A Review of Ways to Make Money Online
Prija has started a very nice contest, the Blogger Rookie of the Year contest.
The idea is to recognize great blogs that started in 2007, and allow readers and bloggers to vote for the one they think is the greatest. Recognizing new bloggers is a terrific thing, and already the post linked to above has a nice representation from lots of bloggers in the comments section.
If you haven’t voted yet, click on over and vote!
Looking for your feed numbers to hit some magic number before disclosing them?
Having trouble breaking through a particular milestone in feed numbers?
You can pretty easily boost your numbers by adding your feed to various free feed directories. The directories themselves will show up as subscribers in the numbers, and they’ll regularly request your feed to look for new content. The only thing they won’t do is read or comment on your posts, or buy anything through your links.
But you can’t have everything, right?
Feed directories also give your feed a wider exposure in the long-term, and may very well result in additional real live human readers on down the line. So a short-term boost in feed numbers now, with the potential of more real readers later. There’s not much of a downside to submitting your feed.
I found a list over at DotSauce.com of 55 Active RSS Directories you can use as a starting point for your feed submitting frenzy.
As a side note, the list was compiled in June of this year, and already some of the links are down. So you take your chances with free directories, but as I said above there’s no real downside to submitting.
This post has been kicking around in my head for a while now.
There’s a huge market targeted at new Internet marketers, trying to sell them products and services that are supposed to make their work easier. The sales pages for nearly every product says something along the lines of, “you need to invest in your business”.
That’s true. You do need to invest in your business for it to grow.
The problem is that many new Internet marketers are not making any money online. That’s to be expected, there’s a learning curve involved. So when they spend money, they’re not spending profits, but whatever they can spare from their regular income. Often, they spend more than they can spare from their daily income, thinking that this new product or service will be the one that catapults them into profit.
Investing in your business means more than just throwing money at it.
There’s the investment of time to learn the skills you need to succeed. There’s the investment of risk in trying a project to see what happens (e.g. starting a blog, starting a membership site, etc). Many of these investments can be made with just a little money involved.
Until you learn the skills you need, products and services won’t help. You may find a program that makes you some money, but if you aren’t learning the skills you need you’ll never be truly successful. You’ll be dependent on someone else’s program and someone else’s skills. And you won’t make as much money as you could if you were the one creating the program.
So while a certain amount of investment is needed in the beginning, I’d suggest that new Internet marketers not jump on every ebook and service that promises instant riches. Stick to the quietly marketed resources that truly provide value, not the latest flash in the pan.
And don’t overdo it. You don’t need five ebooks on SEO, you only need one. And always see if you can hunt up the information for free on various blogs that give SEO tips.
The key point to this post is that money management is part and parcel of doing business online. If you can’t manage your starting capital to last until you get into profit, you’ll likely give up before you get that far.
Joey Burdick has started up a blog called the Revenue Pro.
At first glance, the site seems like a basic make money online type of blog. The normal sorts of links and such. The blog’s new enough that it hasn’t accumulated a lot of posts, and so hasn’t developed its own character.
Joey seemed to realize that, and has started a regular series of revenue sharing contests on the blog. For example, this one offers a 5% revenue share for his October blog income. The idea is to encourage more readers participating in the contests, and thus to increase the value of the prizes. It’s a fun idea that various blogs have done now and then, but I can’t recall seeing one that made it a regular event.
The blog theme is nice and clean, and doesn’t distract from the content. The advertising is nicely low key, and meshes well with the theme. The list of categories is small and doesn’t detract overwhelm the sidebar.
I would suggest a couple improvements, though.
First, the permalinks used are the WordPress default, which is terrible for search engine optimization. Including the post title in the permalink structure would help attract more search engine traffic.
Second, allowing email subscriptions to comments helps to foster conversations between commentors. Without it, someone will leave a comment and not come back for days. With it, they’ll come back to check out the ongoing comments, prompted by the email reminder.
Head on over to the blog and get a share of his revenue for yourself!
Some of you know that I’m moving shortly, about 90 miles east to be closer to where I work. I’ve done the commute for three years, and decided enough was enough.
A big theme that’s come up for me during the whole moving process (which should be over on the 5th, if all goes well) is that of letting go. We love our current house. We live in a city, and found one of the few houses we could afford that had natural woods in the backyard. The neighborhood had a lot of connections for us…we found out after moving in that our neighbor across the street was the childhood friend of my father-in-law, and they hadn’t seen each other for over fifty years.
So leaving our current house has been hard. We’d originally decided to keep it and rent it, so we could come back to it if we needed to. That didn’t work out financially, so we’re going to sell it. But that was a hard decision to make.
We’ve had to let go of the connections, and the attachment to the house (and trees!) We’ve had to let go of knowing what the future will bring (I’m on two-year contracts at work, and have no reason to think I won’t be renewed, but you never know).
How does this apply to making money online?
Letting go is important to online success, too. There are times when you have to realize that what you’re currently doing isn’t working, and you need to let go of it and move on to something else. Sometimes we paralyze ourselves trying to figure out exactly how everything will work, and so never actually get around to doing anything…letting go of having to know how it’ll all work lets us make progress.
Letting go of the need for security allows us to take risks, which can bring not only great rewards, but take us in directions we never could have imagined on our own. Letting go of the need to understand completely lets us experiment and flail around, and perhaps learn from the process.
Take a look at your own online efforts, and see if there’s something you can let go of that may be holding you back.
DealDotCom has been live long enough now to start getting an idea of what it’ll be like.
Frankly, I’ve been disappointed.
