Internet Earnings Adventures!

Another way of generating traffic and links is to become a member of Squidoo and start building “lenses”. A lens is what they choose to call the sites you build. The neat thing is they have a very easy way of putting together a site using their template that takes a short time to get a lens up and running. Squidoo is a social setting that is designed for people to build a lens about something you are an “expert” at and share your knowledge. You can build as many lenses as you like, (some people have 50 or a hundred of them) and using the modules they provide you can put ebay auctions, amazon ads, etc. on your site. You can also put an RSS feed to your other sites on it, thereby building traffic and links! It is very easy to do and actually kind of fun, and you can also earn money from the ads and links they place on your lenses. Here are 5 tips that I got from Nick’s Traffic Tricks to keep in mind;

1. Choose a subject that you are already an expert on or want to be an expert on. This way you will keep checking on it and adding to it. If we love something, we want to keep on talking about it. The bonus is that if you keep it fresh, people will come back again and again to see what you have to say now.
2. Get to know the other Squidooers. Who knows you might be able to work together if your lenses are similar or complementary.
3. Use the modules Squidoo uses. For instance, the RSS module allows you to pull in your blogs to Squidoo. Or use the Amazon module to link to related products on Amazon.
4. Use Squidoo to pull together all the blogs and sites you have into one handy easy to use lens. Make Squidoo a dynamically interactive site where the best of what you have online is available in one lens.
5. Break your information out into a number of lenses so that each lens is tightly targeted.

Click here to go to Squidoo and get started!

It is important to always be looking for other sources of revenue for your blog or website, trying new ideas and removing dead ones. It not only weeds out the deadwood but even subtle changes in your site can be beneficial and make it fresh.

I just signed up last night so it is too soon to give a effectiveness report but BidVertiser seems to have potential. It’s like Adwords, you sign up your site, get the code and place it on the site, and it will place rotating ads relevant to your site. It looks a bit different than Adwords and is actually customizable as to colors, fonts, etc. Click on the link below and try it out.

Make money from your Website or Blog with BidVertiser

Here’s a quick tip to use to build traffic to your site.

Find blogs with similar content or that have subjects you are interested in and post a comment.  Make sure when you post that your blog url is displayed.  The key is to read their blog and actually post a response to a specific issue so that you aren’t blocked as spam.  WordPress blogs have a plugin that automatically puts comments that look like spam in a separate file for moderation and you would not believe how much spam you will get after awhile.  As your traffic builds in a blog you naturally get spidered by Google, Yahoo and others often and if you can get your url posted in a comment it gets shown as a backlink which means more pointers to your website.  Spammers send comments filled  with links hoping to get spidered on your site if you don’t catch them as spam.  If you post interesting comments that are  relevant that just happen to have your link in them, you don’t get dumped as spam and your site benefits.

I just discovered a new source of free traffic for my websites and I want to share it with you. It’s called adgridwork.com and I have set up seven of my sites to test it out. It is like an ad co-op, you place an ad box on your site that shows ads from other participating sites and in return you get to make an ad that will be shown on other sites. Much like Google’s Adsense and Adwords except no money changes hands. If you look to the upper right corner of my sidebars you will see the adbox that they put on your site. They have about 20 different sizes and shapes so you can fit it anywhere on your site. It looks a bit like Adsense but different enough to catch your eye.

It is extremely easy to sign up for and quite easy to make your ad. Once you fill out the form for your website, and make your ad, you are given a chunk of code to place on your site. Once you place the code on your site and their system verifys it, your ads start showing on other sites. I was able to get my seven sites set up and running in less than an hour. They also have a page to look at your stats so you know how many times your ads have been viewed and how many impressions have been made for other ads on your site. In the first 24 hours my ads have been shown over a thousand times on other sites. Only about 5 clicks so far but we’ll see how it works over time.

I recommend that everyone with a site get signed up and try it out. Not only do you get some free traffic but we all can benefit from more sites signing up as that brings in more places for our ads to be shown.

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OK, now comes the biggie, how to get people to find your sites.

The first thing most people head to is Google, where you can use two tools that they provide, Adsense, and Adwords. these tools are considered the biggies by most people and with the power of Google behind them, that’s true, but…….

Adsense is their tool to put Google ads on your website. After you sign up with them you can use a tool that will generate a piece of code that you insert on your site and when someone goes there, Google analyzes the content of your site and places ads that are relevant to the site’s content. If you have a general sports site it will place general sports ads, a pro football site, pro football related ads, a New York Giants site will get fairly specific Giants ads. All well and good and certainly interesting to your readers but do you really want them going to another site and buying there instead of your site? No, you don’t! Besides the pitifully small amount of money you may get from them is not worth it. The only sites that make a reasonable amount of money are the big sites such as CNN, or Sports Illustrated, sites that have a HUGE amount of traffic. So my advice is don’t bother until your traffic is really large. You will notice that this site has adwords on it, I have a fair amount of traffic and I like to be able to track how much people click on the ads for my research.

