Make Money Online with Paid 2 YouTube?

The Monetizer will try anything when it comes to making money online. I've done surveys, blogs, websites, various affiliate programs, and even have looked into how to make money with data entry jobs. There's a world of possibilities online for making money, and experimenting with different program can pay off if done with some degree of caution. You never know when you'll stumble on the next big thing, or get lucky and rake in the dough with an opportunity. You might even find the next shortcut to internet millions. You also never know when you might get raked into a scam. The latest money making opportunity I'm testing is called Paid2YouTube, which is basically a website where you're paid to watch YouTube (and other) videos online. It doesn't take a whole lot of work, but then again it doesn't make a whole lot of money at once.

Before you get too excited, let me explain how it works. First off, I hurried over to the YouTube site and started watching cool little 1 minute videos. But that's not what you're paid for. I hurried back to my stats at the pay to site, and saw a balance of $0 still. That's because the Paid2YouTube site has its own list of video links (under the "Surf Videos" tab) that you are paid to watch. The list I was provided was about 6 videos, with only 1 on YouTube. It just happened to be someone's 6 minute make money online video to pitch a product. The other 5 or so were more interesting and entertaining to me. They included a radio control car with a camcorder attached on top (not good for those succeptible to motion-sickness), comedian Jeff Dunham's hiliarious ventriloquism act, and a video of a "Battle Bots" type fight between two radio controlled robots in a clear glass cage.

Now a few notes - So far it seems as if they only have the same six videos posted each day. So you'll be limited to those options until the site gives more choices of material. They have several categories listed, but only 2 have videos listed.

And a BIG NOTE: When you watch the "Videos From Other Websites", it will take you a site Megavideo site. In my past experience, if you aren't careful this site can have you install a toolbar which leads to some spyware. It took me a while back then to figure out how to clean my computer up. So the trick is, when it pops up the second website, close that one down. Stick with the red and green play arrow button you see on the Megavideo site, don't install anything!

Now about the payment from Paid2Youtube. Simply watching the video gets you a whopping 1 cent each! Comments bank you 10 cents and subscribing to a YouTube user's channel gets you 35 cents. Not the big money you were expecting, but the minimum payout is $10. With a referral program in place it is possible to generate some extra cash for gas money, groceries, or whatever else you may need it for. And if you like making money, getting that $10 can be seed money for starting a moneymaking website, with domain registration as low as $7.

It's took early for me to give this any sort of resounding nomination as a top moneymaker, because my account is still below $1, and I can't say I've been paid to YouTube just yet. Give it a try though for some additional seed money, but make sure you are cautious. I'll be back with an update on my moneymaking activities from the 2009 holidays and more! Best wishes!

Check out more about Paid2YouTube here.

The Top 10 Distinctions Between Millionaires & Middle Class

I recently purchased an audiobook from iTunes called "The Top 10 Distinctions Between Millionaires and the Middle Class" by Keith Cameron Scott. After one listen to this addictive book, I've found myself returning it to it several more times. It teaches some valuable concepts not only for making money online, but for success and finding financial freedom. I highly recommend it as a way to engage in your own introspection when it comes to your personal journey to wealth. You'll find the material easy to follow and some of the stories he gives quite enlightening if not very entertaining.

Scott provides his 10 distinctions as mini-lessons which illustrate what makes the rich wealthy, while the middle class struggles. The middle class seems to get a bad rep, but they often have financial dreams which they allow to dwindle because they go for comfort instead of freedom. Meanwhile the wealthy are busy working on ways to create more sources of income so they can enjoy that freedom that eludes many.

Overall, I found the 10 distinctions book to be well presented, and it won't overwhelm you. It's inspirational, and if listened to enough you can begin to adopt the mindsets needed for financial success. You'll be training yourself to think more like a successful millionaire, while discarding small-minded thinking. This is not to say "poor and middle class people are stupid", but that millionaires tend to have a different though process when it comes to money and how it's made.

Some of the things you'll learn about in Scott's book include the concepts of being generous, focusing on multiple sources of income (especially passive), working for profits vs wages, and focusing on the long term rather than the short term. If you read or listen to this work, you'll find yourself realizing just how many times you might have engaged in middle class thinking, which can be quite small minded at times. One of the best examples is when he points out that poor people talk about other people, middle class talks about things, and the rich talk about ideas. How many times have you found yourself gossiping about others? You've engaged in a poor-financial mindset at least a few times. He goes on to point out that the rich are the ones who have developed the ideas, which ultimately are the "things" middle class enjoy or talk about. These include vacation resorts, sports teams and movies, many of which are funded by and created from a rich person.

If you've read Robert Kiyosaki's "Rich Dad, Poor Dad", you'll notice some familiar concepts in this book, such as the idea of owning your own company to become rich. If you're like me and engage in online moneymaking as your main profession, you're already partly on your way. You're focused more on creating profits, multiple sources of revenue and passive income. For me the next steps involve finding more passive income streams to start building my net worth. I currently receive at least 4 or 5 different payments a month based on my online work. To me that's a good start, but I know much more can be done. Also, I realize I may need to branch out into some real world income streams including the always popular, yet speculative real estate sector. I dabble in stocks, but after listening to this audiobook it makes me want to increase my knowledge in that area as well. The book's worth its price just in terms of its motivational and inspirational factors.

One of the greatest ideas Keith Cameron Scott gives in his book is the concept of rich people continuously read and invest in their personal finance/success libraries. He notes that the middle class believes learning ends with school, while millionaires are always learning more. This concept alone is priceless and actually gives you an excuse to buy Scott's book, "The 10 Distinctions" as it will provide a great basis for your successful path towards financial freedom.

Purchase The Top 10 Distinctions Between Millionaires and the Middle Class at Amazon.com for a low price.

Make Money with Halloween & Christmas Holidays

Hello fellow moneymakers, it's been a while! I've been busy working on a batch of mini sites lately in anticipation of online shopping season. Mainly I'm tinkering with Squidoo, Hubpages, Blogger blogs and some self-hosted websites. Two of the biggest moneymaker holidays are quickly approaching us with Halloween and Christmas 2009. Preparing for these can be fun (or burdensome) depending on how you choose to go about making money with them. I'm here to drop some food for thought and let you know what I've been working on lately.

With Halloween the main thing people will buy online is their costumes, masks or accessories to go with them. You could create Hubpages or Squidoo lenses, or even infobarrels related to this, to make money off Adsense, or by selling Amazon products. I would have recommended eBay products as well, but with their new pricing system, I'll take Amazon (more on that later). Anyhow, Halloween is one potential way to profit online, if you get cracking and create sites. I found through a few of my blogs where I talked about some Halloween related topics, that I received traffic for unrelated topics that involved costumes. So from there, those costumes were made into full blog posts, have seen some sales. You don't really need a Halloween site per se, as you can find many ways to tie the holiday in with your blog theme. Cooking, photography, entertainment, etc etc, all have some sort of relation to the holiday. Mixed bag blogs, fashion, music...the list continues...be creative and keep checking Google Hot Trends for some ideas on upcoming Halloween stuff.

Christmas is really your big time to profit. Some people start their shopping months ahead of time, while most wait until around mid-November, and particulary for Black Friday / Cyber Monday. It's key to have some product-oriented sites set up for these holidays, and even afterward. I downloaded Jackie Lee's Squidoo Christmas Cash Blueprint here, which is a nice little e-book to get you started. She prefers Squidoo, and there's some pros and cons to using them. The best is the fact that Squidoo shares the sales with you through their Amazon modules at the commission rate of 4%. Compared to Hubpages you might not always get that, because of their revenue split of 60% / %40 impressions. Of course there are ways around that..

