You’ll have to excuse me if this review tends to wander a bit, but to be honest I’ve had to write and re-write most of it so many times that it’s a wonder it’s getting done at all. The problem has been a simple one, how are you supposed to measure results when the scale on your ruler is being dicked around with every other day? Just keep that in mind when you read my results further down. Anyway, after being contacted to test Linkvana (this was a gifted subscription for review purposes) I’ve been using it for a fair few months now and this is how I’ve found the experience, I’ll leave you to make your own minds up as to whether or not you think it’s worth $147 a month.
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Money Schemes That Work
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Ever since I changed the tagline of this website to "Wading through the waist deep bullshit of the Make Money Online niche" I've been getting ever increasing amounts of mail from absolute (and some not so absolute) beginners who are stuck with where to get started? The more blogs you read the easier it is to get confused, every week there seems to be a new must have course or product out there that guarantees (yeah right) success. So for all those people baffled and bemused by the whole where the hell to get started thing here's what I would do, in plain English.
Think of a subject that interests you, create a blog about it (doesn't matter if you use Blogspot or buy your own hosting and domain name). Post 2-3 times a week about your chosen subject. Register for Adsense, slap some ad blocks on your blog (Just to emphasise, Adsense is by far and away the easiest way of making money from a website that I have ever found!) Do a Google search for other blogs and forums that are about the same subject as yours. Start leaving some comments and contributing to forum threads. Learn all you can about building backlinks and keep adding unique content.
That's how I started my first website (without blog commenting, blogs didn't exist back then). It's also how most of the big names in this industry started, they created a site about something they enjoyed and stuck Adsense ads on it. Once you've got your first site up and running (and even making a few cents a day) and are in the routine of posting content you can begin to worry about niche research, keyword research, ad optimisation, alternative revenue sources, social marketing and all that other fun stuff. If you can't be bothered to create your first site about something that actually interests you then I don't think you're going to get very far with this whole make money online thing (Go and sign up with SwagBucks or something) Great, now I've got that out of my system below are some of the networks I use to make money online, not all of them all of the time, but these are the ones I have used to make money, have always paid on time and I've never had any issues with. I recommend you give them a try at some point:-
MarketLeverage - CPA Network I've not been signed up with them that long but there is no doubt about just how impressive a CPA network MarketLeverage are. The thing that will hit most affiliates who sign up from smaller networks first is the sheer number of offers and the diversity of those offers. There are very few online markets that MarketLeverage don't have an offer suitable for. On top of the number of offers is the very generous base level payouts. For example when I switched I went from promoting a Home Survey offer from another network that paid out $1 a lead, a very similar offer on MarketLeverage was paying out $1.50. For me that meant an instant profit from my already established traffic. I'm no big hitter in the CPA market preferring to keep it small and low risk but even I can appreciate the instant benefits that being signed up with MarketLeverage bring. There are CPA networks cropping up all over the place at the moment but the way I think about it is this, if you're only going to sign up with one you might as well make it the best .
PeerFly - CPA Network I have to mention PeerFly. They are one of those new CPA networks that I mention above however the reason I recommend PeerFly is very specific. PeerFly are very welcoming to foreign affiliates, and by foreign I mean outside the US and Canada (I live in the UK). This welcome extends to using an automated "call back" system so that you can instantly confirm your details and get up and running. Every other CPA network I've joined has involved several phone calls and the sense that you are being interviewed to join their network. If nothing else the time difference can make this a major pain. This is bearable for me but I imagine must be a serious pain if English isn't your first language. PeerFly obviously appreciate this fact and whilst there are still checks in place their system makes it a much more comfortable experience for non US/Canada based affiliates. Once in you'll be greeted by a very clean interface highlighted their top performing offers. Whilst the number of offers can't match MarketLeverage they do tend to get some excellent exclusives - 1 or 2 of which I've managed to convert into good profit.
