Money Schemes - Learn How To Make Money Online

Attract more search traffic (especially from MSN/Live search) and use the square/rectangle ad formats blended into your body text. They you go, done, Adsense Secrets 5.0, or Adsense Common Sense as I like to call it.

Joel Comm’s latest e-book (spit) Adsense Secrets 4.0 has caused quite a stir in the blogging for money niche. Every a-lister and their dog has wrote about it in order to try and cash in on some affiliate sales. For only $9.95 how can you possibly go wrong? Let me start by telling you that in the past I’ve bought several of Joel Comm’s titles for much more than $9.95, I can hand on heart say the only e-book I’ve ever recommended buying is Aarons Wall’s SEO Book, read into that what you want. Enough to say I won’t be buying this one, especially not as it also signs you up for a $30 a month subscription at the same time.

The big secret to earning money with Adsense is that there is no secret, YOU NEED LOTS OF TRAFFIC. Once you have lots of traffic (preferably natural search traffic, MSN/Yahoo click best) you then place rectangle/square ads in the text of your page. You can go on from there to try experimenting but either way Joel Comm isn’t going to have the magic answer to what will work best on YOUR pages, only you can find that out by trial and error. Take note though, IF YOU’RE NOT GETTING LOTS OF TRAFFIC THEN YOU’RE NOT GOING TO GET RICH USING ADSENSE! Got a site that get 20 visitors a day, you’re not getting to earn hundreds of dollars a day from that, I promise.

There are a couple of reasons I wouldn’t recommend Adsense Secrets 4.0

1. Extra long and extremely spammy “standard” e-book sales page
2. Added “bonus” of being signed up to a monthly subscription service plus no fewer than three mailing lists
3. It won’t let you leave the page, first of all a “are you sure” dialog box and then one of those faux instant chat boxes (these should be made fucking illegal). The whole reason I’m not linking to it anywhere in this post is because if I did you’d never be able to get of the page again and would probably never forgive me for sending you somewhere so shitty and spammy.

If anyone does buy it, good luck. I’m looking forward to hearing your success story of how changing one ad attribute increased your CTR by 15522% or something similar.

If like me you tend to just accept TOS changes willy nilly without actually reading too much into them you may have missed a major change that Adsense are implementing (TOS change 25th February 2008) that could eventually get you banned. Part of the new Adsense TOS is that you are required to have a Privacy Policy that notifies your visitors that cookies are being placed. It’s a mute point because Google do what Google want to do but surely a Google privacy policy link under each add block would make more sense? Don’t hold me to this but I heard somewhere that these changes have to be in place by the 1st of May. Luckily I already have a privacy policy on 95% of my websites so it should just be a case of amending it, the problem is though where do you start if you’ve never had anything to do with privacy policies before?

In order to comply with the new Terms of Service you’re going to have to add a Privacy Policy link to each of your pages that serves Adsense, but what do you put in your Privacy Policy to comply with Adsense? Well I’m nothing if not helpful, here’s a link to a generator that will create your privacy policy for you:-

Adsense Privacy Policy Generator

One thing worth noting is the importance of nofollowing you privacy policy link. The last thing you want is being penalised for duplicate content as well

As an online marketer, web entrepreneur, blogger or whatever else you want to call yourself there are certain jobs that become part of a daily ritual. Some of the most common of these include checking e-mail, checking your Adsense balance and making small updates to web pages/templates. Over the years that I’ve been doing this I’ve always looked for ways of making things just that little bit easier and quicker, I’m sure somebody once said time is money? So these are 4 programs that I use daily, in fact I probably rely on these four as much as my browser and they are just as integral a part of my online money making.

