A one way link is counted as a vote. How much that vote is worth will depend on the popularity of the page that gives the link and whether its on a topic related to the page it is linking to.

Pretty simple and straight forward right? The problem though is when people actually try to aquire these one way links. How do you convince people to let you have a link when they probably understand the value of that link to you?

You should think of one way link building as a 3 tier system. There are low, middle and high quality links.

Low quality one way links. There is a saying that no link is a bad link and these are your low quality links which you can easily get yourself. Social bookmarking, answering questions on Yahoo, forum signatures, article submission, blog comments etc. 

Middle quality one way links. Create a Squidoo lens, a Blogger blog, a Wetpaint site etc. and point a one way link from them to your money pages. All of these Web 2.0 sites are respected by Google and it costs nothing more than your time.

High quality one way links. These are from sites that have high page rank and are closely related to the topic of your own site. To get a one way backlink from a page like this is next to impossible unless you are prepared to pay.

This is because most of the webmasters who own pages with high page ranks know how the system works. They’ve slogged their guts out getting 100’s of low quality links, building dozens of Squidoo and blogger pages to build middle quality links and paid for several high quality one way links.

Link Structure. This is how I organize my link structure because it works for me. I’m not saying its the best but I will say with confidence that it is a million miles away from being the worst.

Google doesn’t like to see anything unnatural. A new 5 page website selling the latest acne treatment which suddenly gets a pile of backlinks is not natural.

I put the money site up and then build a Squidoo Lens, a Blogger blog and a few others. Squidoo and the other Web 2.0 sites can absorb a quick influx of links so I can point several bookmarks to these and submit a few articles to Article Marketing Automation to get the ball rolling.

With a little work you can soon get these some PR, especially if you get active within the communities of the Web 2.0 sites (get a top 10 Lens rank within Squidoo in your category and you will soon be climbing Google).

While I am building up the PR of my Web 2.0 sites I will add no more than 1 or 2 low quality links per day to my money page so that it looks natural. 

As each of the Web 2.0 sites earn some PR I will add a link within the text to my money page, again though slowly to keep it looking natural, perhaps 1 a week.

If I did my keyword research correctly and checked out my competition strength before starting, this should get me at least a top 20, hopefully a top 10 in Google.

For the final push to get the top spot I choose a few one way links on several related sites that have good to high page rank. I get these from Backlinks.com where I can pick up 5 PR4 links for around $20 bucks a month which is an absolute bargain when you see some companies charging 10 times that amount.

From start to finish takes me 3 to 4 months for a keyword with moderate competition, 9 to 12 for moderate to high.

One that stuck out for me was the one from Jason Potash. The email from him states ‘I am going to take you inside and give you some *real* feedback about it (Launch Tree). The good, the bad and the ugly.’

Obviously the video ends with ‘the good’ but its a neat trick. Play the honest reviewer by explaining some low points while at the same time lead the reader to the buy now button and make a killing on affiliate sales. 

As the emails roll in who’s will stand out from the crowd, the ones who’s title screams ‘check out Launch Tree’ or Jason’s that says ‘Launch Tree - Beware Of This’?

Gain the trust of the reader and you can sell them anything!

Just remember though that when someone is recommending something, its usually for their own agender.

I’ve been coaching a friend who fell victim to the credit crunch. “F**k it” he told me, “I’m going to have a go at what you do!”

Seeing as I do affiliate marketing, blogging, list building, PPC, drop shipping, product creation and Adsense I needed to give some thought to what would be best for him and the obvious conclusion was Adsense.

Obvious because once you learn how to make money with Adsense all those other money making ventures suddenly become a lot easier to do.

I’ve read various ’so called’ experts say there is no money in Adsense and I’ve had comments on here along similar lines but they keep depositing 4 figures into my bank account every month thank you very much.

Those 4 figures from Adsense give me the freedom to buy all those crap ebooks that I review here even though I know the chances of  any of them offering me a little nugget of useful info is going to be rare.

It was also Adsense money that gave me the financial freedom to give up the day job and ‘have a go’ at other online ventures without fear of financial failure.

The thing was though that when I first started I couldn’t make money with Adsense. Most people don’t, but once it clicks and you grasp it, you can pretty much make a success of anything online with the added bonus of having the money to have a go at the other things.

