Just to keep you uptodate with some changes going on over at google adsense. They are going to be switching off their adsense referal programs and changing over to an affiliate marketing model used by DoubleClick (an affiliate network they purchased recently). This switchover will be happening during August so if you are an adsense user then get yourself setup with a new google account and start getting prepared to make sure you have a smooth switchover.

If you want more information about this head over to theregister.co.uk or to adsense page on blogspot.

What do you guys think about this change of approach by google?

Enjoy!

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I just wanted to let you all know about a competition a fellow make money online blogger is running just now.

Max over at www.moneybites.com is running the following competition:

Today I am happy to announce the launch of something very exciting. The Moneybites.com Affiliate Challenge. What this is, is a challenge for all affiliate marketers to prove what they are truly made of!

This challenge works behind the premise of who is truly a great affiliate, who can earn the most in a month with a top network (our sponsor, MarketLeverage), and make a bit of extra cash for doing it.

That’s right you heard me, extra cash! But before that let me outline the mechanics of the competition. How it works is if you are a member of MarketLeverage (feel free to sign up right now), you are eligible to win! To clarify right here, you do not have to be my referral to join this contest, any MarketLeverage members are free to join, this contest is open to one and all!

The Rules

The competition is who can earn the most in one month (the duration is June 13^th – July 13^th), through the MarketLeverage network. This is measured by gross income through the network. But wait there’s more!

A scorecard of the top 3 affiliates and their earnings will be kept in the sidebar of this blog while a full list of contestants and earnings will be available in this post.

The Prizes

I know you guys want to see what’s up for grabs. There have been a lot of MarketLeverage contests out there lately so I wanted mine to be a bit different, that’s why the prizes are cash.

That’s right here are the prizes for the top 3 finishers:

First Place: $300 MarketLeverage Amex Prepaid Rewards card

Second Place: $200 MarketLeverage Amex Prepaid Rewards card

Third Place: $100 MarketLeverage Amex Prepaid Rewards card

Random Prizes (to be given out randomly to any participants): One Flip Mino Camcorder, and one 2 GB MarketLeverage USB pen.

As a thrown in bonus any affiliate that I have referred (you have signed up under my affiliate referral link, found here), is eligible to win some extra money. The top earning affiliate in my referrals will get 3% extra on what they have earned (in cash), from my personal pocket after the contest is over.

The top three publishers will win the contest. That means if the top guys two guys make a ton of money and you are the next one up (even if you only make $5 or $1, if you are in third), you will get that $100 rewards card none the less!

How To Enter

To enter you have to be a MarketLeverage publisher (you can sign up free here). If you already are then you have to opt in to this contest by either sending your CD (publisher number) or name that you signed up to MarketLeverage with to admin@moneybites.com. To not reveal any identities, a publisher number will then be given to you (example publisher 1) which will indicate who you are in this contest. Again, email admin@moneybites.com to enter.

I wish you all the best of luck and will be providing affiliate tips and tricks this month that should help you all maximize your affiliate earnings!

Good Luck to all who enter the competition. If i get a little bit of spare time this month I will join in and give you all a run for your prizes

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Assuming you are already into an affiliate program, what would be the next thing you would want to do? Double, or even triple, your commissions, right? How do you do that?


Here are some powerful tips on how to boost your affiliate program commissions overnight.

Know the best program and products to promote

Obviously, you would want to promote a program that will enable you to achieve the greatest profits in the shortest possible time.

There are several factors to consider in selecting such a program. Choose the ones that have a generous commission structure. Have products that fit in with your target audience. And that has a solid track record of paying their affiliate easily and on time. If you cannot seem to increase your investments, dump that program and keep looking for better ones.

There are thousands of affiliate programs online which gives you the reason to be picky. You may want to select the best to avoid losing your advertising budget.

Write free reports or short ebooks to distribute from your site. There is a great possibility that you are competing with other affiliates that are promoting the same program. If you start writing short report related to the product you are promoting, you will be able to distinguish yourself from the other affiliates.

In the reports, provide some valuable information for free. If possible, add some recommendations about the products. With ebooks, you get credibility. Customers will see that in you and they will be enticed to try out what you are offering.