1. GetMail Evolution – The latest version of my mail forwarding program. GetMail simply takes mail from one account and forwards it onto a number of other accounts. The whole reason it exists though is because of Microsoft’s unwillingness to provide open access to Hotmail/MSN/Windows Live Mail accounts. GetMail can natively forward on messages from lots of these accounts (Paid or older than a certain age) or with the help of another program called FreePOPS can forward from just about any mail account (including restricted Hotmail accounts, AOL, Yahoo etc). The whole reason I need this software is because I’ve used (and still use) several throw away Hotmail/Yahoo accounts to sign up for advertising services/other services that I thought might be a bit spammy. Besides, didn’t we all start with a Hotmail account? GetMail Evolution lets me gather up all these legacy accounts without checking them manually and dump the mail into 1 of 2 GMail accounts. It’s great to be able to use one of these throw away addresses keeping my real GMail address for real people I know. My daily e-mail check now involves checking a few Gmail accounts, 1 for work and 1 for personal and a couple run for clients.

2. Massgrid GAlert – So once I’ve got all my mail nicely sorted into my GMail accounts the next step is to check them for new mail. I could login and check them individually but I prefer to have some sort of notification utility that would tell me when new mail has arrived. MassGrid GAlert does exactly that for as many GMail accounts as you like. Even better is once you know you have new mail it’s a simple 2 click process to have your GMail account logged into in your browser, no need to enter username/password details. Another great feature of this software is that you can colour code your accounts so you get a certain colour popup. This allows you to see at glance if your new e-mail is important business (e.g. red) or just a friend forwarding on some smut (e.g. green).

3. Adsense Alert – Another utility that removes the need to manually login to a website to check something, this time your Adsense earnings. For some people Adsense is not important, for me it is. I can use my Adsense earnings to gauge how every other Ad network is performing on a given day. Higher Adsense to me usually means more page impressions, more visitors and a higher income (certainly across my other PPC networks). The trouble with Adsense is that checking your earnings can become addictive and a big drain on your time. That’s why I wrote Adsense Alert. All it does is login to your Adsense account every hour and update your earnings amount which is accessible through an icon in the tray area of the desktop. It has a got a couple of extra little features like being able to set 5 daily goals (that can trigger either a popup to appear or an e-mail to be sent) and the ability to have your earnings displayed as part of the Adsense league. This is just a bit of fun and a way of getting a free followed link from www.themakemoneyonline.net

4. NotePad++ – I write web pages, scripts and programs in more languages than I care to remember and whilst it’s great to have an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for those big tasks when it’s just a case of a small change here and there I don’t see the point. I was using Notepad for these types of quick edits for a long time but it was and is lacking many of the features that I’d like. The main one was the ability to check syntax as I type. Whether it be HTML, PHP, JavaScript, C, Pascal or anything else the syntax is important and NotePad++ has the ability to check these and many many other languages. It also features much better find and replace functionality for those global template updates and the ability to save with encoding for certain operating systems. This really saved me one day when I broke a clients PHP mailing script by saving it with Windows encoding by accident. There are lots of text editors out there, I’ve tried lots and paid for plenty but to date I’ve found NotePad++ to be the best, it also happens to be free.

I’ve just read some news that really pisses me off. Google are changing the rules (how often have you heard me say that recently?) for Adsense referrals. This means for existing Adsense publishers in North America, Latin America and Japan they will go from earning:-

* If you refer someone to AdSense who makes $5 within 180 days you get a payment of $5.
* If you refer someone to AdSense who makes $100 within 180 days you get $250
* If you refer 25 people who make $100 within a 180 day period you get a bonus payment of $2000

to the old way which gives you $100 for each person you refer who makes $100 in Adsense earnings in 180 days. If your referral doesn’t make that money they you get sweet F.A. I just can’t understand this decision, are Google short of money or something?

It gets worse though (much worse), for publishers outside of those regions the Adsense referral program will now cease to exist. Yes it doesn’t matter where the people you refer live, this decision is based entirely on where you live. To date I have referred several hundred new Adsense publishers that make christ only knows how much money for Adsense and this is how they reward me? Nice. Not only will I lose any potential future earnings from Adsense referrals but it also means I have to go through hundreds of web pages removing any Adsense referral code, that is a couple of days work. I just can’t understand the thinking behind this decision, I’m small fry but other people like Darren Rowse (ProBlogger) have referred thousands of new Adsense accounts not to mention the huge exposure he’s always given them (all from his base in Australia). I feel even more gutted for him than myself, to have preached the message of Adsense with such conviction only to be betrayed must be more than a little painful .

