So what is TrialPay? Put simply it’s a payment alternative to Paypal, Google Checkout etc but with a MAJOR spin. Instead of having the end user pay for your item they just have to try another service (e.g. sign up to eBay) and the company that they sign up for pays you instead. In real terms the person gets your item for free but you still get “something” for it.

It’s becoming hugely popular for those people giving away free software and this is how I use it. Have you ever heard of Ad-Aware? They are now also giving away the full version via TrialPay. It is growing all the time and has a lot of developer support.

How Much Can I Make With TrialPay

I guess what most people want to know is the real nitty gritty, exactly how much can I make with TrialPay? The truth is it all depends on the quality of your product and how much traffic you get. If you’ve got a half decent product then it should not be too much trouble to see high hundreds, low thousands each month. As a guide my software converts at between 5%-10%. The amount per “sale” varies depending on which offer the user selects to try and where they live. It can be as low as a couple of dollars or in some cases as high as $70! As a rough guide you can see my last years figures below:-

As you can see from 856 transactions I made $13067 or on average just over $15 per transaction. When you think that this was software that I was just giving away free you can see just how much potential TrialPay has. I’d hate to imagine just how much Ad-Aware are taking using this!

Do I Need To Have A Software Product To Use TrialPay?

Whilst the majority of TrialPay merchants are using it to give away their software there is no limit on the types of product you can “sell” this way. For example one of my friends has started to sell a book he recently wrote (in physical form) using TrialPay. By setting a minimum payment amount he knows that he will at least cover his costs with each transaction. Other things I’ve seen include e-books, subscription services, discount vouchers. Pretty much anything that you sell using a normal payment processor like Paypal could use TrialPay as an alternative. Also as I’ve mention in the past they do have an affiliate program where you can promote other people’s TrialPay products for a percentage. If you’re struggling with affiliate marketing it’s a good place to start. The 2 products I promote are my biggest affiliate earners month on month.

My last 12 months with TrialPay has been a pleasure. I’ve made over $13k, they always pay on time (the 15th of the following month) and the payment options ensure that I get to keep as much of my earnings as possible. If you’re in the software business, even at a freeware level, then TrialPay could be the godsend you’re looking for. It has helped me turn my software from something I just give away to something that contributes significantly to my overall income.

*Come on Bux.To and My HomePages Friends. I should be due payment now and there is going to be a whole lot of bitching it it aint forthcoming

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An Update On TrialPay

However by going cheap I’ve always had a little problem with my main work PC, well ever since I upgraded the monitor anyway. I knew I needed more screen real estate but because I’d only paid for a bog standard onboard graphics card I couldn’t have 2 monitors. So I did what I thought was best and bought a bloody great 23 inch widescreen monitor. It works at a ridiculous resolution, BUT (and it’s a big but) it didn’t actually help that much with my productivity. What I really needed was 2 monitors in one so that I could have for example my text editor and web browser open side by side, I can do it but it involves a lot of resizing and manually moving windows. I couldn’t be bothered most of the time and was just using my applications maximised as usual.

That was until last week when I came across a little application called Split View. It’s freakin amazing. It’s a nifty little windows application that lets you split your monitor into separate regions. You can then simply position applications to appear in whichever region you want. If you’ve got a widescreen monitor it is exactly like having 2 monitors in 1. Any window can be simply snapped to the left or right portion of the screen (you can decide how many pixels you want for each). I can’t over emphasise what a difference this makes to multi-application tasks.

A lot of people say that it’s the little things that can make the biggest difference to how much money you make online. Personally I’m not a big believer in that (give me big things like a lot more traffic any day!) but with this application I can honestly say that if you’re using a single widescreen monitor it will save you a shed load of time moving and minimizing windows. It’s not very often I come across a new program that changes the way I work but this does it for me, it’s an absolute little belter. There’s a fully functional free demo available so I’d suggest you go and give Split View a try.

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Make Better Use Of Your Widescreen Monitor

In my opinion there are a couple of flaws with this. For a start you don’t know what niche the domain you are buying relates to. Relevency is everything! Secondly you can’t check how valuable the links actually are. For example the Domain Marketplace may indicate that a domain has .edu backlinks. Whilst that sounds great it might not be so great if the actual link comes from a domain blacklist on one of the university bulletin boards! You won’t find this out until you’ve paid your money to Shoe.

Now what I was going to do here was show you how to use a couple of websites to extract that same information and find valuable expired domain names. However in reality I wrote a little program for myself. I figured it wouldn’t be too much of a job just to touch it up a bit and let you guys use it so that’s what I’m going to show you how to use.

