I’ve spoke before about looking hard at yourself and working out what services you could sell to make money online.

Today I want to speak about just how much money I have made selling services online.  I won’t go into total detail on all the services I have been trying to push.  But instead I’ll focus upon logo and graphic design site, corelogo.  To begin with corelogo was set up to mainly sell very low cost logos to people with smaller budgets.  Initially I was looking at people spending around $20 per design.  This was a great model to begin with as it helped me gauge the amount of demand for such services.  I soon realised based off my initial findings on selling over 10 logos for this price there definitely was money to be made online selling such a service.

It was great to have a nice low level income being generated from doing something which I enjoyed and given my background graphics design ticked all the right boxes.  However, I soon came to see it was taking way to much time to produce the work on my own.  In some cases I was spending over 2-3 hours on coming up with the initial design ideas alone.  Now that’s not all bad as I was enjoying this time making the designs, I’d have only been spending the time playing games or doing something not very productive!  The businessman inside me was telling me otherwise however, corelogo had to be profitable or it was simply not worth going on with the project as a means to create income.

The first step to making corelogo more profitable was to involve other people.

I’m lucky in that I know a few people personally who are great graphic design artists, and I knew I could depend on them to produce the same quality of work I was producing myself.  To begin with they were simply aiding me in producing the designs for free, as I was charging only $20 per piece.  This was a great help to me.  But I knew it would not last, so I decided to increase the cost of the designs to $40 so I could at least pay them a token amount for the work they were putting in for me.

This proved to me a somewhat bad move at the time.  The work dropped off completely.  In time the work started to naturally come back, the odd few per month direct from search engine traffic and the main stay starting to come from the various webmaster forums I was advertising on.

Then I took a hard look at the financial spreadsheet, I was not to happy with what I was seeing.  based on the hours worked by myself I was making a little over $9 per hour.  This needed to change.  By now I had built up a nice network of people who were regularly coming back for repeat work which was great.  And as my Dad will tell you, business is built upon repeat custom!  To increase my earnings there were two options open to me, increase the prices and increase the staff.  I decided to do both.

This brings us up to date with corelogo in its current state.  We charge $80 per logo design along with all our other services which you can see on our services page.

When new design work is sent in, myself and the team get to work on producing the initial designs based on what the customer wants.  sometimes the ’staff’ produce most of the work, however I go over each piece myself before its passed onto any customer, if the work does not meet my standards it will not meet the customers.  I like to think of myself as the customer and react as they would when faced with the work.  This adds that crucial layer of quality control.

lets get down to some hard facts and figures.  To begin with corelogo took too much time to run and made not a lot of money at all, it was more of a personal hobby.

Through learning how to run this type of business and where to advertise it for maximum return I was soon able to increase the amount of people I could sub contract work out to along with the prices for the work we provide.

This has lead to a profit of over $1000 within 8 months, which is not to bad for something that started off as a personal hobby!

The next steps for increasing the amount of money I make online with corelogo are to redesign the site and look at other advertising opportunities, I think I’m happy with the service prices as they stand currently.

I hope you enjoyed reading this, and if it helps you start your own online service based business then my work here is done!

Has just alerted me to this very basic SEO guide compiled by Google.

I highly recommend anyone who reads this downloads this basic guide and gives it a read through.  Even if your experienced in SEO is good practise to sit down and refresh yourself with the very basics every now and then.

There’s nothing worse than missing out on traffic due to silly basic mistakes!

Thanks again Sachibat for giving me the heads up.

Let me break down exactly just what this ’smart pricing’ really is.  There is a lot of confusion as to the exact definition of the system adsence uses.

What is Smart Pricing?

Google’s smart pricing feature automatically reduces maximum cost-per-click (CPC) bids for certain pages in the Google Network.

Essentially if Google decides the click on any given ad is less likely to result in a sale for their advertisers they reduce the price of that click, so in theory the advertiser saves money which makes them happy, Google makes less money a long with the publisher.

Lets break this down and look at just how Google come to these conclusions on smart pricing.

Continue reading after the break.

Information taken from the official Adsence blog

1. Many factors determine the price of an ad

More than conversion rate goes into determining the price of an ad: the advertiser’s bid, the quality of the ad, the other ads competing for the space, the start or end of an ad campaign, and other advertiser fluctuations.

2. Clickthrough rate doesn’t affect advertiser return on investment (ROI)

The percentage of clicks that convert for an advertiser is the most important factor in an advertiser’s ROI, so it’s not only possible, but common, to have a low CTR and a high advertiser conversion rate. It’s also possible to have a high CTR and a low conversion rate. Don’t remove the AdSense code from your site just because it has a lower CTR – it may be one of your best converting sites.