The second Google tool is Adwords. This is where you write a short ad for your site that will be placed by Google on their Adsense customers website. Sounds good but they don’t place those ads for free and if your product is a fairly popular category such as sports memorabilia, satellite TV, or some other product that many others are doing the cost per click gets big fast! You can suddenly have a huge ad bill with very little to show for it. If you are interested in pay per click you can check out other, cheaper services to start out and see if it is worth it. Goclick.com is one that I have used that isn’t too bad.

The biggest way to drive traffic to your site is blogging. At first I really recommend that you design your BANS and affiliate-o-matic sites in a niche that you have some knowledge in and enjoy, that way writing a blog isn’t as hard a job. Be aware that this is not a path to overnight success. It will take months to develop a following and it will take an hour or two every day of writing and researching to find subjects to write about and ads to place, etc.. But after 3 or 4 months things suddenly start taking off on their own and you don’t have to spend as much time every day. There are several different blogging tools that you can choose from depending on how much customizing you wish to do. The easiest tool is Google’s Blogger. you can make a nice blog with easy to use templates and can have something up and running quickly. You can have ads and everything that you commonly see on blogs by using Blogger. The easiest setup uses their servers and you would have to find an available name for your blog on their domain, an example would be income.blogspot.com for this blog if I was using blogger. This is not always easy as there are millions of blogs hosted by Google and chances are the good name may be taken. You can use your own domain to run your blog but it seems to be a bit confusing to me.

The other option is using self hosted WordPress software. This is a better choice if you are fairly computer savvy, since it takes a little more hands on effort to set up your blog, but I think it is a better choice for a somewhat more professional look as well as more available customization. If you are hosting your web site on Host Gator you can install WordPress very easily from your control panel. Check out my entry Web Hosting Services or click on the Host Gator banner on the right to find out more. TheWordPress people have a huge amount of free themes and plugins for bloggers that can give you wide choice of blog styles to choose from.

So how do you get traffic to your blog? I have found an excellant tool from socialmarker.com where you put a small button to put on your toolbar and everytime you make an entry to your blog, you simply go to that entry, click the button and it takes you to their website and sets up a template that you can then submit that blog entry to about 40 or more social bookmarking sites quickly and easily. Sites like digg, propeller, redit, and others that specialize in spreading the word about blogs. Once you get listed on these sites all sorts of feeds, spiders and other indexes start finding you from all over. As long as you make regular blog entries and list them using these services you will notice more traffic every day to your blog and from there, your BANS and other store sites. Every post should have a blurb at the end that sends them to your other sites and your blog should be using ads from the companies you affiliate with. Believe me, if you follow this plan you will be moving plenty of people to your sites. The keys are, regular posting to your blogs, and the blogs should be part of your niche that you built using BANS and affiliate-o-matic.

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The next step in our adventure is getting the Associate*O*Matic program and setting up a store as an Amazon.com affiliate. This program works in a similar way to the BANS program where you develop a niche store but drawing from the Amazon site and all of it’s products. Every time someone from your site makes a purchase you earn a percentage of the profit.

I found that you should make a complementary Amazon site with your eBay site and cross promote on each site. Not every niche works together but most do. I started with a sports site on Amazon selling jerseys, bobbleheads, toys, whatever, for my local pro and college teams. Then I made a site on eBay selling sports memorabilia and collectors items and promoted the one site on the other. I also got affiliated with several sports related companies and put their banners up so if you liked sports, and after all, that’s why you came to one of the sites, you had a lot of stuff to look at and buy. No matter where they went and bought, I got a piece!

I also had a blog about my local area sports and advertised my sites as well as my affiliate companies. It is important to get multiple streams of income, a person may goe to your amazon store and decide he doesn’t want a jersey but does want a collectible bobble head, so you have him covered!

This is where using Host Gator and the multiple sub domains comes in handy and saves money. Say you get the domain xyzcompany.com and get set up on Host Gator. Let’s then say you want to make a site about Florida sports. Your first site is your Amazon site where you sell logo items, jerseys etc, and you call it, flsportsshop.xyzcompany.com. Next, your BANS shop about sports collectibles, called flfanshop.xyzcompany.com. Finally you make your Florida sports blog, called flsportsblog.xyzcompany.com. You now have 3 sites, one domain charge, one web hosting charge, and with Host Gator you can keep making sites using this same method.

Now click on the banner below and get your Associate*O*Matic program!

