Last week I talked about using Twitter, through Sponsored Tweets, to bring in some extra income quickly and simply. Hopefully you took advantage of the opportunity and have signed up for Sponsored Tweets by now. If not, I have another reason why you might want to consider joining up – contests for awesome prizes!

Izea founder Ted Murphy (the people who developed Sponsored Tweets) has held two great contests using his platform so far, giving away a Dominican vacation and a Canon OES Digital Rebel 15.1 Megapixel Camera Kit so far. Now they are having a contest for a cool $1000 in cash, and this is open to International as well as US entrants this time.

All you have to do to win (once you are signed up for Sponsored Tweets, of course) is be the person who refers the most new members before November 16^th. Winner gets to send out a $1000 tweet and you can withdraw that money and do whatever you want with it.

Contest Rules:

• All referrals must be Twitter accounts over 120 days old

• Entrants must be 18 Years of Age or older

• Any use of Twitter bot spamming, or other spamming, will render you ineligible and will result in suspension of your account.

Sign up, start referring and good luck!

If you are in a contest mood, Jonathan Volk is running a Twitter contest on his blog (see how valuable Twitter can be!) with some cool prizes – first prize is dual 22” monitors! Check it out here.

You earn points for tweeting his blog posts, following him on twitter, subscribing to his newsletter and RSS feed, becoming a fan of him on Facebook and making a blog post about him or the contest.

All of these things are really quick and easy to do, and each gets you a chance at some cool prizes that can really help further your online endeavors. While you may not win every single one (or even many of them) it’s a good way to leverage your online presence for the benefit of your business. For example, you could win the prizes, but assuming that you don’t there is still value in referring new Sponsored Tweets users to earn referral income, getting your name out there and building relationships with other like-minded people. That’s one of the main reasons people like Jonathan host these contests is to build their brand, so make sure that you take advantage of the opportunity to do the same.

The fact is, no matter how much cash you’re making, affiliate networks need you. They know that there is the potential for you to make big money down the road if you’re just starting out and they also know that the majority of their offers are available on dozens of other networks out there. So they need to and want to treat you better than the competition.

For instance, say you like working with Azoogle and want to promote a certain offer, but you know that Convert2Media has the same offer for a payout of $5 more. Well, don’t just sit there and grumble that you’re not being paid fairly - ask your manager if they can match the c2m payout (and tell him you’ll switch your link if they can’t). You’d be surprised at how often it works.

Nate and I put this very principle to work last week. We were making pretty decent coin with a network and had two campaigns that were doing very well. However, our budgets are severely limited by credit card limits, so we don’t have a lot we can spend at any given time. However, we were pretty close to the network’s minimum requirements for weekly payouts anyway.

So I wrote a long and detailed email to my affiliate manager explaining the situation and what was currently holding us back from making serious income. I then promised to reinvest everything we make for the rest of the year to be able to pay down our credit card and get a increase on our limit so that we can be spending some serious money (and thus generating some serious money) after the new year. Lastly, I promised to continue to run each campaign with him after we are able to scale them up and make them HUGE.

Those things alone were enough to make him advocate for our cause with the network’s accounting department and low & behold we’re now on weekly payments and are able to spend more (since we don’t have to wait for net 30 payments before we’re paid next) each week, able to make more each week and will soon be making serious chedda. haha.

So the moral of the story is, if it’s higher payouts you’re looking for, help choosing a niche or an avenue of promotion, or even something as serious as an increase in payment frequency, if you can make your case wisely and give something back to the network, chances are they’ll throw you a bone. If they won’t, find a network who will and it will pay off in the end. Good luck!

For those of you using Twitter, you are all aware of what a great platform it is for communication, breaking news and collaborative efforts. Have you thought about using it to help make you some extra money though?

A great new program that tons of advertisers are using to make money these days is called Sponsored Tweets. It is a really simple and easy way for you to cash in on your Twitter presence since the advertisers come to you! All you need to do is sign up for Sponsored Tweets and create your profile and then wait for the offers to come rolling in! You set your own price per tweet and get to describe you interests so that the most relevant advertisers can find your profile. It’s that simple.

The other great part about this is it really is for anyone. You can use the Sponsor Me feature to promote your own sign-up link, and for each new advertiser you bring in, you’ll earn 5% on whatever they order from any tweeters for the next two years! And that’s on top of the money you get for your tweets, too.

Plus, if you think you might have better luck getting an advertiser to sign on with a more established user, you can always promote other people’s personalized page. Every tweeter in Sponsored Tweets has a public profile and you can use your referral code to point to any of them. For example, if you think you have a better chance of getting an advertising opportunity for our CouponLanding twitter feed you can do that by simply changing a tiny piece of your referral code to point to us.

For example: Here is our referral link http://sponsoredtweets.com/profile/CouponLanding?referral_code=512eb5c41066a5a77e9f290b92d72cd0

If we want to try and get some advertisers for John Chow, we just change /CouponLanding? to /JohnChow? and anyone using that new link to advertise with John, gives us the 5% referral income, while he gets the money for the tweets. Pretty neat ,huh?

