Category: Make Money Online

I joined this program as a favor to an online friend.

I figured I’d get a case study out of it, promoting a simple low cost program to see how it did in various advertising venues. I’d hit safelists, traffic exchanges, the usual places. It’d give me something to write about while I’m still working through all the details on my next ebook (the ebook itself has been done for quite a while, but getting the site set up and figuring out how to make money from it is harder going).

So, what is Work For 3 Dollars?

List Builder

This is one of those sites that says it’ll build your list for you. It’s a bit like a safelist, except that you can only email the people who are in your referral tree. The tree goes 15 levels deep, though, so that could be quite a lot of people. You can email them once a week.

Since they’ve paid $3 to be part of the program, they’re prequalified as far as being willing to spend a little money for a larger return. This isn’t the audience to send a mailing about a high ticket item like Perry Marshall’s Bobsled Run. But low priced ebooks and other one-time payment programs might do well.

Digital Products

The member’s area has digital products you get with your membership. Right now there are four ebooks there, but I’m sure that’ll grow with time. The four that are there now are: Million Dollar Emails and Autoresponder Magic by Yanik Silver, 1001 Newbie-Friendly Tips by Bob McElwain, and Working with ClickBank by Tom Hua. Each comes with resale rights.

The books are a nice bonus, and worth the $3 one-time fee.

Income Opportunity

You earn $0.50 for every referral you bring in, regardless of where they end up in your referral tree. You also earn $1.00 for every person on your first level, and $0.12 for every person on any other level, down to 15. The matrix is 3 wide.

So, if you recruit two people directly, you have your $3 back. If your upline recruits three people into your first level, you have your $3 back. It’s a pretty easy program to get into profit. From there it depends on whether the people you’re recruiting are active themselves, or if they’re just waiting on spillover. With an active downline, your total potential is pretty good.

Conclusions

While this isn’t the sort of program you get into to make a ton of money in, it is a good value for your $3 one-time fee. You get some quality ebooks as well as the opportunity to refer others for income.

If you’re just starting out, or (like me) want something low cost to test different advertising methods, Work For 3 Dollars is a good deal.

AffSphere is an article directory that claims you have multiple ways to earn.

It’s basically a site designed to aggressively monetize article traffic. To give authors an incentive to submit content (beyond the normal benefits of article marketing), AffSphere will send some of those commissions your way.

Here’s a quick review of some of the ways they reward authors.

Affiliate Commissions

AffSphere advertises some programs that you can become an affiliate of, and they’ll display your affiliate link on those banners that display on your articles.

Banner Advertising

You can advertise your own banners on their site, using credits that you’ve earned from both writing articles and referring others. Think of this like a big banner exchange, except you’re using credits rather than truly exchanging banner impressions.

Traffic

The usual benefit of article marketing, you may make some more money from whatever you’re promoting. You can redeem credits for article traffic too, which increases the exposure of your articles.

Referrals

Your article pages also have your affiliate links to AffSphere, so if someone signs up after reading one of your articles, you get them as a referral.

Adsense

Supposedly you can earn a percentage of Adsense income, with your publisher id rotated among all the articles on the site in some way. However, I didn’t see in the back office area any spot to place my Adsense publisher id.

Downline

You earn a percentage of what your downline makes in Adsense, down 5 levels. If, in fact, anyone can earn via Adsense.

Affiliate Links

You can put affiliate links in your articles.

The idea seems like a good one, but I’m bothered by a couple of points.

First, not seeing a way to provide my Adsense publisher id is troublesome, since they make a big deal out of that being one of the ways you can earn. I may just be missing it, but I was walked through entering other affiliate ids, Adsense should have been included in there.

Second, the AffSphere affiliate link to their home page redirects to a sales page for an article marketing guide. AffSphere itself is free to join, but this makes it seem as if you need to purchase the guide, and does a disservice to everyone who does try to promote the directory.