To make real money with Adsense you need to be able to research the competition in any given market, you need to understand keyword selection and you need to know how to optimize your pages so they rank well and get Google traffic.

Once you can do that and you are making money with Adsense all the other ways of making money online suddenly seem a lot easier to understand. Learn about pre-selling and creating bonuses for instance and together with the skills you already have you can move into affiliate marketing. Buy a decent course about email marketing and move into list building.

Even PPC is far easier and cheaper if you know how to make money with Adsense.

All things are possible once you know how to choose a market you can compete in and drive traffic to a page, just substitute the info article you would use for making money with Adsense with your offer/sign up and you are good to go.

If you keep flitting from one money making method/scheme to the next, do yourself a favor and get back to basics with Google Adsense because until you master Adsense you are more than likely going to struggle with the others.

I don’t mind one time offers when I’ve just made a purchase. I don’t blame the seller either, I get the picture…….my card is out, I’m in a buying mood so smack me with another pitch.

3 pitches though before I get to the download page? Ouch! Not only that but I’m being told that actually the sales page I read was full of lies because if I really want to know everything you’ve got, I have to buy your OTO or at least one of your OTO’s because this is the really good stuff that you have held back from the product that 2 minutes ago you convinced me to buy by telling me it was ‘no holds barred.’

The eSlumDog Product

eSlumDog is an ebook broken into 15 modules. I’m not sure why yet and I’ve only gone through the first 6 before I got bored stupid and decided to write this review.

Part 1 for instance is a whopping 9 pages of which the first is a splash page, the second is a copywrite notice, the third is blank and the fourth is the contents page. This practice is repeated in all the other modules. Module 2 had 12 pages, module 3 had 28 pages, a biggy but most were full of screen shots!

I had already guessed the angle of eSlumDog before buying, using the leverage of affiliates to market your own digital product and as I’m soon to release a new product, that’s what got me interested in it.

The trouble though with eSlumdog is that the author has written it for the absolute beginner. So much so that its painful to read. Does a beginner really need to see pages of screen shots showing how to sign up with GoDaddy and register a domain name?

The same thing for converting a Word doc to PDF. Pages after pages of screen shots showing how to use CutePDF when surely a link to the download page and a link to the instructions would do?

eSlumDog is full of this type of filler and that’s all it is because there is no need for most of it. I mean, how many 100% newbies that have never even purchased a domain are going to go “I know, I’ll create my own digital product and market it online.”

His target audience should have been the folk who have been playing around for a year with Adsense and affiliate marketing. They know what a pdf ebook is (they should do, they’ve purchased enough of them) and they certainly know how to register a domain name.

The writing throughout is full of typos which I can live with but it’s also full of glaring holes. Here’s an example of what I mean when the author attempts to explain split testing. The following is under a heading of “So what is split testing I hear you ask?”

Let’s suppose you don’t know what colour to keep for your landing page…you get stuck between green and red…now the question is, which colour will look more appealing to the visitor?

This is where you can split test to find out…make two versions of the landing page and call them 1 and 2…1 has the colour green and 2 has the colour red…now send bulk emails to your prospects…except the links are slightly different, some prospects get page 1 and some get page 2.

OK hands up all complete beginners who don’t understand what a PDF is, don’t know how to register a domain and don’t know what split testing is but are in possession of their own email list that they can bulk email to at will?

The above is no good for the beginner (no mail list) and just too bland for anyone with a little experience. I’ve found plenty of these holes and I’ve only read 6 parts so far.

One of the early modules discusses choosing your topic and you are advised to find something already selling and repeat it but beef up your product to make it appear to be of more value.

I’m pretty sure the author followed his own advice after he read the excellent “24 Hour Hot Product Formula” by Chris Rempel that came out a few months ago. He’s just fluffed it out, got some professional graphics done and written it up for the complete beginner.

If you are a complete beginner though you really ought to get some experience before you dive in with your own product and if you aren’t a beginner and want to avoid all the filler and brain numbing step by step instructions complete with diagrams, buy Chris Rempels version. Its a far better read than eSlumDog and its a lot cheaper too.

Until recently the Adsense ads were chosen based on our sites (or more specifically the page) topic. The new interest based advertising system will serve ads to your site visitors based on what they have recently been searching for, looking at, researching etc.