First of all you can download the Find Good Expired Domains tool using this link. You’ll also need the .net framework version 2 or better to use the software, you can download that from here.

OK. Now that’s done start the program and you’ll be greeted with a nice simple screen. Your first job is to decide what keyword you want in the domain name (see the advantage this has over the domain marketplace already?). Type in the keyword and hit the “Get Domains From Source 1″ button. At this point DO NOT CHECK FOR DOMAIN AVAILABILITY. This causes the program to go off and find domains that have expired at one point or another, they may not be currently expired but we can check for that later.

After a little wait you’ll get a popup telling you how many domains are available. Press Yes to go and get all that extra info about each domain. See if there is any lingering Page Rank, back links, .edu.gov.mil back links, any Alexa traffic etc If there are thousands of results you may want to narrow your search.

Depending on the number of domains this process can take a while. Also note that if you were to check for availability it will take a hell of a lot longer that’s why I recommend not doing it at this point. There is no point checking for a domain being available when it might not be of any value right?

Once it’s finished checking all the domains (or as in my example you get fed up waiting and hit stop) you’re left with a list of domain details. Now I recommend that you order the domains by each column (Links, DMOZ Listing etc etc) and switch tabs at the top to the Check Domains tab.

You should now be able to copy and paste the domain names that are of value into the box on the Check Domains tab. Do that for each column, so for example if there are 11 domains that have some backlinks highlight all those domain names and copy them to the box. Then order by DMOZ listing and do the same for any domains that are in DMOZ. Carry on doing this for each column (domains that have edu links, domains that have some Alexa ranking) and don’t worry about copying the same domain name twice.

Once you’ve got your complete list of domains that have some value you can then go ahead and check each to see if it’s available. On the Check Domains tab hit the “Check Domains” button. The program will go and check each domain to make sure it is 100% available to buy right now. This will take some time, roughly 5-6 seconds per domain.

Now that’s complete you can order them by availability and see if there are any domains worth buying. In my example below the best domain is probably a2zmakemoney.com but with only 4 links would I be bothered to spend $8 a year on it? That’s your call! Of course if I would have left the program to run in the first place I may have found many many much more valuable domains

It’s also worth noting that just because a domain isn’t currently available doesn’t mean it’s not worth persuing. In my example the domain 101waystomakemoney.com is not available to buy right now BUT if you check the URL you’ll find that no website exists. The owner is doing nothing with it. Who knows, doing a quick whois lookup and contacting the owner might land you with a domain with 287 backlinks and some traffic for only a few dollars!

So that’s all fine and dandy but how do you get value from these domains. The easy approach and the one that the great Shoemoney himself advocates is to simply 301 redirect them on to one of your existing content sites. Those links then get credited to your existing domain. Does this work? Yes it does. When originally writing this program I was checking for Thailand related domains, I found one for an insurance company that had 30-40 links. I 301′d this on to my Thai related site and within 2 weeks was in the top 5 in Google for certain insurance related searches. It’s a ranking that has held for months and brought some nice traffic. An absolute bargain for only $8 a year domain registration!

The other way is to buy the domains to build quality content on. That’s obviously a much longer term game than just forwarding but again that’s upto you to decide!

So that’s how I go about finding valuable expired domains, use, enjoy and let me know how you get on. Now here comes comes the disclaimer:

By all means use my Find Expired Domains tool but please be aware that this is free software. It’s not to be bundled re-packaged in any way and sold. It’s also worth noting that that is a very early release and is bound to have bugs, whilst it shouldn’t cause your computer to burst into flames if it does it’s not my fault! Use it at your own risk. Just one final point, some of the API’s used may have usage limits, for example the Yahoo back links check has a limit of 5,000 checks in any 24 hours. Just keep it in mind.

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How To Find Valuable Expired Domains

I live on an Island that has a booming economy. No signs of a recession here, inflation is still running at over 6%, unemployment at less than 1.8%. In the last 12 months our ministers have come out publicly and announced that the current world crisis “will not” effect us. They were in fact full of crap. Of course it would effect us, the financial crisis will be affecting us all in one way or another. They have now changed their tune and admitted that things will become difficult over here. A local bank went under and the shit hit the fan. The final result of the current controversy could destroy our number one industry. Not bad considering it “will not” effect us! If I was you I’d be planning for things to get worse online at some point as well.