Collect and save the email addresses of those who download your free ebooks

It is a known fact that people do not make a purchase on the first solicitation. You may want to send out your message more than six times to make a sale. Remember and be reasonable with the number of emails you sendout to one of your users as you dont actualy want to spam them as that will just drive them away.

This is the simple reason why you should collect the contact information of those who downloaded your reports and ebooks. You can make follow-ups on these contacts to remind them to make a purchase from you.

Get the contact information of a prospect before sending them to the vendor’s website. Keep in mind that you are providing free advertisement for the product owners. You get paid only when you make a sale. If you send prospects directly to the vendors, chances are they would be lost to you forever.

But when you get their names, you can always send other marketing messages to them to be able to earn an ongoing commission instead of a one-time sale only.

Publish an online newsletter or Ezine. It is always best to recommend a product to someone you know than to sell to a stranger. This is the purpose behind publishing your own newsletter. This also allows you to develop a relationship based on trust with your subscribers.

This strategy is a delicate balance between providing useful information with a sales pitch. If you continue to write informative editorials you will be able to build a sense of reciprocity in your readers that may lead them to support you by buying your products.

Ask for higher than normal commission from merchants

If you are already successful with a particular promotion, you should try and approach the merchant or your affiliate manager and negotiate a percentage commission for your sales.

He or she will likely grant your request rather than lose a valuable asset in you. Keep in mind that you are a zero-risk investment to your merchant; so do not be shy about requesting for addition in your commissions. Just try to be reasonable about it.

Write strong pay Per Click ads. PPC search engine is the most effective means of advertising online. As an affiliate, you can make a small income just by managing PPC campaigns such as Google AdWords and Overture. Then you should try and monitor them to see which ads are more effective and which ones to dispose of.

Try out these strategies and see the difference it can make to your commission checks in the shortest of time.

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Not every person on the internet is going to be looking for or interested in what you have to offer them so it is a time consuming and expensive task to even try. What you are going to want to do is focus in on niche markets and take advantage of gaps and cheap converting keywords to maximise your advertising investments profit as fast as possible.


In order to be effective, your adwords campaigns must address a niche market. This requires you to have an in-depth understanding of who comprises the market, why they buy and a tightly focused keyword list.

Who is buying the product or service?

Successful advertisers develop a profile of their typical customer. Keywords, titles, and descriptions must appeal to this person. If you are selling the latest, greatest and fastest gaming pc on the market then you are probably looking to get the attention of dedicated online gamers. To do this you would use keywords based on the latest hardware in the machine and include calls to action in the advert text. For example you might use “Powerfull New Games Machine” instead of just “latest PCs in Stock Now”.

Reaching the right market

The niche – is necessary to avoid the cost associated with clicks by people who are not likely to buy. You should strive to avoid viewers who will click but not buy, because they will pay a higher CPC without attaining sales to balance the expense. Low conversion rates are one way to recognize that ads are reaching too broad a market. For example, if you are trying to advertise a 16gb ipod touch then a possible good keyword phrase might be “16gb ipod touch” instead of “mp3 player” as it is more specific and more likely to draw more relevant traffic resulting in better conversion ratios and reducing waste of advertising budget.

Why do they buy?

Marketing experts suggest that purchasing decisions are made for one of three reasons: to fulfill a basic need, to solve a problem, or to create positive feelings about the self. Adwords campaigns should communicate specifically what need will be satisfied, problem solved, or self-image achieved through the purchase.

Viewers are given pages of hits when they enter a search. They need a compelling reason to choose one ad over another. Effective ad titles will increase click-thru rates. The result of these two steps is a lower CPC and a better qualified lead.

To zero in more closely on the niche market, you can employ negative keywords. These are the words that, when included in a viewer’s search, will cause the ad NOT to appear. Developing an accurate list of negative keywords involves several steps. First, using a keyword research tool, enter the keywords chosen for the advertiser’s website. A list of phrases commonly searched that contain those words will be produced. An advertiser selling tulips, for instance, might find that the search phrase “pictures of tulips” is frequently used. The negative keyword “pictures” would then prevent the ad from showing when a viewer wants an image instead of the real thing.

Use keyword phrase matching to further ensure the ad will reach the right viewers. Variations in spelling, common misspellings, interchanged words, and the use of singular and plural forms of keywords allow the maximum number of potential customers to receive the ad in response to a search.