My recommendation is to click the above link, then edit the address bar to remove the “/reports.php”, and hit Enter. That will take you to the real home page, where you can join for free.

If AffSphere is going to work for you, it will work because you’re creating content for it. As usual, try to direct readers to a site you own in the article. Don’t rely entirely on AffSphere paying you an income, treat anything you earn there as a nice bonus while you’re promoting your other sites.

This is an ebook collecting techniques that 20 articles written by Internet Marketers, focused on quickly earning $100 per day.

I’m not a fan of ebooks, despite having written one myself (see Link Cloaking 101), because most of the time the information simply isn’t useful. It’s too vague, or makes unreasonable assumptions, etc.

With 20 articles written by different people, you might expect this ebook to be a mix of different short articles. It is a mix of different articles, but each article is generally 10 to 15 pages long. Each article goes into as much depth as you’d normally find in a short ebook targeted to that technique.

For example, I started to read the article on niche marketing, and immediately found myself in a discussion of what a niche is, how to use keyword tools, etc. All the same information that you can find for free at Online Opportunity. But then it moved into how to structure your niche site, finding partners, etc.

The article on the $100 a day mindset nicely laid out ten different models for earning online, and talked about overcoming your own mental blocks on succeeding. There are a couple of articles about software creation and selling software, about creating information products, about using public domain material, affiliate marketing, email marketing, and more, including the story of how one man built an Internet greeting card service into a full-time income (the service allowed sending physical greeting cards from a web site inexpensively).

What I like most about this ebook is that the people writing the articles all come across as regular people. They’re not billing themselves as gurus, and it’s pretty clear that not too long ago they were beginners, too.

If you find yourself needing some inspiration, or are stuck for a new idea about how to earn online, then I recommend 20 Ways to Make $100 A Day Online.

There’s a new paid-to-search site in town, called Scour.

In Scour, you earn points by performing web searches. Scour pulls results from Google, Yahoo, and MSN, and ranks them according to the individual rankings on those search engines (it also shows you what each page ranked on each). This alone makes it useful to get a snapshot of where your site ranks for different keywords in each search engine.

What makes Scour different from the other paid-to-search services is that users can comment on individual search results, and vote them up or down. Enough user votes up or down, and that result will display higher in the search results.

So your first act after joining Scour should be to do searches on the keywords you want your sites to rank well for, and then vote them up. It’s a small start, but if you encourage others to do the same, you should get a better ranking on Scour. What will that be worth? It’s hard to tell, it’ll depend on how popular the service becomes. Paid-to-search sites have been popular in the past, so this one might do well.

You can convert your points into prepaid VISA gift cards, mailed to you. So this should work for international users, too, which is a common complaint with any get-paid-to site. I’m not sure how many points convert into how many dollars.

And, of course, you earn a portion of the points your referrals earn, so like all GPT sites, you earn the most by both using the site and getting referrals.

So, join Scour, vote your own sites up, and then do a search on “Online Opportunity”, and leave a comment about this blog.

P.S. I was out of town this weekend, so haven’t had time to continue the Traffic Wave tutorial. It’ll return Wednesday.

A quick post before I continue the Traffic Wave tutorial, since this is time sensitive.

These days, it’s hard to not accumulate a collection of Private Label Rights and Master Resell Rights material if you’re doing anything in Internet Marketing. But what do you do with all of it? You certainly cannot sell the items individually, because tons of other people have the same rights. There are two basic strategies here:

1) Edit multiple PLR items together into a new work. This has the advantage that nobody else is selling the exact same thing.

2) Package multiple MRR items together into a package that seems irresistible, on the basis of how much value they get for their money (e.g. $5,000 worth of product for $47)

But even when you do that, you’re left with the problem of how to market it all. One-time-offers (OTO) are a popular option for doing this. You show your OTO to someone after they sign up for your list or buy something else from you, and some percentage of people will buy.

