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New Social Networking Sites

Simonne — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 09:14:31 +0000

Social networking seems to be very important for internet marketers willing to promote their blogs and other types of websites. This can sometimes become annoying for the social networking members who are only seeking for fun and interaction with their peers. Not once, Stumble Upon users gave negative votes to all SEO or internet marketing related submissions, without even trying to read what was all about in those articles. Digg social networking power users don’t like blogs. Some groups founders in Searchles don’t like anything, as they would accuse you for spamming t6heir groups, even if you try to keep your submissions relevant to the group topics.

Only think of affiliate stores, hubpages or Squidoo lenses: no social networking site loves them, so besides the fact that such submissions do not get any vote, their owners may even get banned or suspended for a certain period of time, if they repeatedly submit such entries. Web directories owners don’t like them, either. So promoting such pages can be really challenging, or it can cost a lot of money. Yes, you can always use PPC to drive traffic to your sites, but this can eat up a lot of money before becoming profitable, if ever.

Two Social Networks Dedicated For Affiliates Launched Last Week

TheFB - The Fast Bookmarker

TheFB.net is a Digg-like social networking website which welcomes any kind of submissions, not only blog articles or scientific pages, or latest news. You can submit there even your BANS or Amazon affiliate sites, without fearing rejection.
TheFB belongs to Terry Didcott, author of The Honest Way, a website which outlines strategies for starting an online business from the scratch, and which includes also a support forum, where you can interact with other internet marketers and discuss any issues you may have in this field.

BlogLancer

BlogLancer is our newest production: a place for bloggers and affiliate marketers who want to bring their work into attention and to generate buzz for their pages. Like TheFB, BlogLancer also allows submissions of any kind of affiliate website, blog or free minisite, and it is based on the same Digg-like script, Pligg.

Both Terry and ourselves are focused on helping people make money with their websites, and we are proud to offer you these new tools for boosting your pages’ authority.

Registration is very easy for both social networks. You can start submitting pages in less than 30 seconds from registration, and you need to get only 5 votes from the other community members in order to get your stories published on the front page.

Please be aware though, that we don’t put an equal sign between spamming and social networking, so please, if you think of doing less than legal things, than these are not the places for you, as you’d get banned in no time.

We also want to keep our social networks family safe, so please do not submit anything that you wouldn’t allow your children to see.

Thank you, and happy social networking!

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Make Money Online With Bloggeries Blog Directory Affiliate Program

Simonne — Fri, 30 May 2008 21:22:14 +0000

Do you already run a “make money online” blog? If you do, there’s a new opportunity for you to grab some quick cash online: The Bloggeries Affiliate Program. Bloggeries, a forum for bloggers, runs a special web directory for blogs and they would pay you to get them customers: for each blogger who buys a directory listing with Bloggeries, you get $20.

Affiliate commissions payments schedule

Payments will be sent monthly, on the first of each month for the previous one, exclusively via PayPal.

Who’s Bloggeries anyway?

Bloggeries is the first blogs directory which has an affiliate program in place. At least it is the first one I’ve heard about.

Affiliate commissions structure

This is a 2-tier affiliate program, which means that you get paid for people you refer and for people referred by your referrals. You’ll be paid $20US flat rate for all approved blog directory submissions you refer directly, and $5US for each approved blog directory submission sent from someone you referred.

What if I don’t write about making money online?

Chances are, if you read our blog, that you are currently trying, or you intend to learn how to make money online. As one of the keys to getting good rankings in search engines is to gather links, you could consider to Get Listed on Bloggeries, which is a PR6 directory. Regular submissions are subject to a $34.99 one time fee. If you wish to get a featured listing, this comes with an annual fee of $49.99.

Signing up with The Bloggeries Affiliate Program would bring you $10 instant bonus.

How To Make An Affilliate Store With Affilistore And Datafeeds

Simonne — Thu, 29 May 2008 12:58:11 +0000

Affiliate stores have a big advantage: once you do the initial setup and link building, they are pretty much the “set and forget” type of businesses, unlike blogs which require content, and good content, and even better content, and still bring you barely any income.

Affiliates stores can be produced in many ways, from writing your own mysql and php based code, to using dedicated scripts like BANS for eBay affiliate shops, or Associate-o-Matic for Amazon affiliate stores, or Affilistore 2.0 for datafeed-based affiliate stores.

This is a video tutorial of setting up an affiliate store using the following elements:

Affilistore 2.0 - free affiliate shops script
Datafeed from a merchant in the shareasale.com affiliate network.

