5 Ways I Make Money Online from my Blog

Filed under Make Money Online by on May 19, 2011 at 7:34 pm {2,777 comments}

Make Money OnlineThere are many ways I make money online. This blog is a humble attempt to document these and tell you that it isn’t rocket science. If I can do it, so can you. After all, that’s the whole motto of my blog in the first place!

Anyway, here are the ways in which I made money in the past, and so can you. I am discussing these methods with respect to my other blog, which is on the topic of penny auctions. My Penny Auctions Blog is a blogspot blog which I started less than an year ago and I already make some good money off it. Here are the ways in which I have monetized it –

1. Google Adsense

This is the simplest method of monetization that I know of. It is simple because you don’t really need to do anything. To get an Adsense account, you just apply for it with Google with a blog or website and you should be approved very soon. Once you are approved, it is easy to earn money with Google Adsense. All you need to do is insert their codes in the blog and you are all set. The advertisements will show automatically.

The reason it is simple is because it is very straightforward. Google will crawl the blog and look for all the relevant keywords. Then it will show the relevant advertisements on the blog. Because Google has the largest database of all advertisers, you can get the best deals. When ads are relevant, people are more likely to click on them. Google Adsense is a pay per click system, so you get paid every time someone clicks on your ads. Remember never to violate their TOS, e.g. by trying to fool Google by clicking your own ads from a different computer, asking friends to click ads for you, etc.

Adsense is good, but it is not the most lucrative. For my blog, Adsense brings in some steady income but it is not the main source of revenue from my blog. There are several other ways to make money from blogs.

2. Direct Advertising: Banner Ads

Direct advertisements through banners is a very good way to make money for bloggers once they get enough traffic to their blog. The more the number of visitors, the more the advertisers will be willing to pay for the banners they place on your blog. How much money you charge depends on many factors. At my blog, the average rate of a 250×250 banner is $50/month, which is not too bad. Blogs that get better traffic will command higher rates.

The main disadvantage of direct advertising is that you have to do the searching. I write to many advertisers in the field of penny auctions and only a few are interested in advertising on my blog. Thus I need to send out multiple emails pitching my blog and if they like it, they will get back. Most of the times I don’t get any replies.

If a blog is more popular, you can always include a link which says ‘Advertise Here’ and you should get advertisers who contact you. I cannot do it for my blog, since it isn’t so big – at least for now! 🙂

I will write a detailed post on how you should find advertisers for banners and how to email them about your blog. For now, you should know that it is hard work but it is definitely lucrative.

3. Featured Blog Posts

Featured Blog Posts are an excellent way to earn money as a blogger. For advertisers, they get to publish on a famous blog in the niche with plenty of visitors. In addition, advertisers can get a good dofollow backlink from an authority blog in this area.

So how do featured blog posts work? Well, if a new penny auction comes up with a promotion or news or some other exciting feature that it thinks will attract bidders, it publishes this on my blog as a featured blog post. In return, I get paid for it. The average cost of a featured blog post on my blog is about $25/post but it varies – for regular advertisers, I like to combine banner + featured posts into a single package.

The process of finding advertisers for featured blog posts is similar to the process of finding advertisers for banner ads. You write to individual websites and ask them if they want to buy featured blog posts. You explain how awesome your blog is and what benefit they will derive from it.

4. Selling Backlinks

This is not directly from the blog but through article directories. I have articles published in top article directories like EzineArticles on penny auctions. I offer advertisers a backlink from these sites. Since the articles are already published, I can sell the backlinks as soon as I finalize a deal. Here again, the charge is about $20-25 per backlink. Advertisers know you write quality articles only through your blog and you should contact them as such. Show them the value of high PR backlinks, especially for the new websites.

5. Affiliate Marketing

This is my favorite because it brings in the most revenue. I promote websites on my blog which have affiliate programs. It is important to make sure that the affiliate products/websites that you promote are good quality because as a blogger, reputation is very important and priceless. So I select the best sites in the niche and promote them on my blog. Whenever they get members from my blog, they pay me a percentage of sales.

So here it is, the 5 ways through which I earn money from my blog. What are your favorites? How do you monetize your blog? Don’t forget to share your story!

 

7 oDesk Tips for Freelancers

Filed under Freelancing, Make Money Online by on May 19, 2011 at 12:01 am {54 comments}

oDesk TipsThese oDesk tips will help freelancers get the oDesk jobs that they want. oDesk is a marketplace that brings freelancers and employers together. This is a way to bring workers and employers together so they can negotiate and work on a project. oDesk is just a medium for the interaction of the two parties and provides some safeguard mechanisms to facilitate the process smoothly but ultimately it is between the contractor (freelancer) and business owner (employer) to decide the terms of their work arrangement.

oDesk is a great way to start a freelancing career for anyone. It is completely free to join (there are no premium memberships, like at other freelancing sites like Elance or Guru) and has a flat rate of 10% fee for all payments made at oDesk, which is actually not too bad, at least for beginners. It is a really great way for someone to make money online by using his skills.