But again, we’re only pushing the problem back one step. As a beginning Internet Marketing, you aren’t that great at building a list, and you don’t have other products people are rushing to buy. It’s a bit like the chicken and the egg, how do you sell what you have when you don’t have any prospects?

Enter Auto Pilot Cash Streams.

As of right now, there are 4,259 contributors signed up to the site. Each of those contributors will log on regularly to see if any of their referrals has purchased an OTO (which earns them a commission). They’ll log on to edit their gift details. They’ll log on to see what gifts other people are giving. And every time they log on, they are presented with an OTO from another member.

That’s right, as a contributor you can provide an OTO that gets displayed in rotation with all the other contributor’s OTOs. The web site handles the payments and pays commissions to the referrer of the purchaser, and credits your account with the remainder. You can get your OTO in front of a whole slew of people interested in Internet Marketing, and you do not have to do any traffic building or payment processing.

In fact, the only things you need to do are:

1) Provide the HTML for the sales page (you do not host this, it’s hosted on the Auto Pilot Cash Streams site)
2) Say how much you want to charge
3) Provide a download link for the product (the product file itself is hosted on your domain)

Once your offer is approved, it starts into rotation.

At this point you should be wondering how often your offer will display, if there are over 4,000 contributors. Luckily, most people are lazy. They join to earn from their referrals, not to put up offers. I’d say there are only about 20 offers up there right now, based on how often I see the same ones. That will certainly go up, but it’s still a good ratio.

And, the giveaway hasn’t even started yet, so these are just contributors. Regular members will join starting August 1st, and you’ll get more traffic to your offer. I see this as the perfect opportunity to test an OTO. You’ve invested nothing but half an hour of your time getting it set up, since most PLR and MRR products provide sales pages for you. And you get to see how well the OTO does with an Internet Marketing audience.

To get started, join Auto Pilot Cash Streams. And if you have PLR and MRR material and aren’t excited about the possibilities with this site, ask yourself how you plan on earning anything from those packages if you aren’t willing to put them in front of people?

You’ll see a lot of offers on the traffic exchanges lately with headlines like, “I’ll pay your way”.

The whole “pay it forward” fad is designed to lure people into systems that they aren’t sure about. The idea is that your sponsor pays for your to get into the system, placed people under you, and at some point you take over payments. That might be at the second month, or at some other time.

This sort of scheme typically doesn’t work, but it’s worth looking at why.

Think about the sort of person who is going to be attracted by a pay it forward scheme. Someone who doesn’t know how to market, because if they knew how to market they wouldn’t need their sponsor to place people under them. Someone who has a low amount of disposable income, because otherwise they could afford the $10 or $20 a month for membership. Someone who is either gullible enough or desperate enough to believe the hype of the system.

In short, your recruits are not being qualified based on their willingness to stick with a system, their need for the product the system offers, or their ability to recruit others, which are all valuable qualities in referrals.

The money doesn’t work out, either. The sponsor will always come out behind in a legitimate pay it forward system. Say they pay $10 for you to be a member. They’ll get some portion of that $10 back, but it’ll typically be a small portion. Most of the pay it forward systems seem to use GDI, which pays the sponsor a whole $1 per referral. So the sponsor loses $9 per month on you.

Normally the sponsor offers to pay for your first month, as a trial. The idea for them is to immediately put one or two people under you. That gets you hooked, because you’re making a couple bucks a month from those referrals. Then, when the second month comes and it’s time for you to pay your $10, you stay in because you think your sponsor will continue putting people under you.

But they’ll have moved on to the next new person, trying to hook them. You’ll be mostly on your own, although you’ll probably get another referral now and then to show you that they’re still working on your behalf. They want you to stay in long enough to pay them back what they paid for your first month’s membership. But it takes a full ten months for that to happen. How many of you will pay $10 a month to earn $2 or $3 a month for nearly a year?

