Erik’s Blog: Board Shorts and Business Suits

As I was sitting out on the waves today during my lunch break I began to think about some recent “affiliate” income that I was able to generate. It got me to thinking how great the offer is and how it essentially creates $35 for the economy.

Some of you may remember one of my first posts titled Wanna Make $25. It could have been better titled “Here’s $25 for Free” or earn “Earn 10% On an Investment in One Day.” But either way it got the point across. Inspired by Steve Pavlina’s post (surprise surprise) about offering his ING referrals through his website I thought I would do the same. Besides I was learning about affiliate income being generated through other websites and this was a sure fire way to have people make me $10.

For those of you who don’t know the deal goes like this. INGDirect.com is an online banking firm with very few physical banks anywhere. Essentially 1 per major city. Having less people and leases allows them to give back more to their customers in the way of interest. Currently their interest rate on a basic savings account is 3.9%. Better than a lot of CDs that I have seen from local banks. When you sign-up with them you are allowed to get people to sign-up through you and make some money. When the referral you acquire joins INGDirect by funding their account with at least $250, you’ll get $10 credited to your account but better yet your referral will get $25. They don’t even have to put any more money in the account and they still get to keep the $25.

Yup, the only affiliate program I know of where your customer gets payed, guaranteed.

The best part is, you tie your checking account to the savings account and transfer money between the two just like you would if you had a savings account at your own bank. It’s that easy to fun the account. You can withdraw money whenever and you can fund the account whenever. Just like your bank it takes a day or two to clear between accounts and that’s it. No fees, nothing.

Well, as I mentioned I posted that about 5 months ago when this blog first went live. Since then I have gotten 0, the doughnut, to sign-up. I had one person email me about it but no one sign-up. Then, out of the blue, on Monday I got an email from someone interested in getting an ING account but not wanting to fund their account without the opportunity to get the free money.

All I had to do was get her email address and her first and last name and send her an email from my ING account with that information and there you have it. Done! $25 for her, $10 for me, $35 of free money created.

By the way if you would like to get and ING Direct account and make $25 for free send me and email at evossman@gmail.com and include your return email address, First, and Last name, and I’ll get you a referral link as soon as possible.

FREE MONEY

Here are a few more quick links to some fellow bloggers talking about their earnings for the past few months. I find these interesting, helpful, and motivational. You might also pick up some tips from these guys and gals about how they’re making their mark on the internet entrepreneur industry.

Bootstrapper Notes nets $68.83/day in February

Blogging my pursuit makes $89.47 for February

Green Affiliate Selling ads and increased AdSense Earnings

Hope these keep your enthusiasm and spirits high for your internet endeavours.

Erik

Spurred on by recent posts about earnings from The Internet Cash Flow Guy making $62 last month, Burts AIS sites making him $162 a day!!!, and some guy that just published a brand new site, not indexed by Google ,which made him over $1800 in one day???**

Now I don’t have the luck of that last guy**, and I am slowly crawling at the heels of the Internet Cash Flow Guy (Burt is far off and definitely motivation to succeed) but I did see some increase in profits from my sites. The profits that I am seeing are most likely due to two things.

1. Putting more money making opportunities on my sites in the way of ads and affiliate links.
and
2. Posting more frequently. February was a very busy month for me, as was the beginning of March but I am getting back into a routine of posting and trying to work myself into an efficient blogger and site developer.

Earnings for the previous 2 months were:

February - $1.03
March - $7.08

I hope to continue this upward trend but realize that I will need to continue my progress in the right direction.

**By the way that last guy was an April fools joke he played on a lot of people, but a good way to drive traffic to his site.

Forums are tough in every sense of the word. From getting people to join and keep visiting to getting people to moderate them, Forums are tough. But from that hard work of sticking with it can come great rewards.

I recently came upon, through a co-worker who knows this guy, a random blog published by someone who runs a Forum that I happen to belong to. This publisher recently was offered $25,000 for a golf forum that had, at last check, over 6,000 members and over 15,000 pages indexed in Google.

The Forum is Golf Rewind and if you visit the site you’ll notice the publisher hasn’t done much in the way of monetizing the site. Therefore I think $25,000 was a shot in the dark offer and with some monetization on the publishers part he could get a lot more than that offer. Which I think is why he didn’t sell the forum.