With Hubpages you can stick your Amazon Associates link into the hub you write up, as long as you don't go spam crazy. I'd recommend two total Amazon links, perhaps one in the top and one at bottom. I learned that too much Amazon on a Hub will make Ezine articles not accept an article linking to that Hub. So tread carefully when you create your Amazon hubs or lenses. Squidoo is more lenient on allowing more affiliate links, but to a limit. The advantage to Hubpages over Squidoo is they seem to rank better in some cases with Google and other sites. I've found Squidoo always brought me a lot of Yahoo search traffic. It really depends on which keywords or product you're targeting.

Blogger blogs are another option for Amazon Associates products. Consider creating a Christmas holiday style blog as recommended by Jackie Lee from Internet Marketing Strategy for Moms. She suggests a blogger blog as a way to build links to your Squidoo lenses (or Hubpages) to get them ranked for the terms. Of course you could also just make the Blogger blog full of Christmas gift products with Amazon Associates links to the items.

Of course all of this got me thinking, why not have both a Christmas and Halloween website, self-hosted. Netfirms sells domains for just $7 for the first year, and Hostgator is my preferred hosting service, with GoDaddy probably second. Yes, these one-time holiday sites would exist year round, but they would make you bigtime profits if done properly. By that I mean, finding the right keywords for your URL that aren't too competitive. Otherwise, your self-hosted sites might just get lost in a sea of millions of Google results for Halloween and Christmas. But having these two huge holiday sites could prove valuable in terms of link power down the road, as well as in making money off the shopping done for these holidays.

If you want more insight on how a guy is making tons of money with Adsense via Amazon sites, check out 6 Months Later: $300 Daily w/Adsense (Lessons Learned) by XFactor over at Warrior Forums. Just don't get too caught up in reading all of the posts, as it's a HUGE forum thread, but contains very valuable insights.

Also, your holiday or Christmas site could really be a product review site, which if you think about it could make you money year round, as people are interested in all sorts of products that Amazon sells. You'll start to realize you might own a lot of stuff that other people are looking up online. Furthermore, eBay Partner Networks allows you to use code on self-hosted Wordpress or static websites. So you've got more options to make money - even though Amazon seems the better of the options. Chitika, Widgetbucks and other affiliate programs are even more creative ways to cash in.

That said, I'm not feeling the new EPN Quality click deal so much. To date my clicks have been worth 1 cent on several days, then 3 cents on several days. Would I prefer 3 cent clicks over someone buying an Amazon associates product to give me a 4% or 6% commission...I think you know the answer to that my friends..

So get started on making your way towards Christmas profits. It's not too late to start finding a way to profit from the 2009 season, and even preparing a website for the 2010 season and beyond!

Here's to your success,
The Monetizer

How to Make Money with SEO Traffic & Leveraging

It's been a while but I'm back again...As usual other projects have consumed me, but I wanted to share something I started thinking about more in the recent weeks. Once you're earning with Adsense on several sites, and maybe earning with some other moneymakers like Amazon, eBay, Clickbank, you might want to expand your efforts. You might produce several blogs or sites, and find that some work really well to make you money, while others fail.

Sometimes you discover that no matter how much traffic you might get on a particular blog site, it's incredibly tough to make money off that traffic. One example may be music or entertainment blogs, which are popular, but it's hard to say how profitable they are. These can be tough to monetize in my experiences. You try the Google Adsense route, but learn that the ads just don't get the clicks, or the ads just don't pay you jack for them. In some cases they even lead to smart pricing. So you swap out Google and try something else. If you're on blogger, you can't use eBay Partner Network, but can go with Shopping Ads or Amazon Associates. You continue to see that it's even tougher to convert, however there are some tricks, tips and other things you can keep in mind. Don't go hitting the "Delete" button for that particular blog, or decide to give up on the site. Here's some food for thought and ideas of ways to make money online with your content that brings the big traffic but doesn't seem to make you any money.

Leverage your Traffic to other Sites

Consider using a blog that gets big bursts of traffic as powerful leverage to bring traffic somewhere else. Why waste the efforts right? Let's say you've got a blog that you make no money with, but would like to, and it's getting a few thousand visitors a day based on some specific posts you did. Consider using that blog to bring the traffic to another site that converts. One example is Associated Content, where you can make money for writing online.. Over there you'll make $1.50 for every 1,000 page views. Doesn't sound like a lot but it all adds up, and that kinda money could pay for hosting charges or help you buy a domain. Maybe consider writing a general article that really sparks attention, that will get people clicking to it on AC. Most celebrity scandal topics could do pretty well on AC, so why write it about on the blog if you can do a 400-500 word article on AC that makes you some extra dinero? Another good example is to send them over to a good Squidoo lens, where the more traffic your lens gets, the better rank it achieves, and in some strange, mysterious formula, that could possibly give you a nicer payout.

Another consideration is using Widgetbucks which also pays for clicks and impressions. I used Widgetbucks in this form months ago until I earned a payout, and have re-introduced it in a few places that were scoring high traffic. Widgetbucks pays you for both clicks and then impressions, so the more impressions you get on your blog or site, the closer you'll get towards a payout. The minimum for Widgetbucks is $50, which again is not going to help you retire, but it will help you squeeze money out of that blog that's not performing.

Chitika is yet another one to try, and in their case the payment is just $10 minimum, so you can earn a bit of extra money to invest into your online moneymaking, buy yourself lunch, go see a movie, or whatever else the money can do for you.

From there, I just recommend testing to find what works. Consider trying related affiliate programs that Pay-Per-Lead on your blog. Back to our hard-to-monetize blog examples, a friend recently asked me about making money with a blog, saying he'd like to start a music blog. He specifically mentioned making money with Google Adsense, and based on experience, music blogs are tough to monetize. That's when you really need to put your thinking cap on though. Can you refer people to buying sheet music, musical instruments, artist albums, or joining some sort of subscription site? Consider using programs from Linkshare, Amazon Associates and Shareasale as well as Commission Junction.

Always think of Monetization

If all else fails, consider creating a catchy, clickable advertisement banner to go up at the top of your highly trafficked blog (or hire someone to make a simple one). Use it to grab those viewers and direct them to another site that you can make money with, or even to a Clickbank product. It will be indirectly making you money if you have your traffic sent to the right place (including AC or Squidoo). My overall point here is you need the mindset to make money online, to keep finding ways to monetize all your content, even the stuff that doesn't seem worth it. That's not to say put all your effort in, but keep it in the back of your head.

You need to try new things with the under-performing blogs until you can determine what works best with them. And yes, in some cases you'll try 5-10 ideas and nothing seems to work. Give them a chance though, maybe several thousand impressions before you swap them out though. Do your best to track the stats using what the various programs allow you to. There's no sense in letting any traffic go to waste these days, so always be thinking of ways to monetize it if you really want to profit at this online moneymaking game...

(As for Adsense, there's a really interesting, informative forum post over at Warrior Forums, you may or may not have seen from a guy that makes $300-500 a day using about 30 websites he built with Adsense. Check it out here.)

Goog Cash4U - Beware of Money Making Scams!

Goog Cash4U which is also GoogCash4U.com and comes up in browsers as "SundayBikeRides.com" when typed in, is among the latest in potential money making scams. Making money from home is something everyone wants to do, and when they see the attractive advertisements online that make it look so easy, they're immediately lured in. According to GoogCash4U, you too can make money online by simply signing up with them and following their simple advice. You can be your own boss and work on a laptop while you sip drinks on the beach... But beware!