After setting up the affiliate store, as shown in the video tutorial, I’m going to do the following:

Submit the site to 1000 free web directories. Tool used: Website Submitter (the test version is free, the paid tool is $47)
Write one article about perfumes and submit it to about 200 article directories. Tool used: Article Submitter (the test version is free, the paid tool is $47)
Comment on about 10-20 do-follow blogs in the perfumes-cosmetics niche.
Bookmark all pages of the website with social bookmarking sites. Tool used: Bookmarking Demon (free alternative: Social Poster - this takes much longer, but if you don’t have money, it’s still good)
Let the affiliate store “ripe” for a while, get indexed by Google, and get some traffic
Watch the stats: build more links anchored on the keywords that show in my stats and I’m not number one in Google for.
Add more categories, based on long-tail searches observations: if I see a lot of visits from, let’s say “Chanel perfumes”, I’ll add a new category in the sidebar, called “Chanel perfumes”. This would generate a new page for my shop, with an URL containing my keyword, so I increase the chances of getting even more traffic for that keyword.

Please keep in mind that I don’t intent to rank quickly for very competitive keywords. This will come with time (months, or even years). In the beginning I just want to get the shop indexed by Google and ranked for as many long tail keywords as possible.

How To Set Up An Amazon Affiliate Store Using Associate-o-Matic

Simonne — Tue, 13 May 2008 19:34:24 +0000

This is a video of myself setting up Associate-o-Matic on a web domain. After watching it, you’ll hopefully be able to set up your own Amazon affiliate stores, on your domains.

Please be aware that, prior to installing Associate o Matic, you need to have your own domain and hosting.

As this is the first time I’m using Camtasia Studio, and my first time when I record myself doing something, please excuse the small hesitations I’ve had a couple of times.

This affiliate store for Amazon Kindle ebooks can be viewed online at www.readerslounge.net, with only one change: I’ve removed the subcategories, because it seems that there is a glitch in Amazon for this category: all subcategories displayed exactly the same products. However, I’ve let them there in the video, so you can see how to include them, if you want.

If you want to promote Associate-o-Matic and to earn 20% commissions on any sales you generate from your websites, join Clixgalore via the small banner below:

Joining the affiliate program is free and it is not conditioned by your purchase of Associate-o-Matic. If you want, you can use the free version and still make money from the affiliate program, by promoting the software.

Info Domains Are Just Horrible, Stay Away From Them!

Simonne — Mon, 12 May 2008 17:47:29 +0000

Do you believe that .info domains are not so good?

While you think twice, let’s take a look online:

CSS3.info: All You Ever Needed To Know About CSS

PR: 8
Alexa Rank: 128,354
Compete Rank: 114,138 with 13,240 U.S. visitors per month
Date established: May 2006

So, over a two year period, css3.info scores much better than many older .com domains. How did they achieve this? Simply by telling people what they ever needed to know about CSS.

PRChecker.info: Check Google Page Rank Of Any Web Pages

PR: 8
Alexa Rank: 27,972
Compete Rank: 26,797 with 69,065 U.S. visitors per month
Date established: September 2004

Not too bad, taking into consideration that there are so many places on the web where you can check your site’s PR for free.

Afilias.info: Global Registry Services

PR: 7
Alexa Rank: 156,307
Compete Rank: 838,857 with 1,100 U.S. visitors per month
Date established: July 2001

Registry Services are very competitive. As you can see, this .info domain has a honorable position.

Many internet marketing people fear .info domains, or just prefer not to use them for building authority sites. As the above examples show, .info domains are horrible only if they are used for horrible purposes.

And, you see, Google knows the difference very well, although the great majority of .info domains are used for black hat things.

Do you still fear using .info domains?

GoDaddy Stops Selling .Info Domains

Simonne — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 12:20:45 +0000

You probably know and have already benefited from GoDaddy’s promotion for .info domains at the price of $0.99, which has been active for quite a while.

Well, if you had your share of cheap info domain names be happy: as of today, GoDaddy doesn’t sell info domain names anymore. Not only the promotional price is gone, but the .info extension is not available anymore at any price.

As I intended to make another serious info domain names purchase this morning, I tried to find other registrars with promotions. Of course all GoDaddy resellers were affected, none of them offering .info domains anymore.

The best deal I was still able to find was at Moniker, where you can still get the .info domain names for $4.94. All others I’ve checked offered .info domains at $8.75.