Its safe to assume that Google believe they will make more money from interest based advertising than from the content based advertising model and if they make more money, so do we. At least that’s the theory anyway.

For those of us using Adsense, interest based advertising is going to change the way we make money online. At the moment we find keywords that advertisers are spending lots of money on and then we build content around those keywords so that, with a bit of practice, we can convince Google to show those ads with lots of bids on them. All we then have to do is drive search engine traffic to our content so that some of it will click on those ads and make us good money.

With interest based advertising, all that goes out of the window (eventually and if it goes to plan) because someone who has spent an hour researching and planning their next vacation and then decides to take a break by reading your latest blog post about keeping rabbits will be seeing ads about vacations rather than the ads about rabbit breeding.

This is great news for sites with lots of traffic but from poorly paid keywords. I’m thinking of movie news sites, tattoo sites or image based sites and the like where the payouts can be as low as a few cents a click.

If you have such a site, hopefully you will see improvements over the next month or two. I myself have several that get 4 figures daily traffic but I had to remove Adsense to avoid been smart priced. I’ll be switching Adsense back on one of the sites soon and testing the results.

Expect to see lots of fluctuating in your daily Adsense reports for the next month or 2 while interest based advertising kicks in and they iron out any problems.

Since that last post I have been busy setting up more online stores and currently have 6 up and running and at various stages of their development. 2 are making several sales a day, 2 more selling items with higher end tickets are selling several a week while the latest 2 have yet to sell anything but they aren’t yet on Google’s first page and its early days yet.

This success with drop shipping has caused me much head scratching over the last few days as it’s easy money yet goes against the passive income I initially craved and the reason I set about trying to make money online.

While I can cope with setting up the odd new link campaign whenever we sail into a marina with wireless availability on our way around the world, placing daily orders and coping with customer queries via ship to shore is not my idea of freedom even if it were viable.

The solution.

I’m going to sell them on once I have 6 months worth of sales to show my potential buyers.

The very last module in the drop shipping blueprint course I signed up for explains exactly how to flip an online store for between 12 and 24 months takings. The first store I set up is already doing well over $1000 a month so if I keep churning them out the way I have started, then obviously I am going to be turning over a fair amount of cash.

Tim Godfrey who was one of the drop shipping experts teaching on the course showed us a video of him on CNN after he sold one of his drop shipping stores that sold bird cages for $173 000

I was chatting to one girl on the course at the same time as me who is now making over $1800 a week and she only has 1 store although she was targeting the American market while I’m targeting the UK (that’s my excuse anyway). She told me she would never sell hers when I told her my plans as she saw her store as security for the long term future and I guess it just depends on what your particular plans are.

Me, I don’t want to be placing orders and replying to emails even if does only take an hour a day but I do want the money.

You can watch a video about making money online with drop shipping which is done by Steve Clayton, another drop shipping expert who taught on the course I did. It’s very much an eye opener and well worth having a look at.

Click here to watch the video and see the same drop shipping course I took that 6 weeks later is already pulling me an extra $3K per month.

I know from experience that when you first start using Google’s Placement Targeting, the huge selection of websites out there for you to place your Adwords ads on can be quite intimidating so lets look at how you pick the Adsense publishers that will drive traffic to your offer out of the many thousands that you can choose from.  More importantly perhaps, lets see how you can do it for the lowest price possible.

Google’s placement targeting works exactly the same way as Google Adwords but without the need for keywords.  Normally you would decide which of the search results you wanted your ads to appear on by targeting specific keyword sets but with placement targeting you select websites that are carrying Adsense ads to show your ads. So instead of hoping your target audience searches for the keywords  you have used and then sees and clicks on your ad, you find the sites they visit and put your ad on there for them to see.

Anyone with a standard Adwords account can use placement targeting.  You can simply add placements to an existing campaign you are running; simply click on the ‘Placements’ tab on the main page of your ad group.  There are four ways to identify placements: ‘list URLs’, ‘describe topics’, ‘browse topics’, and ’select demographics’.