An affiliate is basically a person or website that signs up to be a “salesman” for a company. You do this by placing banners and ads on your website, or placing pay per click ads on a search site such as Google that steer people to the company’s website, where once they get there, hopefully they buy something. They track who sent them to their site by embedding code in the banners, etc. that tells them who sent the customer.

You can go individually to the different sites you want to become an affiliate for and sign up but that is time consuming. What you want to find are companies that handle affiliate sign ups for multiple companies and then aggregate what you have earned and pay you directly for all of the companies you affiliate with.

The first and most important company to sign up with is Commission Junction as they handle eBay as well as a multitude of others. By the way, CJ calls you a “publisher” instead of affiliate. It is key that you pick the companies carefully that you affiliate with for each web site. If your site is about trucks, you find affiliates that are automotive related, such as insurance, or performance parts. You don’t want womans clothes or cosmetics on your truck site, but you do want them on your jewelry site!

Another good site for affiliates is Linkshare. There are a lot of companies that do this but most have a poor selection of quality companies but these 2 seem to have the best selection of good companies to work with.

You also need to go to Amazon.com to become an affiliate with them since the next post discusses the web site building program Associate*O*Matic which works similarly to BANS, only with Amazon. These two programs will be the foundation that you build on.

For one of the best manuals about Affiliate Marketing around, you need to get the one guide that I found was worth it for the amount of info I got, Super Affiliate Handbook by Rosalind Gardner. Click Here! to get it.

OK, go get Rosalind’s handbook, and then go to Commission Junction and Amazon!

As a bonus, click on the banner below to become a VMC satellite TV affiliate. It is one of my most consistent performers!

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The BANS program is a great moneymaker for me.  Niche marketing is a key to making money on the internet.  No one can be “all things to all people”, except Amazon, and it is a lot easy to advertise to a small group who have common interests.  You will find that any niche that you can come up with may have only a few people in any one geographic area, but nationwide or even worldwide, most niches than become a large amount of people.  BANS works by having you become an eBay affiliate, which is easy to do and we will discuss that more in the next posting.  Once you become an affiliate, figure out your niche and make your site you make money every time someone signs up as an eBay buyer and also when they buy something.   Read the following, go to the site and get the BANS program and get started!

When you hear “eBay” and “money” in the same sentence
your probably think of becoming an eBay seller.

You place product listings in the eBay marketplace, buyers bid, you pay your
eBay seller fees and what you have left is your profit margin.

There is, however, another way to build a business which still revolves around
eBay but which doesn’t involve you selling a single thing in the eBay
marketplace.

This “other way” opportunity is based on the eBay affiliate program
and a great tool which makes entry into this opportunity not only
possible but also super easy. This tool is called “Build
A Niche Store“.

Now if you don’t know – an affiliate program enables you as an
individual internet entrepreneur to promote the products of a company in exchange
for a commission on all sales that you refer.

You are basically operating as an internet middleman and connecting internet
browsers to particular products and companies through you own network of websites
and marketing methods.

If we return to the eBay affiliate program, eBay actually invites you to
promote all of the product listings in the eBay marketplace and in exchange
for your efforts will pay you up to 75% of the revenue they make from each
sale you refer plus up to $35 for each new active eBay member you refer.

You can have a read about the eBay.com
affiliate program here

What this means is that you can earn up to three quarters of eBay’s
revenue simply for connecting people to the products listed in the eBay marketplace.

Not only do you get to partner with the best branded marketplace in the world,
you also get access to and control over ALL of the products listed in this
marketplace. The eBay product inventory becomes YOUR product inventory and
yet you do NOT have to stock items, deal with customers, organize shipping
or process refunds.

You are no longer limited to selling only those products which you can buy
and sell for a profit margin. You can choose ANY niche market and promote
those eBay products relevant to your chosen niche outside of the eBay marketplace,
funnelling targeted traffic through to eBay and into your own affiliate commissions.

Golf clubs, sewing kits, laptops, dog collars, diamond rings, Florida real
estate…

If you know eBay you know how BIG it is – there are NO limits.

At this point you might be thinking - well this sounds interesting but in
reality is there any money in it? Well, here’s the shocker – eBay’s
top affiliates make over 1 million dollars a month. That’s right –
8 figures a year without stocking, selling or shipping a single thing!

Now eBay does provide some basic free tools to help you succeed as an eBay
affiliate and build an affiliate business BUT it has been the development
of a tool outside of eBay that has really opened this up as a legitimate business
opportunity.

The tool, as I mentioned earlier, is called “Build
A Niche Store” and what it enables you to do is build eBay affiliate
websites targeted to any eBay niche you want. These act as the medium through
which you funnel targeted visitors to eBay.