3. Google doesn’t make money from ’smart pricing’

In fact, we make less money, since the cost to advertisers is reduced in order to provide a strong ROI. Ultimately, this leads to higher payouts for publishers by drawing a larger pool of advertisers and rewarding publishers who create high quality sites.

4. Remember the old chestnut: “Content is King”

The best way to ensure you benefit from AdSense is to create compelling content for interested users. This also means driving targeted traffic to your site — advertisers don’t gain as much ROI when paying for generic clicks as they do for quality clicks that come from interest in your content. Good content usually equals a good experience for user plus advertiser, which can be much more valuable than CTR.

Keep in mind that like most Google technology, our system for calculating advertiser pricing gets updated regularly. We’re constantly improving our ad products to benefit both the publisher and advertiser communities; what benefits one side ultimately benefits the other.

So reading over this you can see Google basically decides in the interest of the advertiser if the traffic you have just provided to their site is likely to convert into a sale and decides to credit you the publisher accordingly.  Now producing original content seems to be key here.  Original content = better traffic = more money to the publisher per ad click on their site.

For more Adsence related posts click here!

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So I’m on my daily rounds of the major SEO blogs and I come across this little gem of a bitch fight.

So there you have it, Matt Cutts has stopped following Shoemoney on Twitter, why you ask?  Well it seems he doesn’t agree with people who

‘…do sponsored tweets’

For the full story head over to http://www.shoemoney.com/2009/06/14/matt-cutts-and-me/

There is also an active disscussion taking place over at netbuilders

The ‘key’ is to target keywords which have the highest cost per day estimations.  This means that businesses and companies are actively competing for these advertising spaces and therefore more money is being pushed into specific niches.  The advertising budgets of these companies is a good indicator of the profitability to be found in certain niches.

After the break I’ll include a table which outlines the cost per click, clicks per day and cost per day of some keywords.

This table gives you an idea on the relative amounts of money being created over certain types of niche’s.  These figures are not 100% accurate, as that would simply be impossible to determine.  However they do give a good idea of where the money is!

Thanks for reading, hope to see you next time ;)

Myself I will probably enter but I will also actively follow the progress of the many veteran SEO players Netbuilders has.

This is definitely going to be a competition you do not want to miss!

Ok so lets look at how I actually managed it.

Sites displaying Adsense:

• 2 blogs, this one and another on a popular mmorpg pc game.
• 2 content driven sites.
• 21 web proxies.

The main bulk of the income has come directly from Adsense which is displayed on the main page of the proxies.  The very nature of proxy advertising is to get burst traffic, generally over time the revenue generated from proxies tends to drop, that’s why setting up new fresh proxies as often as possible is the way forward.

My current Adsense total = $102.12 that’s as of 2nd March 2009 (date of this post)

My goal was to try and break the magical $100 mark in February, but I think I can let myself off for missing the mark by 2 days!

The question is, what to do now?  Well more of the same really.  I’ll be looking into updating my content sites along with adding more.  Creating more web proxies and focusing on services I can provide.

My latest project is www.corelogo.com which has taken off really well.  I’m happy with the design of the site and I’ve just started to advertise the services CoreLogo offers around webmaster forums.  Its nice to have something different to do, its all very well staring at text for hours on end but that can soon become a drain and off putting to some extent.  There’s nothing better than whipping out Illustrator and Photoshop to get the old creative juices flowing!

So what the hell have I been doing online since this blog started?

My first goal was to reach the fabled $10 amount on Google Adsense, that was the first major mile stone in my greater online money making plans.  I managed that fairly fast with an average income around $0.10 per day at that time.  That’s nothing great but it was the start I needed.  It showed me how easy it was (in theory) to make good amount of money online from advertising revenue only.  My first angle of attack was to start setting up content driven websites, based on WordPress.  I have a solid understanding of WordPress from some past experiences so it made sense to stick with what I know.  I looked at things in my life which I currently enjoy or have a good interest in, then I began to produce sites based around those subjects.

One of the first criteria in making successful sites is to base the site on subjects you know and understand.  Making content driven sites to produce income is all well and good, but its a hell of a lot more difficult when you have no interest in the given subject.  My advice is to stick to what you know, all day, everyday, then you can’t go wrong!

Eventually I had produced 4 content driven blogs/sites.  Then it was time to learn SEO methods.  I have a good knowledge on the more common easier methods, but I need to expand this knowledge.  That’s what my current focus is aimed at.

