How to Make Money Online with Blogspot, AdSense and Clickbank for Free

I wrote a recent comment on my SEO/AdSense Ready WordPress Themes site in response to a commenter saying my AdSense income is a lot of money to someone living in India.

If you read my comment you’ll probably pick up I’ve recently had my eyes opened to how hard it must be for people living in places like India to afford my SEO WordPress AdSense themes: I sell them for only £10 (under $20) each which is cheap for someone looking to make money in the UK/USA (if you can’t make the £10 back online in a month you aren’t cut out to make money online).

I’ve been thinking how I can help poor people (those who can’t risk spending £10 on a theme, £5 on domain registration fees a year and £5 a month of hosting a WordPress blog) use my SEO/AdSense knowledge to get started in making money online and that’s what this article is about.

How to Make Money Online Without Spending a Dollar

There are many options for making money online without spending any money up front, I’m going to cover using free Blogspot/Blogger blogs at http://www.blogger.com/ and using AdSense and Clickbank to make money from free search engine traffic to your blog. At the end of the article is a list of links to some of my other SEO type articles, I strongly advise you read them all as I’m not going to cover much SEO here and it’s important for generating search engine traffic for free.

Firstly this is not a quick money making scheme, it’s going to take effort, in fact if someone completely new to this managed to get to $50 a day within a year of using these ideas I’d be very, very impressed (if you have money to spend WordPress is where I’d put my time, it’s better SEO wise, but it does cost money to start: hosting and domain registration fees). For a poor person living in India or Pakistan (which is where a LOT of my traffic to my money making and SEO information sites comes from!) even $5 extra a day could make a big difference to the quality of their life.

Using Blogger/Blogspot Blogs to Make Money Online

Obviously the first step is register a free Blogger account and Blogspot sub-domain at http://www.blogger.com/. If you’ve never used Blogger before don’t worry too much right now which sub-domain you register as it’s free to register as many as you want (I have more than a few myself ) when you read the SEO tutorial linked at the base on this article you’ll learn what sub-domain is best to register.

I’ve been selling two AdSense/SEO Blogger/Blogspot themes under BlogSpot Blogger Templates with AdSense and SEO for a couple of years at £5 each, but barely get any orders. They use the old Blogspot legacy code (it’s much easier to SEO and add AdSense to) and that might be one of the reasons why they don’t get ordered much, also they are based on two of the original Blogger themes, so not a great deal of choice.

I’ve created a new Blogger/Blogspot AdSense/SEO theme (based on an original Blogspot theme) read about it at Free Blogspot SEO/AdSense Template Rounders 2.

Free Blogspot SEO/AdSense Template Zip File

You can see an example of what the theme looks like at: Lady GaGa Music Videos.

Using my Free Blogspot Theme to Make Money

The Blogspot theme is fully search engine optimized and AdSense optimized and requires one simple search and replace in a text editor to replace my Google AdSense publisher ID with yours. Sign up for a free Google AdSense account at https://www.google.com/adsense/

The theme uses the old Blogspot legacy code which means your Blog has to use the original Blogger coding (can’t use their new widgets/gadgets), but it’s a small price to pay for an SEO/AdSense ready Blogspot theme (especially a free one).

To install the SEO/AdSense themes code, log into your Blogger account and under your accounts Dashboard click the “Layout” link, followed by the “Edit HTML” link and near the bottom of the page click the “Revert to Classic Template” link, click OK on the warning box and on the next page paste the free Blogspot SEO/AdSense theme code (that you’ve already replaced my AdSense publisher ID with yours).

Click the “Save Template Changes” button and you have an SEO/AdSense Ready Blogspot Blog just waiting for new content.

SEO Your Blogspot Blog

There’s a few basic settings to change to get the best out of Blogger.

Under Settings/Basic
Add a relevant Title for your Blog. For SEO reason it makes sense to have a keyword rich title (see the links at the bottom of this article). If I’d have made this site on Blogspot I’d have used the same title as I use here “45 Year Old Millionaire Make Money Online Blog” (it’s keyword rich).

