Digital Entrepreneur: A Resource Guide For Internet Entrepreneurs http://www.digitalentrepreneur.net Strategies, Resources, & Tools for Internet Entrepreneurs, Bloggers, Web Designers & Online Retailers Wed, 20 Feb 2008 23:05:09 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.3.1 en Affiliate Marketing 101: Making Money With Pay Per Lead Programs http://www.digitalentrepreneur.net/affiliate-marketing-101-making-money-with-pay-per-lead-programs.htm http://www.digitalentrepreneur.net/affiliate-marketing-101-making-money-with-pay-per-lead-programs.htm#comments Wed, 20 Feb 2008 23:05:09 +0000 admin http://www.digitalentrepreneur.net/affiliate-marketing-101-making-money-with-pay-per-lead-programs.htm Not every affiliate program is sales related.  There are also tons of merchants who will pay affiliates for qualified and legitimate leads.  Pay per lead merchants are some of the best merchants to promote for a variety of reasons - the most important of which is that you can be compensated when your visitor completes an online lead form - the conversion rates are generally much higher because the visitors you refer don’t need to make a purchase to complete the action.. Some of the most popular pay per lead programs include merchants in the insurance, mortgage, and service businesses.

Of course, this comes with some caveats. Merchants will only pay affiliates for qualified AND legitimate leads.  That means that the person you refer not only has to completely fill out the entire form with real data, the lead has to qualify for the Merchant’s service. For example, sending a Michigan-based mortgage provider a lead from Russia isn’t going to get you any cash. That said, it is still much easier to get visitors to fill out a form than to buy something online so, in most cases, pre-selling and converting large numbers of visitors is easier. Of course, because the people you refer aren’t buying anything, the payout for leads are often less than standard affiliate sales percentage, but not always. It’s common to see larger commission numbers in industries like insurance and mortgage loans where the lead means big money for the service provider - keep that in mind when hunting for these types of affiliate programs.

A good place to start looking for affiliate programs with the most lucrative pay-per-lead programs are at larger affiliate networks like Commission Junction and Linkshare, but be on the look out for affiliate programs run right off the merchant’s website. Those are the gems. Also try a quick google search for specific terms like “mortgage lead affiliate program”. You can bet that if there are good pay-per-lead programs on the larger networks that there’ll be a lot of affiliate competition around those programs, so taking the time to find programs that aren’t heavily publicized could pay large dividends in time, effort and income later on.

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]]> http://www.digitalentrepreneur.net/affiliate-marketing-101-making-money-with-pay-per-lead-programs.htm/feed Thoughts On Planning, Branding And Building Base Content For A New Blog http://www.digitalentrepreneur.net/thoughts-on-planning-branding-and-building-base-content-for-a-new-blog.htm http://www.digitalentrepreneur.net/thoughts-on-planning-branding-and-building-base-content-for-a-new-blog.htm#comments Tue, 05 Feb 2008 21:25:20 +0000 admin http://www.digitalentrepreneur.net/thoughts-on-planning-branding-and-building-base-content-for-a-new-blog.htm Aaaah that new blog smell. There’s really nothing like it. Logging into Wordpress for the first time right after installation and publishing that first post can be exhilarating, especially if you’re planning on making money with your blog. Bloggers that have weathered the first few months of blogging will all tell you that building a blog’s readership from the ground up is hard work and that, unless you’re some kind of celebrity, traffic building takes time and patience. It’s easy to lose steam and motivation in the early stages without focus, the right expectations and a plan.

Although I only flipped the switch and released this blog to the search engines a few weeks ago (January 12th to be exact), I have a road map in my head of where it’s going over the next few months, and I thought that I’d take a moment to share my strategy and some thoughts with my readers, so you know what to expect over the coming months and why. Here are a few thoughts from me on planning, branding and building a new blog… (more…)

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]]> http://www.digitalentrepreneur.net/thoughts-on-planning-branding-and-building-base-content-for-a-new-blog.htm/feed Unleashing The Massive Profit Power of A Common Spelling Mistake: How The Greatest Typo-squatters Make Millions From Fat-Fingering Searchers http://www.digitalentrepreneur.net/unleashing-the-massive-profit-power-of-a-common-spelling-mistake-how-the-greatest-typo-squatters-make-millions-from-fat-fingering-searchers.htm http://www.digitalentrepreneur.net/unleashing-the-massive-profit-power-of-a-common-spelling-mistake-how-the-greatest-typo-squatters-make-millions-from-fat-fingering-searchers.htm#comments Thu, 31 Jan 2008 00:27:32 +0000 admin http://www.digitalentrepreneur.net/unleashing-the-massive-profit-power-of-a-common-spelling-mistake-how-the-greatest-typo-squatters-make-millions-from-fat-fingering-searchers.htm 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 …

