Make Money Online | Making Money Online With Blog

How To Hide An Affiliate Link And Make It More Professional?

Lee Ka Hoong — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 14:10:50 +0000

Nowadays, making money online using affiliate program is getting popular, most of the internet marketers are trying to promote their affiliate link and hope to get someone to sign up the affiliate program under their affiliate link, when their referrals make money, they make money too without doing anything, it’s simple.

There are two options for you to make money online with affiliate program, one is promoting the product in the affiliate program, when you make a sales, you will get paid a commission. Another is referral program in the affiliate program, when you refer someone to sign up the affiliate program, and your referral make a sale, you’ll get paid a commission as well.

Nevertheless, I’ve seen many people is still using the affiliate link or referral link that the affiliate program provides, so you will see affiliate link like this, example :

http://secure.hostgator.com/cgi-bin/affiliates/clickthru.cgi?id=myblog2day

When you point your arrow on the link, the corner of the bottom left of your browser will show the link URL. It doesn’t look professional at all and everyone knows this is an affiliate link, you know up to 50% people ignores affiliate link, including myself unless the link is something that interests me. So in this post, I’m going to show you how to hide your affiliate link and modify it to any pattern you like.

6 Steps How To Hide An Affiliate Link

I’m going to modify my Hostgator affiliate link as shown above. So here is the step-by-step tutorial on how I modify and hide my affiliate link.

Open a notepad and paste the coding as below.

http://secure.hostgator.com/cgi-bin/affiliates/clickthru.cgi?id=myblog2day“>

After that, save the notepad name as “index“.
*Change my affiliate link to your affiliate link.
Open a folder and name it as whatever name you like, it’s better to name it as something relevant to the affiliate program. My affiliate link is the Hostgator affiliate program, so I name and save it as “Hostgator”.
Copy the “index” notepad file and paste into the folder that you created in step #2.
Now copy the affiliate program folder and paste it into your wordpress folder using FTP. I pasted it into the root directory, you can either do the same or create a new folder says “recommends” and paste your affiliate program folder into the “recommends” folder.
If you create the recommends folder and paste your affiliate program folder, eventually your affiliate link will be looked like this.

http://www.domain.com/recommends/affiliateprogram/
I pasted my Hostgator affiliate program folder into the root directory, so my Hostgator affiliate link will be looked like this.

http://myblog2day.com/Hostgator/

Now, it looks more professional right? The affiliate link is looked like a page in your blog, when people clicks it, it will redirect them to the affiliate program site. Hiding affiliate link is very simple, it increases the click through rate as well as the chances that they sign up the affiliate program under your affiliate link. With that said, your affiliate earning will be increasing equally.

Make money online with affiliate program is not that complicated, but it’s not as easy as you think because you need to drive more traffic to your site and refer your readers to sign up. If you able to drive more traffic to your blog, I believe that getting your readers to click on the “professional” affiliate link and sign up the affiliate program is not difficult. Eventually, making money online with affiliate program is not a myth anymore.

This is a simple tutorial that teaches you how to hide your affiliate link and modify it to be more professional. There are many ways to hide your affiliate link such as using TinyUrl.com, Bit.ly and etc, they allow you to modify your affiliate link to a short URL, but I think that modifying affiliate link by using our own domain name will be more personal and this increases the trust from your readers.

Have you done this for your affiliate link before? Besides of this, what method did you use to hide your affiliate link?

Free Blog Contest Giveaways In WeBuildYourBlog

Lee Ka Hoong — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 15:58:47 +0000

This week, Andrew Rondeau from WeBuildYourBlog.com had written a great guest post in this blog which was talking about “What Is Blogging And How Do People Make Money Online“, Andrew brought everyone back to basic and this might benefit to beginner who doesn’t know anything about blogging and how they can make money online. That was the best guest post I ever had in this blog, so I would like to give a free shout to Andrew’s blog contest.

Free Blog Contest Giveaways

Andrew is running a blog contest in his blog, that’s a great blog contest as it gives out up to 10 prizes to 10 winners, all the prizes are attractive, some of them are Thesis Theme, header banner design, hosting and domain, social bookmarking submission, keyword analysis research, banner ads and etc. If I win then I’ll definitely grab the header banner design prize because I need a professional designer to design a logo for my blog.

How To Enter?

It’s simple to join this contest, follow the steps and gain entries, the more entries you have, the higher the chance you will win.