The reason that MLM payment schemes such as GDI work at all is that each person is expected to do recruiting. As your downline grows, so does the number of prospects being shown the sign up page. If the entire downline waits for their sponsor to get referrals, though, the number of prospects the sponsor can get remains the same as the downline grows. They simply cannot keep up in the long term.

Now, if you were looking to get into one of these programs, and you knew how to market and intended to do your own work, joining through a pay it forward scheme would make sense. Just don’t rely on your sponsor to do all the work to get you into profit, because it probably won’t happen.

I’d posted earlier a review about E-junkie.

Recently, the folks over at E-junkie offered a coupon code for my readers that will extend the normal one-week free trial to a full month. A one-week trial barely gives you enough time to play with the system, let alone start generating sales. But a full month is plenty of time to get everything set up and generate enough sales to cover your second month’s membership fee (which is $5 for the lowest level, selling 10 products).

To get the extended free trial, sign up at E-junkie and use the coupon code E-JUNKIEOPP. Enjoy!

This seems to be the summer for me to look at ways to take payments on your web site.

FatFreeCart is an absolutely free shopping cart you can use on your web site. You don’t even need to register with anyone to use it. The shopping cart supports both PayPal and Google Checkout, and will support item variations (e.g. sizes, colors, etc). This is basically a way to take payments only…no delivery of downloadable products is supported. So you process all the orders that come in.

But then it’s free, so you won’t get everything.

If you want something a bit more comprehensive, including digital delivery of products, you’d want the pro version of FatFreeCart, at E-junkie.com.

Unlike some of the other services I’ve reviewed lately, E-junkie supports both digital delivery and shipped goods. Digital products are stored securely, and for shipped goods they take care of calculating shipping costs and keeping track of how many items you have left in inventory.

E-junkie is a paid service, however they don’t charge you per transaction, but rather a flat fee per month based on how many products you’re selling. The least expensive option is $5 a month for 10 products. Presumably, if you have products that actually sell, you can easily earn back $5 a month in profit. You do get a 1 week free trial to make sure everything works for you. If you have existing traffic to your site, you might make enough sales that first week to pay for a few months’ subscription.

There’s also a way to get E-junkie for free if you take payments through TrialPay. TrialPay is an interesting way to give your products away for free and get cash for it. Basically, customers must complete an offer that will then pay you at least as much as you would sell the product for regularly. The customer then gets your product for nothing, and you get whatever the advertiser gives as a reward for the offer.

So how does E-junkie compare to Oronjo for selling digital content? If using affiliates is part of your business model, E-junkie has that built into the system. As far as I’ve been able to tell, Oronjo does not. Both securely store and delivery your digital products.

If you want to sell both digital and shipped products, or use affiliates to sell your products, E-junkie seems to be the best bet.

Update! The kind people at E-junkie have provided a coupon code for my readers that gives them a full month’s free trial. Use the coupon code E-JUNKIEOPP when you sign up, and you’ll get the extra trial time. That gives you even more time to play with the system and start generating sales.

Flogd is a new service that provides you with a way to build an online store to sell your products.

This is one of many such services offered online, but each has it’s own spin. Flogd is intended to help you sell your own products on your own website, or on MySpace. You can specify the name and description of the product, and several varieties (e.g. different sizes, colors, etc), and how much each variety costs. Flogd will give you some code to paste into a website, or MySpace profile, and your visitors will be able to add items to a shopping cart and check out using PayPal. Flogd will collect sales tax for you. You’ll be responsible for reporting the tax to the appropriate parties, and getting it to them (e.g. the state you live in).

The store itself is a bit of Flash code that is displayed on any website you put it into. You don’t get a web page you can direct people to, as in Zlio or Bravisa. You must already have, or be willing to create, a website to place the store code on. This is most useful if you already have a website that gets traffic, and want to easily add your own products to the site. For example, you run a site with tutorials on making hand made jewelry, and want to start selling your own jewelry. Or you run a site about your band, and want to start selling CDs of your music.

