Archive for January, 2008
Unleashing The Massive Profit Power of A Common Spelling Mistake: How The Greatest Typo-squatters Make Millions From Fat-Fingering Searchers
Making Millions For Kevin Ham is all about the “O”…or the lack of it, really. Open up a new browser window right now and type in any word you can think of with a “.cm” at the end…chances are, you’ll find a domain owned by Kevin Ham called agoga.com populated by Yahoo ads. This recent article in BoomJ titled “The Man Who Owns The Internet” gives us a brief but enlightening view into how Kevin Ham, master of Web domains, built a $300 million empire from aggressive domaining. I’ll quote liberally here with no apologies just to wet your appetite. Check out the full article on BoomJ to really find out how a doctor turned domainer and became an internet mogul.
Here are some quotes from the article…
…Trained as a family doctor, he put off medicine after discovering the riches of the Web. Since 2000 he has quietly cobbled together a portfolio of some 300,000 domains that, combined with several other ventures, generate an estimated $70 million a year in revenue…
…Early on, he wrote software to snag expiring names on the cheap. He was one of the first to take advantage of a loophole that allows people to register a name and return it without cost after a free trial, on occasion grabbing hundreds of thousands of names in one swoop…
…Given Ham’s reach on the Web — his sites receive 30 million unique visitors a month — it’s remarkable that so few people know about him. Even in the clubby world of domainers, he’s a mystery man …
The Official Launch of The Sensely Adsense Optimized Template Theme For Blogger and Wordpress
Adsense loving bloggers take note. If you’re looking to make money blogging and you’re on the hunt for just the right Adsense Optimized Wordpress or Blogger Theme, Sensely’s newly released Adsense Optimized Theme is a must see. Although there are many free adsense optimized themes available on the web for free download, the majority of them are buggy eye-sores that ruin the user experience, and don’t really take into account the technical aspects of what really makes adsense perform. Sensely’s adsense theme package comes with a lot of extras and customizable options but it’s also got a (low-range) premium theme price tag. So why pay for this theme? Here’s a quick review of what you get for the money.
Make Money With Your Videos Today: Dump YouTube And Upgrade To A For-Profit Video Sharing Community
Although many of us are waiting for YouTube to finally announce the launch of it’s community profit sharing program, it’s probably not a good idea to hold your breath. If you’ve got tons of great video content just sitting there on your hard drive and you’re itching to make a buck by doing something with it, there are a couple of YouTube-like alternatives that will pay you money for your content. Check it…
Earn 5$ Per 1000 views on Metacafe
The first site on this list is Metacafe. The site has a rewards program based on the number of times your video is viewed by visitors. There isn’t much fine print here. It’s as simple as it gets. The more your videos are watched, the more you get paid. Under their current program, you’ll earn $5 for every 1000 times your video is viewed. There’s only one catch. Similar to a lot of affiliate programs and Google’s Adsense program, you don’t get paid until you hit the $100 minimum payment threshold (approximately 20,000 views). While it might seem an insurmountable hurdle, any YouTube video fan knows that 20,000 isn’t that hard to do if your video catches on. Good quick videos can be incredibly viral and a low budget video shot on a home camera can generate millions of views over its lifetime. Take this video of Freddie “the YYZ Guitar Hero” on YouTube, for example. Since October 2006, the video’s been viewed on YouTube over 5 MILLION times. In a profit-sharing program like Metacafe’s, this video would have earned….ummm…carry the two…… $25,000 to date (and counting).
Hold on, we’re not moving on just yet. There’s more. If you have a website but don’t have any videos of your own you’ll be able to get in on the action pretty soon. Metacafe is about to launch an affiliate program for publishers where you can easily embed videos into your website or blog (YouTube style) and get paid based on the number of views. It hasn’t been officially launched yet, but you can check it out on their affiliate page.
My Top For-Profit Pick: Revver
Revver, although similar, has a slightly different revenue model to Metacafe. In my opinion, this could be A LOT more lucrative than Metacafe’s basic per-view program because Revver’s publishing tools make videos 10 times more viral. Here’s how it works… Users still earn money based on the number of views a video gets. However, instead of paying per view and leaving the content as-is, Revver inserts advertisements onto users’ videos and pays them a 50/50 share of the profits from those ads. The more viewers a video gets, the more money you get. Here’s where the program really gets good…when you upload a video to Revver, in addition to attaching an ad, they also attach unique tracking technology to the video. Revver ads can be served like YouTube on ANY blog or site, anywhere on the Internet. Since ads are attached to the video itself and dynamically served wherever your video travels, there’s no restriction on how your videos are distributed. The more people email your video, post it to other websites or download it from P2P networks, the more money you could earn. Consider that for a second. Now we’re talkin!
One last thing on Revver - For Bloggers and other Wordpress users, Revver’s got their own plugin for video publishing within posts and sidebars. How…ahem…convenient.