Knowing one’s niche and reaching that segment of the market can enhance an advertiser’s success with Adwords campaigns.

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A freebie or competition event is very simple to setup and all you need is the prizes. The best way to go about this is to find people and websites with tools and services that would actually benefit your users. Approach them and ask them for a contribution to your prize fund. They should be interested in this as they give a little something away and return they are essentially getting advertising for their product or service from you.

Now their is no point in doing a great big competition and getting nothing back in return so you are now going to want to capitalise on this opportunity by channeling the participants where you want them. For example, if you are looking to build an opt in email contact list then you are going to want to give the participants the entry details or even one entry to the competition for providing their email address. Likewise, if you are a blog looking to increase your readership you easily tell the users that competition entry information is in your feed at which point you can direct them to signing up to your feed.

You are also going to want to spread the word, after all a competition for your current readers is all very good and well but you should be looking to increase your readership or newsletter subscription. The first step would be to encourage the competition sponsors to promote their prize to their reader base. Secondly all of those networking contacts you have with your friends and online associates in your field are great for spreading the word of your great new competition. It might also be worth mentioning on the forums you are active on if those websites allow it.

I will be launching a competition soon and I hope to be able to source some great prizes for everyone so keep your eyes peeled.

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You will quickly realise when setting up a google adwords campaign that google provides you with estimates on traffic for the keywords you are using. Lets imagine that we want to advertise some PPC software. An obvious keyword to add to your campaign first would be “PPC Software”. Now lets imagine that google predicts that this will produce 1000 clicks per day costing X amount. In reality are you going to get this many clicks? From my personal experience it is very hit or miss.

So why do Google privide this information for their users? I would imagine the biggest reason is to give the users a rough idea as to the potential of the keywords they are thinking of using. Therefore these statistics should be taken lightly.

In all fairness the estimates provided are probably the best Google can produce as certain factors are out of their control. The main factors that cannot be taken into consideration are as follows:

1. Advert text - Calls to action etc can greatly affect the clickthrough rate of an advert.
2. Relevancy - If the advert is not relavant to what the user is looking for you are not going to get many clicks and the ones you do get might not be useful resulting in wasted advertising money.
3. Existing brand awareness - Well known brands can draw attraction even in PPC adverts.

Because of factors like that you can see why Google would find it hard to provide accurate estimates.

Now this is not a Google bashing article as I actually believe that they provide an excellent platform for searching and advertising on. I am pointing out a flaw that highlights the importance of monitoring and testing your keyword campigns to realise there full potential.

I currently use a custom written piece of software to track and monitor my campaigns but this can easily be done on a budget using Microsoft Excel or even cheaper by using the Open Office spreadsheet software. If you are going to opt for a spreadsheet then make sure that you can view all of the essential results side by side so that you can easily spot the performance and any future drops in effectiveness. If your a little bit savy or willing to put in the research hours you can learn little coding tricks to put in the spreadsheets to perform calculations and automatically display the most important pieces of information.

There are many reasons why racking and monitoring your campaigns is important but they are all about maximising profits and reducing wasted advertising money.

If anyone needs any more specific help with monitoring there PPC campigns then please feel free to drop me a comment or send me an email and I will write a post to help you with your problem.

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It is fairly obvious that if you do not have a steady level of traffic you are not likely to earn any level of profit worth mentioning. Like any business, without any customers you don’t get sales. Traffic represents all the people that gets a chance to see what you have to offer. The more people who see your products the more people there would be to buy them.

Nobody puts up an E-commerce site that doesn’t expect profit. We have a startup capital that needs to be regained. With a consistent traffic, we at least have a fighting chance to achieve that probability. Monetizing your traffic would optimize your chances of making the best out of it.

Making Money out of your Traffic

The best and most proven method of making a profit out of your traffic is using advertising. The Internet generates hundreds of thousands upon hundred of thousands of traffic everyday. Most of them are searching for something. While some are just looking for information there is also a good percentage that is looking for something that they need.

The Internet has proven to be a very reliable source in finding what was deemed to be a very unsearchable product. The Internet has made the world a smaller place; you can advertise a product in deepest darkest Peru and get customers from all over the world if their is a demand for it and that demand is greatly increased just by the fact that with the Internet the entire world is now available to you. This is even more true if your business is built on digital products and services as you do not have the deterrent of expensive shipping methods to send your goods all the way around the world.