Scams run rampant when it comes to online moneymaking ventures, and this one does not look much different. The Goog Cash 4 U site makes claims that you can make up to $250 to $943 a day online just by using search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo. We all wish it were that simple, but it takes a lot of hard work to make money online. Don't be fooled so easily! Don't be fooled by their claims of being on major cable stations either, unless you actually saw them on there. They cite ABC, MSNBC and CNN, but are really referring to the fact that "working from home" has been discussed on those networks.

The product being advertised by the site is an Internet Wealth Builder, which supposedly will teach you the easy path towards passive income and wealth online. They say the product guides you step-by-step to learn how to place online advertisements, target a worldwide audience, make money with every ad click, and then get your paycheck from the search engines...

Of course to get in on this, they want your Full Name, Country, Zip, Email and phone number. I'm sure they won't harass with phone calls or emails right?

Basically take any claim like this about how easy it is to make money online with a grain of salt. I've been in the online moneymaking world for several years now, have read ebooks, studied other successful blogs, websites, and have done a lot of my own research. Most likely, this program wants your money, rather than wants to make you money. Tread with caution and investigate any opportunity fully before you jump in. If you give up your info to them, be prepared to possibly be hounded.

If you want to learn some real secrets to making some money on the internet, I recommend you check out The Rich Jerk's ebook for a one-time price of $10. At least this guy doesn't hide the fact that he's obnoxious, yet loves to make money and shares his secrets..

Content, Competition, Comments & Copycats

Phew...Out of breath, but back again and still going strong! Last month was an extremely busy one for The Monetizer, but to sound like a broken record, it was my best month yet in terms of online moneymaking. Ever since I went on a tear with Hubpages and Infobarrel, I greatly increased my earnings, and have started working on additional income streams beyond just Google Adsense. It's great to generate all that money from Adsense, but it's also good to know there are other ways to make money online besides the big G. I'll discuss a few of those here today as well as some other things on my mind lately about MMO...

Make Money with Amazon Associates vs. EPN

With the recent banning of eBay Partner network links on Hubpages, Squidoo and Blogger, I worked feverishly to pull those down and in many instances replaced them with Amazon Associates. I have to say I'm quite pleased with the results as I focused on a specific product and made more money with Amazon Associates this past month than I ever did with EPN! With the Christmas season coming up, I'd recommend if you want to make money online you consider setting up Hubpages and Squidoo lenses to focus on Amazon. People shope there in droves for the holiday season, as well as eBay. eBay seems to be moving to a earnings per click structure in October though, so it may be best to work on Amazon-based content.

For a well-written, thorough post on how you can bank on AA with the holidays approaching quickly see Tracey Edward's article How to Make Money with Amazon.

Content Writing to Make Money

Don't get me wrong, writing is a passion, but even our passions can cause us to burn out and become drained. I have been doing A LOT of writing over the past several months, but the hard work has payed off. It's like they say if you do what you enjoy, many times the money will follow, and in this case it has. I haven't outsourced anything yet, although I tried to with Entrecard. Its marketplace seems to be full of ads that no longer are any good, as the few I contacted for directory submissions and writing eZine articles never answered their ads. No big deal, as for now I'm doing fine with writing my own stuff. On the recommendation of Ben at Make Money Online with SEO, I joined JetSpinner, which is an article spinning site. Basically you'll write or take your articles and insert special spin notation code into it, then press the button and BAM! It will generate 50 or however many your specify articles of unique content that you can use on various article sites. The paid membership will allow even more cool features such as a thesaurus and article directory submissions.

I'll be honest, it's all new to me, and as much as I love writing, setting up the spin notation can be quite a chore. An article that may take me 20-30 minutes would take an additional 15-20 minutes, but the results you'll get are 50 unique articles you can use for linkbuilding. If you're not outsourcing, you're going to do a lot of work, so consider it. Check out Jetpsinner here

Comments Probably Won't Make you Money

Comments on blogs are always a delicate situation, and I've been finding a lot of spammers lately as well as the "I just found your blog and don't know what to say, but really enjoy reading it and will be back again. - Betty ". I'm sure you've seen that one at least a few times if you have several blogs you run. I also have started getting a lot of link exchange requests on some blogs for subject matter that doesn't even relate to my blog. It's a sign of the times, as you increase your internet properties, you're going to find more and more spam, and lazy commentors looking for a quick fix of traffic. I'm not sure if the people commenting on Blogger blogs understand the concepts of DO FOLLOW and NO FOLLOW yet, but they'll learn. I'd rather spend my time writing articles with DO FOLLOW links then waste money on a program or service just to spit out the same comment on NO FOLLOW blogs. That's just me though.

Clickbank Update

Keeping with the C theme here on this post, I earned my first Clickbank check. Many people out there are great with Clickbank, and it's something I'm aiming to get better with. If I target the right products, I believe I can start earning extra income through that. As it stands now my top earners are Google Adsense, followed by Amazon Associates, then Linkshare, which is an affiliate program. Squidoo comes in here or there with a payment, but as we know their whole system is a mystery, because Seth Godin likes it that way.

Competition & Copycats

I've always enjoyed competition, but not when people become shady with it. I've read on blogs by several of the hard working moneymakers that people on various sites simply stole their niches or ideas. Well recently, I found someone went beyond that and actually stole a bunch of content from a website I run, and just plain pasted it as articles on Hubpages. I was flabbergasted, to use a favorite word, so I alerted the Hubpages staff about the culprit's articles. If you're reading this, shame on you, in the end you'll only lose out from being dishonest and lazy. Competition can be healthy, but online it can get downright dirty, because people just don't play nice. Hiding behind the computer monitor makes it easier for some individuals to be just plain lazy and sheisty. With that said, I won't let one or even a few dishonest individuals stop me from my quest to make money over the internet.

Here's to your success,
The Monetizer

PS: I want to recommend a free e-book I found that is well worth the read. It's called "You were Born Rich" by Bob Proctor. Yes, it's about the law of attraction, but it's extremely interesting and contains other insights into what could help you become a multi-millionaire. If you haven't read it, it's very inspiring and will help you determine just how successful you really can be, whether it be in this moneymaking online, your job, or life in general. To get the book go to www.bobproctor.com, enter your Name and Email, and you'll be able to download a free PDF copy of the great book!

Make Money Over Internet - Free Online Moneymaking Sites

When it comes time to make money over internet connections, many people imagine they can turn on their computer, use some secret formula and start earning thousands of dollars easily. It's not that simple though friends, because making money on the internet will require either a lot of hard work, or investing your own money into the venture before you see significant payouts. However, there are some great free ways you can start earning money online, which are perfect for beginners to learn about how money is made here on the world wide web! On this page, I'll detail three particular websites you'll probably want to focus when you are just starting out. If you're already keen to online moneymaking, stay with me, as you may want to use these sites as well (if you're not already!)

The first option to make money is a website called Infobarrel. You can join the Infobarrel site for free and start to earn money with them almost immediately. You will also need to have a Google Adsense account, but those are very easy to apply for. Once you've got the Adsense account, you will place a special publisher ID (from your account) into your Infobarrel account. The way infobarrel works is very simple. You write articles for their site with good content, and then earn a percentage of their advertising revenue. The more visitors or views your articles get, the more likely you are to get a good bit of money for writing articles on Infobarrel. It's a very easy site to use in terms of publishing articles. The only thing to be aware of is they have built their site on good content, so don't think you can get away with writing any old article and pasting it there. Infobarrel prefers how-to's and more educational type articles. The editors will reject or deny your articles if they feel they aren't up to their standards. For a way to make money online for free, I recommend you join Infobarrel now, and give it your best shot.