Beating Google To the Punch: Flixya’s Embedded Adsense Ads
This one’s worth mentioning for historical purposes, but I think it’ll probably be phased out soon. Flixya is a lot like Revver in that is shares ad revenues on a 50/50 basis with its users. However, instead of using their own ads, Flixya uses Google Adsense to serve ads into video pages. Although they beat Google’s recent adsense-for-video program (fed by YouTube) to market, Google’s Adsense for video program is now available free to all adsense publishers as of a few months ago (which you can see in the right sidebar of this site). Publishers under Google’s adsense for video lets you keep 100% of the click revenue and it works seemlessly with Adsense serving related content in classic Google style, so I don’t see Flixya being a real player in the for-profit video sharing arena for very long. I thought I’d acknowledge it though. ;-).
Bidvertiser Announces A Pay Per Click Advertising Solution for Feedburner Feeds!
Finally someone came up with a solution to monetize Feedburner Feeds outside of Feedburner’s Ad network. Feedburner’s internal ad network kept a lot of smaller blogs out of the game by requiring a minimum traffic count, so this should generate a good buzz with small blog owners. When Feedburner announced it’s up-coming integration with Adsense a few months ago and then didn’t offer its publishers a way to actually deliver Adsense ads within the feeds themselves, a lot of people were disappointed. I definitely was, especially because the solution that they did offer when it was finally released just embeded Adsense ads within your posts on your blog, which only takes a simple do-it-yourself quick fix at the bottom of your singlepost.php file. This morning, Bidvertiser Announced 3 distinct solutions to this problem and they should do really well with them. All of them allow you to keep your current feeds and feed counts. Here they are.
- For Wordpress users that DONT use Feedburner, the new Bidvertiser Wordpress Plugin allows you to seamlessly embed the Bidvertiser Ads in your feeds. You can download the plugin from your publisher account.
- For Feedburner user, there’s a solution that allows you to embed the Bidvertiser Ads in your current Feedburner address, without having to change more that the original feed field. Click here to find out how.
- Here’s the feed solution for Blogger/Blogspot users.
If you’re new to Bidvertiser and you’d like to start monetizing your feeds with PPC ads, you can get started by signing up for your free account here.
Affiliate Marketing 101 - Earning Money With Pay Per Sale Programs
Pay per sale affiliate programs are the most common type you’ll find on the Internet because there are so many e-tailers. The programs are based around you referring visitors (potential buyers) to a merchants website and being paid a commission when the visitor buys a product or a service from the merchant. Commissions can be earned as a flat fee (mostly related to the sale of services) or as a percentage of a sale. Commissions based on sales percentages are much more common and can range anywhere from 1% to up of 75%. What you’ll find is that most of the big e-tailors that have affiliate programs with a lot of affiliates, like Amazon or Dell for example, will pay out low percentage commissions because of the volume that they deal with. In contrast, there are a lot of smaller companies that sell information products, community subscriptions and downloadable software where commissions are much higher per sale. E-Harmony is a great example of an affiliate program that pays huge commissions for each sign up - the last time I checked they awarded their affiliates 100% of the sign up fee, which comes to around $100 a sign up….that’s a great payout just for someone clicking through! You can see how the numbers would add up quickly for high performing affiliates who have sites that draw thousands of visitors a day. Of course, that’s a double edged sword - really great affiliate programs draw a LOT of affiliates and competition can be fierce, so chose your programs wisely and spend time developing sites where you can stack up to the competition. Here are some quick tips for finding good pay per sale affiliate programs.
DIY: How To Embed YouTube and Google Videos into Wordpress Posts Without Using A Plugin
Although I love Wordpress, The WYSIWYG editor can get squirly when you’re embedding YouTube and Google videos into your posts. Firefox usually handles it well, but pages generally go nuts in Internet Explorer. There are a few plugins available that’ll allow you to easily embed video object code into posts in Wordpress, but, the truth is that you don’t really need a Plugin. You just need to know a few easy work arounds.
Profiting From Your YouTube Videos
You may be wondering whether there’s a way to make money with video content on YouTube. The honest answer right now is “kindof”. At present, YouTube is strictly a free video sharing community and members should expect to upload and share their content without any anticipation of a profit. YouTube currently makes all of their profit from ads on their site, and there is no real mechanism for users to generate revenue directly from the videos that they upload. But that’s all expected to change soon.
Bootstrapping: Finding Creative Ways To Raise $200-300 To Jumpstart Your First Affiliate Business
Although you don’t have to spend money to make money with affiliate marketing, you do have to spend some money if you want to make a lot of money quickly right out of the gate. It’s just cold hard math. Unless you’re willing to take a long-term approach, starting an affiliate business or site for free can be an exhausting, frustrating experience. It can take weeks or months of consistent effort to see real traffic and stable earnings. Top affiliates, in contrast, tend to spend a little bit on tools and software that give them an edge like good affordable web hosting, a custom web design, advertising and a great keyword tool. You don’t need to break the bank to really hit the ground running, though. You can launch and market a really kick ass blog or site that generates tons of cash quickly for just a few hundred dollars. Here are some creative ways that you can raise funds for your first little startup.
