Posted on September 3
Everett Sizemore made me want to blog a little more, so I thought I would give this to you.
If you’ve never used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk), you’re missing out. MTurk lets you pay people for specific tasks. These tasks could be things like writing short articles, but anyone can write a short article. MTurk does let you do a few other things that can make you a lot of money. I’m still making money using MTurk so I can’t divulge ALL of my secrets, I can give you some tips and let you adopt them into your marketing plan.
1. Content Generation – Would 100 real reviews make your product review site stand out? I have paid about $.10 per review. Works great with a WordPress review plugin.
2. Legit Comments – Want to make your site appear well trafficked but get sick of posting comments to yourself?
3. Social Bookmarking – I’ve moved into more automated methods of social bookmarking, but if you’re still doing it yourself, this is a great way to outsource it cheaply.
The following are likely against the terms of service for at least one of the sites, so use at your own risk.
4. Digg Votes – Want to get a site to the front page? Would 100 votes from unique IP’s and unique Digg accounts help? Make sure you’re sending traffic to the page, not directly to Digg.
5. StumbleUpon - I hate SU traffic, it’s pretty much useless. They don’t buy anything, they don’t click ads so to me, they’re a waste of time. If you can monetize this traffic, use it the same way as you would Digg.
6. Arbitrage – DEFINITELY against the TOS…Pay $.25 per signup to a CPA offer that doesn’t require a CC. NeverBlue has some good email offers.
Keep in mind, these are only suggestions to help you think outside of the box. I personally don’t suggest that you violate the terms of use of any of the sites listed, including MTurk. MTurk is a little trigger happy to ban your account…Trust me on that.
Posted on July 27
Typically webmasters start out with Adsense as their revenue stream. While it’s easiest and definitely quick to use, Adsense is not always the best performer if you’re looking to earn money online from your websites. With Adsense you’ll always run into a couple problems.
1. You can’t presell. With an affiliate link, you can talk about the product so your visitor knows what to expect when they get to the advertisers page. You can give them the price and details, and if they still click, they’re likely to buy since they already know everything. If that isn’t the product they’re looking for, they’ll continue browsing your site. You’ll make a sale, or keep a visitor. With Adsense you don’t get the chance to do either.
2. You’ll earn less. While I can’t say that every single one of my sites that has affiliate links makes more with those affiliate links, a majority do.
3. All your eggs in one basket. If all of your income is coming from one source and something happens to that source, your revenue drops to $0.
4. Unknown revenue share. This has always been the biggest issue with me. Google doesn’t tell you how much you’re going to earn. In fact, they tell you how much they will give you per click, after you send them the clicks. It’s totally backwards but until they have a reason to give you that info, they never will.
Moving away from Adsense is tough, and I wouldn’t suggest dumping it all together. Start slow, remove the ads from one page and replace it with affiliate links. Test it for a month and see what the revenue is like when compared to Adsense.
Posted on March 18
I couldn’t really figure out a way to title this post without using the word “spamming” in the title, but here you go.
This morning I experimented with a grey hat method of getting links and traffic. The basic premise is changing your referrer to always show a link you want instead of the page you’re actually coming from.
Then when a website owner views their logs/stats, they see your link. Generally you want this link to be something important like your site or a money making site.
Here is my secret tip. Set up your referrer that targets a specific demographic, then start browsing those sites. Click all the links in the comments, the blogroll, the in-post links, etc.
I don’t know how well it will work, but I set up a specific test page and will keep you posted! If it works, I’ll give you the exact method I used and the tools to make it work.
Posted on February 22
I don’t normally tell you about ideas that I don’t do myself, but I do see a huge opportunity for the right graphic and vector art designers. There are a handful of great companies that play the middle man in finding buyers for photography and vector creations.
My favorite is iStockPhoto.com. I’ve been buying stock photography for over 4 years from iStockPhoto and am a huge fan.
In the last year there has been a shift from traditional photography towards vector art. Take a look at this search for “trees”. Out of the 32 pictures for sale on the first page, 15 of them are vector. That’s almost 50% of the top pictures of trees are not real trees, they’re digital art.
If you are talented, browse the popular files, or just do a search like I did and you’ll find people selling stuff that you can make at home that will earn you money. Each time you sell something, iStockPhoto.com will pay you a royalty on that picture or graphic. The more you sell, the more you earn. The more you design, the more you sell. Design one or two each day and you’ll be earning a lot of money online in no time!