Another site where you earn money on the internet is called Hubpages. The Hubpages site is similar to Infobarrel, in that you will be publishing written content there also. The difference is that Infobarrel offers you 10% more revenue than Hubpages does. However, Hubpages offers you the ability to put some other moneymaking modules onto your "Hubs". These include modules with eBay and Amazon products. When someone makes a purchase after clicking on your module, you'll receive a % commission from the sale. You'll need to be a member of eBay and Amazon's affiliate programs in order to do this, both of which are free to join. Hubpages is a great community-oriented site where other members join your fan club and post comments on your articles. Your articles can include all sorts of extras such as big pictures and even Youtube videos to help illustrate your article's points. Again, it's free to join Hubpages and get started earning income on the net there.

The final site I want to tell you about is called Squidoo. Squidoo is very much like Hubpages, but offers a lot more modules. On Squidoo you can create a lens on any topic you choose (without it being adult content). A lens is basically a one page website you are creating on your topic. It can include written text, videos, Flickr pictures, Amazon products, eBay products, countdown timers, and much, much more. Squidoo is a site where you can really let your creativity run wild. Now the reason I've listed this particular site as the third and final make money online site is because it's a real mystery how your earnings work there. Squidoo uses a special algorithm formula to determine your earnings, based on page visits, your lens page popularity and more. Basically, each month Squidoo divides its revenue amongst all publishers who did well, and you receive a certain amount. It may be a big amount or small amount, and usually you have to earn at least $10 to receive a Paypal payment from them. Nonetheless, Squidoo is free to join and make money online, although I'd recommend it third of the sites mentioned here.

I've now given you three very easy sites you can join to start making money online today. Keep in mind your success on these sites will be directly associated with how much work you're willing to put in, and how much research you do. The more articles you write with good content, and the more you work to get traffic to those articles, the better you'll do with your online income. You'll find yourself able to make money over internet sites with great confidence. Here's to your success!

PS: If you want to learn even quicker ways to make money on the internet, I highly recommend The Rich Jerk's ebook!

Make Money with Clickbank Project Part 1

Well folks, there's nothing like making money online. July 2009 was my best month so far, thanks to working hard and creating Hubs, infobarrels, articles for directories, and many, many blog posts as usual. Google Adsense, EPN sales, some affiliate sales and chitika all helped me earn a very nice sum that I'll see during August 2009. But I'll be honest, I wrote, and wrote, and wrote, and wrote.... Yes at times, I thought my hands were getting carpel tunnel syndrome, or that my eyes would explode out of my head, but it all pays off (and I still have both eyes and both hands).

Don't get me wrong, because writing is something I've always loved. But usually when it's about topics I want to write about...So it can get tedious when it's the topics that make money.

In this post I'll talk about making money with hubpages, the whole Ebay Partner Network debacle with links, and my latest project which will be learning how to make money with Clickbank.

Hubpages Boosted my Online Income

Hubpages is something I strongly suggest to anyone who believes it's:

1)impossible to make decent money online OR
2)thinks it's hard to get your stuff ranked in search engines

I found that Hubpages can make you a very nice amount of money, and for someone who's new to the MMO game, you'll probably want to use that as your stepping stone into bigger and better things. How much money you make there really depends on picking the best topics you can (in terms of decent traffic & low competition for searches), and also on making 50+ hubs. I know that's staggering. It took me at least a month or so to create that many hubs, and my flaw if you want to call it that is wanting every hub to be informative, original and sound smart. That can be a tall order, and take lots of research! But like I said, it did pay off for me, and I believe it will pay off for you as well. You can look at the Hubpages project as a way to fund buying your own website for blogging or other make money purposes.

Ebay Partner Network - In or Out?

As of this post I have no clue whether I will receive my pending earnings for EPN which are greater this past month than ever before. As you know, EPN changed up their rules bigtime, outlawing publishers from using EPN links in places like free blogger blogs, squidoo, hubpages, twitter, myspace, etc. It made a lot of people nervous since they get a nice sum of money from EPN each month. It made me nervous for a bit, but it's not my sole income. I realized I have a lot of Internet properties between squidoo, hubs, sites and blogger blogs. I did my best to remove all EPN links I could from those "3rd party" sources, but it may have been in vain. At one point, I finally decided I had done the best I could with it. If I missed a link or two and they kick me out, so be it, but I gave it my best go to get cleaned up. There comes a point when your time needs to be spent elsewhere, and time is money. I know that if I'm booted from EPN, I still have other sources to make money online. Hope any readers with EPN did the same if they had this situation..

Make Money with Clickbank Project

Now there's nothing I love more than a good challenge. I've been able to make money online with a survey site, with article sites, with eBay sales, ebay partner, Amazon, Chitika and others. Something you haven't seen me talk a lot about on here is affiliate marketing, in particular using Clickbank. This is something I stayed away from due to a lack of understanding, but now it's time to throw that caution into the wind. My goal now is to start working the Clickbank affiliate program that many people claim can really help you bring in some serious money. Now again, I realize it doesn't just happen. Google Adsense took me several months before I even reached that elusive $100 minimum. And it was because I was clueless about what to do, what topics to use how to get found, etc. With Clickbank, I feel a bit more confident, but will feel better once I see some sales roll in. I'm going to create 10 different free blogger blogs to try my hand at 10 CB products. I've already got 4 done with a few posts, which will include the product review.

I've found all sorts of schools of thought on how to go about promoting CB products. Some say Squidoo is the best way to go. Some say to use free blogger blogs and post to Google/Yahoo groups with your link in the signature. Some recommend that you absolutely must have your own domain self-hosted site. I read one blog which recommended setting up ads on USFreeAds. So I purchased a one year's membership there for $10, and will use that method in addition to some others such as Craigslist and SEO. I'm anxious to get some sales, but at the same time don't want my other income to suffer. So I'll tread a bit cautiously but will report back results to see if I find any useful info to help others in their quest with Clickbank.

I also want to recommend people check out my review of The Rich Jerk, which is a great ebook to get if you need to get yourself motivated for making money online. If anyone knows of any good books, sites, blogs that have CB advice or strategy, feel free to leave your comments below!

Related Posts:

SEO & Keywords will Make You Money!

Micro Niche Finder Review

Jeff Paul's Shortcuts to Internet Millions

Make Money Online with a Rich Jerk!

I gotta admit, this guy's quite a character, just like the Monetizer. After reading the Rich Jerk's stuff I was quickly hooked on it for several reasons. First off, he pulls no punches and cuts to the chase, with valuable online moneymaking tips. He doesn't baby the people who write in complaining they can't make money on the net, instead he tells them like it is. Secondly, he's highly entertaining with an obnoxious style of humor that many will enjoy (and some may find repulsive). You'll get several chuckles out of what he has to say all while learning how to bring in the bucks. Nobody wants to learn money making in a boring, dry way, as the MMO blog arena is already flooded. So basically the guy makes money and entertains people all at once. His site sports pictures of yachts, sports cars and beautiful women.. Must be quite the lifestyle to lead!

Some people may be put off by Rich Jerk, who blatantly admits he doesn't care about other people. He still takes the time to tell people what will work. But really he just wants to make money, which is what we all want. The Jerk even claims he has so much money he uses 100 dollar bills as toilet paper (in fact one of his entries written came from a session while he was using the toilet).

I've already learned several great techniques from what this guy has to say, no matter how obnoxious or crude he is. I'd recommend his e-book to those who want a serious kick in the butt to start making money online as he offers valuable tips on building an online empire, and even starting up your business with little or no cost. I've uncovered some great tips on gaining traffic and profits, selecting niches and just making money, from all from the writings of a self-proclaimed "Rich Jerk". His e-book will give you a free website to use for your business as well as tips on how to quickly draw traffic to it. From there, Rich Jerk will show you how to gain money from your new visitors.