1) Subscribe his newsletter (5 Entries – Compulsory)
2) Retweet the post (3 Entries)
3) Add a comment (2 Entries)
4) Digg the post (3 Entries)
5) Promote the contest in blog post (5 Entries)

This takes you few minutes to complete all the steps and you stand a chance to win a great prize, why not? The contest will be ended in an hour from now (Friday November 13, 2009 at 12noon EDT), so hurry up!

How To Win?

Andrew will random pick all the 10 winners from the “hat” and all the winners will be notified immediately. From what I can see from the comment section, there is only 25+ participants and there are 10 prizes, so the chance of winning a prize is high, so take action now!

Action now!

I’ve done all the steps required by Andrew and I’m waiting for the announcement after an hour from now, you know I’ve won 2 cash prizes in the past, so I’m going to win another blog contest and grab a great prize!

Join Andrew’s Free Contest Giveaways now!

What Is Blogging And How Do People Make Money Online

Lee Ka Hoong — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 16:35:10 +0000

Blogging is a simple medium on the internet, which can be used to share your thoughts, opinions, expertise, pictures, videos – almost anything – with everyone around the world.

Blogging is like having your own magazine and anyone can create one. You can create a blog on any topic of your liking. You can create blogs just as a pastime or hobby or even to make an income.

One of the main advantages of blogs is that they are very easy to create and you need not have any real technical knowledge or website designing skills. No matter whether you are a student, a housewife or a businessman, you can create a blog of your own.

Blogs are also an effective medium for the celebrities and renowned personalities to interact with their followers. The visitors can drop in their comments and the blog owners can reply to those comments. Blogs are not only handy for personal usage. They are used by many companies as well to reach out to their employees and clients.

Making an Income

But blogging is not only a means of social networking and reaching out to your followers. There are many blog owners who consistently rake in 5 digit and even 6 digit income via blogging. All that you require is a computer with internet connection and you are ready to earn.

Some Of The Ways To Earn Money From Blogging

1) Selling your own service or product
Let’s say you were an electrician by trade. You could start a blog sharing your advice and also allow people to contact you for your services. Or what if you were a retired electrician? You could create a product called something like, “101 best ever electric DIY tips” and sell it via your blog.

These are some of the fastest growing products and services that sell on the web:

Products:-

Books
Gifts
Gadgets
Software
Collectables
Advice type information

Services:-

Web design, hosting, marketing, building
Financial
Legal
Writing
Proof –reading
Administrative
Consultancy

Does you service or product fit into any of the above?

2) Google Adsense
It is one of the most popular ways to earn money on the internet. Here, you host the ads of other web merchants on your blog. When any user clicks on the ad, you get a portion of the revenue generated. But here, you have to test where to place the adverts. The best place is normally just under the title of the post and before the blog post text starts. But you have to test it. Change the adverts to a different place on your blog and see what difference it makes to your income. One thing I will add – don’t expect to become rich via AdSense. You have to have a huge amount of daily traffic visiting your blog before you start seeing even only $100 a month.

3) Adding affiliate banners and links
Affiliate marketing is basically, where you introduce the buyer to someone else’s service or product, and for the introduction and ultimate sale you receive a commission percentage. Look at almost any blog and you will see banner type adds for products. If you were to click on one of the banners and buy the product, the owner of the blog would receive a commission for that sale. Commissions can be as high as 75%, so if you were to display the right banner ad, you could make a lot of money.

Some of the bigger affiliate marketing companies where you can search for products to promote includes:

Click Bank: http://www.clickbank.com
Pay Dot Com: http://www.paydotcom.com
Commission Junction: http://cj.com/publishers/

4) Amazon is the largest affiliate company around
You can sell Amazon products on your blog. The niche of your blog will determine whether you can make money via Amazon. Again I’m personally in the wrong niches to make any serious money. You have to sell a lot of books at $10 when you are only getting 5% or 10% to make anything serious. But if you are in any physical good niches like TVs, gadgets etc then you can make a good income by selling Amazon products.

5) Writing product reviews
This is another form of making an income via affiliate marketing. Write a review via a blog post of a product or service you have used and benefited from. I recommend you actually use the product or service and benefit from it before you write your review. That way your review will come across as more personal and believable.

6) Selling links
If you have a high traffic to your blog and have obtained a high page rank (PR), you can earn money by selling links i.e. someone puts their link or banner on your site for a monthly fee. If your blog has a high PR, its space can be sold to other bloggers / web merchants. The money that you earn depends on the PR of your blog. Higher the PR, more money you can get.
On my sites, I use all methods listed above except Amazon.