SwagBucks - Paid To Search With the demise of My HomePages Friends I was left with a gap. I was used to being paid for my searches but it looked as though that opportunity had gone forever. Then I stumbled across SwagBucks. SwagBucks don't pay you per search but rather run a lottery each time you perform a search. In this lottery you can win SwagBucks which can then be redeemed against prizes. So what I here you say, that's not being paid to search? Well what if I told you that one of the prizes is a $5 Paypal voucher? Now that is being rewarded with cash for searching. In order to redeem this prize you'll need 70 SwagBucks but get this, you can win up to 20 SwagBucks with a single search! Personally I've had plenty of 5 point searches and even though I've not been using the SwagBucks system very long I've already redeemed plenty of $5 Paypal prizes! In short this pays better than My HomePages Friends.
Google Adsense - Contextual Ads Contextual advertising from Google. Google have the largest pool of online advertisers and they are just desperate for more places to show these advertisers adverts. By signing up with Adsense you can display these adverts and earn money. In return each time an advert is clicked (pay-per-click) or viewed (pay-per-view) you get paid. Earnings are always in US dollars. In order to get the most from Adsense you need lots of targeted traffic. Any webmaster can make a few dollars using this approach but to hit the big time you need to be thinking about thousands of visitors a day. My own experience has shown that it's not always the traffic you think that pays best with Adsense, for example I've found visitors from the Live and Yahoo search engines create more of my Adsense income than Google's own traffic. I wrote a post a little while back about one of the methods I used to make big bucks with Adsense!
TrialPay - Payment Method Think of TrialPay as an alternative to Paypal. If you are selling a product or a service then TrialPay offers your visitors another way of paying you that doesn't have to involve them parting with cash. In return for your product or service the visitor agrees to try something from one of the large online retailers or services. As it's likely something they would sign up for anyway in effect they are getting what you give them for free. In return the other company pays you. TrialPay has slowly grown over the last 3 years and I can't believe that more merchants haven't taken advantage of their services to get paid for what they currently give away for free. Some examples of companies that have recently jumped on board include AVG and Ad-Aware.
InfoLinks - In-Text Linking This will be the bit where I used to write about Kontera. Not any more I'm afraid, InfoLinks well and truly blow Kontera out of the water. Using InfoLinks on your webpage’s causes certain keywords to be underlined (either single or double), on hovering over them an advert appears and when clicked you earn. It's as simple as that. Some people find them obtrusive, however I have never ever had a visitor of one of my websites complain about the use of In-Text advertising. The fact is that the only people who tend to not like them is other webmasters. As with any pay-per-click based advert in order to maximise earnings you need to maximise traffic. Unlike Adsense, organic Google traffic has always contributed most to my InfoLinks earnings.
Click Cash - Being An iFreinds Affiliate Click Cash is the affiliate for iFriends an online dating/adult friends website. Whilst this might appear at first to be a very small market they offer many creative’s that you can show on your more general websites. In my experience they work well on general personal blog style websites. Perhaps the best thing about Click Cash is the payout, they'll pay you $80 for each free sign-up you can get them plus a $50 bonus just for signing up as an affiliate That's a huge chunk of cash.
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From Our Blog
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Linkvana 2.0 Review
May 2nd, 2012 -
Using Traffic Launch Pad Pro To Promote Auto Traffic Buddy Blogs
April 20th, 2012I’ve been using Auto Traffic Buddy for almost 6 months now and although like everything else out there in Internet Marketing land you have to take the sales page with a pinch of salt it is actually quite a good system. I’m not going to go into detail here because I’ll be doing a proper review at some point but enough to say that it is effective in increasing organic traffic. However there is 1 thing you can definintely do to improve the effectiveness of the system.
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Don’t Remove Your Build My Rank Links
April 13th, 2012There have been some strange goings on lately around Money Schemes Towers. Ignoring what Google has been up to there have also been a couple of more significant changes affecting the amount I’m making from Pay-Per-Click sources. I think I’ve finally got my head around what is going on now and this is why I’d suggest that if you haven’t already you may want to NOT remove your Build My Rank posts!