Here's what to expect from the Jerk's helpful e-book:

-A FREE money making website.
-Exact instructions on how to make money from the FREE website he's going to give you.
-How to build your own list of email subscribers - and how to send them other offers that earn you money automatically.
-How he had the # 1 ranking website in Google for 3 years, for terms such as "bad credit", "bad credit loans", and more. Over 100 million competitors couldn't beat me - Even the big lending companies.
- How to sell products for companies that will pay you big commissions.
- How to create your own eBay business.
- EXACT instructions on how to make money from scratch, step by step.
- A complete list of websites that have made him millions.
- Free updates and 24 hour support for life.
- Access to his private members only forum, where over 40,000 other Rich Jerks (site members) will help you out.

There's also several free resources included with the e-book which make it well worth the price of download.

You've probably seen the 125x125 banners on other sites promoting this wealthy jerk. I wouldn't recommend an e-book here that I didn't find useful and entertaining all at once. His e-book The Rich Jerk is available for just $9.95, as an instant download, and it will get you going. That $10 will be well invested as you find numerous ways to get your online business into high gear!

To learn more about Rich Jerk's entertaining and valuable e-book, Click Here!

(Disclaimer: Some may find the Rich Jerk humor crude or obnoxious, so brace yourself!)

eBay Partner Network Changing the Rules

The eBay Partner Network (EPN) is such a wonderful moneymaker, depending on how you play it...EPN allows us moneymakers to place affiliate links, banners and flash displays in places like Blogger, Squidoo and Hubpages. People head to the eBay site through our links and we score! Unfortunately, there's been a recent email bulletin sent out by the EPN people claiming that they are making a major set of policy changes which is going to reduce our abilities to profit:

Important updates to the Network Code of Conduct include the following:

* eBay Partner Network does not compensate for sales that come from invalid click activity, which includes, but is not limited to the following:
o clicks generated by a publisher clicking on their own ads
o automated clicking tools/traffic sources/robots
o activity generated by other deceptive software
* Publishers may only place links and/or promotional content on sites they own. Affiliate links on third party sites such as Craigslist, MySpace, etc. are not allowed.
* You will not redirect any traffic to middle servers for the sole purpose of masking your referring source of traffic. This includes the use of URL shortening services (including but not limited to tinyurl.com, short.to and cloakedlink.com).

There's been some confusion about what this all means exactly, (see Network Code of Conduct for more). Some say it means no more EPN on Squidoo or Hubpages. However, there was never any specific mention of either of those sites in eBay's language. What they did "seem to say" is that you can't put tiny URL links or re-directs on your sites to mask eBay partner links, and that you can't use eBay links on sites that don't allow these affiliate links under their terms. Way to confuse the masses eBay Partner Network! If it's a "partner network", I'd think that means we all work together. Instead, eBay's recent notice gives current, active EPN members til August 1st to get their sites straightened out. That can mean a lot of work for those of us with lots of internet properties around the net! There has been a lot of buzz on the eBay Partner network forums, with EPN staff chiming in to clear some things up, sorta.

Of course the hubpages community is up in arms about this, discussing the amount of work it will take to remove all of the capsules from their hundreds of hubs. Luckily, one of the Hub staff members has mentioned they have sent communication to EPN, but will also be working on a built-in tool with hubs to allow mass removal of all eBay modules off your hubs, should this be necessary. The Hub staff also kindly suggested they would switch things over so that they would get 100% of the eBay revenue. At least they're finding solutions to help the masses, rather than getting in the way!

My advice is either get working to remove your eBay affiliate links from places that they shouldn't be (i.e. sites like article directories, myspace, facebook, squidoo, twitter). Remember that Squidoo uses eBay revenue sharing modules, so you should be most concerned with removing affiliate links you may have placed into your lenses. It will mean time and work, but it will also mean staying in this eBay moneymaking program, which is starting to look like it wants to be exclusive to your own properties, such as websites you pay to run. We've all got a good 10 days or so to get our butts in gear, so maybe break your internet properties (Blogger blogs, Squidoo lenses, Hubs, etc) into manageable lists and check off your progress as you examine them and remove the improper EPN links.

And of course my other advice is to tap into the many other moneymakers that you can choose from online. Diversify. These programs change rules and go out of business all the time, so constant worrying over one will just be too much stress...So don't stress over EPN and find more ways to make money online!

PS: On a side note it seems as of today 7/20 that the EPN reporting system is having some issues, so don't despair if you're not seeing stats on your dashboard. If you are, maybe I should despair! ;)

SEO & Keywords will Make You Money!

Let's face it folks, there's no such thing as shortcuts to internet millions, but there are some very hardworking individuals out there sharing their knowledge and insight. One I've mentioned is Courtney Tuttle of The Keyword Academy. I recently joined just due to the fact that the Hubpages phenomenon has really taken off. Joining TKA allows you to view training videos done by Court and his associate mark, and also provides you with forums as well as some great webinars. They dedicated a webinar just to the building of hubpages and how to get it ranked.

Another guy that I respect for his hardworking online money making efforts is Grizzly who also teaches How to Make Money Online. He hasn't shown himself via any recent posts, meaning he's extremely busy working away, which is what we all need to learn to do to make money in this game. But if you immerse yourself in his blog entries, you'll find a true "wealth of information". His posts may seem to go on and on, but that's his style. They're still full of Golden nuggets of wisdom for how to make money online.

Now enter Ben of Make Money Online with SEO. Ben just might be the hardest working dude online from what he's written at his blog. He apparently forces himself to create 100's upon 100's of hubpages, Squidoo lenses, ezine articles and info barrel articles. In fact, reading his blog taught me of Info Barrels which is yet another way to improve your link power and make money. Ben shares a strategy of creating a hubpage, info barrel and ezine article all based around the same keyword or phrase. You then link from the ezine to the info barrel to the hub page, and watch it rank! I'm testing this as you read this, by creating infobarrels to hook up to my existing hubs. InfoBarrels also give you a 70% cut of the Adsense, while Hubs give you just 60% of the impressions. Ben is working towards an income of $50 to $100 a day. Not too shabby and his writing is truly inspirational to those who can't motivate themselves to just do it, when it comes to online work.

Now many gurus stress how you need to join social media sites and become an A-List blogger. John Chow and Shoemoney entice us with pictures of their lavish dinners and trips to see UFC fights, as well as pictures of beautiful girls from trade shows. Readers are sucked in and just toss up a pretty looking MMO blog to finally realize the good life. But it just doesn't come that easily. And that's why SEO and Keywords are key to your online success. I've seen it myself and attribute my success to the inspiration of Courtney Tuttle, Grizzly and most recently Ben of MMO with SEO, because these guys throw themselves into their work and just do it.

Due to this you don't see these guys posting so much on a daily basis. And why is that? Because they are busy with countless other projects making money. They aren't here to show us what they're eating, or which show girl they caught on their new digital camera. They aren't sharing predictions for UFC 100 or showing us who they bumped elbows with at the blog expos. Again, they're working, because work is what produces income, unless you inherit a fortune, win the lottery or discover oil on your property. Lesson learned: work=money, but I think we all already knew that, we just don't choose to accept it. Accept it, and get busy making yourself a nice extra income online!

Micro Niche Finder Review

Micro Niche Finder Review

Micro Niche Finder is a nifty application developed by James Jones which can help anyone make money online, whether it be blogging novices all the way up to the much more experienced SEO wizards. I had been reading a lot of buzz and positive things about the Micro Niche Finder software and after having some recent record months of online earnings, I wanted to break through to a higher level, rather than plateau or fall off. I decided it was time to take a serious plunge and make an investment in my online business to generate even more income. More money will allow me to invest in other aspects such as paying others to write content.