Here are a couple of examples, one targeting Race Cars and the other Golf
Equipment:

Race Car eBay Affiliate Website

Golf eBay Affiliate Website

As you can see, these are professional looking websites that contain all
of those eBay products related to their target niche inside a searchable store
format, each of which automatically contains your eBay affiliate id.

These stores then automatically update as new products are listed for sale
and old listing expire from the eBay marketplace and the software has built
in development features which enable you to create new store pages, add content
to these pages, create content pages, modify your template etc etc.

Basically, in the space of about 10 minutes (once you are familiar with how
the software works) you can create a fully functional eBay affiliate website
targeted to the niche market of your choice.

Your store content is all search engine friendly which will provide the foundation
for attracting targeted traffic from the search engines and you can then use
the development features to attract more targeted visitors which will in turn
mean more eBay affiliate commissions.

It really is a brilliant concept and I’ve been hearing great things
about the guys behind the project and the member forum which you get lifetime
access to when you purchase the product.

Build A Niche Store comes with a step by step user manual which will walk
even the most technically inexperienced through setting up their eBay affiliate
website, 9 professional template layouts which can be customized (from inside
your admin panel) to match your target niche, lifetime member forum access,
comprehensive product support and possibly most importantly – an UNLIMITED
domain license which means you can build as many of these niche websites as
you want for the small one time fee.

Think about how many niches eBay caters to!

How big could your eBay affiliate business be?!

This product gets my full recommendation – check it out today…

Click
Here To Read More About Build A Niche Store

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The first thing you need to do is get signed up with a web hosting service. This can be a difficult choice as there are literally hundreds of services out there. The keys that you need to look at are price, bandwidth, features and service. I am not a computer wizard by any means, I understand a lot of what’s going on but I don’t have time or the interest in becoming a wizard. I looked around for quite awhile, studied the ads, and even tried a couple to see what it was like. So needless to say I suffered from information overload and got confused! I backed up and looked for some honest referrals from users and the service that seemed to get a lot of good reviews was Host Gator and that’s who I settled on.

Price-A lot of companies compete on price and frankly, most of them have fairly low prices. Host Gator starts with the Hatchling plan at $4.95/month, goes to the Baby at $7.95 and finally, the Swamp, at $12.95/month. The difference between each plan is is disk space allowed, bandwidth allowed, and domains and subdomains allowed. These things are important because a key to making money is multiple web sites, and the more space, bandwidth and domains you can use with one account the better your profits.

Bandwidth-Think of bandwidth as the size of the pipe going to your website, the bigger it is the more traffic that can be moving in and out of your site. This works not only at the same moment, but also cumulatively over the month. You don’t want users to be denied access or have the process slowed down because you skimped on bandwidth. Storage space is related, you need adequate space to hold multiple websites and data.

Features and ease of use-Many Web Hosts include features such as scripts, software, site builders etc. to help you build a professional website. Also key to this is ease of use for you to learn how to use their system and to do any maintenance. I found some Hosts to have good bandwidth, storage, etc. but really stink in the ease of use. Host Gator’s control panel is great, it’s easy to use, and has a lot of features available, including being able to install Wordpress blogging software easily from the control panel. This ease of use is perhaps the biggest reason I went with Host Gator and will probably never leave.

Customer Service-Another big one. Most customer service is done by email and takes awhile. Host Gator has an online feature where you type in a question and within a few minutes a live support person is responding via keyboard, sort of an Instant Messaging feature that I have used several times and got great help.

Domains-There are many ways for you to get a domain name and once you do your host service will set up a domain name server for you. Simply put, they give your domain an address that the internet uses to find you. Host Gator then allows what is known as subdomains. If you look at my address you will see income.tinmansystems.com. tinmansystems.com is my domain and income is a subdomain. You can have numerous subdomains such as blog.tinmansystems.com and never have to pay anything except one domain charge and one account fee! I currently have 7 subdomains and more are on the way!

This should give you a quick overview on Web Hosting, and get you started on your internet income road. Now, find an available domain name to get and click on the Host Gator banner on the right and get your web site started!

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Let’s face it, there are ton’s of sites, emails, ads, whatever, screaming at you about making thousands, and even millions on the internet.  Guess what, unless you are able to come up with the next Facebook, Amazon, or eBay, you probably won’t.  But,,, if you are willing to work at it you can make a tidy second income, and if you work a little harder you can make a pretty good living.  The trick is to separate the wheat from the chaff and I am going to lead you down the path to a good living by showing you what has worked for me and what has not.

I will be making entries in this blog and I would love to have feedback and comments from you about what is working for you.  If you want to make an entry it will be moderated by me and as long as it is relevant and helpful to others I will allow you to post it.   Comments are moderated also so lets not spam it up here.  Also, I am not interested in mean spirited posts, or flame wars.  Everyone has their opinions, lets here it but use some respect and some restraint.