This makes me question my whole relationship with Adsense and whether to carry on or not, I haven’t said anything about this but my Adsense earnings in the last month have started to crash. I’m getting the same number of impressions and the same number of clicks (CTR has always been consistent for me) but the amount I’m being paid per click is drastically down. I wonder if this is because of where I live too, if it’s not happening already then how long before Adsense start changing the percentage they give to publishers depending on where they live? This has got me worried, replacing my Adsense earnings is going to be a big job but I guess it’s time to start looking for alternatives.

Was just catching up yesterday after my break but had to do a double take at this:-

Looks like Adsense have come up with yet another new ad layout, that big header blends in very nicely! Of course every company is always looking at how it can improve things but I doubt that it’s coincidence that since Google altered the clickable area of their Adsense ads that they have been experimenting with many more Adsense ad layouts. Certainly the example above tends to borrow very heavily from the styling of the page, when I first saw it I thought something had gone screwy with my WordPress and part of a post was being inserted at the top. Whilst in the long run this is bound to be good news (Google will stick with what works best after testing) it does go to show what little control we have over the Google ads on our pages. If you’re one of those people that likes to have total control over the look of your pages then Google Adsense is definitely not the way to go!

I’ve been running alternating colours for my Adsense ads for a little while now, it would have easily been enough time to identify any patterns….BUT for one thing. When Google decided to change the clickable area of Adsense blocks the stats really started to swing around. It’s still early doors but there was enough of a shift to make it worth while posting about.

What Were The Best Adsense Colours
When I first started this I borrowed some colour combinations from some of my other websites just to try high and low contrast, same and mixed font colours etc. The one which I wasn’t expecting to perform at all was the yellow background with green title. I was wrong. The bright/stand out Adsense colour combo was outperforming every other combination on here. The differences were not amazing but definitely a 1-2% CTR improvement.

What Are The Best Adsense Colours
Now that Google have changed the rules my high contrast block is crap. In fact both the blocks with different background colours to the page (Yellow and Blue) have almost stopped performing completely. That leaves 2 options, the block with all black text and the standard Adsense Blue, Black and Green combination. No suprises here but the block that contains links that look like standard links (blue) are at least twice as good as the all black text block.

So the morale of the story here is that from my experience under Google’s new rules their standard Adsense colour combination works best. Now might be a good time to start experimenting with your Adsense colours again, if nothing else but to confirm that what you are using now works best with the new Adsense rules. I’m going to carry on running my different Adsense colour combinations until the end of this month but if it carries on like it is I’ll be heading back to a Google standard Adsense block.

I really can’t believe that I’ve just had to create a blog post with that heading but it’s true. In only a couple of months my WidgetBucks earnings are on the very brink of overtaking the money I earn from Adsense (and in the process becoming my biggest income earning PPC network). What is even more remarkable is the fact that I only use WidgetBucks on probably 5% of the number of pages that I use Adsense on, that’s seriously awesome earning power.

To be honest I haven’t even been keeping track of my WidgetBucks earnings, I installed the widgets on some product pages, some non product pages and just left them to it, I would have been happy with $5! Only the fact that they’ve been getting a rough time recently from some big name bloggers made me check my stats. I still haven’t managed to wipe the smile of my face.

If you’ve got product related articles and pages then I would seriously recommend that you give WidgetBucks a go, whilst they might not suite everybody’s websites (they don’t perform well on general news non product web pages) if you can find a page or two when you can match their offers to your page content then you can make some serious cash.

Rather than start answering individual questions I figured it would be easier if I just did a post about how I make money online. This isn’t so much about the networks I use as the actual tactics I use to make money.