I consider myself to be moderately skilled with identifying good niche areas to write blog posts or Hubs or Squidoo Lenses on, but wanted to take it to the next level. I've always done well with Adsense, and have started to do better with the eBay Partner Network in addition to a few other programs. Micro Niche Finder seemed like the app to get to help me start working on making some money with Clickbank, as well as creating new hubs and niche blogs. Also, automating the process of all that keyword research is something that can pay for itself. You've heard of "work smarter, not harder" right? Well Micro Niche FInder (MNF) allows you to do just that.

The MNF program is a quick download and easy to install, and comes with two receipt codes so you can use the program on two computers (maybe your PC and laptop, or work computer). Also, there's a recent bonus where they throw in a "MNF to go" Jumpdrive which comes in the mail within a week or so. There's several more nice bonuses which I'll mention further in the review. Anyhow, within mere seconds of purchasing the software I had an email sent to me with the download link, and within a minute or two I had it downloaded and installed. There's a "check for updates" feature you can click on as soon as you're up and running to make sure you're current, and from the looks of it a very good support system for help or inquiries.

So what exactly does Micro Niche Finder do? In a nutshell it will speed up your search for profitable niches that you can rank for and profit from. It allows you to type in a keyword, or phrase and then return the information us online money makers need most. You'll get back the related keywords and phrases that you just might have a good shot at ranking for. You get the CPC or Cost Per Click for Google Adwords ads, so you can get an idea if maybe a niche blog with Adsense on it will generate good money. You'll see the results count for the exact phrase in Google (the phrase if you type it into Google with "" around it). And you also get something called "SOC" which is a color-coded indicator of how good a chance you have to rank and beat other search results in Google for the term.

The fun doesn't stop there with MNF, as it includes many possible ways to take a term and make some good money. You can click on the term itself and bring up a pop-up menu of even more options, such as the ability to see the Google search results for that term. Or you can automatically search Ezine articles to see how many articles are written on that phrase. You can bring up Amazon's product results for the phrase, or Clickbank search results to see if there's affiliate products to sell. James Jones has a series of helpful moneymaking videos you can view at the Micro Niche Finder website to give an idea of what can be done with it.

In my estimation, this program's easy to navigate around and use for your moneymaking benefit. I already have a good handle on keywords and ranking for them, but feel this will give me a leg up on the competition. It may also expand my moneymaking into new venues.

What I love most about MNF is two things:

1) The SOC or Strength of Competition indicator. This shows you a number as well as a color code; red for don't bother, yellow for caution and green for go ahead and swoop in on this niche now!

2) The "Brainstorm" feature. It allows you to just click the Brainstorm button and Micro Niche Finder generates lists of hot products you can try to sell online. It's a very helpful feature that can really get your creative juices going. Not only that, but I noticed some niches with CPC's I had no clue about until hitting that button! Just for an example, "envelopes" has some CPC's around $4 - $5, which surprised me, although I'm not sure I want to start a niche blog about it. Squidoo lens perhaps? As you can see MNF definitely provides quite a bit of help to your online moneymaking possibilities.

All of that said, I encourage those of you who want to get even more serious about your online income to purchase Micro Niche Finder. Within a few months it'll likely pay for itself with the amount of extra income you're bringing in whether it be through Adsense, eBay, Amazon or Clickbank. And you will receive some great bonus e-books to get you brainstorming about Squidoo, eBay and PLR (private label rights) content, as well as a Google Adsense page generator, a jumpdrive and James Jones' regular email newsletter which so far has given me some nice tidbits for making money online. James Jones must be one creative (and rich) guy because he certainly has come up with some interesting ways to profit from the internet cash machine!

How to Make Money Online with Hubpages

Google's Wonder Wheel for SEO

(Google continues to give us more help in search engine ranking)

A newer innovation in the world of Google is the Google Wonder Wheel. You may have heard about this new search related feature you can tap into, or it may be news to you. I honestly learned of this just a few days ago, but already see it as a useful tool when it comes to crafting blog content and even creating hubpages to make money online.

Apparently, Google unveiled the Wonder Wheel experimentally to select internet users. If you do a simple Google search, you may notice under your search box and to the left a bit it says "Web" and then "Show options". Click "Show options" to unveil a panel of various Google search info you can tap into such as:

Videos
Forums
Reviews

Recent results
Past 24 hours
Past week
Past year

You'll also notice "› Standard view" which has the Wonder wheel below it. Click on that and you'll launch the Wonder Wheel for your particular keyword(s) search. In my example below I did a search on the late Michael Jackson. What it gives is a branch out from the original term to other terms and keyword phrases that internet users tend to search for.



This is helpful as it allows you to create a smart linking structure around your keyword you want to rank for. It gives you related material to write about on blog posts or Hubs or Squidoo lenses, which you can link back to the keyword phrase you're trying to rank for. Make sure to use SEO optimization when crafting your related posts and good internal linking. This cwill help solidify your ranking for key terms and bring you the extra traffic and potential money you're looking to earn.

Squidoo Policy Updates

For those of you who are fans of the fun web property creation and self-promotion site, Squidoo, they just recently sent an email to all lensmasters announcing some bigtime policy changes. Previously Squidoo didn't care about "spammy" lenses too much, as compared to Hubpages (see make money with Hubpages). One of Squidoo's policy changes involve spammy lenses, and a new outbound link policy.

In case you missed it, here's Squidoo's official email I received 6/17/09:

1. No Spam. This one's not new, but it's worth saying again.

It's simple: given our pedigree, our point of view and our dyed-in-the-wool, we-will-never-change-our-mind conviction on this issue, spam is not okay at Squidoo. For a few years now we have had a very strict and enforced stance against spam. That's staying the same, and if anything, getting even more rigorous. If you actively spam people with your Squidoo lenses (by email, in blog comments, by stalking and harassing people on Twitter, by tricking people with the content in your lenses, and more) we'll lock your entire account.
2. No more X-rated or Porn lenses

If you came to Squidoo to create X-rated or pornographic content, the time has come to say farewell. We're not discontinuing these lenses because we've suddenly grown shy, or because we no longer believe in the freedom to publish what you want. We do. Practically though, supporting X-rated pages no longer makes sense, and it invites more spam and empty traffic and wasted overhead than anything. Find out more about why we're making this very hard decision, and what it means for your X-rated lenses. (Don't panic! You can export your content and take it with you).
3. No Junk Topics from our "SquidDon't" List

Lenses on free movie downloads. Toenail fungus cures. LoseBellyFatNow promotions. Reverse Phone Lookup 4U. You know junk when you see it. And lots more examples.

Unforunately, topics like these are overwhelmingly conditioned and proven to attract spammers. If a topic has displayed enough trickery and spam and bad activity, we choose not to support it. If we find a lens on a SquidDon't topic or something very similar to it, we'll lock it. For good. Our best recommendation: Don't bother with topics like these. There's plenty of incredible stuff to write about and recommend online without having to go near the edges of what we're got going here.
4. A new limit on overly promotional lenses

Making a lens to promote or recommend something is a terrific endeavor. It's a big part of why a lot of our people are here. But: Less is more! Sales lenses far too often turn into junk lenses, as described by the relentless number of outbound links to the same exact domain. Being overly promotional rarely works. "Buy here buy here buy here!" never does.

So to help you focus your lenses, and sell even better--and to help surfers find our pages more useful overall--we're introducing a limit to the number of outbound links to the same domain that you can have on a lens. If you have more than 9 links to the SAME domain on a single lens, your lens will get locked for review. Of course we'll have domains that are whitelisted out of this (meaning, you can have as many outbound links to them as you like), as well as sites that are blacklisted (meaning, even a single link to that domain will get your lens locked).