The program is really starting to take off so make sure to sign up for Sponsored Tweets and start making easy money while enjoying Twitter.

According to TheDomains.com,

Efficient Frontier Inc, which calls itself the world’s largest search engine marketer says that the number of clicks on ads served by Microsoft Bing.com search engine jumped 13% in the two weeks since it was switched from Live.com.

“Those gains are significant in terms of revenue,” said Justin Merickel, marketing vice president at Efficient Frontier, which places about $750 million in text ads on top search engines worldwide.

With the U.S. search ad market valued at $12 billion this year, each additional point in paid-click share Microsoft gains would be worth $120 million in annual revenue.

So, that being said, are you testing your campaigns on Bing.com? If not, don’t you think it’s time to give it a shot? Sounds to me like Bing could be liquid gold!

How the Book Came to Be:

The idea came to me awhile ago, actually. I was cruising the Google Adwords Toolbox looking for potentially profitable, high-traffic keywords when I somehow happened across the keyword “baby name” and noticed that, between the singular and the plural version of the phrase, there were nearly 11 million monthly searches. And, when I Googled the phrases myself, I noticed that there was nearly no PPC competition for either keyword. “Golden!” I thought. But when I went into all of the affiliate networks we belong to to look for a baby names-related offer to begin to promote, I didn’t find a single one. I was bummed out and quickly put the niche out of my mind to move onto something else. And the “baby names” idea stayed there — on the backburner — until weeks later when I read this post on Shoemoney.com about making money online with your own products. The post was guest written by Scott Skinger, who is the founder and president of www.TrainSignal.com, an ecommerce company that produces and sells computer training products for IT pros. After reading it, I immediately started brainstorming and that’s when I remembered the baby names niche! Brilliant! Since I couldn’t find any baby names products to promote when I wanted to, why not write my own?!

Making the Book:

I was able to procure a baby names database from the Buy, Sell, Trade section of the forums at Namepros.com, which I was able to convert into a Word document and, after a full week of reformatting the database to read like a book, writing an introduction, a table of contents etc. to make it look more like a book and creating a cover for it in Photoshop, I had a final product to start promoting. When all was said and done, the book has nearly 8,000 names — complete with their country or culture of origin, their intended sex, and the meaning of each name, all listed alphabetically — and is more than 180 pages long. Not too shabby. Though it was pretty tedius work reformatting everything, it wasn’t an awful lot of “work” really, and the potential moneymaking benefits could far outweight the work I put into it.

Getting it Online:

I knew I wanted to sell the book online through affiliates. Although it cuts down on the profit margins a great deal to where we’ll only make a few dollars per sale, it also cuts down tremendously on the amount of work we’ll have to do moving forward so we can continue to focus on other projects while this one runs quietly in the background, hopefully bringing in some nice residual income. With that in mind, I set up the landing page in the traditional “long sales letter” style you see many eBooks sold through. Only I didn’t want ours to ramble on for hours like many Make Money Online eBook sales letter pages do; I needed to keep ours short and sweet. I found this great, FREE “sales letter” landing page template from dotcompreneur.com to start with and made some personalizations to it to better fit our niche and our target audience. And just like that, we were in business.

To begin to promote it, I looked into listing the book on ClickBank, PayDotCom, and Click2Sell but ended up opting for ClickBank because of their built-in automation. Although their set up fees are higher than either PayDotCom or Click2Sell, I liked that ClickBank paid my affiliates for me during each sale. With the other two networks, I would have had to pay them all manually from my own funds, which is a pain in the ass. I would have to make sure I was around to pay them on time and that I had enough funds on hand to pay them the money they were due when they were due it. I like that with ClickBank the money that gets to me — even if it takes a few extra days to arrive — is all mine, and I won’t need to worry or do anything more with it.

So I went ahead and followed the ClickBank directions for setting up my site for their system (including the “pitch page”, “thank you page”, payment buttons, etc.) and was good-to-go. I paid the setup fee and litterally 2.5 business days later (yesterday), I got an email saying that my Baby Names Book was approved for sale and would be listed in the ClickBank marketplace to be promoted.

What Happens Next:

From here, we can only hope (and monitor and optimize, of course) that it begins to be promoted right away and takes off, which I think it should. Between all of the Baby Names-related keywords (there are a bunch of high-traffic ones; look them up) and keywords like “mom”, “pregnant”, etc. there are TENS OF MILLIONS of monthly searches — think about it, how many women become pregnant every day; it’s a limitless niche — and very little PPC competition currently. After that, we can sit back and rake in the money while an army of affiliate marketers sell the product for us. As I said, we can then use that residual income to fuel other products we have on our horizon. Here’s wishing us luck!

Note: if you would like to promote our Baby Names Book “Hello, My Name Is…”, make sure you’re signed up with Clickbank.com and then click here to get started.