There is a myth regarding .info domains, that they are not so credible for Google or other search engines, due to the fact that spammers use them a lot, because of their low price. I have to say that I do own some websites built on .info domain names which perform well in search engines, so I was quite happy with getting lots of domain names for $0.99 a piece (plus ICANN fee and VAT, but nevertheless, it was a good deal anyway).

We surely learned our lesson from this: never postpone what you can do now. We could have done this extensive keyword research one week ago, and not yesterday. We could have bought this new batch of $0.99 info domains yesterday, and not today (when we had this surprise, and we are now facing the situation of paying at least 7 times more for the same purchase).

It seems that Murphy is not sleeping: who would have thought that GoDaddy would stop selling info domains just a couple of hours before we wanted to buy about 100 such domains?

Later update: this lasted only for several hours, enough for us to publish the news everywhere. Now things are back to yesterday’s status, which means that you can still buy .info domains for $0.99 from GoDaddy and all its resellers

How To Build Amazon Affiliate Niche Stores

Simonne — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 21:43:56 +0000

Affiliate niche stores can be a good source of online income, if set up properly. The concept is simple: pick a niche, get a script to pull the products list from the merchant, make a nice layout, promote your affiliate niche store and enjoy the profits.

In reality, first of all you need to be approved by the merchants or by the affiliate networks where you are going to get the products from. An excellent option is eBay Partners Network, which allows you to sell eBay products from your affiliate store and get paid commissions. The best software for building eBay niche stores is called BANS (Build A Niche Store). It costs $97 and you can build unlimited number of stores. If you want to know more about working eBay affiliate niche stores, check out Vic’s tutorial on how to build a BANS store. You could also browse through his older posts, in order to find out more about keyword research and niche narrowing strategy.

Is eBay Willing To Make Money With Everyone?

At first sight, eBay Partners Network seems to be warmly inviting everyone to join. Aren’t we all equal? Indeed we are, but some of us are more equal than others. Fact is that Romania is set up on automatic rejection in EPN (eBay Partners Network). If you dare to argue that, you’ll end up in infinite passing shots from one client service executive to another, until they make it clear that you are not wanted, regardless your experience, your knowledge or your 20 BANS sites built just to give them an example of what you can do to help them make more money. They simply don’t want you in, it’s their business and they don’t feel like explaining you the reasons.

Bye Bye eBay, Hello Amazon!

In my own experience, Amazon sucks! All I ever managed to sell were Christmas trees stands and a few books about personal development and Microsoft Excel. It is true that I never promoted them too much, those sales came from some links I slapped in the sidebar of one of my blogs for a while.

But if you take it seriously and develop focused niche stores, Amazon can be as good as eBay, and the niche stores can be built in about 10-15 minutes each, after you get used to the software. Like eBay, Amazon has the great advantage for the affiliates of being a trusted online source, so buyers are sure that they are really going to receive the items they order online.

Amazon’s commissions for affiliates range between 4% and 10% of the product’s price, depending on the quantity of items you sell each month and of the category those products belong in.

EBay gives affiliates 50% of their profit on items sold via their websites. I don’t know how big this profit is, because I was not accepted into the program (yet ), but it is possible that this 50% commission equals the Amazon 4%-10% one on the selling price. What eBay has and Amazon doesn’t is the $25 you get paid for any new member joining from your affiliate links.

What Affiliate Store Script Is Best For Amazon?

Diana and I have tested quite a few scripts over the past two weeks. Some of them were free, some others required monthly payments, others were free with the condition that 10% of your affiliate income goes to the developers. We even tried to hack BANS to make it work with Amazon, but our programming skills and willingness to do it are far too low by comparison with the advantages we’d get by using BANS for this purpose.

We decided to go for Associate-o-Matic, for the following reasons:

It is easy to use: after a few days of practice, we can now build a basic Amazon affiliate niche store in less than 15 minutes. As the idea is to build as many stores as we can in the shortest possible time, this was the most important criterion in our quest. Now each of us has the ability to build 10 stores a day, so in one month from now we expect to have quite a nice portfolio. As we were not sure on how the stores would perform, we are building a big part of them on .info domains, which we bought for the nice promotional price of $0.99 from GoDaddy (and I believe the promotion is still ongoing, in case you are interested).
It allows adding content to the store pages: like in BANS case, you can add top and bottom text boxes in which to place your keywords rich text. You can also add separate pages, if so you wish.
It can be easily optimized for search engines:
There is a panel with mod_rewrite options, you go there and make your choices, then you are pointed to the code you need to put in your .htaccess file. This option is available only for the paid version (which can be tested for free for 30 days).
There is another panel in which you can input your meta tags, like keywords, description and site title.
It costs $97, one time fee, and you are allowed to build as many affiliate stores as you wish. We liked it very much that we were allowed to test the full version for 30 days, so we have time to see if we can get used to that dashboard which really looks overwhelming at first sight.

