Money Schemes - Learn How To Make Money Online

Whilst it’s always great to read about these guys and girls making hundreds of thousands of dollars a month from the internet I sometimes think that it paints a false picture of what it’s really like trying to make a living online. Something that most new internet marketers and bloggers don’t realise is that the majority of these people have been around a long time and have built up slowly. They have a number of launch pad websites that they can use to launch any new website onto a running start in terms of links and traffic. This is why the rich get richer on the internet.

It’s no secret that in order to make money online you need traffic, you can either try and get it for free via natural search and referral traffic or you can pay for it via services like Adwords. It’s this getting traffic part that puts most people new to the internet off (normally after only a month or 2 of trying). The problem is that the search engines like old trusted websites, all new websites are treated as a being a bit suspect. If you don’t have any established websites then you’re going to struggle to get both search engine traffic and links. This is especially true if you’re doing something that a hundred other people have done before you. Unless you are very good at social networking and can manipulate some links from Digg, StumbleUpon, you are sunk in terms of high levels of natural traffic before you even start. This leaves paid for traffic and buying visitors out of your own pocket. This gets very boring very quickly and that’s why most new marketers, online money makers don’t last more than a couple of months. You have to realise that this is a marathon and not a sprint.

The secret here is you need old established websites in order to help you build your new ones. I have websites that have been knocking around for 11-12 years now and it is these I use to launch any new projects. A link here, a mention there and soon I’m being featured in the SERPS. After a few months in the SERPS the natural links start to build and before I know it there is yet another website in my arsenal that is seeing nice amounts of traffic. Without these launch pads I wouldn’t expect to see the same progress for 12-18 months and this is what people need to think about. Whilst it’s nice to be rich this week, if you’re new you are much better thinking 12-24 months down the line. Start buying domains and building domains now that you can use to launch and invoke trust in your new projects and you’ll reap the benefits later on.

A few tips:-

1. When you buy a new domain, put something/anything unique on it straight away.
2. Let the search engines know about any new domains you have ASAP, building trust takes time.
3. Do not be afraid to interlink your own websites, at worst you’ll only get a small benefit
4. Rather than paying for links to a new domain consider spending the money on an old established domain that comes with links

Did you see what I did there (thanks or no thanks….get it….I’ll get my coat)?

Following on from John Chow’s startling revelation that the only way of making any real money online is to attract visitors and have them view ads that are targeted to what they are looking for this seems like a great time to write about my experiences with TNX, yet another way of getting those all valuable eye balls in front of your ads. By the way John is completely right, targeted ads in front of visitors is all it takes to make a living online (as if getting visitors is that easy).

So What Is TNX?

In short TNX is a link brokerage service, they allow you to both buy links on other webpage’s and sell links on your own. This is not a new format and for a long time it has been one of the best ways of securing one way links for many websites that struggle to grow natural links. It’s probably no secret that a lot of the link sellers are blogs with a lot of the link buyers being businesses. Where TNX differs from many of the other services is that it’s possible to get a lot of links for your buck (10,000 PR0 links for only $11 a month, surely the next best thing to free links). I’m not really bothered in selling links, in terms of my own websites I don’t think I would earn a lot with TNX so my experience is entirely limited to using TNX to buy links and getting those visitors in front of my ads.

Getting Started
To give TNX a fair chance I deposited $50 into my account, this was enough to buy 60,000 TNX points. Whilst still a small amount in link buying terms TNX implies they’ll deliver more for your dollar so I thought this was a nice amount. Once your points are safely in the system (you can also earn points by selling links) you can they go about creating an advertising campaign, this is where things can get a little confusing. In order to get your campaign up and running the first screen allows you to select a category (they recommend selecting 5-7 of the 17 available options), GEO targeting (English all the way for me), the number of Yahoo Back Links for the page you want your link on, the page ranks you want to target and finally how many points you’d like to spend. There is no way of softening this, this page is bloody complicated to use. As you change your target PR, Yahoo links and categories then the number of links your chosen points can buy will change. The other confusion comes later along because the amount of points you specify here is a guide only and doesn’t actually affect your link buying at all. At a later stage you have to specify the number of links you want for each category, TBL, PR combination (with no real indication of how much this is going to cost in terms of dollars). If your looking for thousands of links across lots of categories this can take some setting up, luckily for me I was only targeting one category, with 2 sections of YBL and a couple of PR’s.