Below it is a tag line (labelled Description), again if it was this blog on Blogspot I’d have used “My journey to wealth and riches or an embarrassing site documenting financial failure trying to make money online!” You will see this description near the top of your blogs page.

All other settings on that page can be left as default.

More settings to change:

Under Settings/formatting
Show: change to “5 posts on the main page”.
Enable Float Alignment: no (if you leave this as yes it messes with some of the AdSense ads placement).

The rest of the settings aren’t important and can be left or changed depending on your needs.

Under Settings/Comments
If you don’t want to deal with comment SPAM (can be a problem on blogs) I’d change these settings, definitely do this if you plan to run lots of Blogspot blogs (absolute pain to manage the comments):

Comments: Hide
Comments Default for Posts: New Posts Do Not Have Comments
Backlinks: Hide
Backlinks Default for Posts: New Posts Do Not Have Backlinks

Under Settings/Archiving
Archive Frequency: Monthly
Enable Post Pages?: Yes

That’s it, you’ll have a Blogspot blog as good as any of my Blogspot blogs.

Next step is creating posts.

Under Postings/New Posts
Is a very easy to use posting form. Anything added here will be visible as a new Blog post on your blog.

The Title is VERY important, make it keyword rich and descriptive (see the links below for how to optimise a pages title).

The other box is where the main content goes.

Now you have an AdSense ready Blogspot blog that’s been setup with SEO in mind and you know how to create new posts.

Lets Make Money with Clickbank

Clickbank is an affiliate marketing network (free to join) where product publishers (selling ebooks etc…) get people like us to promote their products for a fair share of the revenue generated. I’ve tried a lot of affiliate schemes and Clickbank is the one that gives most money relative to effort because of it’s very fair revenue sharing (can be as high as 75% goes to us).

Make Money Reviewing Clickbank Products

One way to make money from Clickbank is to review Clickbank products. I’ve used this technique successfully, but the hard part is finding decent Clickbank products to promote (a lot of trial an error I’m afraid).

My sons have all made money from Clickbank before the age of 16 reviewing Clickbank products just like I do, in fact it was my eldest son (age 15 at the time) that introduced Clickbank to me Anyone can make money this way.

I find writing an honest review of a Clickbank product has worked well for me, this has meant I’ve had to buy the Clickbank product to review it, but if you don’t mind trawling the Internet to read other peoples Clickbank reviews and copy their thoughts into your own reviews (don’t copy the actual reviews, you’ll get your site banned from Google for duplicate content, just the ideas: it’s a good product because sort of thing), when you’ve made a few sales of a Clickbank product consider contacting the author of the product for a free review copy so you can do a better review.

My advice would be to add Clickbank product reviews to your Blogspot blog along with other articles and posts, in this way you have two ways to make money from your traffic. If someone likes the Clickbank product you’ve reviewed they buy it, if not they might click an AdSense ad.

Unless you review a lot of rubbish Clickbank products and say they are all great (I personally don’t do that, some products really SUCK), you are going to find it hard going finding lots of Clickbank products to review. What I do on a site with Clickbank reviews is also add other articles, so you are always creating new content and generating new search engine traffic and even though most of my pages don’t promote products, they do have AdSense ads on them. The article you are reading now will make money for me long term as some of you will click the ads (currently test Clickbank ads on this site to compare them to AdSense ads).

Search Engine Optimization Links

As promised here’s a list of SEO resources (more of my sites) that you might find helpful in learning search engine optimization techniques to drive traffic to your Blogspot blogs. Without traffic you won’t make any money from your Blogs and I’ve found the best way to generate free traffic is through SEO means.

SEO Tutorial
SEO Tutorial for WordPress
SEO Tips
Make Money Online Guide

Free Blogspot SEO/AdSense Template Zip File

Good luck making lots of money online and if you do use the free Blogspot blog to make money drop a comment below.

David