Make A Fortune Promoting Other People’s Products & Services Online
Learn how Affiliate Marketing can make you a full time Income online. It’s not rocket science and you can start making money today. This site will show you how to build and grow your own affiliate business online and show you the proven strategies you need to know to become a high performing super affiliate.
Finding The Best, Most Affordable Stock Images To Maximize The Visual Appeal of Your Sites
Would it shock you to know that you’ve got less than 15-30 seconds to establish your credibility with new site visitors? Studies have shown that people make unbelievably quick decisions about a site’s value - it only takes most people a matter of seconds to scan a landing page and decide whether to stay or go elsewhere. Including good quality images that are relevant to the content on your site is one of the best ways to convince new visitors to stick around long enough to read your content and ads. I cant stress the next point enough. If you’re trying to make money online you’re in the business of getting and keeping people’s attention. If the majority of your visitors leave your site within 15-30 seconds, never to return, you’ve wasted time, effort and money getting them there, especially if you’re spending money to drive traffic with contextual advertising. Images should be thought of as an investment. They capture people’s attention far more quickly and effectively than any other element on a page, and pairing relevant, attractive images with your content says to visitors “this site is a credible and valuable resource for what I’m looking for.” The only problem is that most of us aren’t graphic designers or professional photographers who have tons of image stock to use. So where are the best places to find affordable royalty-free stock images? Here are a couple of great resources you can use to punch up a website without breaking the bank.
Affiliate Marketing 101 - What Is Affiliate Marketing And How Does It Work?
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Did you know that you can make money simply by promoting other people’s products online? Affiliate marketing is where you earn commissions by referring visitors from your website to a merchant’s website. A merchant is any individual entity or company that sells products or services online. Yahoo, eBay, Best Buy, and Overstock.com are all good examples of merchants with affiliate marketing programs. These companies have all set up programs that you can apply to directly on the web to become an affiliate. As one of their affiliates, a merchant will pay you commissions to promote their products and services online. Affiliate Programs are everywhere these days - almost every major company doing business online has one. And best of all, signing up is free, which means that you never have to spend a dime in order to make money. Sound good? Then read on.
Book Review: The Adsense Code - What Google Never Told You About Making Money With Adsense, By Joel Comm
Before I dive into the pros and cons of this book, I think it’s important to acknowledge how significantly the book has impacted the way thousands of Internet publishers use and understand Adsense. At this writing, the book is just over a year old and it has been heralded as an instant classic in the growing world of Internet marketing. After making the New York Times best sellers list in 2006, The Adsense Code firmly established Joel Comm as an authority in the world of contextual advertising. Regardless of what I say in this post, the numbers tell the story. This book was a hit. Here’s why.
Although countless millions of websites run adsense ads, very few sites actually generate enough traffic to really see large, consistent adsense earnings. When web site traffic is low, infrequent and unpredictable, it’s tough for site owners to see how small tweaks in the placement or configuration of ads on a page affect click rates and earnings. This makes maximizing your adsense income difficult. But big numbers don’t lie. When a website is getting large amounts of consistent traffic, small changes in the way ads look and where ads are placed can make a big difference to the number of clicks they get.
Affiliate Marketing 101 - The Benefits Of Affiliate Marketing
There are tons of reasons why getting into affiliate marketing is a great way to start generating multiple streams of Internet income. This post is devoted to just a few of the reasons becoming an affiliate marketer can benefit you.
A Quick and Dirty Guide to Recognizing and Avoiding “Get Rich Quick” Schemes
The Internet is littered with ads for “get rich quick” schemes and it’s easy to get sucked into wasting time reading about automated systems that are going to make you hundreds of thousands of dollars every month in your sleep. For every site advertising a legitimate business opportunity there must be a thousand sites run by people that are advertising pyramid schemes or just collecting email addresses and spamming the hell out of inboxes with affiliate links. So how do you tell the difference between the good and bad? Here are a few fun rules of thumb for safely navigating the web on your journey to Internet riches:
Scammers Love Sports Car Photo Ops
It amazes me how often I find websites trying to sell steaming piles of B.S. with a picture of a guy standing next to an expensive sports car. What baffles me is that the pairing of a get-rich-quick message with the visual of an expensive set of wheels must work a lot, because pictures of dudes hamming it up next to hot rods are everywhere! Before you go giving your email address away and opening up your inbox to sir-spam-a-lot, recognize that any loser with a point and shoot camera can get a picture of themselves standing next to a set of hot wheels.
Best Wordpress Designers: Cory Miller
Cory Miller is the founder of Cory Miller Media, a web development agency that provides custom blog design solutions and blog consulting. Cory also co-owns a web design firm with Nathan Rice. The duo operate a WordPress theme site called RockinThemes.com, hosting almost 50 free themes that are available for download by the public. All of the free themes have a professional, modern look and are perfect for anyone blogging for business or news organizations. Cory also has a few Magazine-Style Premium Wordpress themes available, the most notable of which are NextPixel and Dark News.
Look for Cory’s up-coming venture with Brian Gardner, a premium Wordpress themes site called iThemes.com