Setting Your Links
So once you’ve got your campaign settings sorted it’s on to actually creating your links. TNX like you to create a minimum of 10 unique link texts. A great tip here is to use the import facility (I spent 30 minutes creating my links the first time only for them to be refused for a typo). If I would have used the import then I could have quickly just changed the text file and re-imported. TNX sets a 65 character limit for the length of your text (this is for link text and does NOT include your anchor html) which is quite generous in terms of getting plain text before and after the link. Make sure to target some of your links to deep pages as well, mix it up a bit. You can of course use more than the minimum 10 links.

Once you’ve got your links done you can now select how many links you want for each category/language/YBL/PR combination. I kept life simple order in groups of 10. Once you’ve completed that then it’s just a case of waiting for your campaign to be approved and for links to be assigned. To give you some idea I ordered a total of 60 links 48 of which were fulfilled at a cost of 35088 points a month. A bit of quick maths works out at about $29 for the month. Considering 13 of those links were on well targeted PR3 (with 1500+ Yahoo back links) pages that’s amazing value for money, I seriously doubt whether you could find that sort of link buying power elsewhere.

Do They Work?
This is the thing, did my links either improve search ranking or provide direct referral visitors? The truth is that yes they did refer traffic and my search rankings did improve after 2 weeks of using the links. I can’t say for sure if those links provided the extra search benefit but it would be hard to argue against them (They all look fine in Google’s Webmaster Tools). Perhaps even more importantly to us make money onliners the extra income from the target website more than paid for the cost of buying those links. Whilst the traffic wasn’t huge (more because of my target niche) several hundred people made there way over and stuck around for more than 2 minutes and viewed several pages. What I liked most about my TNX links was that they all seemed well positioned above the fold, this really helps when it comes to getting those visitors.

When it comes to link buying I’d recommend TNX, if you’ve got large sites with thousands of pages then I’m sure they’d be a great place to sell links as well. Whilst it’s true that the actually campaign isn’t the easiest thing in the world to setup once you get there it is worth it. They also run an affiliate program that I’ve just joined and will be writing about if and when it proves to be any good. All in all I’m happy.

So it’s not making money in the strictest sense of the words but not wasting money is just as important when it comes to making a living online. When I first started this blog, my first real blog, I shot of like a rocket looking for ways of getting those initial visitors. Don’t know why really, I could have relied entirely on good old fashioned SEO techniques to draw in natural search and referral traffic but I was excited and wanted some quick results. I spent quite a lot of money in that first month, some was money well spent, some was just a waste. What it did prove though was the power of affiliate marketing from a blog because I’m pretty sure everything I signed up for was being promoted by at least one of the A list bloggers. Without further a do here’s a quick run down of some of the things I spent money on:-

Million Dollar Wiki
My online money makers page cost me $100 at the million dollar wiki, expensive for a single page but when I saw the number of bloggers promoting it and the fact it was a 15 year investment I decided it was a calculated risk worth taking. In the first few weeks of my page being there it managed to pay for itself (mainly thanks to TLA) and although the traffic it refers has dropped to a trickle it still does send the odd referral this way. Overall I’ve got to say that I am happy with the Million Dollar Wiki but if you’ve only got $100 to spend it might be better going elsewhere, especially now that the initial buzz has died down.

Bloggings Most Wanted
Everybody has seen one of those buy a pixel etc etc websites, well this was just the same but for bloggers. Buy a square for $25, upload a picture and have traffic referred to you for ever more. The problem with these sites is that they are only as good as the person marketing them. In this case after the initial surge of being featured on John Cow nothing seems to have happened since. Like the Wiki, traffic was high with the initial publicity but I’ve just checked and in the last week it has not referred any visitors (and I’m at the top of the most clicked bloggers list). At the end of the day this is $25 that could have been better spent elsewhere (note to self, impulse buying is stupid)

Blogging The Movie
This is probably the craziest thing I got involved with. I’ve even had to go back and look at the details to find out exactly what I’ve signed up for! Anyhoo, for $100 I get to have a permanent link on the Blogging The Movie website (as one of the first sponsors to sign up), a couple of reviews and if the target to buy a car is met my domain name plastered on the side of a car! If they don’t meet their target then I get the $100 back. Blogging The Movie is a project to travel the world videoing 10 bloggers, I prefer guns and scantily clad chicks in my movies but each to their own and all that. Either way I’ve paid $100 to help promote it, in terms of referral traffic it’s been a bit of a shocker but to give them their due it is delivering consistent traffic levels. All I need now is for them to make a mega hit and ride that traffic wave to wealth (or not). I guess time will tell whether this was worth it or not.