Around the time the first 4 sites were completed I joined Digital Point Forums.  Then from a few days of using DP I came across a link to Netbuilders.org

Joining an active community of webmaster is the single best thing anyone in my position could have done at the time.  You have at your disposal a massive resource of Internet information.  Any subject is covered, and in most cases covered in depth.  Myself I have become an active member of Netbuilders.  After first joining DP I used the forums for a few hours, made a few posts but never really got the responses I wanted.  Netbuilders came along and saved the day.  Questions would be answered with frightening detail and fast to, it really is an invaluable resource to me.  I highly recommend that if your looking to make money online you take the time to join a webmaster forum.

From using Netbuilders I started to see how other people were making money online.  I noticed their was a fairly active number of members making money from web based proxies.  Proxies allow people to bypass content filters at their place of work or learning.  this means they can get onto FaceBook and all the rest while they should be working!  It takes very little time to set a proxy up, however there is a lot of background work which needs to be done.  The first task was to select a proxy hosting company.  The first company I used were fine, but expensive.  Soon it became apparent that I would be needing more and more bandwidth so I was forced to change hosting companies.

Once the background work had been completed I started to buy cheap domains, .info for example.  Proxies are somewhat special since they do not really need that much SEO to perform well.  Instead you look at promoting them on websites people use to find new proxies.  You add your proxies to toplist sites, directories, Yahoo Answers etc etc etc.

My current online assets are;

• 13 web proxies
• 6 content driven sites
• 1 service based site

I’m in the process of developing a logo/graphic design site.  It looks like the next natural progression in my making money online journey, you can find a little more on selling yourself online in my previous post.

My total earnings since BlogStew began stand at $172.12

That’s pretty impressive, but its not taking into account all the expenditures on server hosting and such.  The income comes from a combination of providing services and advertising revenue.  By the end of this month I’d like to go over the $100 Adsense mark and get my cheque sent out!

On a side note please subscribe to my RSS feed!

The hardest part can be forming a back catalogue of work, known as a portfolio.  If your just starting out then you have nothing to show, so people are less inclined to take you on.  You can either try and push through this phase or produce work for yourself to primarily act as portfolio content.  Once you have a developed portfolio of work you will need somewhere to show it all off.  This would be a good time to find a catchy domain name and develop a site to suit your services needs.

There are many components to making money online, simply putting all your effort into one sector can become boring and maybe not be as profitable as diversifying.

Finding work can also be tricky to begin with.  The best option would be to post on active webmaster forums announcing your services, showing your portfolio off.  You could then move on to job forums, people ask for specific jobs to be completed.  You tender for the job, giving a quote and hopefully given your good portfolio you get taken on by the client.  When I first started to look into offering services that I can provide myself, I was astonished at the sheer amount of money being thrown at things I could do!  It seemed silly to me to ignore this possible stream of income.

So my message is this, sell yourself online.  If you can design logos, code websites etc then look into the market and find a gap for you to fit in.  People want jobs doing all the time, and people pay.  They pay for knowledge and time, that’s ultimately what you are selling.  You’re selling yourself.

I want to move into graphic design, offering my services for logo and banner design.  I have no qualifications in design, no certificates to show I can use Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, yet I have years of experience with both.  So I need to depend upon a solid portfolio of work.  From reading various forums I came across a quote similar to this:

Self taught people have confidence, they had no teacher to help them out during the hard times.

I know people that run small the medium size businesses here in the UK.  They have no degrees in business or anything like that.  They have the drive and focus to succeed.  Confidence is key in this world; you have to be confident in what you can do.  Then you need to get out there and do it!

First of all let me hit you guys and gals with some figures.

Domains cost = $7.13 for 6 domains, of which I’m only currently using three.

Hosting = $5.98 per month

Domains + Hosting = $13.28

Adsense Earning

27th = $1.13 (Running 2 proxies with  addition to Tech-FAQ toplist only.)

28th = $2.98 (Added both proxies to tons of toplist sites.)

29th = $4.68 (started a new proxy. added to all toplists as previous two.  Now running three proxies.)

Total running costs – Adsense earning = -$4.49

As you can see from the result I’m currently $4.49 in the red.  That’s after three days using only Adsense.  I fully expect to pay for all my hosting and domain costs today, once the clicks start to roll in.  However I’ll be facing some further expenditures.  I’ll be needing a better hosting plan, after using 11gig out of a 20gig hosting plan so far!  But that’s only a minor increase, and will hardly make a difference if I continue to see the sort of day on day increase in Adsense earning I am at the moment.  I also started a proxy based Google Group, subscribe via www.getworkdone.info !

As far as today goes another proxy or two will be set-up.  I’m on the lookout for some more quality templates to use.  Its best to avoid using the same one over and over, it will only end up bringing you attention from the Adsense goon squad.  Same goes for content, its best to make sure each proxy is unique in content.