Please read all the important details on how this works.

Make Money Online with Hubpages

Some of the readers here at the Monetizer blog may have participated in the Hubpages 30 day challenge which encouraged "Hubbers" to create 100 Hubpages in just 30 days time (the challenge ended about a week ago). To this day, I completed 23 of them, simply knowing it wasn't realistic for me to ignore the other projects I'm working on regularly. However, I've already enjoying the potential of Hubpages as a moneymaker and also a great source of "link juice". Thanks to Courtney Tuttle for the inspiration to start with the Hubs again, since I had left them for dead a year ago and turned to Squidoo. I found Squidoo user friendly and fun, but in all reality Hubpages offers much more potential because of the kind of profits you can generate. I've read several success stories of members who are pulling in anywhere from $300 to over $1000 a month from the site, by using unique monetization strategies. And there's no reason why you and I can't enjoy similar success. After all, more money/passive income is always a good thing. Those of us with current web properties (blogs, niche sites, etc) can benefit from making hubs to support those as well.

I took Courtney Tuttle's advice from The Keyword Academy and just started finding topics which were somewhat competitive, with keyword CPC's (Cost-per-clicks) of anywhere from $2 and up, using the Google Adwords Keyword tool. Court recommended you find those with a $5 or more CPC, but in my experience using the Google Adwords Keyword tool, those can be quite competitive. Kudos to Court who really knows his stuff, I think it'd be interesting to be a fly on his wall and see how he finds good keywords (and how long it takes him). I focused on several gems I found in various niches, and also went for a few more competitive ones just to see how they might fare. I figure if you add plenty of relevant tags on your hubs you may draw traffic that way. Also, your hubs may show up as related pages on other people's hubs. As for how I selected keywords, I went for those with at least 3,000 searches a month, and at least $2 CPC. Generally the gurus say that you can expect to make 25% of whatever the average CPC is for keywords. So if you're keywords are in the $5 level, you'll make $1.25 a click and so forth. I figure that sometimes if you pick the right niche, even if you're making 50 cents a click, yet getting 20 clicks or more, you're doing well.

I did my research for my various topics, and in some cases discovered the hubs are easy to write, but it's not something I'd want to do 5 or more of per day. I'll tell you that probably the best and easiest hubs you could set up are those about various products you own. Consider doing product reviews for everything and anything you own (tech may be best but there's other areas), even if you're not seeing it on the Adwords top keywords searches. There's most likely other people out there who may be searching for that same product as you have already. They could be the lucky moneymaker you stumble upon too. Also consider those products and any issues you had with them and found yourself frustrated at how tough it was to find an answer to your questions. That may be another way you want to go with your hubs, by helping others answer the question you had to search for.

Hubpages are in fact much like Squidoo as they offer various components you can add to your hubs. Those are the text, photo, video, rss, news, links, ebay, amazon and poll components in addition to several others. You simply click to add one then edit it as you see fit. You're able to position the eBay, Amazon and photo's very nicely right inside your text blocks to give a wraparound look. Quite helpful if you want to "pitch" or talk about various products and then have 4 eBay auctions for the product next to that.

The forms of monetization for your hubs are Google Adsense, eBay partner network, Amazon Associates and Kontera. If you're a member of all four programs, great. If not, you'll need to sign up and be approved. Adsense is the easiest to be approved for, followed by Amazon, then Kontera, then eBay. When you're official, there's a spot called Affiliate Settings where you go and plug in the required ID's from your various accounts. Google Adsense ads are pretty much automatic on all hubs, and you'll receive 60% of the impressions revenue. Hubpages makes the other 40% which is generous considering they house your free web properties. The 60-40 rule applies to eBay and Amazon ads as well. Those you'll need to implement into your hubs on your own, but they allow you to control the keywords that bring up the various products. As for Kontera, you'll need to specify whether you turn it on for each and or every hub. Hubpages recommends that unless you're earning at least $50 a month with Adsense that you consider keeping Kontera turned off. They also note that if you don't earn at least $5 with Kontera in a given month, your earnings don't roll over to the next month. Good to keep in mind.

I strongly recommend that you add Google Analytics into your Hubpages account, and also create URL tracking channels for each and every hub on Google Adsense. When I first started out I was seeing some money in my Adsense earnings which I couldn't account for. It's much better to know what's making you money and what's not. Also, with Analytics you'll be able to see just what keywords/phrases are bringing you search traffic and then you can work to either make that page stronger for the keywords, or create a new page just based on a new term that looks hot.

Use Hubpages to help your current web properties and niche blogs get better rankings too. But don't overdo it, play by the rules. Here's some words of wisdom about linking from hubpages:

1)Maintain a Hubber score of 84 or above to make links you put in your hub pages "Do Follow". You can up your score simply by creating at least 5 or more hubs.

2)Don't make hubs spammy. Don't place more than 2 links to the same site (i.e. your blog or site) in the same hub page, and don't make a hub that's all affiliate links.

Folks, Hubpages is definitely a moneymaker and way to get some nice link juice to your other web properties. I sent some hubpage links to a particular blog page that I had been trying to rank page 1 on Google for over a year. Within a week, the page ranked on Google search results page 1 right behind two very prominent companies' listings for the same thing. I also discovered in these few weeks I devoted to making more hubs that I earned more money off just one hubpage in about a week, then I made in total with all of my Squidoo lenses last month! Think about that, because while Squidoo may look cool and be talked about more, Hubpages seems to have better Google rankings, and the ability to help your blogs or sites rank better.

So, if you're not a hubber yet, why wait? Sign up here and start your hubpages!

Million Dollar Mattress Thrown Away?!

In some offbeat money news, an Israeli woman recently tossed out an old mattress for her mother in favor of a new one. What she didn't realize was that the old mattress was being used to hide away a million dollars. Once she found out that startling news, she immediately rushed out to try to find the discarded mattress. She searched frantically searched through three different landfills with no luck in finding the million dollar mattress. A manager at the dump explained why the lady is going to have quite a challenge finding her million dollar mattress...

According to Times Online:

Yitzhak Borba, the dump manager, told the radio station that his staff was helping the woman, saying she appeared “totally desperate”, but the mattress was hard to find among the 2,500 tonnes of rubbish arriving at the site every day.

Mr. Borba said that he increased security at the site to keep would-be treasure hunters at bay. For her part, Anat is displaying an admirable stoicism. “People have to take everything in proportion and thank God for the good and the bad,” she said.

I can see it now, a mattress company or store starts their own promotion or contest, where one lucky shopper or couple of shoppers buys the bed containing a cool million dollar prize!

But really, where should you keep your extra money, checking, savings accounts, the stock market or in a safe place? With the recession going on in the States it was seeming like a good idea to hide your extra money in your mattress because of the stock market and banking woes. But now it seems like you better think twice because you just might throw away a million dollar mattress!

Plentyoffish.com Login Issue - Poor Customer Service?

(Firefox displays that Plentyoffish.com server is down)

You've more than likely heard the story of successful internet entrepreneur Markus Frind. He's the brains behind a completely free dating site, Plentyoffish.com (down as of 5PM EST 6/8/09). The website operates as Markus' one man project, although he has admitted to hiring a staff of 6 or so to help out in a small office. He's made as much as 10 million dollars per year with his free dating site, just by running Google Adsense ads, banners and various affiliate ads such as an ad for "Double Your Dating", a $40 downloadable book. And the most surprising aspect of them all (or envy-inspiring) is he claims to work just a few hours a day, 10 hours a week and earns millions of dollars.