TLA
My $135 spend with TLA was money well spent, not only did it draw in some/lots of traffic but it also proved conclusively that buying traffic with TLA was a very viable option. I have considered doing the same again (I only ran the ads for 1 month) to give the blog a boost but at the moment with Christmas fast approaching I’m going to stick with my own rules and be a little conservative.

It seems funny but when most people talk about how much they make from blogging they ignore their expenses. My expenses were quite a lot to start of with but now are next to nothing, I’ve got this blog to a level where it can pay for itself and give some return as long as I don’t do any crazy spending, I almost feel like I’ve found my own little place that I can use to build from. If I carried on like I was then it would have been a lot longer before I could say I was making a profit, sure I was making money, it’s just I was spending it before I got it!

Following on from my traffic buying test with TLA I’ve decided to run a similar type test with the fairly new link brokerage service from TNX. Now before Google throw a fit about trying to influence their rankings I’m not. I’m using TNX as a tool to get eyeballs in front of affiliate deals/advertising only, I’m not using them to sell links. This ones all about making money people! In fact the site that I’m pointing them at has no PR and gets very little search traffic (with TNX or without). As far as I’m concerned I’m paying for referral visitors and I’d like to see if using TNX giving any sort of ROI.

TNX differs from TLA in that it’s more concerned with spreading links far and wide, cheaply! One commonly quoted example is the ability to buy 10,000 links for only $11 a month. The flip side of this is of course that for certain content publishers TNX is not going to pay enough, that’s exactly why I’m more interested in buying traffic rather than selling links with them. On the other hand if you’ve got very large low PR websites it could be a great way of adding to your income.

Well the good news is that I’ve been using TNX for nearly 3 weeks now and my initial $30 worth of ads has already paid for itself! I’ve still about a week to go until my first month is complete but I’m seeing using TNX as a new cheap and effective way of driving traffic.

I’ll do a full review of my own personal highs and lows of using the TNX service when my first full month is over next week.

The whole point of the nofollow attribute is to do one thing, to say to Google “Please don’t include this link in any linking algorithm, ta very much”. It’s actually quite handy when it comes to affiliate marketing as it can help not only your website but also the site you are affiliating for, nobody wants to get panalised if they can help it. With this latest PR update I’ve just come across an anomaly that proves for a fact that Google are ignoring the nofollow attribute and not only crawling that link (as many people expected) but also factoring it into the linking algorithms.

A little while back I entered a partnership for a website and became their one and only affiliate, in order to facilitate my traffic the site owner create a mirror of his page under a different folder. In order to avoid any form of duplicate content penalty and just to be polite and not out rank his own site I nofollowed every affiliate link. I’ve checked the back links and other than one splog that has ripped one of my pages I’m still the only person linking into my affiliate URL. I’ve gone through each link in turn and double checked, each link is nofollowed. So how then that my affiliate URL is now a PR3? If Google are paying attention to the nofollow attribute then this should be impossible, yet it’s there clear as day. Unless I’ve missed something it looks to me like Google are ignoring nofollow, why?

I suppose it begs the questions, is part of Google’s trust rank algorithm not to trust webmasters and to crawl whatever they like?

Edit: One final note, ProBlogger has had his PR restored and confirmation from Google sources that the penalty was all about link selling, in that case I’m a bit annoyed, this Blog has never had a paid for link on it, in any guise.

(This will be the last mention of PR for at least 3 months )

I suppose one of the advantages of working for a couple of “big boys” who like to throw some money around is that it gives me access to information and stats that can help with my own websites. As much as I’d like to be I’m not in a position to be spending high hundreds if not thousands of dollars on something that may or may not work. Managing this for somebody else is easy, guess I’m just a bit of a chicken! Take for example Press Releases, it is easily possible to spend hundreds of dollars getting your Press Release distributed (Just ask John Cow!) but is it really worth it? I don’t think so, there are plenty of places where you can have your release sent for free. Many people argue that the best distribution points (such as Google News and Yahoo News) do not pick up from these free news sources but that rubbish. You can have your press release distributed far and wide for free if you just know where to go.