However, it is not easy to get the dream assignments at oDesk unless you follow these oDesk tips. This is because you will be competing against several candidates from across the globe. Some of them will have superior skill and experience while others might have a cost advantage compared to your bid. Therefore it is important to know and understand the best oDesk tips which will help you land your coveted job. There are regular tips on cover letters that you follow, but this post is written exclusively for oDesk cover letters.

oDesk Tip-1: Complete Your Profile

This is a very important part of your oDesk work experience which is often neglected by beginners. oDesk profiles are fairly comprehensive. You need to enter a lot of information regarding your previous experience, your skill sets, work portfolio, work samples, etc. It is very important that you take the time and effort to fill these out in a detailed manner. Potential employers do look at your complete profile, so it is important to appear professional.

Also remember never to bluff your way into a job – always be truthful about your skills. For example, oDesk asks you to assess your English skills. If you enter a 5, you better be good because it is not hard for an employer to make it out if you are anything less.

Another important aspect of the oDesk profile is including a portrait of yourself. This shows employers that you are genuine and serious about the work and are here on oDesk for the long term to make it as a freelancer.

A final tip is to make sure that your oDesk profile shows 100% complete by the time you are done. This way you can keep track of the essential elements like portfolio, resume, portrait, etc.

oDesk Tip-2: Make a Compelling Tagline

oDesk gives you an option to sell yourself in one line using a tagline. Use this wisely. When an employer looks at your profile, the first thing he sees is this tagline beside your name. It should be compelling and should showcase your strengths in that particular area. Don’t make it very generic, like “Excellent writer for hire”. Instead, make it very specific to your needs, like “Published author with 10 years of creative writing experience” or “Experienced copywriter with a Masters in English” or something that is right for you.

oDesk Tip-3: Take oDesk Skills Tests

Many employers want the best people and taking the oDesk skills tests not only shows that you are good but also shows that you are serious. Personally, I have taken and passed 14 tests related to writing, 9 of which show a Top 10% badge against the score. This is a good thing to have in your profile page.

Taking the oDesk skills tests is especially important for beginners who do not have a lot of work history and feedback. By passing these tests with flying colors, you are showing that even though you haven’t worked long at oDesk, you are serious about making a commitment to your freelancing career.

oDesk Tip-4: Never Bid Below What You are Worth

This is a common mistake made by people who are desperate to get their first job. They try to lower their rate to much below what they are worth. There are many job postings at oDesk aimed at people like these but this is not the right approach towards any freelancing career. Sure, as you gain in feedback and reputation within the community, you can demand higher prices but that doesn’t mean you under-sell yourself to write articles at $1/hour.

In the long run, you are always better off working on projects that are worth your time and effort and those are the employers you really want to be working with in the long term. You may have to prepare an additional 10-20 job applications but don’t sell yourself short. Follow all the other oDesk tips here and even without the feedback and experience, you can demand good wages.

oDesk Tip-5: Read the Complete Job Description

Different jobs have different requirements and it is very important to read the full job description before you decide to apply for it. Of late, many employers ask the freelancers to include a certain word or phrase in their cover letter, just to make sure they have read the full posting. I personally don’t like this a lot but many employers stand by this tactic to weed out the applicants. If you fail to mention that word or phrase, they will not even read your entire cover letter and you are simply rejected.

Also, reading the complete job description helps you prepare the right cover letter which is very important and discussed next.

oDesk Tip 6: Write Customized Cover Letters

As with traditional jobs, a cover letter can make or break the application. It is very important that you read and understand the full job description and know what skills are required. If you think you are suitable for the job, apply with a customized cover letter. The employer should see that you have read the full posting. Mention a point or two that he has written in the job opening description. Show your previous experience as relevant to what the job demands.

It is very common, especially for people new to oDesk, to simply make a general cover letter and post it for every job posting. This is a completely unprofessional and wrong way of approaching a freelancing job or career. Customized cover letters show you are genuinely interested in the job. And make no mistake, it is very easy to spot a general cover letter which is written for every post in the category and not specifically for the job at hand.

oDesk Tip-7: Maintain a Good, Long Term Relationship

This is a tip for the long term, which is very important. Today, I hardly look for new assignments at oDesk because I work with my previous clients with whom I have worked for long. Really long. It should be the same in your case as well. Once an assignment is completed, if you go over and beyond what was initially expected, not only will you get a great feedback but you will also get the future assignments.

Starting out on a freelancing career can be challenging but if you follow these oDesk tips and be serious about committing to freelancing, you can live off it and make a great career. You will find a lot of success stories at oDesk where contractors have successfully quit their day job and now work full time, freelancing at oDesk.

