Make Money

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%!).

I’ve been subscribed to a handful of marketing type newsletters for ages now, but rarely read them (1073 unread messages in that email folder).

With the creation of my 45 Year Old Millionaire site (my new inspiration to make more money) I’m looking for new ways to make money online and compared to people like Joel Comm I’m a newbie at marketing

Looking at the latest newsletter/emails from some well known marketing experts I see one from Joel Comm:

Subject: [Joel's Tips] – Do You Have Multiple Revenue Streams?

I was thinking about this yesterday when I reread through my Million Dollar Business Ideas When Disabled! looking for mistakes: always a good idea to take a second look at an article with fresh eyes a day or two later.

I was going to add this to my last post Million Dollar Business Ideas When Disabled! but the AdSense program deserves a page of it’s own.

When I got into the AdSense program I didn’t think it was worth much of my time, which was a mistake in hindsight! Signed for the AdSense program in February 2002, according to the “Choose date range” search facility when choosing “All Time” it was the 22nd of February I was accepted and the 27th of February when I got my first impressions.

On the first day received 110 impressions and made $0.08.

It took until Tuesday, 30 March 2004 for my first day of making more than $1 (made $2.10 that day ).