What brings me the most income?

My own products and services, by far.

Then recommending and selling affiliated products and affiliated banners/links.

Then selling links and banner space

Then Google Adsense.

These are some of the ways of earning money by blogging. Which method you adopt will depend on your blog’s popularity, niche and the efforts that you are willing to put behind it.

What’s been your best way of making an income via blogging?

About Author :
This is a guest post from Andrew Rondeau at www.webuildyourblog.com where he covers all the aspects of starting your own blog and making a blog income.

How I Make Money Online From Blog Contest?

Lee Ka Hoong — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 13:38:22 +0000

Last month I’ve joined a blog contest in BloggingWithChris, it was a cash prizes contest which gave out up to $600 cash in paypal to more than 20 winners. The contest ran for about 2 months and the winners have been announced 2 days ago. Fortunately, I’ve won a $40 cash prize through paypal! It was my second time won cash prize through blog contest, it was pretty excited to see that and again I prove that we can actually make money online through joining blog contest.

How I Look For Blog Contest And Make Money Online

In my previous article “5 Tips How To Look For Blog Contest and Make Money Online“, I’ve stated 5 tips how you can find blog contest and make some quick cash. In my experience, I find that blog hopping is the best way to search for blog contest. As we know, nowadays many bloggers like to organize blog contest to drive more traffic, get more backlinks, get more subscribers, get more twitter followers, and of course get exposure to the public.

So you know many bloggers like to organize blog contest to improve their blog, blog hopping is the best way for you to look for blog contest. I used to read more than 10 blogs a day and I won’t miss out any blog contest organized by them, so when you find any blog that interest you, bookmark and read them regularly.

I’m not going to talk more about how you can search blog contest and make money online, it’s a very particular topic and I’m sure you know how to look for blog contest too. If you’re out of idea on how to look for contest, read my previous article and you’ll get some idea from there.

I was quite happy to win the cash prize, thanks to Chris Peterson who is the founder of BloggingWithChris.com. I’ll be spending the money for my new on-going project.

Have you won any cash prize from blog contest before? How much was that?

5 Ways For Teenagers To Make Money

Lee Ka Hoong — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 15:30:28 +0000

After the article that I’ve published last week that was talking about “7 Ways How To Make Money For Kids“, it received quite a few comments from readers and some of them did do part time job when they were kids, and that article would be helpful for you (if you’re a kid right now) or your kids to get some ideas on how they can make money even they don’t have any specific skills or internet knowledge.

So I’m going to write an article about ways for teenagers to make money, kids can make money, teenagers can make money as well. The age of a teenager would be 13-19 years old, this age is good enough to do some part time job and earn some extra cash. I did do a few part time job when I was teenager, I made quite a lot extra pocket money to buy something I want.

As we know, nowadays many parents want their children to be independence and they want their children to learn something themselves instead of guiding them all the ways. So, if their children need money to buy something such as PSP, Play Station and the like, then they have to work and buy it themselves. This is to let them experience the working life and they should know money is not easy to earn, so they will know the value of money. But don’t be too serious about this, they’re still young though, they should have healthy life as a kid or teenager too.

There are many ways for teenagers to make money, it’s not regarding to make money online, perhaps it’s not a make money online related article that you’re looking for, but I hope teenagers who are looking for part time job to earn some extra cash would find this article useful.

5 Ways For Teenagers To Make Money

1) Filling Survey
It’s not another online survey filling program, it’s a real job. When I was a teenager, I used to make money by filling survey form. You can go to any survey firm or company in your area and ask for a job, they’re always looking for freelancers to complete the survey form.

There are 2 types of survey form filling, one you need to bring your survey forms and go to specified housing area and request for a 5 minutes interview house by house, says you have 30 forms and you need to go 30 houses and request for interview. It’s tiring but survey firm pays higher price for this type of survey form filling.

Another type will be doing interview via phone, you need to call to few numbers that have been prepared by the survey firm, and you request for a short interview and you fill up the survey form, that’s it.

I took the first option and I made $100 for filling up 20-30 survey forms in 2 weeks time, I’m not sure whether it’s a good offer for you right now, but $100 was a lot for me when I was teenager.

2) Home Tutor
Home tutor becomes very popular today, many parents don’t want to send their children to tuition centre but hiring a home tutor to lecture their children at home. If you’re good in simple maths, you should be able to look for someone who needs a home tutor for their 6-10 years old kid. My girlfriend’s sister is a home tutor and she is making thousand per month, she has only 3-5 students.

