Archive for the 'Making Money' Category

Alternatives to Google Adsense

Published
by
KevinKarter
on December 4, 2008
in Advertising Networks and Making Money
. 5 Comments

Every now and then, people get banned from Google Adsense for some reason. I hold the view that Google will ban you only if you have done something wrong. Not otherwise. But many people have many different views on that. Anyway, this post is not about how not to get banned from Google Adsense, but on what the alternatives are if you do get banned from Adsense! This is one of the most common question asked of me by email, what are the alternatives to monetize a blog, or a website if you cannot use Google Adsense.

Here is the list of a few Google Adsense alternatives:

  • Kontera - Kontera is not exactly an alternative to Google Adsense, being an inline text link, but it is something that works best with it. This is my second best earner after Adsense.
  • ValueClickMedia - ValueClickMedia is one of the two best CPM/CPC based network (the other being CasaleMedia). It is difficult to get accepted into it. But if you get into it with a quality site, there is nothing quite like it.
  • CasaleMedia - The second best CPM/CPC based quality network which can make you good money online. Not that difficult to get accepted and they have many quality campaigns for good CPM and CPC.
  • NeverBlueAds - My first choice for proper affiliate programs. They have good collection of advertisers and quite good support too.
  • ClickBank - If you are new to affiliate marketing and want to try selling digital products, this is the best network available. You get auto accepted. They have digital products for most of the niches on the net. So whatever the niche of your website, you will find a product to sell on it.
  • Adbrite - Adbrite is also a good Google Adsense alternative for making money online. This works best for website which have a huge number of impressions. I use them for my low quality websites which have quite high page impressions.
  • Chitika - Chitika is a network whichwas quite bad, but has learned from it’s mistakes and is now quite good. They have started different kinds of new products.
  • Amazon - I use amazon by putting just one or two related books/cd/dvds link on all my sites. It is good to just put one related link of a book or related product and forget about it. I am starting to get some good results with their widget products as well.
  • TNX - A new link selling network which allows you to sell links on any site with or without traffic, or even decent Page Rank. So if you have a new site, you can make some money with TNX by just selling one unique link on a page.
  • WidgetBucks - If you have a website related to electronics products or other shopping related sites, then you can make good money with widget bucks
  • Adtoll - Adtoll is a new and promising Adbrite type of advertising network, which allows you to sell your own links as well as RON links.
  • Adversal - If you run wallpapers, pictures or celebrity related sites and you don’t have a problem running pop-ups, then Adversal is the best pop-up network at the moment.

What about you? Tell us about your experience with these networks and any others that you like.

Affiliate Strategies for Newbies

Published
by
KevinKarter
on November 2, 2008
in Advertising Networks, Making Money and internet marketing
. 0 Comments

Many times I get asked a simple question from newbies:

I am a newbie to affiliate marketing and PPC, can you let me know few tips and tricks to getting started?

Well, I don’t have any tricks up my sleeve, but yes, there are some tips.

I think the easiest way to learn affiliate marketing and PPC is to try it yourself. What is the simplest place to start? In my opinion, many online marketers have started and having good success with clickbank, and is a good place to start. I recommend it.

For newbies in this field, its is difficult to make websites (or landing pages) as it involves a lots of different stuff. So, the simplest way is to send the traffic directly to advertiser’s website. It is not the best way, but it is the simplest way to start. Remember to do a little bit of research and try to choose a non-saturated clickbank niche for your campaigns. Here is a list of good campaigns and advertisers, I would advise that you try some yourself to see how they work:

  1. Commission Blueprint - huge commissions and easy conversions makes good money for affiliates marketers.
  2. Make Money Flipping Websites - a video series teaches anyone how to earn money from home flipping websites.
  3. 12 Month Millionaire - amazing money making secrets of a 28 year old who made $100 million in two years!
  4. Web 2.0 Wealth - learn how to make multiple incomes from custom Wordpress blog with multiple income options.
  5. Flipping Domain Names - learn how to make $1,000 a month simply buying and selling domain names.
  6. Recession Rescue System - 3 giants of the internet marketing world show you how to make money in a recession.
  7. Blogging to the Bank - the best blogging advice on the net. Highly recommended.
  8. Secret Affiliate Code - send traffic and make money, great promotional tools are here

So what are you waiting for, get started today and soon you’ll be earning good money.