Adsense is my biggest earner and it is the easiest way for me to see changes. Several changes are already starting to be seen. If you visit any of the webmaster style forums you’ll see that there has been a huge increase in Google banning domains from showing Adsense. Many many more publishers are getting warnings. This isn’t anything to do with a change in Google’s policies, it’s just a case of them enforcing them so that they are seen to be giving the best possible value to Adwords advertisers. After all, Adwords advertisers are what drives Googles whole business. When you and I get an Adsense payment, it’s not Google paying us, it’s the Adwords advertisers who have paid for the adverts that show on our sites. If these advertisers (businesses) don’t think they are getting the best value then in times as hard as these then it’s an easy decision to consolodate their spending and pull back.

I’m already seeing some signs of this pulling back. I operate in a number of top end business niches that easily attract high value adverts. $1-$3 per advert click is quite normal and has been for years. However in the last couple of months I’ve noticed that the value of these adverts is not the same. The advertisers are obviously cutting their bids and that affect both me and Google. However I’m not really too worried by this. High value services like this don’t attract huge amounts of traffic so in turn the actual revenue isn’t that high. And this is where I’d like to mention the good news. At the lower end I’m not really seeing any difference. Niches that attract $0.10-$0.50 per click have remained steady. In fact I had one of my better Adsense days just last week, topping out at well over $300 for the day!

I don’t think there is any doubt that the credit crunch is affecting online advertising although we’ll probably not see the full effect quite yet. We are down the line and it will take a while to filter through to the lower end businesses. But it’s not all doom and gloom. Marketing online has become so popular because it provides businesses with an amazingly good ROI. As long as Google carry on doing what they are doing, filtering the wheat from the chaff then as long as you’re playing by the rules and creating quality/useful content then I don’t think we’ve got anything to worry about. Certainly not in terms of your Adsense earnings.

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Credit Crunch Affects Adsense

When I first started this blog I spent a lot of time commenting on other blogs to get that “valued” followed link. I’ve since stopped. What affect did you think losing all these links would have on my Google rankings? It’s made no difference, sweet FA. My rankings have held steady, many months with no negative effect, if anything I noticed an increase in my positions when I stopped commenting.

So what this tells me is that if you’ve got a blog with the top commenter plug-in enabled that it’s very easy for Google to identify it and discount outbound links. Lets face facts here, it’s hardly the greatest algorithmic challenge in the world to identify blogs that have the plug-in installed. If you can do a Google search to find blogs that have it do you really think that Google would let this simple gaming of their system continue? The fact that it’s a followed link that the page author hasn’t approved means that it’s ripe for Google penalisation.

Of course there are some benefits, you might get a little bit of referral traffic (if your comments are interesting enough) but is it an efficient way of using your time? I don’t think so. If you’re the sort of sad bast…. that spends hours replying to every comment on every post then this is a wake up call for you. Stop commenting on other people’s blogs and spend a little time writing GOOD content for your own instead.

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Top Commenting Doesn’t Work

What a bunch of fucking muppets. But prices must go back up right? Well no actually, the company can go under and then you lose whatever you put in. It happens, it’s happening right now! Companies going under. Even if a company survives the current financial crisis there is nothing that says that share prices have to go back up again to anything like old levels. Recent prices have been off the back of a hugely inflated economy thanks to the western attitude of borrow till you drop. We’ve all been writing cheques that the economy couldn’t cover and now it’s pay back time. You want to know a growth industry at the moment? Bookmakers. They are doing roaring trade as people who have been made unemployed put their last pay cheque on a nag. You may think that by buying stocks you’re making a long term can’t loose investment. In reality you’re no different to the man in the street nipping down the bookies to spend his wages.

Don’t ever expect things to ever be allowed to get this bad again, borrowing wil be under much stricter regulation. Our economies will and should never be allowed to get this far out of hand so the inflated share prices that we’ve all enjoyed over the last 5-6 years may actually never return. The global economy will be a much different place when all the dust settles from this. Dickheads who can barely afford the cash to buy a packet of crisps will never be allowed again to borrow 5 times their salary to buy a car! This all means a much calmer, levelled and realistic economy.

At the moment there are very few assets actually worth anything. Cash and gold. If you must spend your money spend it on gold. Stocks and property as investments have had their time and if I was you I’d leave the likes of Brown and Bush to provide the rescue packages, it’s not your job. Of course if you’re raking it in via blogs then you can probably afford to be stupid with your money. Good luck to you. It’s not great advice to advise others to do the same though is it?