5 Worst Ways to Make Money Online

Filed under Make Money Online, Online Scams by on May 18, 2011 at 6:35 pm {1,185 comments}
Worst Ways to Make Money Online

Beware of Online Scams

What are the worst ways to make money online? Actually there are plenty. It is not hard to make money online when you know what you are doing. However, the main problem is, many people who are new to this area are not sure how to go about it. Millions of people dream of making a living online but few accomplish it. Part of the reason is that they get caught up in these myriad different ways that promise to help them make money online but are little more than scams. As a beginner, it is very important to know the right approach and method that will make money for you. Do not make the mistakes of taking up one of these worst ways to make money online –

1. Paid to Click (PTC)

This is perhaps the worst way to make money online ever designed. The reason it is popular is because it requires absolutely no skill, no commitment, no investment, no risk taking and no real effort to learn. It is then not surprising that the returns are so low. The way PTC or paid to click works is that you need to click on an advertiser link and be on the page for 20-30 seconds, after which you will get anywhere from $0.001 to $0.01 per visit.

If this were a job, you would perhaps need to work 100 hours a day to feed your family. The amount of money that you can make is surprisingly small. The payouts are deliberately made to be high so that many people can drop out. Actually it isn’t that high – say $10 is the norm but then to reach $10 you need 1000 clicks, which is about 1000 minutes of your time, including the loading of the pages and everything else. That is about 16 hours of work for $10!

As you can see, all you need to do is just click on sites and visit advertisers. There is nothing else that you need to do. You don’t require any skill and there is nothing to work smart. They do have some incentives for referrals but that is a low and hard process in itself. Worse, many of them don’t even have Paypal payments but will instead pay you through AlertPay or Liberty Reserve which make it extremely hard to transfer even the $10 to your bank account.

What is surprising is that PTC is one of the worst ways to make money online, yet people flock to it very often, especially the beginners who know no better. I wish I could gather them all and teach them a thing or two about real ways to make money online!

2. Paid to Surf

Paid to surf is another pathetic way to try to make money online. There can be manual surfing or auto-surfing where you need to install a software. The reasons are similar to the ones given above – the amount of money you can potentially make is very less. Paid to surf pays less than paid to click, so you can imagine that you might need to spend an eternity doing nothing to get paid with these programs. It is not really a way to make money.

In rare cases, you might want to use paid to surf programs to drive traffic to your site (of course you must beware never to use programs like Google Adsense in these sites, otherwise you will be banned) for whatever reason. This traffic will almost never convert but you might want higher traffic stats for whatever reason. Even then, it is one of the worst ways to make money online.

3. Pyramid or Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) Schemes

These are nothing but scams. Pyramid schemes continue to flourish, especially on the internet in spite of their notoriety . I would say these are worse than the above two because at least in Paid to click and Paid to Surf, you don’t need to make any initial investment. In MLM marketing or Pyramid schemes, you are required to buy a worthless product and then promote it to your friends so they buy it and so on, and the people who join under bring you a commission.

There are very few genuine multi-level marketing programs but most on the internet are total scams. The products are inherently worthless and you are required to keep selling these worthless products to others. The point of pyramid schemes is that they are by design unsustainable and many people in the pyramid stand to lose a lot of money. The only people who really make money are people running it.

4. Online Data Entry Jobs

Don’t get me wrong, there are many genuine data entry jobs online, which is to be expected. However, most of the advertisements that you see require you to “buy” an initial package for say $49.95 only. This is ridiculous. If you really want genuine data entry jobs, try Elance or oDesk. These online data entry jobs will again need you to sell these packages to friends, which is kind of like a pyramid scheme again. Since these offer no real jobs and need you to pay upfront, these are one of the worst ways to make money online because it is totally misleading.

5. High Yield Investment Programs (HYIP)

These are classic Ponzi schemes. You would be surprised by the number of people who think they can get something out of nothing. All HYIPs are scams, without exception. If only people would think with a clear head before “investing” their money in these programs.

Anyway, the typical sales pitch for HYIPs is that they need to money to invest in some very technical and complicated investments or Forex trading. Then, they claim to give you extraordinary rates of interest. Many years ago, it was akin to “double your money in a month” but now it is more “believable” about 10-15% a month. Still, this is just a ponzi scheme and there are no investments that guarantee this return. After a saturation point is reached, the site will wrap up with all the money.

Bonus. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is a crowdsourcing microtasking platform where digital workers spend their time doing digital tasks … for a few pennies. Tasks typically take 10-15 minutes at least, and you’ll get paid about 10-15 cents on those on an average. You’d be lucky to make $1/hour, and $2/hour is probably the maximum anyone can make. As to why so many people actually work there, that has even baffled the experts who are actively researching this. Don’t become one of their subjects!

So these are some of the worst ways to make money online. If you are aware of other common newbie traps, do comment and let me know and I’ll include those in further posts.

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