A slightly upsetting fact, which may result in lower conversions than in the eBay - BANS combination, is that buyers stay on your site until they want to make the payment. Only then are they redirected to the Amazon website, which is too late in my opinion. Like eBay, Amazon also works with cookies, so it actually doesn’t matter if the shopper buys an item from my store, or something from the Amazon website, as long as she got there via my affiliate links. So I wish all buyers to get off my site and go to Amazon as quickly as possible, because some of them would probably change their mind before pressing the Pay button. This means I’d never get paid, because they didn’t have the chance to get to Amazon via my referral link. I can smell here a poor conversion rate, but since the stores are so easy to build, why not give it a try? It’s a set and almost forget income source, so it can be a winner even with this major drawback as I see it.

So, if eBay Partner Network doesn’t like your blue eyes, you can give Amazon a try. If you don’t want to take our word for granted and set up your stores with Associate-o-Matic, we’d be happy to hear about your experience with other programs. If you wish to test Associate-o-Matic, we’d advise you to download directly the full version, as you won’t be required to give your billing details for that. After 30 days, you’ll be free to have your choice: either pay the $97 and stay with the full variant of the script, or get downgraded to the lite version, which has the disadvantages that you cannot use mod_rewrite and 10% of your earnings go to the developers of the script.

We are going to make a video to show you how to set up an Amazon affiliate store using Associate-o-Matic, in order to help you overcome the initial sensation of a very complicated thing (we had it, and I’m sure you’ll have it, too).

Until then, we are curious about your thoughts on this issue. Also, if anybody from the “forbidden countries” was accepted and is willing to share the trick with us, he is more than welcome to do it.

What Joel Never Told You About Making Money With AdSense

Simonne — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 07:21:18 +0000

How much do you want to make money online with AdSense?

As much as to pay $9.95 on a book which promises to reveal “what Google never told you about making money with AdSense”?

Written by Joel Comm, this ebook has been promoted so much during the past few days, that it made me wonder how much is Joel giving to all those affiliates.

Even if we leave aside the fact that the AdSense guru is trying to scam his disciples by forcibly subscribing them to whatever service for as little as $29.95 per month, as very well noticed Mark from 45n5.com, the AdSense Secrets ebook doesn’t share one of the biggest secrets for making money with AdSense: getting the amount of traffic which can really bring you a lot of money from AdSense.

Who Is Joel Comm’s eBook For?

I think Joel Comm wrote this AdSense Secrets book to cover all levels of internet marketers, thus failing to properly address any of the target segments. We are going to see why:

Is AdSense Secrets for absolute newbies to internet marketing?

They will find out a few indications on how to buy a domain name, how to get it hosted, how to set up a website, how to put AdSense on it and how to tweak and split test it, in order to get the maximum out of it.

The newbie doing all those will end up with a probably decent site, well optimized from AdSense standpoint (although there are a few tips in the book which didn’t work for my sites), but not visited by anybody. Some of Joel Comm’s suggestions on how to get traffic to the website cannot work on a new website, while others are completely irrelevant: if you can convince me that adding a RSS feed to your site will result in floods of traffic, then I’m the golden fish and I’ll fulfill you 3 wishes.

I give you only one example: adding a “send a friend” feature to a site visited only by its owner will result in getting some of his friends coming to visit. It may work on huge sites, which already get many thousands of visits per day, like iVillage.com, one of the sites owned by Joel Comm (who doesn’t even use the feature on this website).

If 10000 people see your page every day and 1% of them send it to a friend, you’ll get 100 new readers every day. But if you have a traffic of 10 people per day, guess how much traffic the “send a friend” feature would bring you. This is traffic, no joke, isn’t it? And how much money do you think you’d make?

Joel Comm gives useful advice on how to track the performance of your ads, or how to perform split tests to determine what ads colors or shapes, or locations are the best performers. It’s something like our guide to using AdSense channels, but more detailed.