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BUY BUY BUY

My conclusion - It’s a crock of shit.

I’ve spent time adding “related links” section to both old and new blog posts. All in I created over 1700 outbound followed links to other blog posts in the hope of getting links back. Out of those I actually got links back from less than 5%! Of all those links I can count the number of visitors (in a month) on 2 hands. In reality all I’ve done is provided votes for a huge number of sites and in return got back a few no-followed links and a couple of visitors.

So why do so many experts push this as an awesome link building strategy? My theory is that because it’s so easy to do. It takes no time to knock up a bit of software that uses the blog search engines/directories to find blog posts by keyword that accept ping backs. Auto generate a bit of HTML to copy into your post and you’re done, Wordpress/Blogger takes care of the rest. Unfortunately most ping-backs have to be approved for a start. Have enough people think that what you’re doing is junk and you’ll find yourself in the Akismet auto spam category, trust me, I know!!! In the meantime you’re damaging your link profile by linking out to all and sundry. It’s very hard to damage your link profile by gaining “bad” links (because that’s out of your control), however it’s very easy to damage it by linking to bad sites. The ping-back method encourages this.

Overall this is a rubbish method for gaining links and traffic, don’t use it if you value your site. I’ve now got the fun job of going back through removing those links, oh joy.

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Does The Ping-Back Link Strategy Work?

The great news is that there is a tool that lets you do this 100% for free, it’s called WebCEO. Once you’ve got WebCEO downloaded and installed your first job is to “Add New Site”, it’s all really simple stuff. Add your URL and a name for your website. Now your site is added you can start the “Check Rankings” tool. You’ll be greeted with a screen that looks like this:-

As you can see there are 3 things that you have to do. Decide what search engines you want to check for rankings, what keywords/phrases you are looking to rank for and finally how deep to scan each search engine. I normally scan to a depth of 4 pages, any deeper than that and you’re not “really” ranking.

WebCEO has a huge list of search engines and directories that you can check your rankings in. One of the features that I really like is that it allows you to see where you are in the various regional varieties of Google. Not being based in America this is very important to me.

Once you’re setup you can run it for the first time, WebCEO will go away and try and find your site for each phrase/keyword. Once it’s finished you can check your positions in a variety of ways (e.g. by search engine, keyword etc) There is also very comprehensive history reporting allowing you to see how things have changed.

So that’s your ranking check setup, however ideally you don’t want to have to run this manually. More good news. WebCEO has a built in scheduler, now you’ve configured your Check Ranking task you can automatically run it using the scheduler at whatever interval you choose. To be honest I tend not to check mine any more frequently than every 2 weeks - 1 month because rankings bob up and down all the time. Checking this stuff daily could drive you insane! It’s much easier to look for and try to react to trends.

The WebCEO ranking checker is actually a very powerful tool and there can be a lot more to it than what I’ve shown here. My goal was just to show you a very simple of way of monitoring your search rankings for free. Experience tells me at this point a bunch of Mac users will start whinging “what about me?” There are probably programs out there that will do the same or a similar job job but the harsh truth is that as a Mac user you are in a minority, a huge majority of software is written for the Windows platform so I’d suggest you get yourself a good emulator. Alternatively think about maybe getting some cheap Windows VPS hosting. There are a number of services out there that offer a Windows VPS for considerably less than $99 a month that you can install your own software on.

Next in the series:- I’m going to show you how to find your own valuable expired domain names so that you’ve no need for the Domain Marketplace.

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How I Check My Search Rankings For Free

Don’t mind me, I’m just rambling.

Isn’t it amazing how popular Shoemoney Tools have become recently? All of a sudden every big name blogger has been using them and they’re great. Oh and by the way you get access for less than $20 for 1 month only. Take John Chow for example, he made more than $2000 in affiliate commissions last month by bigging up Shoemoney Tools. I have a question though, if he’s been using them since the TAC how come his PPC spend hasn’t changed that much? The main point of these tools is to help you profit from PPC, if they work for you then your PPC spend would go up, a lot?! His link profile hasn’t altered that much and he’s certainly not using the ping back method. What part of Shoemoney Tools is he using exactly? Doesn’t matter though cos it’s much easier to make money by writing a blog post for your mate and getting affiliate commissions instead. $2000 plus for next to nothing, awesome work! Especially when you’re helping out a “friend”.

