Post Promoter

In using MTAmazon to power my Amazon Associate account I found it wasn’t hard for me to generate click throughs to Amazon. But having people click through didn’t lead to sales. And it looked as though it was diminishing my Adsense results without bringing in any more money.

People may be interested in nude aerobics (or at least seeing them performed) but that doesn’t mean they’ll buy them. It wasn’t hard to choose Amazon products to advertise that would cause few click-throughs. I easily knocked the rate down by about 75% by listing more costly and less sexy items. The text ad CTR went up slightly but it is hard to decide if that was a consequence or unrelated.

Even when people don’t buy what you’ve displayed they may buy other things like seafood cookbooks and power drills. It won’t surprise me if my jockeying of text ads and Amazon Associate links doesn’t continue for a few months before I discover what is right for my website.

Today’s big change was getting a two-week test key for the Cusimano Associate Engine. My stats show plenty of people clicking a couple of my “eShop” links but no sign of them buying anything at all. I’m hoping the two week test will give me a chance to determine if I simply have the wrong sort of website (though the clicks via MT Amazon don’t seem to indicate that) for an Associate shop.

Too many variables and not enough time.

Originally posted 2004-03-09 17:19:50. Republished by Old Post Promoter

On a couple of my sites I’ve been experimenting with a couple of ad networks.

They’ve quite wrongheadedly classified the sites as adult. There is content about sexuality but no actual sexual content. Google accepted one of the sites for Adsense but showed the alternate ad more often than an Adsense ad. Some of the content probably uses words that Google doesn’t ‘like’ as it were.

So I thought I’d see if another text advertising network would prove more profitable. But the only ads I’m getting are for a couple of adult sites, nothing my readers are apt to care for. The income has been pitiful.

Before moving on to my next experiment I’d like to accumulate the minimum payout.

Hoping to reach that amount is what prompted me to explore the most annoying evil in web advertising: pop-ups.

I won’t try to offer a defense. I’d planned to allow the pop-up ads for two weeks at most. Earn enough to be paid and turn them off.

The site I chose for pop-up ads gets about 25,000 unique visitors a month. The pop-ups brought in only a few cents a night.

Partly perhaps because of the increasing presence of browsers and toolbars that block pop-up ads. Though when I check the site the ad popped up even though I was using Firefox.

Feeling guilty for annoying visitors and not seeing at least a couple of bucks a day I removed the pop-up ad code on the third day.

Ah the shameful power of greed.

Originally posted 2005-05-26 12:55:40. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Copyright 2006 Dennis Watson

Why, you ask? Because it’s free and many free classified sites get thousands of hits per day. Most have search capability, which means you have a good change at someone seeing your ads. Many webmasters have used them continuously with great success. Most marketing experts and marketing E-books recommend placing free classifieds daily.

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