Generating traffic is far from being an easy task. With the ability to sell world wide comes the downside that your competitors can too and there are a lot more of them as you are playing against people in many many countries. However, if done successfully this could open up a Pandora’s Box of possibilities. One of the benefits is monetizing your traffic flow.

So, to get to the core of it the more traffic you generate the more likely you are considered as a desirable, desirable, in a sense that a site with good traffic flow has a potential customer base which is what your paying advertisers want. Basically traffic equals profit. Advertising is the name of the game; with the good advertising scheme you can use your traffic flow to your advantage.

Magnetization Methods

One monetisation scheme is called “pay-per-click”. With every click a visitor of your site makes on an advertised link you will be paid. The more traffic you generate and the more clicks that happens would spell to more profits. The big players in this field are Google and Yahoo. They both provide easy ways to integrate targeted and up to date adverts straight into the content of your website. Because Google and Yahoo adverts are generated based on the content of the page your customers are on they are highly relevant and more likely to convert through to clicks and therefore profit for you.

Affiliate Programs

Another method of monetizing your traffic are affiliate programs. You can link up with other tried and tested sites and online companies and monetize your traffic by having a percentage of sales generated by traffic coming from your site.

The basic idea is, traffic generated from your site will go to another site that can offer a product that you do not carry. Many programs can keep track and make records of transactions that was made possible because of site linkage.

When purchases are made by customers that was led by your site to their site you get a percentage of that sale. Affiliate programs would give you the benefit of monetizing your traffic without the actual need of carrying or promoting a certain product.

It is worthwhile if choosing to use affiliate marketing to generate money on your website to select only programs that you trust and are relevant to your target audience. If you put a banner to a golf website on your page about blue widgets then you are simply throwing money away as your not likely to get many conversions.

There are so many ways and methods to monetize your traffic. All it takes is a bit of hard work and the desire to successfully launch a profit-earning site. The Internet is a veritable source of information, many tips and guides are offered everywhere in how to monetize your traffic and make your site a good profit earner.

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I realised that I had got completely caught up with trying to keep on top of several large projects of which each was incredibly time consuming. To give you a better understanding I am going to let you in on my old work routine that I decided to stop following yesterday (This was not a planned schedule just one that I ended up in).

7.00am - Alarm clock goes off and its time to get up and get ready for work.

8.00am - Travel to office

9.00am - arrive at office and power up the computer and start looking at client requirements and start working through them.

13:00 - Grab some lunch but continue to work whilst eating

19:00 - Time to leave the office and head back home

20:00 - Arrive back home and turn on the laptop and begin working on clients online advertising campaigns and checking performance of PPC campaigns.

21:00 - Time for a break and to eat some dinner, Watch TV and spend time with partner

22:00 - Back to the laptop again and working on my many websites.

24:00 - Time to finish up and get as much sleep as possible before another day begins.

That totals up to 14 hours of work a day plus 2 hours of travel time.

The weekends were not so bad but I was constantly checking on clients campaigns and working on my own websites too.

It seems strange to me now to see just how mad a schedule I had gotten myself into but it is worth noting that no one forced me to follow this routine.

Anyway, its time to put that madness behind me. I have decided to work on one project at a time and reduce my overall hours spent working whilst trying to streamline the more time consuming tasks.

The main point of this post is to try and highlight the dangers of not paying attention to personal schedules or even worse not even having one. I am currently trying to create a manageable and reasonable daily routine for myself that I can use to focus my efforts and free up more time.

I am hoping that by also focusing on fully developing one of my own sites at a time I will actually be more productive and actually get results much faster. I will keep everyone updated on any benefits I see from any changes.

Does anyone currently chart their time spent in order to manage there time better or do you have any great ideas for improving time efficiency?

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The study generated some interesting results regarding the type of content that is most often forwarded, as well. The most popular content is humorous material.

The second most popular category is news, followed by healthcare and medical information, religious and spiritual material, games, business and personal finance information and sports/hobbies… in that order. So it is easy to see that humor is the best content for your viral e-mail campaign.

Cartoons, jokes and funny video clips are among the things that can be added to an e-mail to insure that it will go viral. People will want to pass along something that makes them laugh.