It would be interesting to know the traffic numbers as well as why he doesn’t monetize every single forum thread. I see only a few with small Google ads placed in obscure places that probably don’t have high click-through rates.

I will try and track this person down and find out more about the offer and the plan for Golf Rewind but this publisher has put in a lot of time and effort making a site that has high traffic, excellent repeat visitors and a good place to make money. Forums are tough to maintain and you gotta give him credit for keeping with it.

33 Domain Names
3 blogs
1 niche content site
average about $0.20 a day in some type of income

The $0.20 a day earnings are promising but nothing to write home about. The domain names, well I’m not parking any of them with income stream sites so making money on those is non-existent. I have, however, learned a lot about blogging and website development in general. Enough I feel that I have given myself a good base to really jump into the online empire building world.

I have been hemming and hawing over the question “Is it too late to get into the online game?” My conclusion. Heck no. The amount internet users grows daily and with previously poverty stricken countries finding wealth that number shouldn’t slow down any time soon.

Therefore, over the next 3 weeks I am going to try and develop a base site layout that I can apply blogs to and build sites. My plan is to develop a quality CSS based blog layout and use wordpress to publish my blogs. Then I am going to develop a php based niche content site layout (as well as using CSS) and publish a few more of those. My goal is to have 5 more, in addition to the 3 blogs I keep now, within a month.

My goal is to streamline everything. Use one statistics package, an easily maintained blog publisher, easy to add content layout for niche sites, and a good promotional plan. I will have to schedule writing times everyday to write on each blog and update content based sites.

It will take some time to setup but I feel I have learned enough about building websites and maintaining them that if I execute a good plan I will be able to easily keep this many sites while working 9-5, running, playing golf, tennis, and being social. We’ll see.

Are you looking for a list of ways to monetize your blog, website, feed, email, or niche site. Well look no further. I think I have covered darn near every program that is out there. I did a bit of research and found the if you are looking for an alternative to Google’s Adsense you are going to have a hard time finding a similar payout. YPN is rumored to pay more and if you have the right impulse buying traffic chitika can make you some good money. In my findings I also found a few sites that let you monetize your email so for instance all those email lists you might keep to make people return to your site can make you money.

I have listed 40 programs below and a brief description. Please feel free to comment and ad if you wish. In searching through all the ads posts and ads search results I found that a lot of the ad services previously mentioned have been bought out by companies such as marketbanker by adbrite. Wonder if Google will buy out Chitika. I know there’s rumor of it. Anyway, I hope this list helps you out.

Google AdSense - the mother of all advertising, if you get in, tread carefully and try your hardest not to upset them. Through all my research I haven’t found anyone who said any other ad program was better than this.

YPN - Yahoo Publisher Network is Yahoo’s alternative to AdSense. I have seen mixed reviews on payout. Darren at problogger.net switched back to AdSense on his blog but kept it on other sites. This tells me it seems to be site specific, try it out and leave your feedback.

Chitika - their e-minimalls advertising is also another competitor for Google AdSense. The claim here is that they work on impulse buying. My feeling is that since it is such a large ad and only one product you need to have your content well suited for the ad type.

MSN Adcenter - a Beta version of MSN’s answer to AdSense has been launched. I’ve only heard of very few people being offered a spot in the beta test but I’ll keep you posted if I hear of earnings reports from fellow bloggers

BlogAds - this advertising company is for those that have a lot of traffic. Steve Pavlina recently joined up with blog ads and is offering a pretty top spot on his site, and MSN bought out a ton of ads last year from blog ads making a pretty big splash in the blog world.

PeakClick - this ad program is another text and banner type ad service based in Austria offering payment in EURO’s. I found one blogger using peakclick on her niche sites, check out her post about PeakClick and for updates on earnings

DoubleClick - this is another advertising company that is used by the heavy hitters like MTV.com, myspace.com, friendster.com, and SI.com. DoubleClick is used for higher traffic sites as you can see but something to shoot for!

Intellitext - this ad service is a very interesting alternative to AdSense. They offer advertisement that is hidden within your content, when a user scrolls over your text an link to an appropriate ad pops up

TextAds Dot Biz - ads look like Google AdSense ads and YPN but I don’t believe you can customize the colors. If I get more sites I may try this one out, I like the way they look.