This sort of ring leading gets on my tits. It’s aimed at the lowest common affiliate marketer. Somebody who can’t afford to spend $100 (no sign of that $250 a month price increase yet, shock, horror) a month but because his favourite bloggers are recommending something (entirely non biased and nothing to do with any recent networking at a convention or the affiliate commissions) they will throw a bit of money at it just to give it a go. Market research will probably show you that most people will take a punt up to around $20?

Here’s a tip for you, if you can’t afford $100 a month for Shoemoney tools then they’re not really going to benefit you. You NEED a budget to get anything of any value out of PPC, if $100 is too much forget it. Is there value in Shoemoney Tools? Certainly. But only for certain types of marketers. Do I believe that all of a sudden they are the greatest set of marketing tools on the planet because there is an affiliate commission in it? Do I bollocks! I get the impression that if one of the top bloggers took a dump in a plastic bag and tried to sell it you’d suddenly see a deluge of “shit-in-a-bag made me money” blog posts.

I can’t really do anything about all this, it’s just the way the wanky blogosphere works. What I will do though is a series of posts about free alternatives to the various elements of Shoemoney Tools. I was one of the early paid users so I’ve got a good idea of what was available. Over the next few days, weeks, months or whenever I get around to it I’ll offer up some free alternatives. There is nothing magic about Shoemoney Tools, just a bit of text parsing and hooking up to some APIs. The information is out there for free, you just need to know where to look.

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Free Alternatives To Shoemoney Tools

Jump forward a few years and Paul is now 17 and looking for his first job. He’s got several more languages in his locker and can write pretty much anything he wants. He’s offered the choice of 2 jobs, 1 as a developer in the government, one as a programmer in a small software house. He’s offered both jobs on the basis that he shows them 100 lines of the maths behind his recently finished GPS system. He KNOWS deep down that even though the pay is much less, the benefits are non existent and it will be much harder work he wants to work for the small software house. He LOVES programming, writing applications is his life, be it games, database systems or just the fun little applications that make peoples lives easier. It’s been his thing since he was 6 and he’s bloody good at it. He’s better than good, Paul is only looking for a job because he’s recommended to leave college a year early after one of his lecturers sees the game he writes in pure C to demonstrate how a processor works. To sit in a government office programming exactly what he’s told is not his idea of fun.

At age 27 Paul finds himself in a position where he can work for himself. His programs have become so popular over the internet that just the traffic on his software site creates a good income. He then gets his moment in the spot light when one of his programs appears on PC Pro as one the 100 greatest freeware programs ever. This is great, he now has all his time to write what he wants. BUT this is where his mindset changes. Seeing the potential money that can be made online Paul’s concentration starts to wander. Rather than doing what he loves he starts to spend more and more time doing something that he hates, writing! Before he knows it Paul has that many websites that need fresh “text” content that he’s spending all day every day just writing. He’s being a dickhead, he’s forgotten the one thing that he was truly good at - top notch software. What software he does write now is rushed and jumbled together. Paul has the freedom to do anything he wants at the moment and instead of doing what he loves, instead of writing programs that people download by the tens of thousand, instead of writing software that people link to in their thousands he’s writing this shit and trying to game links using ping backs. Yes he makes a very good living online but is there really any need to tell the world about it? He spends his time reading about affiliate marketers and MMO bloggers who with no actual “real” skills or talent at all, are millionaires. He finds himself defending affiliate marketing as a “legitimate” business when in reality he knows that it’s for scum. Tricking the stupid into parting with money for what is 99% crap. He looks up to these people, Chow, Cow, Shoemoney, Rowse, Johnson, Cruz and wants to be like “them”. From being brought up with fuck all he’s some how gone from the mentality of working your ass off for everything to just wanting the easy way. “Why write software (which requires a brain) when I can just churn out this brainless shit?” If he stopped to think for one minute he’d realise that all these people just had ONE lucky break. They’re not clever and it’s certainly not repeatable. He knows that the real “clever” marketers are people you don’t see or hear from. Paul has become a fucking joke in his own mind and his so far from happy it’s not funny.

To be brutally fucking honest this shit stops here. From now on I’m not an internet marketer, an affiliate marketer, a SEO or anything else that wank. I am somebody who makes his living writing software, not words.

For those that have read along with me for the last year, thanks. It has certainly been a step outside my comfort zone and I appreciate the support you’ve given me. My final bit of advice is simply this - step away from the internet and do something real with your lives. You’ll feel so much better for it, I promise. You could be the one that “gets lucky” with the internet but what are the chances really, you’d be better of trying to win that Euromillions Roll-over.

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To Be Brutally Fucking Honest