You can use all 4 options when deciding where to put your placements.  With each search, up to 100 available placements will be listed, with the approximate number of impressions per day listed.  You can also refine your search by the type of ad you want to run by clicking on ‘Choose Formats’.  Select the formats and sizes that you want to use, and Google will refine the list to show only the sites with the selected formats available.

All of that takes time which is where the free Adwords Digger comes into its own. Adwords Digger will find you sites that are showing up in the top 10 rankings of Google for specific ‘high traffic’ keywords. This allows you to be sure that your ads are being seen by targeted prospects and are on sites that you know get plenty of traffic.

Once you have your list of sites you then simply copy and paste the urls into your AdWords campaign and you are off to the races! - low cost and extremely targeted ads.

Once you have your campaigns running you can monitor the click thru rates carefully and any that are doing well (remember, these are highly targeted sites) you can change from CPC to CPM. This means you pay for a block of 1000 impressions rather than pay per click.

The theory behind this is that if you’ve carefully targeted the websites your ads are going to appear on, then your click-through rates are going to be much higher than the average, making the CPM option (with lower costs because there are no guaranteed click-throughs) better for your campaign.

It is important to remember that you will need to constantly analyze the results of your campaign to ensure that your CPM costs are, in fact, saving you money versus CPC.  If sites are not performing within the standards you’ve set for the campaign, remove them; likewise, if a particular site is giving you a great click-through-rate, invest more impressions in that site.

Google’s placement targeting is a great option for anyone like me who used to do well at Adwords but got driven out by continually increasing costs of keywords or for someone new to Adwords without the budget to compete in the search results.

I was using misspellings of certain brand names and with very little competiton from other Adwords users I was making a killing. Then Ad spy tools started to appear and others were finding my keywords and started bidding on them.

Profit margins slipped as I had to spend more to make less and before long it wasn’t worth the hassle as I had to monitor my Adwords account carefully or I could have days where I might even spend more than I could make.

I soon decided that to make money with Adwords (serious money) in the current climate required large advertising budgets, ie. spend $2000 a day to make a thousand and that wasn’t for me so I put my efforts back into making money online via other methods.

Google Adwords recently introduced ’site placement targeting’ where you get to select any websites making money with Adsense to carry your Adword ads. This was enough to tempt me back to run some tests and while the benefits were obvious, finding suitable sites was a long winded affair.

The Kahuna guys have just released a new free tool that finds suitable sites for you, making the whole process much easier and quicker. I’ve been playing around with Adwords Digger over the last couple of days and its a very handy little tool. Type in your keyword and select how many results to check, top 10, 20 100 etc. and set it running.

It gets the results from Google, visits each site to see if it has Adsense ads running, then checks its traffic stats at Alexa to make sure its worth advertising on. Once its done just select the urls of the sites you want and save as a text file. Copy and paste that file into your Adwords site placement targeting list and your Adwords ads will start showing on those sites.

Select the right sites and you can see just how powerful Adwords Digger really is. The cost per click is relative to using the content network except it is much more targeted. More targeted traffic means better conversion rates.

Result is less cost per click and less clicks needed per sale.

Adwords Digger is 100% free with no nagging screen or ads etc. It is simply 1 of a suite of tools from the PPC Kahuna membership that they decided to make available to the public.

If like me, you gave up trying to make money in AdWords, this tool just might be what you were looking for to get you back in the game and if you are already running successful Adword campaigns, everyone likes lower CPC and higher conversions so give it a try in your niche. It won’t cost anything except 10 minutes of your time.

You can download it by clicking here.

I wasn’t far wrong but its much more than that. Ewen constantly refers to his real life experiences as examples to help in getting his point across so he goes into how he got started, where he went wrong and when the light went on etc. Its kind of like a blueprint to online success but with the life story interest attached.

Whether he set out to have the book come across like that I don’t know but its an excellent read and I found his story inspiring. By using his experiences you do get his points about why you should be doing this and that if you want to make money online.

For those who don’t know, Ewen Chia is one of the good guys with a reputation for always over delivering and his first book to go to print didn’t disappoint. The whole book is a no nonsense explanation of exactly how he got to the magical figure of his first million dollars but each step is explained in detail so you can follow his exact approach and learn from his mistakes without having to make the same errors he did.