Kanoodle - their claim to fame is BrightAds that are used to grab the users attention, which are very similar to AdSense, even down to the Ads by Kanoodle in the bottom right. They also have pop-ups that land the user on a new page when they click, definitely something AdSense should do to allow your site to still be loaded. Again their payout isn’t quite what Google can provide.

AdBrite - text based ads that pay via check, you can also advertise on some pretty big sites like friendster.com, and ebaumsworld.com which a 1 week spot will cost you $2,360.00 for a text link

AdGenta - another text link ad service focused on blogs, they allow you advertise on your RSS feed as well. I believe this service is powered by Miva

AVNads - this alternative allows you to set the price for ads on your site and they give you 75% of the sale price. You control the look of the ads that are on your site and you have the right to reject ads as well.

CrispAds - has both text and graphical banner ads, with three methods to make money. 1. you can submit your site so crispads shops you around to find specific advertisers, 2. earn $0.20 per click from your choice of keywords based on ads 3. earn 70% of revenue per click using your choice of keywords

IndustryBrains - allows you to charge a premium to advertisers and offer ads through searches, text, or graphical banner ads

OneMonkey - sell text based ads on your sites, tracking conversion rates and they claim you have control over your ad revenue unlike AdSense

Pheedo - provides payment every 30 days via paypal and allows users to show text ads earning them 65% of revenue generated per click

Text Link Ads - this program uses humans to review your site and sells space on your site for a flat monthly rate that you see 50% of.

TargetPoint - has 4 ways to earn money, adpoint - exitpoint - imagepoint - underpoint, these are kind of self explanatory but offer you interesting alternatives. They also offer better conversion rates for higher traffic sites

ValueClick - has several programs for publishers (that’s you) and advertisers. Commission Junction is one that I believe is used by EBay for their affiliate program. CJ has lots of affiliate programs that you can sign up for like EBay and could really keep you busy trying to monetize your site.

Clicksor - content based text ads, banners, popups, XML feed, and a search box. They also offer a 10% commission on referrals with a $5.00 sign-up bonus per referral. Payments are bi-weekly by paypal or check and payout is 70% using their ads with the option to earn 85% if you provide your own ad programs.

BidVertiser - claim to target the highest bidders to your site for your content, $10 payout through paypal, block unwanted ads, customize ad layout, make money from clicks.

AdKnowledge - graphical ads for your website, as well as for your email list. This is a great way to monetize that email list you use to bring visitors back to your site!

RevenuePilot - earn 60% of clickthrough revenue, and a 10% referral bonus for life! Text based ads with search results

SearchFeed - a search based site ad-on, earn money when people search and click through, or on referrals of advertisers or publishers

FastClick - similar banner and text ads with the option of pop-ups and the potential to earn up to 65% of click revenue, you need at least 3,000 page views per month, and your site has to be legitimate, claim no more than 2 previous banner ads should be on your page

YesAdvertising - accept and pay advertising from all over the world, guaranteed payout, bi-weekly payment via check or paypal, 5 level referral and text and banner ads

BidClix - they say you can use this with Google AdSense and allow you to choose your price for you ads spots and your advertisers after they choose you

AdHearUs - pay per click, 18 ad formats, content driven, multiple ads per site

AllFeeds - text ads, banners, pop-aways, that use your content and underline the words related to their ads that users can click on

AffiliateSensor - use clickbanks ads and get keyword based text ads

CBprosense - like affiliate sensor

Quigo AdSonar - basic text ads, let you specify defaults, unsure about payouts

Nixxie - they partner with Kanoodle, Miva, and Overture so I would imagine their payment isn’t that high because there are more people that the money has to go through before it reaches you.

Mirago - offering search and contextual based ads for your site

Miva - neat thing about them is that they allow you to put contextual and search ads on your 404 error page. This would be good for those of you who know how you can customize your 404 page, they also offer suggestions on how to do this.

BannerBoxes - 70% payout, you approve ads, and become a member of all the affiliate programs they have access to

contextWeb - customize ads, they claim a higher revenue stream but that seems par for the course with all these alternatives to Google AdSense

ExpoActive - choose the ads you like based on your content and change the ads so they match your layout

CoverClicks - yet another website offering an ad program, check out their site though it has a futuristic terminator feel and sound, gotta turn on the sound