The Mistake of the Make Money Online Brigade

Published
by
KevinKarter
on February 11, 2008
in Blog, Making Money and internet marketing
. 6 Comments

What is the biggest mistake any ‘newbie’ can make when starting a Make Money Online business? They  plan to make money in the “make money online” niche!

But that is what you are doing Kevin I hear you say! Yes, but I am not doing this to make money, I am doing this to tell everybody how much I am making from all my other niches :-)

So why is it a mistake for newbies to start in the Make Money Online niche?
Making money in this niche is not an easy task and here are some of the reasons why it may not be a very good idea to start your online business in “make money online” niche:

  1. It is already a saturated niche with some big players like problogger.net, shoemoney.com, johnchow.com, and thousands of others making some serious cash.
  2. The people that visit such sites are webmasters and most of them are ad blind. So it is very difficult to make money from webmasters.
  3. Most of the people in this niche already know, and tell the tricks in this field. So it would be difficult to find and write something new which is not known to them.
  4. CPC costs in this niche is much less than others niches like finance, auto, health etc.
  5. If you find something new/great in this niche, it gets copied/duplicated quite fast on blogs bigger than yours as well in some other form. And they get the credit instead of you.
  6. Huge search engine competition in this niche.

So, in what niche should you try to make money?

Try something which you are interested in. It can be anything. My suggestion is think outside “make money online” niche. Spend some time, do some research and find a niche which interest you and does not have massive competition.

Affiliate or Adsense ?

Published
by
KevinKarter
on February 10, 2008
in Advertising Networks, Making Money and internet marketing
. 11 Comments

I have a website in the health niche. This site is about 2 years old and makes around $500/month consistently with adsense since last year. This site has a top 5 ranking on most search engines for some very good keywords and gets around 1,000 unique visitors a day. So, with those 30,000 uniques and $500 in adsense, I was happy with $16 eCPM. Who wouldn’t be? That is a pretty good eCPM. So, I was very happy with this site. Until a couple of days ago.

So what happened two days ago?

I got an email from one of my competitors, saying that he is willing to buy my site (they had seen the search engine rankings for it). I told them that the site is not for sale. Then, they gave me an offer which was very difficult to refuse. An offer of $20,000 for the site. I was shocked. Is my site that worth? How he is going to monetize the site making that much money? All these questions came to my mind.

At first, with the amazing offer price, I was just about to sell it. But then I thought, wait, why not try and see what he is going to do with the site. I can do that myself and see if my earnings can be increased. So I started researching the related sites and found that most of my competitors are not running Adsense but running some affiliate links which have some very big payouts.

I put those affiliate links on my site 48 hours ago and here are the stats I see for those 48 hours:

So in 48 hours, that’s a total of $652.60. So if I keep earning that sort of money every day, that would be around $9,789.00 per month from this site alone! Even if I average the figures down a bit to $200 per day (instead of current $326.30), I will be making at least $6,000 per month from this site, which was only making me $500 per month through Adsense until now.

So, Adsense is not always the best way to monetize your website. If you can the right type of affiliate programs which pay well and suit your niche, you can earn more, a LOT more!

Later on this month I will update you all on how the month went.

So, whats next?
As of now I have kept adsense on the site. I will keep them for next 5 days (total of seven days). Then I will remove them for next 7 days and will compare my affiliate earnings from these two weeks. That will decide whether I should remove adsense completely from the site or not.

What do you think? Have any of you had similar experience with changing from adsense to affiliate, or even the other way around?