3) House Painting
You might need to learn how to paint a house before you can start doing this job, it’s not complicated I guess as I’d tried to paint a house in the past. You can ask 2-3 friends to work together, once you have enough manpower and you can look for the project. Simply hanging around your housing area and see is there any house doing renovation and they need painter, you can earn quite a lot of money with only 1 project.

4) Home Typist
Are you familiar with the word “home typist“? Is it sound like a scam? No, it’s not scam because it’s not online home typist. In fact, there are many university students or lecturers are looking for home typist to help them type the short notes or assignments that they’ve been done in hand writing, they will need your help to type the short notes or assignments into computer. It’s fairly easy, you just need to have a computer and you know typing.

5) Mow Yards And Clean Houses
There are many teenagers doing this to earn pocket money. As you know, there are many working ladies and gentlemen out there, and they have no time to clean their houses or move the yards, or they’re just lazy to do that after the tiring working hours. So you can hang around your housing area again and see which household has long glass and not been mowed for quite some days, knock the door and ask about that.

Conclusion

There are many other ways for teenagers to make money out there, but I find this 5 ways are quite effectiveness. Since it’s not a make money online related article, so I try to make it as short as possible. This article shows that teenagers can actually make money in reality other than making money online.

Did you try to make money when you was a teenager? What did you do?

Huzzer Blog Commenting Contest Win Up To $600!

Lee Ka Hoong — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 13:14:16 +0000

So you know I love blog contest as I won a cash prize $42 and a few little prizes in the past. A buddy of mine, Helmi Asyraf Abdullah‏ who is the founder of Huzzer dot Com just email me and tell me about his current on-going blog contest, so I would like to give it a shout to all of you because he gives out a lot of great prizes to the winners!

Participating blog contest is one of the way where you can win some great prizes as well as cash, you can also make money online by joining blog contest, simple right? So Helmi is running a blog contest which gives out various prizes up to $500, Helmi updated the contest and it adds up to $600 at the 2nd revision.

How To Join?

It can be considered as a Commenting contest, it’s very easy to join this contest. You just need to leave genuine comment in any article in Huzzer dot com, the more genuine comments you leave, the bigger the chance you win. Besides of commenting, you can also give this contest a shout, just like what I’m doing right now.

How To Win?

There is a Top Commentator section at the sidebar, it shows how many comments that commentators have left in the blog. At the first stage, people who stay at the Top 3 Commentators will win the prizes. Don’t be disappointed if you see someone has been leaving up to 60 comments in the blog, read further and you’ll know who will be the winner.

Prizes

1st Place

1 x StudioPress premium WordPress theme
1 x Freedom Hosting Plan (1 year free)
1 x copy of Ultimate traffic eBook
1 x ‘Choosing the Right Words’ eBook
1 x 125×125 advertisement spot in AdesBlog
1 x 125×125 advertisement spot in Huzzer Magazine
1 x free 1 month subscriptions to studies program, Winners Circle

2nd Place

1 x ThemeForest premium WordPress theme
1 x copy of Ultimate traffic eBook
1 x 125×125 advertisement spot in RobsWebsTip
1 x 125×125 advertisement spot in Huzzer Magazine
1 x free 1 month subscriptions to studies program, Winners Circle

3rd Place

1 x Hash One theme from Obox Design (without support)
1 x copy of Ultimate traffic eBook
1 x 125×125 advertisement spot in RobsWebsTip

Bonus Prize
Great and special mystery prizes to the most active person who actively promotes the contest, such as writing a blog post, retweeting the article, and the like.

Best Commentator
This prize will be giving to the commentator who leaves the best comment in term of the quality, so be sure you leave genuine and helpful comment and win the prize.

1 x developer licence of ClassiPress theme worth $149

Mystery Gift
Each participant will be awarded with mystery gifts from Obox Design and WpWebHost, Helmi will distribute the prizes to all the participants in email, so be sure you subscribe to the contest mailing list to receive the mystery gifts.

When The Contest Ends?

The contest will be ended on 19th November 2009, the winners will be announcement on 20th November 2009.

Action Now!

This is an awesome blog contest that organized by Helmi, so don’t miss it! Bear in mind, don’t be disappointed when you see someone has been leaving up to 60 comments, Helmi only counts genuine comments. Besides of winning prizes, you would get quality one-way backlinks by leaving comments in the blog because Huzzer dot com is a dofollow blog.

So you can now join the contest by leaving honor comments in Huzzer dot com!