Who Does Free Press Releases

Once you’ve had your press release written you will then need it distributing. These are the sites I’ve used in the past that will distribute for free. In my own experience the stats I have seen from several of these are equally on par with the distribution and take up that you see with an expensive PRWeb.com release!

www.prleap.com
www.pr.com
www.24-7pressrelease.com
www.pr9.net
www.malebits.com
www.free-press-release.com

I know there are lots more out there but that’s a pretty good list to get you started. Before you go and spend hundreds of dollars on your press release you might just want to think about using the free press release services that are available.

I completely forgot that I was supposed to be doing the results of my TLA experiment today. If you missed the first post the idea was to see exactly what $125 ($100 of which would be free as a new Text-Link-Ads member plus the $25 it takes to qualify for the free $100) would get me with TLA. I got slightly carried away and spent $135 instead but what’s $10 between friends?

I ran my ads from the 1st to the 30th of September on a number of “Make Money Online” blogs, the results were very interesting and to be honest if it doesn’t inspire you to sign up with TLA then nothing will.

My TLA Blogs

These are the blogs I chose to advertise on, how much it cost for the month and how many visitors each referred as well as the number of pages each visitor viewed and the amount of time they spent here:-

www.matrixmails.com – $15, sent 130 visitors each of which viewed on average 1.32 pages and spent 1:03 on The Make Money Online Dot Net.

www.5xmom.com – $15, sent 29 visitors each of which viewed on average 1.55 pages and spent 1:13 on The Make Money Online Dot Net.

www.carlocab.com – $25, sent 87 visitors each of which viewed on average 1.45 pages and spent 1:21 on The Make Money Online Dot Net.

wwwjohncow.com – $20, sent 141 visitors each of which viewed on average 2.13 pages and spent 3:16 on The Make Money Online Dot Net.

adsense-tw.com – $20, sent 73 visitors each of which viewed on average 1.81 pages and spent 1:39 on The Make Money Online Dot Net.

cashbulge.com – $15, sent 12 visitors each of which viewed on average 1.42 pages and spent 1:26 on The Make Money Online Dot Net.

www.soulcast.com/tag/blogging – $25, nada, nil, null, nothing.

In total my $135 resulted in 472 targeted visitors in a highly competitive niche. If you’re not an existing TLA customer and take advantage of the $100 worth of free links you could have that same traffic for the grand total of $35 (and that’s not forgetting the $25 I wasted on soulcast.com). At a little over $0.07 per click that’s unbelievable value for money in the “Make Money Online” niche.

The great news as well is that all this extra traffic has resulted in my RSS count growing from 10 to nearly 50, increased Adsense revenue and some extra inbound natural links as people like what they read and link here. So the question is just how popular is your Blog and are you prepared to spend $25-$25 to give it a boost? If you are then you could do much worse than taking advantage of TLA’s $100 offer!

I have a very limited number of web directories that I actually consider to be of some benefit to webmasters in terms of either referred traffic or link love. My list at the moment is headed up firmly by DMOZ (The ODP) and the Yahoo Directory.

Aviva Directory is another one of the directories that gets mentioned a lot whenever anybody tries to point out that there are good directories out there. It’s one that I’ve used for several years so have easily been able to shoot down anybody trying to make out that that will boost your page rank and deliver thousands of visitors to your door. Just because the directory has a high page rank and a great Alexa ranking DOES NOT mean that it’s going to pass that on to you.

However, after having 1 clients website listed in the directory for 6 months with no referrals something is just beginning to happen. This month has seen 19 referrals and 2 enquiries coming from the Aviva Directory. Of course those 2 enquiries were from the operators of spam directories looking to add our website but at least it’s traffic! I suspect that it’s a combination of new directory owners looking for websites to add and maybe that the Aviva page with our listing on is now starting to rank somewhere in a search engine (I strongly doubt that it’s Google) for maybe the companies name or a related phrase.

So if you are willing to pay the $49.95 for a regular listing then it looks as though Aviva Directory can refer you some traffic. On the other hand it’s made no difference to the search results or page rank.