He also publishes some tables with results for his own sites. Very well, you’d say, but please note that he averages 7000 page impressions per day per each channel he mentions there. How much time do you think a new website needs to collect 7000 impressions for one page? Or how relevant a test would be if you took into consideration only the 3-4 clicks per day you get on your ads to make a decision which ones perform better (and probably some of you would be happy to get even those clicks)?

So if you bought the book now, congratulations! In a few years of sustained work, it will probably be useful for you.

If you didn’t, then don’t! If you want to learn more about AdSense and about bringing real traffic to your website, go read this series on how to make money using blogs, which is absolutely free and doesn’t automatically subscribe you to anything.

Trying to apply Joel Comm’s AdSense Secrets to your new website is like trying to drive a car after you’ve learned all the circulation rules and all the streets, but nobody taught you how to actually drive the car.

This leaves us with two options: Mr. Joel Comm is either not so much of a guru, or he keeps the real secret of getting traffic to a website for himself, case in which we might say that he intentionally misleads the buyers of his ebook.

Making Money With AdSense Starts With Traffic

If you already manage to bring lots of search engine traffic to your website, then even if your AdSense ads are poorly designed and positioned, you’d still make some money. If this is the case, you should buy Joel Comm’s eBook, because you’ll find some useful info in it (provided that you skip all chapters but one or two, which are the real value of the book for your case).

If you have no clue on how to drive organic traffic to your site, this is what you need to learn prior to any monetization and ads optimization techniques and tricks. Otherwise, you’ll keep on buying one ebook after another, and another, and another, and you’ll end up thinking that internet marketing is only a huge scam, as you already know so much and you are still not making any money (like in the car driving example above).

For this, we should all thank to people like Mr. Joel Comm, who sits on a fabulous income, but still needs your $9 for a book which points to resources which are partially so old that they are not functioning anymore since one year ago (Overture).

Free Blog Layouts

Simonne — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 09:59:16 +0000

Free blog layouts are not hard to find at all. In order to be available for free, blog layouts are released under the Creative Commons License which grants you the right to use and modify the layout, provided that you keep the links included by the author in the footer intact. In case you think that you can delete the links and get away with that, then you should know that most of the times, at least for Wordpress blog layouts, the author receives an email each time somebody installs his theme for the first time. If he checks on your blog to see how you implemented that free layout and the links are not there, you got caught. So you’d better think twice in case you usually get rid of those links in the footer. Besides, leaving them there shows respect and appreciation for the author’s work: after all, you are allowed to use his work for free, so he deserves this small sign of recognition from your side.

Free Blog Layouts Sources

Depending on your blog software, you can obtain free layouts for your blog in different places:

Free blog layouts for Wordpress blogs:

Themes.Wordpress.net
WPThemesFree.com
FreeWPThemes.net
SmashingMagazine
Template Monster
SEO Wordpress Themes: these themes are already optimized for search engines, so they can help you rank better for your desired keywords, if you use them
Free Wordpress Themes Galore: these themes are also optimized for search engines and they have advertising already in place, so all you need is to replace the ads with yours and you’re done.

Free blog layouts for Blogger blogs:

BloggerTemplates.org
Blogger-Templates
FinalSense
BlogspotTemplates
Fresh Blogger Templates
Free Blogger Templates

Free blog layouts for Movable Type blogs:
The Style Contest
Blog Fashions

We put together this small guide of free themes, because we got this question from a reader who wanted to know where he could find some fresh new themes for his blog. As he mentioned, many repositories contain the same themes. This is normal, because the authors submitted their themes in as many places as they could find, so some of them can be found all over the place.

If you know some other good resources for free blog layouts, please feel free to add them in the comments to this post.

Buy My Blog For Fame Or Money

Simonne — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 09:04:25 +0000

How many times have you heard that if you’re serious about blogging, you should treat your blog like a business? More than a couple of times, perhaps.

Sometimes, a business can start by buying an already existent business and make it grow further. If you have the money, why not skip those first years when you have to struggle for each client, for each contract, for making your way to the top? That’s the same with blogs.

That’s nothing wrong with buying an already established blog, which already has an audience and which already makes some money. But how do you evaluate a blog before buying it?

RSS feed subscribers number is one of the assets. Or is it?

I think it rather shows how popular the writer is, but you have no certitude that those subscribers are going to like your style, so you cannot be sure that they will choose to stay with you or rather dump the blog.

