Make Money Online

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 read a post at http://www.moneyhospital.co.uk/blog/post/could-you-actually-live-off-60-a-week-20183 regarding living off Job Seekers Allowance (the DOLE) which is apparently £60.50 a week now.

The user comments brought back memories and made me think some people would be better off starting their own business (self employed) rather than being registered as unemployed and claiming job seekers allowance (JSA) or income support (you claim income support if you haven’t paid enough national insurance contributions).

When I started my first business selling adult lingerie and sex toys I’d been out of University for about three years after leaving on medical grounds (chronic back pain, had a back operation earlier this year to fuse discs). I’d been unable to finish my degree in genetics or work due to disability and had been claiming income support on medical grounds (I wasn’t classed as unemployed, I was too disabled to work).

I signed up for Twitter around this time last year as part of an attempt to use social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter to make more money online through social network marketing.

After gaining thousands of Facebook friends (which was a pain to achieve) my first account was banned by Facebook: if you requested friends at a high rate you’d get a warning. Stop requesting friends for a while and the warning goes away and you can request more friends. Despite listening to those warnings my account was locked (still is)!

Signed up for a new Facebook account, but didn’t make any friend requests (probably have 10 friends now). Do have 2 Facebook groups about AdSense Secrets and SEO Secrets with hundreds of members, but not doing anything with them as fell out with Facebook

I’ve been an SEO consultant for years and own over 100 domains and through SEO testing have had at least 20 domains banned/penalised in Google, (I expected many of them to be banned since was testing SEO limits) so have a lot of experience with Google penalties.

About 5 months ago I started selling text links from my Free Recipe site (used one of the text link seller sites) and after a lot of technical problems finally got the entire web site added to their text link inventory, that was 50,000 pages available for selling text links from. I expected overtime to make a fair bit of extra cash from selling text links, apparently averages about $5 per link for a site like that one, so with 50,000 pages to link from there’s the potential for a lot of money without having to do any work (my preferred way of making money ).

You’ll hear a lot on forums about making money online from Blogspot blogs and Squidoo lens/blog pages mainly because they are completely free, (lot of cheap people trying to make money online )

I rarely use Blogspot as a CMS since I prefer to use hosted WordPress blogs which means I buy a domain and host it (got 2 dedicated servers currently). This costs money (not a lot really, for me ~$1,500 a year for over 100 domains) and a hell of a lot of people who are supposedly serious about making money online are unwilling to spend any money!

I’ve been using Clickbank for about 18 months now to make money as an affiliate, (sign up as a ClickBank affiliate here (it’s free). Currently I don’t have any products in the Clickbank marketplace, (so I only market others products) but can see that would be the way to go to make a lot of money.

I’ve been practicing SEO for over 10 years and offering SEO services for about 8 years, so I could make an SEO product to sell on the Clickbank marketplace (probably will).

Clickbank Affiliate Products

In the meantime I’m a Clickbank affiliate promoting a handful of personally reviewed products, I don’t seriously promote a Clickbank product in a review format if I don’t think the product is worth buying: in other words I’ve bought and used the product and recommend others to use it because I think it’s good.

Was reading a blog post titled If You’re Reading This Blog Post… You Could Get $100,000 Worth of Coaching and Products From Me.

Basically you answer three questions to win some business coaching and products from Rich Schefren. Inspired me to write a post as it hit home to a problem I’ve been having for going on two decades!

1. Do you know what your single greatest constraint is right now? If so, what is it?

My biggest constraint is a physical disability, while at University in my early twenties (studying genetics with an aim to being a research scientist) my lower back got so bad I couldn’t complete my three year Bsc degree. After dropping out of Uni I couldn’t work due to back pain whilst sitting/standing (had to claim government benefits on medical grounds).

Was reading a post on Digitalpoint forums where someone who was trying to make money online through AdSense had posted they had lost their job! Started a post but it got long so turned it into this post on my site (why waste the content on a forum).

I’ve been doing what this person is trying to do for years (make money online) and I have banned sites making more money than what he reported ($2 a day from AdSense).

Some of my Google banned sites make more than this because they have a LOT of pages, but they are penalised (not really banned as they are still indexed in Google) because the content is thin affiliate content: Google hates thin affiliate (meaning you use the affiliates content with nothing unique) sites, will spider/index them but send very little traffic to them.

I don’t normally bother to track affiliate based revenue regularly, but think it will be interesting and inspirational to track it from now on, month by month to see how my millionaire plans are progressing.

This does not include the money I make through my SEO business or any investments, so ONLY affiliate and advertising (AdSense type programs) revenue.

Affiliate Revenue for June 2008

Google AdSense Revenue : $1,203.32 ($40.11 a day)
ClickBank : $363.83 ($12.13 a day)
Amazon : $98.25 ($3.28 a day)
Private Ads** : $402.72 ($13.42 a day)

June Affiliate Revenue = $2,068.12 ($68.94 a day)
Extrapolation = $25,162.13 a year

Hmm, thought AdSense was going to break $50 a day on average last month.
ClickBank revenue is up, Amazon revenue down.

I have to admit I thought I was good at AdSense ad placement already and have been selling AdSense templates (mainly for WordPress) for about 8 months, I get a lot of practice placing AdSense ad units and see the CTR from a lot of websites.

When you believe you know everything there is to know about a subject you’ve already made a serious mistake, so I’m always open to learning I’ve made a mistake.

Thought I had a Good AdSense CTR

I use AdSense on a lot of sites and over them all my CTR was around 1.7% for May 2008. An AdSense CTR of 1.7% isn’t particularly high, but this includes sites in niches that are just not going to result in a great deal of clicks (like Classic Literature, CTR below 1%!).