(click on the image for full-sized version)

Now out of these two ads, which would you be more likely to click on? The good, professional-looking ad on the right-hand side, or the one on the left which is pixelated, was clearly made in MS Paint (I didn’t add those red arrows, they were already there!) and has a huge, glaring misspelling!

Running display ads in your PPC campaigns in addition to the traditional text ads is always a good idea — there’s often less competition on a keyword with display ads than there is with text ads and the CTR of display ads can be higher, too — but if you’re going to take the time to test display ads, make sure and take the extra twenty seconds to spell check your ad. And if you’re serious about making money from PPC (or online in general), find a way to acquire a copy of Photoshop and an at least remedial understanding of the program (or shell out the couple bucks it takes to hire someone who can make a killer ad for you).

Otherwise, if you end up running ads like the guy on the left has done, you’re just pissing your money away!

But I’ve found — for me at least — it to be super helpful to have and end goal in mind, something you can buy or have if you make X number of dollars online. For some people it’s something like a new car, or a new house or even an item as simple as a Nintendo Wii. And while I too want all of these things for myself, I’ve been reading Timothy Ferriss’ book Four Hour Work Week this week and I’ve decided the one thing that I now want to work toward is having enough money to have a Virtual Assistant on my payroll.

Seriously, I can’t think of anything more ballin’ than that. Ferriss describes his experiences with VAs at length and discusses how he’s hired VAs from places like elance.com or Your Man in India for $4-$25 an hour to do everything from blogging research to setting up meetings and interviews, to sending people flowers for him. Reading that has given me a new found drive for making enough money online to be able to hire myself a Virtual Assistant. Everyone needs to have goals, right? What are yours?

The rules to enter the contest are quite simple. All you have to do is follow Cakes on Twitter @nickycakes, go to Cakes’ original contest post here, click a button to generate a unique tracking link to the contest for yourself and Tweet it out to the world. Pretty friggin’ simple, really.

So how do you win? Well, for linking to the contest you get 1 point, and for everyone that enters the contest through your personal link, you will get 1 point. The winner will be randomly selected at midnight EST on MAY 15th from all of the entries. Keep in mind that the winner will not necessarily be the person with the most points (although the more points you have, the better your odds of winning); think of each point as a raffle ticket, or an entry into the contest. So even if you only send one Tweet for one point and have no followers and no one enters the contest through your site, it’s still better than not entering at all. Do it. Good luck!

Chances are, if plenty of other people are running similar offers in similar niches, then there’s money to be made there. Yes, it means greater competition and a higher cost per click, but it also means a greater reward. Keep your eyes and ears open as you surf the web in your spare time and take note of what you see. Have you seen the same affiliate offer or landing page advertised in many different places, or even just the same niche in a lot of different ad networks? Well then, it’s pretty safe to assume that the affiliate running that offer is making some decent bank at it, or you wouldn’t see their ad everywhere (unless they’re just throwing a ton of money against a wall and hoping something sticks. But wait long enough and if the ad is still there then they’re probably onto something).

Check out their offers, check out their landing page and see if you can learn something from what they’re doing. Keep in mind I am NOT recommending you copy their landing page word-for-word; there is no room in this industry for straight stealing and you are not setting yourself up for long-term success if you simply steal other people’s content. You will eventually be caught and run out of Dodge.

That being said, there is no reason you cannot learn from what other people are doing to be successful and emulate their campaigns. We’ve all capitalized on good ideas we’ve seen demonstrated elsewhere, in this industry or any other.

As I said, though, with a popular niche comes more people and more competition. Chances are you won’t be able to direct-link, for instance, to an offer in a niche like Diet Offers or BizOpp Offers and you’ll need to be that much more creative and original to out-do your greater competition. But remember, if there are a lot of people already there promoting a niche, there’s already a lot of money to be made there, too. Go get yours!

So, if you’re stuck when it comes to what niche to choose or what offers to run, look around and see how other people are doing what you want to be doing. Learn from them, build on what they’re already doing, test, optimize, think outside the box and GET PAID! Good luck.

The transition, although pretty nerve wracking, isn’t without some security. I have lined up a part-time sales & marketing job (also working mostly from home) with some guaranteed income and some definite security, which is helping to keep me sane. Meanwhile, I will be using the rest of my weekly free time to do some freelance & magazine writing, and to build up and officially launch Nate & my own New Media firm, TookMedia; which will specialize in Internet marketing, social media branding & development, copywriting and content creation, blogging, and a few other bigger web ventures we have up our sleeves (which will undoubtedly be unveiled in the coming months).

Back to the Blog

The change will also allow me to put more time and energy into AffiliateByNight.com, which I’m excited about. It should grant me enough free time that I’ll be able to get back to posting almost daily, rather than the two or three posts a month we had fallen to. So certainly be ready for lots more goings-on ’round here.

Lastly, if anyone in “the industry” happens to be reading this — I know some of you are — and wants to collaborate on your Internet marketing/branding initiatives, or if you need some freelance writing done, please don’t hesitate to give me a shout. Otherwise, grab our RSS feed, follow us on Twitter, and get ready for lots more to come. Cheers!