And even if they stayed, how do you translate that in money? How much money do you think you can make monthly from one subscriber? You probably are a subscriber for several blogs out there. Only think of how many things have you bought lately from the blogs you’re subscribed to, and you’ll understand what kind of earnings you can expect from your subscribers.

The monthly income is another certitude. Or is it?

It depends where this income comes from. I’ve seen in the SitePoint Marketplace blogs listed for sale, claiming they make X amount of money every month. If the income comes from AdSense, this is a certitude and a value you can count on when you calculate how much it would take until you get your investment back.

But if the income comes from paid reviews, it doesn’t have any value at all, because you’ll have to write paid reviews in order to keep that money coming every month. If this is your aim, you’d better buy some pre-owned domains with PR for some $5 - $50 and use them for writing paid reviews until they get slapped by Google. You’d get your investment back much faster than if you paid several thousands for a blog, based on the idea that a normal price evaluation is the monthly income times 10.

The Alexa rank speaks volumes about the blog’s traffic. Or is it?

In order to count in Alexa, a visitor needs to have the Alexa toolbar installed in his browser. By all probabilities, somebody who has Alexa toolbar installed knows what internet marketing is, knows what ads are, and he might already have bought all things that you’d like to sell him via your affiliate links. Why is this guy valuable for you? Not for the money you’d earn from having him read your blog, that’s for sure. A good Alexa rank only shows that there are a lot of internet marketing people who read that blog. A not so good Alexa rank shows nothing: that blog could have really high organic traffic levels, from people who don’t have the Alexa toolbar, so it could make a great acquisition in case you want to make money online from it.

The Google PR is worth the money. Or is it?

PR can be faked, so you should never pay a high price only based on a high PR. There are sites like domainpagerank.com, where you can check if the PR is valid or not. However, PR alone doesn’t help you with anything. It doesn’t bring you traffic, it doesn’t help you rank high for any keywords in SERPs.

What matters when evaluating how much a blog is worth?

I got the idea for this post after finding out that One Man’s Goal sold for $10,500, which Marc, the new owner thinks is a good deal, and after noticing that John Cow is for sale, too. The Cow published some statistics of his blog, and one of them got my attention: he says that 20%-30% of his traffic is organic. In my view, this is the real traffic, one of the most important metrics of a blog’s value, because:

Organic traffic is fresh: they are most probably new to the programs I’m promoting as an affiliate, and they are most prone to subscribe via my links rather than people who found my blog from social networks or other blogs.
Organic traffic are people who have a need and search the net for a solution. They either find it on my blog and subscribe to my feed, or buy the products I endorse, or both, or they don’t find the solution on my blog, so they leave it by clicking an ad (which also translates into money for me).
Organic traffic is not influenced by the blog sale: they will find the blog in Google for the same keywords, regardless who’s the actual owner of the blog. While the subscribers number is expected to decrease over the first few months after a blog being sold, this has nothing to do with the organic traffic. They will keep on coming, as usual, so they are a certitude.

So, here are a few things to check when buying a blog:

Traffic split: organic, direct, referrals. Beware at the organic traffic, as it may come from PPC campaigns, and many counters don’t make the difference. Ask to see Google Analytics stats, because in there you’ll see the Google (cpc) traffic apart from Google (organic) one.
Income split: AdSense, paid reviews, ads selling, donations. If there is no AdSense on the blog, but you think of it as a future option, check the organic traffic, take the best keywords the blog ranks well for, and put them in the Google AdWords Keywords Tool, which will give you an estimate of the CPC and of daily number of clicks. By taking that figure and dividing it by 2 or by 3, you’ll get the maximum potential earnings you can expect if you rank first for that keyword. Why divide the figure? Because that’s AdWords, that’s what advertisers pay to Google per click. Publishers’ revenue is smaller, because Google keeps a commission on every click. This commission is not disclosed, but from some tests I’ve done, I’d say that Google keeps at least half of the amount paid by advertisers.
Backlinks pointing to the blog: you can check them in yahoo.com, by typing link:www.sitename.com in the search box. You’ll see a list of all sites pointing back to that blog. If there are very few links, it means the blog is not so popular, so either its PR is fake, or it is coming from only a few high PR backlinks
Reputation: look through those backlinks, to see what other bloggers say about the blog you wish to buy. I’m not saying that you should believe all that’s been said, but you can at least be aware and try to judge things with your own head before spending your money to buy an established blog.

What do you think? How would you tell a scam from an opportunity? What else would you check if you wanted to buy a blog?