The book launches on the 26th February and as far as I know costs just a few bucks. I found that as it was in print I read and soaked up the info far better than I do an ebook. Probably because I read it in bed and wasn’t constantly getting distracted by emails arriving or links within the book to follow etc. At 380 pages ‘How I made My First Million On The Internet’ is far too long for an ebook anyway.

I’m told if you are one of the first to order the book you will be getting access to his Internet Millionaire System which is a series of videos showing you exactly one of the very same methods he uses over and over to start up a successful online business.

You can download the first chapter or 2 for free as well as the table of contents by going here. Its both an inspiring read and a solid blueprint to your own success.

For whatever reason, you could end up with a page getting plenty of traffic but no product to sell. You can always find another related affiliate product of course but that means re-writing your reviews etc. and besides, that’s fine when you know its happened but not so good when say, you don’t know the affiliate program is no longer being run but you are still sending them your traffic and all for free.

All in all the benefits of selling your own info product are pretty obvious to anyone serious about creating a passive income online which is why you should be constantly on the look out for a niche with shit products. That’s how I find my targets anyway. I’ll be trying to find a decent affiliate program for a niche I am entering with a pack of PLRPro articles and find that the top 3 sales pages at Clickbank all look like they were done by some young kid who’s used more fonts than a ransom note!

I’ll dig deeper and check that the traffic is there and more importantly, that buying customers are in the niche and there really is potential for a passive income stream and if it pans out I’ll do the research and write an ebook. This takes 2 or 3 days from start to finish including research. A 25 page report will sell for $19.70 but a 50 page ebook will sell for up to $47 (but as low as $37 depending on the subject).

I then send $80 via PayPal to my favorite graphic designer, a very talented guy called Semmy (www.myminisitegraphic.com). I tell him the title of my new ebook, my catchy tag line and who my target audience is and within 12 hours Semmy works his magic and sends me a draught which I have yet to ask him to change.

For my $80 I get a killer mini site, several ebook covers such as hard back, soft back, stood up, laid down etc. A square banner and a standard sized banner for promoting, a buy it now button and everything else I need to have a very professional looking site up.

Next bit is the most important if its to work as a passive income - The sales copy. This is where most fall down when they are trying to sell their own info product. It’s easy to think that because YOU know it’s a really good product that answers the exact questions being asked in this niche that others are bound to understand this is just what they need. They won’t of course unless you sell it to them with great sales copy.

Also, passive income stream means doing as little as possible for your money so you need to get across in your sales copy EXACTLY what they are buying. That is the problem which your ebook resolves. Otherwise you are going to be spending your time answering emails and that’s not what you are trying to achieve.

I’ll spend at least 3 and sometimes 4 days writing the sales copy when I’m creating my own mini site. I’ll take a look at winners in other more competitive markets via Clickbank and incorporate their copy layout into mine. I’ll write it and then sleep on it before rewriting it several times again through the day and then sleep on it again.

After a final day of tweaking I’ll get the missus to proof read it twice before publishing it (just one spelling error can lose you a sale).

Once it’s up I’ll start to build backlinks to it nice and slow. Crappy social bookmarks to get the ball rolling with 3 or 4 good links through the first week and I’ll also throw up a Squidoo lens ready to use for promotion.

While the link building is under way and I’m waiting for it to kick in I’ll create my 10 page report to give away for sign ups and also write 10 emails and load up the autoresponder.

Next its back to Clickbank. Remember those 3 shit products in the niche I’m about to own? I check what they are paying affiliates so I can better it and then I search for sites promoting those ebooks and contact them to introduce my new superior info product and to explain why mine is a far better ebook to promote.

Once they visit my site and see Semmy’s professional graphics and my better commission rate, I have myself an affiliate team.

The very first passive income I set up was an ebook I wrote that’s been on the UK market for over 5 years now. It still averages 3 or 4 sales a week which makes me just over $100. Not much until you work out that’s an extra 5K a year and a total so far of at least 25K (its actually much more than that as it sold really well for the first year of launch).

Not bad for 50 to 80 hours initial work and a few hours a year maintenance, updating etc.

I have several of these passive income streams set up and running. Selling your own info product is something you should always have at the back of your mind whilst doing your niche research whether you are investigating it as a possible affiliate market or just for Adsense, keep an eye out for a potential gap that needs to be filled or a problem that needsto be solved.