You are responsible for ensuring delivery of the items. This is distinct from Oronjo, which specializes in products that can be digitally delivered and handles that for you. Flogd seems more suitable for physical products that need shipped.

The big disadvantage is that you need a product to sell! Luckily, Flogd has partnered with Bravisa to let you import all the products from your Bravisa store into Flogd. The idea is that Bravisa would take care of shipping and customer service, leaving you to just put your Flogd store on a web page that gets targeted visitors. The current integration has a shopper redirected to Bravisa to finalize the purchase of Bravisa items, although that’s supposed to be more seamless in the future.

Another feature that would work well with the target market is the ability to allow affiliates to put the store on their web sites, and earn a commission from sales. That feature doesn’t currently exist, but reportedly is coming soon.

Flogd seems ideal for small groups that have physical products to ship. A band might use Flogd to sell their CDs, or someone who makes crafts or homemade jewelry might use Flogd to sell their products. Other solutions exist if you’re selling info products, but if you’re selling something that you produce and physically ship, Flogd might just cut down the time you need to sell online.

Note that Flogd is currently free, but that is only through the beta period. No details are available right now on the fee structure that will go into place at the end of the beta period, but that should be in September 2008.

This is a guest post from AffiliateTips.com – an affiliate directory where you can find affiliate programs to get you started with affiliate marketing.

Using Blogs for Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a relatively new way of making money online and the business is constantly growing. As this is a new type of business it’s a good idea to use modern ways of communicating with clients/readers. One of the ways to get noticed when working with affiliate marketing is through blogs. Read this post and understand the benefits of bloggin when trying make some of that affiliate money.

If you’re able to create a hugely popular blog and combine it with affiliate marketing it’s probable you’ll make some big cash. If you for example write about the topic of beauty and add beauty affiliate programs to the blog chances are you’ll make some online money.

Popular Since the Start

Instantly when blogs started to show up on the Internet they became popular among people all over the world. Everybody, from single persons to big companies, use blogs to connect with people visiting their site. Many people visit blogs to obtain information about a certain subject – or to simply get entertained and read about various products and services.

Readers will Feel Dedicated

If you keep your blog niched on a certain topic you’ll have a great chance of attracting dedicated readers. Many visit blogs to get exclusive information about the topic they love and that they feel they won’t find on a regular website. Surfers feel as if it’s more personal reading a blog and as if it’s not a big company trying to sell them a product or service. One could say that you become somewhat of an opinion-leader that people turn to in order to obtain information.

Easy Manageable

If you’re thinking about starting up a normal website you have to have some technological knowledge. The basics of how to create a site is a must. This is far from the fact when it comes to blogs. They are easy to set-up and don’t require you to have any understandings of HTML. Publishing new articles and updating is done by a push of a button. Even though blogs are as easy manageable as they are they’re still very professional looking, at least most of them – visitors won’t notice your lack of knowledge.

Inexpensive Way of Marketing

Although it’s cheap to setup your own website it’s often even cheaper to start up a blog as many are offered for free. When staring up a business you don’t want to spend a fortune while doing it and with blogs you won’t have to. You will for sure also get your message across in an easy manner and if you’re really good you will get a lot of incoming links which will only increase your popularity. Blog platforms such as Blogger and WordPress both have great free blog solutions that are well suitable for a start up affiliate marketer.

Search Engine Optimization Friendly

The last thing that we would like to mention is that blogs are extremely search engine optimization friendly. This is a must if you want to increase your visitors – which you of course want as it will increase your possibilities to make a living as an affiliate. If you’re running a regular website you have to be much more of an expert at SEO to get a high ranking on search engines. When blogging you simply have to update your content on a daily basis and it would be a good idea if you could stuff it somewhat with necessary keywords.

To sum up you’ll have great possibilities to make money as an affiliate through blogs. You’ll save lots of money and, if you have it in you, readers will feel dedicated to you and they’ll return every day to see the latest news that you’ve written about. So, start blogging today and increase your income!