My Standard Recipe

1. First and primarily I build content websites and not blogs. I have one golden rule when creating any new website for myself, and that’s only to create websites about subjects that interest me AND that I can provide original content for. In short I only write about the things that I know about. Some of these websites might get updated several times a week and others barely once a month but whatever content I add is my own and is always written to be of some benefit to whoever ends up reading it. If it’s a major project I will custom build a template, if it a small website I’ll probably for for a freebie template.

2. Once I have my website I then perform lots of basic SEO checks and keyword optimise it. For me my first lot of traffic always comes organically from the search engines, as long as your content is original and interesting then linking and referral traffic tends to build naturally from that. At this point I should actually be promoting and marketing using the social networks but to date I’ve not had much to do with them, this is something I will be looking at in some detail in the future. If you are struggling to attract natural traffic then read the SEO Book, download WebCEO and if needs be consider spending a few dollars on some links even if only for the first month or so.

3. This is where the interesting part starts, making money. So I’ve got my new optimised (for visitors and search engines) website, the next step for me is always adding at least 1 Adsense block. This is very effective with new quite small websites because your visitor may not find all the information they want, a text Adsense advert can actually be of real value. I will leave the new website with only Adsense ads for 1 to 2 months. If there is no traffic in a niche no matter how well placed you are and you’re not seeing anything from Adsense then this is the point at which to stop and try something new.

4. In the time Adsense is running I will look through the various affiliate networks (Commission Junction, Trade Doubler, Click Bank, Never Blue Ads) and try and find any good fitting deals. Do not waste your time with affiliate deals that do not match your websites content (no matter how big the commission), you’re just wasting space. If I find a nice product I’ll add it to my website, as a rule I will create a whole new page for the affiliate deal rather than just use a banner. Adding value for your visitors as well as pre-selling is vital.

5. At this stage my new website is making a little money from Adsense and slllooowwwlllyy starting to convert the odd affiliate deal. It’s making money.

6. So my website isn’t so new at this stage and has nice amounts of traffic, now is the time to add another ad network. Kontera has been a nice earner for me and doesn’t tend to have any bad affects on other ad networks. My website is now earning money from several pay per click networks, affiliate deals and building a nice mailing list. THIS WILL ONLY WORK THOUGH IF YOU CAN KEEP PUMPING OUT ORIGINAL AND INTERESTING CONTENT.

7. Once a website has several thousand unique visitors a day I start to think about direct ad sales. This can take anywhere between 12-18 months. I treat every website I create as a long term project with the guaranteed money from direct ad sales each month being a great goal to target.

Selling Software & My Original Products

1. Besides making money from advertising and affiliate deals from content websites I also sell my own software. I can’t really give you much guidance on this other that to say that if you’re not a software developer I suggest you check out Rent A Coder. For a small outlay you just might get yours hands on something that you can sell over and over for many years.

2. Build a website using the recipe above for each product you wish to sell, key elements are home, product, FAQ, support, privacy & terms. Use the PAD standard to gain hundreds of free 1 way links, press releases are great for promoting new products.

3. This is the only point at which I would ever use Adwords or any other PPC advertising network. I do not use PPC networks to advertise anything other than my own products simply because if you’re promoting an affiliate product via Adwords then you can bet that another 10 affiliates are doing the same thing (inflating bid prices). This makes making money in this way very hard, some pro’s make a fortune this way but they are spending very big in the first place.

So as you can see I keep things really simple (ads, affiliates, newsletters, original products) and as low risk as possible. I can’t recommend spending hundreds/thousands of dollars on any website until you have found a niche that proves itself both with PPC and Affiliate sales. Because I have kept things so simple to date it also means I have lots of room for expansion in the future e.g. my first steps into blogging with this blog. Hopefully I’ll be starting my first forum website soon as well as starting to do a little bit more with Adwords and affiliate deals. As you grow and get sales you can start to negotiate improved rates, I’m sure that this is how the so called super affiliates make so much money. That is my next target.