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]]> http://www.digitalentrepreneur.net/unleashing-the-massive-profit-power-of-a-common-spelling-mistake-how-the-greatest-typo-squatters-make-millions-from-fat-fingering-searchers.htm/feed The Official Launch of The Sensely Adsense Optimized Template Theme For Blogger and Wordpress http://www.digitalentrepreneur.net/the-official-launch-of-the-sensely-adsense-optimized-template-theme-for-blogger-and-wordpress.htm http://www.digitalentrepreneur.net/the-official-launch-of-the-sensely-adsense-optimized-template-theme-for-blogger-and-wordpress.htm#comments Tue, 29 Jan 2008 22:33:49 +0000 admin http://www.digitalentrepreneur.net/the-official-launch-of-the-sensely-adsense-optimized-template-theme-for-blogger-and-wordpress.htm Sensely Adsense Wordpress and Blogger ThemeAdsense 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. (more…)

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]]> http://www.digitalentrepreneur.net/the-official-launch-of-the-sensely-adsense-optimized-template-theme-for-blogger-and-wordpress.htm/feed Make Money With Your Videos Today: Dump YouTube And Upgrade To A For-Profit Video Sharing Community http://www.digitalentrepreneur.net/make-money-with-your-videos-today-dump-youtube-and-upgrade-to-a-for-profit-video-sharing-community.htm http://www.digitalentrepreneur.net/make-money-with-your-videos-today-dump-youtube-and-upgrade-to-a-for-profit-video-sharing-community.htm#comments Wed, 23 Jan 2008 06:57:41 +0000 admin http://www.digitalentrepreneur.net/make-money-with-your-videos-today-dump-youtube-and-upgrade-to-a-for-profit-video-sharing-community.htm 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

Metacafe ScreenshotThe 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 ScreenshotRevver, 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

FlixyaThis 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. ;-).

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]]> http://www.digitalentrepreneur.net/make-money-with-your-videos-today-dump-youtube-and-upgrade-to-a-for-profit-video-sharing-community.htm/feed Bidvertiser Announces A Pay Per Click Advertising Solution for Feedburner Feeds! http://www.digitalentrepreneur.net/bidvertiser-announces-a-pay-per-click-advertising-solution-for-feedburner-feeds.htm http://www.digitalentrepreneur.net/bidvertiser-announces-a-pay-per-click-advertising-solution-for-feedburner-feeds.htm#comments Mon, 21 Jan 2008 23:14:38 +0000 admin http://www.digitalentrepreneur.net/bidvertiser-announces-a-pay-per-click-advertising-solution-for-feedburner-feeds.htm 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.

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.

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]]> http://www.digitalentrepreneur.net/bidvertiser-announces-a-pay-per-click-advertising-solution-for-feedburner-feeds.htm/feed Affiliate Marketing 101 - Earning Money With Pay Per Sale Programs http://www.digitalentrepreneur.net/affiliate-marketing-101-earning-money-with-pay-per-sale-programs.htm http://www.digitalentrepreneur.net/affiliate-marketing-101-earning-money-with-pay-per-sale-programs.htm#comments Sun, 20 Jan 2008 19:23:48 +0000 admin http://www.digitalentrepreneur.net/affiliate-marketing-101-earning-money-with-pay-per-sale-programs.htm 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. (more…)

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]]> http://www.digitalentrepreneur.net/affiliate-marketing-101-earning-money-with-pay-per-sale-programs.htm/feed DIY: How To Embed YouTube and Google Videos into Wordpress Posts Without Using A Plugin http://www.digitalentrepreneur.net/diy-how-to-embed-youtube-and-google-videos-into-wordpress-posts-without-using-a-plugin.htm http://www.digitalentrepreneur.net/diy-how-to-embed-youtube-and-google-videos-into-wordpress-posts-without-using-a-plugin.htm#comments Sun, 20 Jan 2008 00:46:19 +0000 admin http://www.digitalentrepreneur.net/diy-how-to-embed-youtube-and-google-videos-into-wordpress-posts-without-using-a-plugin.htm 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. (more…)

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]]> http://www.digitalentrepreneur.net/diy-how-to-embed-youtube-and-google-videos-into-wordpress-posts-without-using-a-plugin.htm/feed Profiting From Your YouTube Videos http://www.digitalentrepreneur.net/profiting-from-your-youtube-videos.htm http://www.digitalentrepreneur.net/profiting-from-your-youtube-videos.htm#comments Sun, 20 Jan 2008 00:25:08 +0000 admin http://www.digitalentrepreneur.net/profiting-from-your-youtube-videos.htm 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. (more…)

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]]> http://www.digitalentrepreneur.net/profiting-from-your-youtube-videos.htm/feed Bootstrapping: Finding Creative Ways To Raise $200-300 To Jumpstart Your First Affiliate Business http://www.digitalentrepreneur.net/bootstrapping-finding-creative-ways-to-raise-200-300-to-jumpstart-your-first-affiliate-business.htm http://www.digitalentrepreneur.net/bootstrapping-finding-creative-ways-to-raise-200-300-to-jumpstart-your-first-affiliate-business.htm#comments Sat, 19 Jan 2008 19:39:08 +0000 admin http://www.digitalentrepreneur.net/bootstrapping-finding-creative-ways-to-raise-200-300-to-jumpstart-your-first-affiliate-business.htm 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. (more…)

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