The initial offering was EasyMemberPro, software for running a membership site. The pricing was at about half off the price on the sales website, around $150.
Half off sounds great, but that was half off the version of the script that allows you to run unlimited membership sites. The version that allows you to run one membership site cost around $150.
As a programmer, I know that the price difference between the two versions is purely a sales tactic. It’s a bit like one-time-offers. If you don’t know that the software will work for you and make you money, why buy the version that works for unlimited sites?
On the other hand, if you can make money with a single site, then financing the purchase of a second license is no big deal.
So I don’t consider the price on DealDotCom to be much of a deal.
Other products were similar. $1 for a membership to Nicheology.com sounds good, but then after that it’s full price ($30 a month, I think). So basically you’re getting a trial membership and paying for it. Another product included master resale rights at the same price that you would buy the regular product without resale rights for…well, you know my opinion of resale rights.
Lots of no deals.
There have been a few gems. WPAffiliatePro is a nice system for cloaking and tracking affiliate links in a WordPress blog. You can do the same cloaking and tracking for free, but not so nicely integrated with WordPress.
BayRSS integrates various affiliate programs such as Amazon and Ebay directly into WordPress blogs, making it trivial to link to suitable products to monetize your blog.
Overall, though, the basic strategy at DealDotCom seems to be to offer the higher, overpriced versions of products at a more reasonable price, and call it a “deal”.
The combination of time pressure and scarcity mentality that DealDotCom uses is inspired, and a great tactic for selling to Internet marketers.
Just do your homework, and make sure that you’re really getting a deal.
The kind folks over at Bravisa emailed me to let me know that I’d left something out of my review.
In my comparison between Zlio and Bravisa, I hadn’t realized that they work from slightly different models. Zlio works off the salesperson model, where you get a commission for every item sold from your store. Bravisa works off the wholesale model, where you specify the markup from the wholesale price, and you keep the markup.
Here’s the example they used to illustrate the point:
As an example, the Yankees Toy Box made by Guidecraft is available at Bravisa as well as at Zlio.
Bravisa works directly with Guidecraft (the manufacturer), whereas Zlio works with Buy.com who in turn works with Guidecraft.
At the same sales price ($160) to the customer, for each sale:Bravisa shop owner makes $51.07,
Zlio shop owner makes $ 4.80
The added income from your own store makes Bravisa more attractive, provided you create a store and market it well. Zlio’s referral income makes Zlio more attractive if you primarily want to just recruit others into the program (although someone has to sell products for you to make any money).
Ultimately, if you want to create niche stores online, it’d be worth creating one in Zlio and one in Bravisa, and running a test to see which produced the most income for you.
Bravisa is a site that allows you to start an online store for free.
It’s tempting to compare the site to Zlio, since they both have the same overall goal: to let you make money opening your own shop. I never have been able to resist temptation, so I’ll do this review as a comparison between the two sites.
Both allow you to pick a title and a web address for your shop. A Zlio shop address looks like this: http://kidspuzzles.zlio.com/, while a Bravisa shop address looks like this: http://www.bravisa.com/mybstore/ecofriendly.
The advantage here goes to Zlio, since a subdomain based address is a bit more SEO friendly, directory friendly, and people friendly. For example, I can use Directory Maximizer to auto-submit directory entries for a Zlio shop, but not a Bravisa shop.
Both sites allow you to pick products to sell in your shop. In Zlio, your shop starts out empty and then you search for specific products to add. In Bravisa, you choose a category of items and all items in that category are added to your shop. You can then remove individual items you don’t want to sell. Which way is best? This is purely personal preference. My mind works more naturally in the Zlio model, but I got along fine in the Bravisa model.
Both sites provide a wide range of products to choose from. My quick test on the breadth of their offerings was to search for roleplaying materials (a nicely obscure niche area). Zlio had quite a lot available, while Bravisa had none. This isn’t really a fair comparison, though, since Bravisa is brand new and Zlio is more established. If you really want a product at Bravisa, ask them to add it to their catalog.
Both sites allow entering the Google webmaster tools ID. Zlio allows putting your own Adsense ads in your shop with a nice point and click interface. I didn’t see any way to put Adsense in with Bravisa.
Bravisa has some great tutorials, including one on getting your products into Google Base. This should help expose more people to the products in your shop.
The one area where Zlio has the clear advantage is that when you refer other people who create a Zlio shop, you earn a percentage of what they make. Bravisa doesn’t appear to have any referral program.
It’s still a bit early to say which online store creator I like the best. Zlio is more polished, but that’s to be expected since Bravisa is still in beta. I’d expect Bravisa to improve quickly and address the areas where Zlio is clearly superior.
I won’t keep you in suspense, the answer is “Yes”.
A site called Listasaurus.com will pay you 25 cents for every ad you place in the following categories:
* Free Stuff
* Stuff for Sale
* Real estate (non-commercial ads only)
* Rentals (non-commercial ads only)
* Vehicles (non-commercial ads only)
On the other hand, you get charged $10 to leave an ad in the Business Opportunities section. So I doubt this will be a popular place for Internet marketers to leave ads, unless they have fairly liberal guidelines for the Free Stuff section.
But you can expect all the other sections to be very popular!
The September contest is approaching its end.
To enter, be listed in the top commentators’ list by the end of September 30th. The winner gets a discount on two years of top quality web hosting through Site5. Or, if they don’t need web hosting, we’ll work something else out that they’ll like.
The bottom of the list is currently held with 2 comments. So make 3 and you’re guaranteed to be on the list in time for the end of the contest.
Unless someone else has the same idea.