Everybody knows that visitors from Bing and Yahoo are the real clickers? Google traffic is great for bulk and for showing off impressive visitor stats but when it comes to making money, especially from pay-per-click adverts, then Bing and Yahoo are where it’s at. Of course the Build My Rank, LinxBoss etc systems don’t target one specific search engine, backlinks from these sources also had a major (most of the time even more significant) impact on your other search rankings. I had one page in particular that was being propped up quite nicely by Build My Rank and this is why I regret having those posts removed. That one page has gone from earning over £10 (about $15) a day to less than £1. It wasn’t really getting any Google traffic anyway so that wasn’t the problem, it’s the crash in rankings on Bing that has killed its income.
There is an important lesson to be learned here, Google != The Internet.
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Rank Jumpers DeIndexed
April 10th, 2012It never rains but it pours! No sooner do I recommend switching from Build My Rank to Rank Jumpers than Rank Jumpers itself comes under the spotlight of Google. Rank Jumpers has now been de-indexed, the service is closing and all posts will be removed. Google really do have their knickers in a twist of this link building services don’t they? Are there any “safe” options out there? Well there’s at least one very good one….
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Help, I’ve Got Links Coming From Deindexed Pages?
March 23rd, 2012Quick, panic. Start throwing your hands in the air like you just don’t care. Some websites have been de-indexed and they have links pointing at you! Will the world end? Is this the end of life as we know it? No. Read More
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Build My Rank De-Indexed
March 20th, 2012Bummer. According to this post Build My Rank is no more. As of yesterday the vast majority of their network sites were de-indexed by Google. What will this mean to webmasters who had used their service? Well I suppose it depends on how much you relied on their links. I can’t imagine anybody who used BMR as PART of their link building strategy being too badly affected. If on the other hand you hit them hard with the same keyword over and over with little diversification then I imagine your rankings have tanked just about now?
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Just Got Banned From Adsense?
March 20th, 2012It looks like Google are doing another one of their large audits of Adsense publishers and some big name bloggers have found themselves banned. To be honest I’m not surprised in the slightest, to start off with Google needed Adsense ads to be displayed on our websites in order to have enough relevant content to attract advertisers. Now things have changed significantly because Google owns so much web real estate on which to show their own ads. Small time publishers (and by small time I mean anybody generating less than 7 figures a year for them) are nothing but endless hassle and legal problems to Google. Eventually I’m sure they will shut down Adsense in its current form. They don’t need our visitors, they have enough page views to sell from their own websites (Gmail, Youtube, Maps, etc etc) Appealing to a ban is a total waste of time, if Google want you gone then you’re gone, so what should you do if you just got banned from Adsense?
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Google Changes – February 2012
March 2nd, 2012A long long time ago, in a galaxy far away, everybody who was trying to make money on the internet was told that when it came to getting top rankings you had to have keyword relevant links pointing at your content. So like good people we all followed the word of
God, sorry I mean Google. Then one dayGod, sorry I mean Google, decided that they’d changed their mind. This day occured in February 2012, all of a sudden the online world became skewed and the same old sites owned byGod, sorry I mean Google, found themselves dominating the search results even more than what they had been. So what could we do to live in this new world and stand any chance of a piece of the pie?
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Build My Rank Closing
February 21st, 2012Build My Rank is one of those things that I’ve never really blatantly written about (I mention it in my recommended tools and have told people in response to comments but I’ve never dedicated a single post to it, until now), why I hear you ask? Simply because the power of their system was always going to be limited by the number of people that used it. Eventually there would come a point where over saturation of their network would occur and like Linkvana before it the effectiveness would decrease rapidly. Affiliate commissions for referring you guys over there are all nice and stuff but not at the expense of a system that is extremely important to my link building strategy. I’m not that stupid, or at least I’m not that stupid anymore!
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Does Google Count The TLD Of A Domain Name For Ranking?
February 16th, 2012Only Google can answer that question for sure but having just seen one of my websites outranked by a flood of utter gargbage Exact Match Domains I’m going to go out on a limb and say no it doesn’t.
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