Twitter has became the largest free social networking and micro blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages, we call it as tweets. Also, there are more and more twitter tools launched on the web too, there is various of twitter tools which has various function, some helps you to find targeted twitter user, some enables you to automate the system such as follow and unfollow, some allows you to unfollow all people that you follow, and the like.

When it comes to make money online, there is few advertising platform which you can join to make some easy money with your twitter account. As we know, SponsoredTweets is one of the largest advertising platform on the web and it was founded by IZEA, a social media marketing. When a business is growing, there are always other competitors to start and compete each other.

Make Money Online With Ad.ly

Recently, another advertising platform was launched on the web and it caught many twitter users’ attentions, it’s Ad.ly. Ad.ly is an in-stream advertising platform that matches top-tier Twitter publishers with top-tier brands. It enables twitter publishers to make money online by sending messages or tweets that required by advertisers, you can set the price that advertiser will need to pay for a tweet or message. Of course, you can approve or reject the offer that you received, but I believe that no one will reject the offer because nobody hates money, right?

The system is simple, you just need to sign up Ad.ly and you just need to sit down and wait for advertiser to contact you. Of course, you need to build a huge number of followers with your twitter account, the more the better, that’s the only key to make money online with your twitter account, despite any advertising platform, they’re all the same.

Ad.ly Race – Official Contest

Ad.ly is running a contest, it gives out a great prizes to the winner. The winner will be getting a 13′ Macbook Pro, the approximate retail value of the prize is $1,199! How are you going to win the prize? It’s simple, just sign up Ad.ly and approach to the Referral Program and grab your custom referral link, go ahead and refer as much friends as you could, people who refer the most referrals, the people win the prize.

The contest will be ended at 11:59 p.m. PST on December 13, 2009, so take your time to refer as much as you can now. The person who refer the most referrals will win the contest. It’s not easy to win the prize as there are thousands twitter publishers are joining the contest, but just try your luck and have fun, who knows you can refer the most referrals?

It’s fine if you couldn’t be able to refer the most referral, at least you’ve received some referrals and they might bring you some cash too. Ad.ly has a referral program (as mentioned above) which allows you to earn 12% of everything your referrals make on Ad.ly, it’s slightly higher than the 5% referral bonus from SponsoredTweets. Both of them are good, you will need to try them yourself to see which network brings you the most income.

FOLLOW ME and SIGN UP AD.LY AND JOIN CONTEST

Have you tried anyone of them? How was your experience?

Today is a big day for MyBlog2Day, New Straits Times (NST) is Malaysia’s oldest and largest newspaper publisher, has featured me on the newspaper today under Tech & U section. The topic was make money online blogger in Malaysia, it was really cool to be featured on the newspaper. I would like to take this opportunity to thank my friend Roseli from MalaysiaWorkAtHome.com who is a full time blogger, he shouted for me to the writer in NST and that was the reason the writer contacted me for interview, it was because I’m at the Top Spot #1 for the keyword “Make Money Online” in Google Malaysia too.

In the interview, I’ve talked a little bit about why and how I started my online venture, of course I’ve mentioned how I managed my blog in part time even I work full time as a Quantity Surveyor and study part time too, time is the biggest block on my journey to making money online, but it doesn’t stop me to grow my blog.

It was an one page interview in NST, it was Roseli and me in the interview page and the title “Lucrative if done right!“.

Please check out NST’s page for the real interview.

In the interview, I’ve talked about how I make money online from my blog using my spare time and how I went through the process on my blogging journey. Make money online from blogging is not complicated if you follow the right steps, eventually you’ll be able to make a living from online, as NST mentioned, “it was not an overnight success“, it’s true.

Once again, I would like to thank Roseli for shouting for me, and NST for featuring me in the newspaper, I appreciate it! Last but not least, for anyone who doesn’t have a blog and would like to start your first blog to make money online, don’t be hesitate to contact me and we can work something out together.

I’ve shared my online venture, it’s your turn to share your online venture with us, write a short paragraph and talk about your online venture in the comment section below.

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.

1. Open a notepad and paste the coding as below.
   

   <html>
   <head>
   <title></title>
   <meta http-equiv=”Refresh” content=”0; URL=http://secure.hostgator.com/cgi-bin/affiliates/clickthru.cgi?id=myblog2day“>
   </head>

   </body>
   </html>

   After that, save the notepad name as “index“.
   *Change my affiliate link to your affiliate link.

2. 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”.
3. Copy the “index” notepad file and paste into the folder that you created in step #2.
4. 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.
5. 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/

6. 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?

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!

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.

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?