5000 Dollars In 45 Days - My IM Voyage

How can my website make money? Wow, I get this question so often that I thought I would post a simple answer here. If you are building niche websites or even hobby websites that rank well and get traffic, the most basic and easy way to make money is through Google Adsense. Google Adsense places advertisements on your website that are relevant to your site’s content. Every time someone clicks you get money.

Although it sounds easy, it is a little more involved than that. For instance, when I got started, nobody bothered to tell me that there were niches paying over $1/click! Nobody told me there were niches where $10/click is commonplace! I have a little fish hobby website that gets over 3,000 unique visitors each month. Guess what? Some of these clicks are below $0.01 and most are $0.03! Yikes! Go ahead and do the math. Suffice it to say that you need thousands of websites to make money with this set of keywords.

I noticed that the best way to make money with niche websites (this is my observation, YMMV) is to have your own product. If it is under $10, you can easily best any Adsense earnings. I also, incredibly enough, noticed that in some niches, a PayPal donate button will actually outperform Adsense AND affiliate ads! Strange but true.

Well, I hope this little post got your creative juices flowing. Ahh, that sounded bad, I mean I hope this pointed you in the right direction

TomG.

Well, for those of you loyal readers who have been following this blog, the verdict is in. The idea was to create 10 identical blogs and see if they were penalized in the search engines for duplicate content.

I varied the link building strategies and also mixed up the posting order, but that’s about it. The results are in and duplicate content seems to be a myth. I did not see any penalty for using content over and over again on different sites.

I will now sell the ones that were least successful and keep the biggest earners. Thanks for following this experiment.

TomG.

Hello everyone!

As some of you may already know, I’ve been involved in the Blog Flipping Fool launch for the last 8 weeks or so. Since I made some real money flipping blogs, I really do think this is the way to go. In my ebook, I outline the exact steps you need to take to go and make some money. The ebook can be found here: Flipping Blogs For Profit.

As in all efforts, if you don’t take action, success will never come. Flipping blogs takes some work. I think the work part scares many would-be millionaires off! The thing is, flipping and/or creating blogs can be very profitable. There are two parts to the plan. The first part involves creating and/or aquiring blogs to sell. You then promote them using methods in our ebook or methods outlined here on this blog.

The second part (watch out, here’s the money part) is where you decide which blogs are so profitable you add to your blog empire and which blogs will be for sale. In the long term, you will have two types of blogs. The first type is the blog that brings in a nice passive income. You keep these blogs and continue to promote them. They provide your income base. The second type is the blog you built for sale. These blogs will provide the cash you need for expenses and future expansion.

This strategy is working very well for me. I encourage you to get the ebook and give the methods a go. You won’t be sorry!

To your great success!

TomG.

Hello fellow Internet Marketers! Today I have a special treat! A guest article from Hamida over at InternetMarketingRamblings.com. This post has some fantastic information on traffic generating methods. I use them myself. Enjoy!

TomG.

These are my top 15 favorite ways to get traffic to my own sites (in no particular order):

1. Participate in related forums using a signature link that points to your site – Most of my traffic to this blog comes directly from my sig link at the Warrior Forum. I frequent a number of other forums as well where I link back to some of my niche sites. You can find lots of different niche forums here: Big-Boards.com

2. Social bookmark your sites using either Social Poster or Social Marker. I don’t get a ton of traffic this way, but if you have a newsworthy topic you may get a few visits here and there.

3. Leave comments on other people’s blogs and link back to your site.

4. Answer questions on Yahoo Answers and quote your website as the source – this works better for some niches than others but I manage to get quite a lot of traffic this way.

5. Write articles and submit them to article directories – some people like to submit to a number of different article directories, I personally prefer to submit just to Ezinearticles if the aim of my article is to get traffic to my site. More top article directories are Buzzle, Goarticles and Searchwarp.

6. Write a Press Release and submit it to Webwire (I don’t do this very often as it’s hard to find a “newsworthy” topic for some of my niche sites, but when I do it can generate a lot of traffic). This isn’t free, but at $19 isn’t overly expensive either. If you want to go the free route I recommend Pressbox, Free Press Release and i-newswire – you can find more free press release sites here

7. Use Pay Per Click e.g Adwords, MSN Adcenter, YSM – this isn’t something I’ve tested extensively, but it’s definitely high on my list of “things to do” for 2009. Free advertising is great, but I think a mix of both free and paid will be even better!

8. Submit a blog to a blog directory – because most of my niche sites are blogs I submit them to the top blog directories (I just Google “blog directory” – the top ones will come up on page 1 and 2 of Google)

9. Submit you RSS feed to RSS feed directories – I submit to Feedagg, Feedest and Feedage (your feeds can rank quite well in the search engines using these sites).

10. Nothing beats good SEO for traffic. I can’t really go into SEO here because there’s too much involved, but simple steps such as optimizing the titles of your pages for searched for keywords, using a keyword rich domain and so on can make all the difference to how you rank.

11. Have a link to your site on community sites like Facebook, Myspace, Twitter etc. I personally only use Twitter (I have a Facebook profile but don’t use it for marketing purposes) – whenever I make a new post to my blog I announce it on Twitter and it brings me traffic.

12. Create a freebie product to give away e.g a free report or ebook. Include your affiliate link to a more comprehensive product or include links to your site.

13. Submit your site to the hundreds of free directories – Check out the original SEO friendly free directory list - http://info.vilesilencer.com

14. Submit videos to video sharing sites like YouTube. Include a link in the description and within the actual video – I haven’t done much of this yet but from what I’ve seen it works well for many people.

15. Create small “feeder” sites with Squidoo, Hubpages, Wikidot, Weebly etc and link to your “money” site (or direct to merchant if you like). Both of these can rank well and send good traffic to your main site.

You’ll probably have noticed that a lot of this can be very time consuming (even working full time online I couldn’t possibly do all of this myself) so I highly recommend outsourcing some of the more tedious tasks like social bookmarking, creating web 2.0 sites, articles, directory submissions etc if you can afford it. If not, then stick with the tried and tested methods like article marketing until you’re making some money.

Hamida