They are a lot more likely to hit the forward button and send your email to their friends and relatives if it is an “advertainment” rather than an advertisement.

Not along ago, about 35 million people got an e-mail containing a picture taken in Disneyland. It took a minute to see it but there was Donald Duck lying prone in front of the famous Cinderella Castle. The title of the picture was “Bird Flu has hit Disneyland”. It was a viral e-mail advertising Disneyland and used the edgy strategy of making light of what’s serious… and it works. Here is a picture for all of you who missed it

I’d guess that most people who own a computer have seen that picture… and thus the advertisement for Disneyland. The bird flu epidemic is newsworthy and has the potential to attract an enormous amount of attention to any brand that might, for whatever reason, associate itself with it.

Remember that people are much more likely to share a joke or a funny picture than anything else so you would be well advised to include humor in your e-mail campaign.

Now the only trick is to come up with something funny and unique without resorting to rebrand other peoples funny videos and flooding youtube with lots of the same video with different urls.

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BUT, it doesn’t take a whole caboodle of cash to generate website traffic for your site.


Ever wonder how does big hit sites drive traffic top their site? Most of them are spending tons of money to drive the traffic to their sites, investing in many advertising campaigns and different forms of marketing schemes and gimmickries. This is all worthwhile because, well, they are what they are now, high earning, big hitting websites.

You don’t have to do this if you don’t really have their resources. There are many ways to generate low cost website traffic without having to spend what you don’t have or can’t afford. Many people have banked on high cost methods and have ended up losing their shirt over it.

Here I present to you the five simple ways to generate low cost website traffic that could help your site a whole lot. Even if you only get a small percentage of successful visitors in to client ratio it still works especially if you get a high number of website traffic.

Exchange Links

This is a sure and proven method. Rarely would you see a site where there is no link to another site. Many webmasters are willing to exchange links with one another so that they could produce more public awareness about their sites. You’ll soon see and feel the sudden upsurge of the traffic coming in to your site from other sites.

A major prerequisite in exchanging links with other sites is having the same niche or content as the other site. They should share a common subject so that there is continuity in the providing of service and information to what interests your target traffic.

Exchanging links also boosts your chances of getting a high ranking in search engine results. It is common knowledge that search engines ranks high sites that have inbound and outbound theme-related links. With a good ranking position in the search engines, you will generate more traffic in your website without the high costs.

Traffic Exchange

This is like exchanging links but on a different higher level. This may cost a bit more than exchanging or trading links but could be made cheaper because you get to earn credits. You can use those credits when viewing others traffic, while you earn credits when someone views yours.

Traffic exchange services are the viewing of another’s site or page. This is done vice versa where a site can use your sites contents and so can you to his or her site. You both benefit from each others efforts to generate traffic. The other sites visitors can go to your pages and know more about your site as well as theirs. Once again the public awareness of your sites existence is boosted.

Write and Submit Articles

There are many e-zines and online encyclopedias in the internet which provides free space for articles to be submitted. If you want to save costs, you can do the articles yourself. There are many freelance writers who are willing to write for you for a small fee, but to save money, it is wise to do those articles yourself.

Write articles that are themed along with the niche of your site. Write something that you have expertise on so that when they read it, they can feel your knowledge about the subject and will be eager to go to your site. Write articles that produce tips and guidelines to the subject or niche your site has.

Include a resource box at the end of your article that can link them to your site. Write a little about yourself and your site. If you provide a light, information-laden and interesting article, they will go to your site for more.

Make a Newsletter

This may sound like hard work because of all the articles you may need to use to build a newsletter but on the contrary, this is not so. There are many writers and sites that are willing to provide free articles as long as they can get their name in on your newsletter. This will also provide free advertising for them as well.

As your newsletter gets pass around, you can widen your public awareness and build an opt-in list that can regularly visit your site.

Join Online Communities and Forums

This only requires your time and nothing else. You can share your knowledge and expertise with many online communities as well as your website. You can get free advertising when you go to forums that have the same subject or niche with your site.

Share your two cents and let them see how knowledgeable you are with the subject. As you build your reputation, you also build the reputation of your site, making it a reputable and honest business that could be frequented and trusted by many people.

There are many many other ways of generating traffic for your website and I will be discussing these in new posts soon so keep your eyes peeled.

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