Markus find programmed and created Plenty of Fish all on his own, which in and of itself is amazing. Not that the site is beautiful, but it certainly became useful and profitable for what it is. Recently, Markus noted on his May 1, 2009 blog that he hired a programmer to start working on his site, which seemed revolutionary for this one-man internet million dollar business. Many people had called Markus a bit arrogant and nonchalant when it came to customer issues with the site, as he seemed to think it was always fine how it was and things that many users reported as issues, he saw as insignificant. For example, user pictures of themselves were distorted on certain pages because the programming wasn't done to fix the issue. As of today June 8, 2009 (6/8/09), it seems that the website is down. A plentyoffish.com login issue has arose and when you enter the site's address www.plentyoffish.com into your web browser, you're left hanging. This is something that happens with all sites, big and small. The difference here seems to be in the fact that there's no word of warning given to anyone about what the issue is with Plenty of Fish. A site like Google will at least inform members that the site is going to be down, or a splash page tells them that the site is currently under construction.

A few lessons can be learned from the Plenty of Fish login problems. Number one, you can become a millionaire off Google Adsense by creating a valuable, highly-trafficked internet property. Number two, that property should be run as a business with customers ranking first. It's the customers who drive a site like plentyoffish.com to be as successful as it is. Unfortunately for the head honcho, when a site is down that generates $10,000 a day, it's definitely losing income and potentially losing its members.

Read From 10 Hours a Week, $10 Million a Year at New York Times for more on Plenty of Fish and Markus Find.

Latest Obsessions: Hubpages & iTunes Podcasts

It's been a while friends, and unfortunately I was getting a bit complacent with my earnings and chose to enjoy some time away from blogging. Complacency is definitely a bad flaw at times, as it will rob you of your drive to make money as you feel "well this is good enough". A break was needed though, as we all burn out at times. I'm now focused again. I've recently been devoting my attention to two great moneymaker tools online: Hubpages and Podcasts.

First off, Hubs are compared a lot to Squidoo lenses, and in many respects they are similar in how you craft them with text, pictures, videos, RSS feeds and eBay/Amazon products. However, the Hubpages staff seems much more prone to kick you off for "overly promotional" pages. They generally don't allow more than 3 links to a blog or site. So when you build a hubpage, consider building it on a topic related to the keywords you want to rank for. In the past few weeks, I've been inspired by Courtney Tuttle's personal experiment to create 100 hubs in 30 days time and see how much income and link juice they generate. While I don't expect to do 100 like Courtney due to other projects, I've completed 10 hubs in about a 5 day span now, and set up Adsense, Amazon Associates and eBay Partner Networks to be associated with my Hubpages. It seems hard to track how much you're earning on Adsense from Hubs, but you may notice you've made X dollars and your report doesn't account totally for all the clicks. Those missing clicks are most likely from your hubs. Some simple math will tell you how many dollars or cents you've made. You don't even need to link out if you choose not to, as you may just decide to create free hubs for their potential revenue. Keep in mind it's a revenue sharing deal, so Hubpages will be giving you a % of the click money (more info on revenue sharing). Hubpages, like Squidoo, social bookmarking and article directories, can be a great way to get powerful links to your keyword content, so consider utilizing the free site as best you can. Get started at Hubpages here.

My other obsession as of late is listening to iTunes Podcasts during occasional free time. I know many bloggers who will tell you that you should be podcasting in addition to blogging and making videos all while marketing your stuff. Honestly though, who has time for all of that? Many success mentors and gurus suggest that we should constantly feed our minds with positive food, such as books, and audio tapes. Podcasts can do that if you find ones that interest you, and you can listen streaming through iTunes, or download to listen to later, or put on your iPod/iPhone. I recommend that when you have down time, you take a gander at what's available for free to listen to at iTunes Podcasts. The "Self-help" and "Business" categories offer a plethora of great shows, and some which are bad or just blatant advertising. I've enjoyed a few that talk about how to apply the Secret to your life, how to create wealth, entrepreneurial topics and SEO. And if you need to relax, there's some great meditation and relaxation style podcasts. The Inner Health Studios one in particular seems to put me at ease and to sleep almost whenever I want...so check them out, because they just might give you the inspiration, ideas or stress relief you need to make more money...Now it's about time for the The Monetizer to go listen to a relaxing podcast and take a power nap!

Lesson Learned in Blogging: Be Prepared!

First off, apologies to the faithful readers who stop by and view the Monetizer blog regularly. It's been a while folks, and ironically not even a day after I installed a brand new, more powerful wireless router, there was an internet outage here in the area. It turns out there was a bad fire in a nearby town which ended up damaging a major fiber optics line. That incident left The Monetizer and many other people without the internet for days. It's hard to remember back to a time when people didn't rely on the internet as heavily, but I do seem to recall them. Amazingly, the internet allows us to do so much from banking to making money online and keeping in touch with friends and acquaintances, that we really take it for granted. When it goes down many of us are lost.

Needless to say, when the net is down, so is my ability to update any of my blogs, check my online accounts, etc. My streak of updating one of my most heavily search engine visited blogs ended on Tuesday, as I had no way to post. I could have driven around looking for a free wi fi spot with my MAC laptop, but in a remote woodsy area, that can be a challenge and quite time consuming. But now in hindsight I've come up with some helpful things for all regular bloggers to keep in mind. These are just in case a disaster or minor incident strikes that interferes with your ability to blog, such as your internet service is out or your computer goes down. You basically should consider several alternatives and backup plans to keep your blog in business during those times. These may be common sense, but they're lifesavers in the blogging biz. Here's some ideas...

1) Schedule your blog posts in advance - Both blogger and wordpress allow the ability to create a blog post and then set the time and date of your choosing. I've used this feature quite a bit for my one blog, to automatically post at a certain hour each Monday and Friday. It's been quite helpful, and when I took a vacation, I set up a series of 5 blog posts to go up each day I was away. Definitely a life saver, and it could also provide you a nice break from blogging if you want it.

2)Have another blogger on staff - Whether this be your family member, friend or someone you hire, having another person authorized to post for you can also be helpful. Maybe it's a virtual assistant you hire. These people can be prepared to be your lifeline and post a blog or just an update to let your readers know what's going on and why you might not be posting in the near future.

3) Find the internet - As today continues with no internet service, I'm coming up with all the possibilities of internet services I can use free of charge. Examples are public libraries, friend or family in nearby areas, and the good ol' Bojangles fast food stop which offers free Wi-fi to patrons. I'm contemplating getting myself to one of these soon, because I hate to let my fans down and also realize that if the internet is out for days my email box will probably be overflowing with spam!

I've also considered the option of phones. I don't have the fancy Blackberry or iPhone quite yet, but I'm assuming these could also be lifesavers and allow people to blog over that wireless service. Granted, many of us find typing on a regulation size keyboard easier than the tiny ones that come with a phone. There may be ways to upload text from your computer to the phone/PDA so keep that in mind as another alternative.

It's times like these that truly put you to the test and can make or break your business. Folks, my best blogging advice is to always be prepared as best you can when disaster strikes. Always have a plan so that your blogging business can "weather the storm" and keep on going, and your readers will stay with you.

Here's to your success,
The Monetizer

Make your Webhosting Choice!

Just recently I purchased 3 new domain names as well as web hosting for some new make money online projects. As you probably know, there's a ton of different hosting companies you can choose to go with and each has its own unique benefits such asthe size of space you get online, bandwith sizes, number of domains you can host on the account, email accounts, and more. When you start seeing all the various offers for hosting in magazines and online, you begin to realize it's mindblowing just how many of these companies exist. If you don't have word of mouth from someone else, making the hosting decision could be difficult.

A website resource that seems like a great spot to start your search for web hosting is Webhostingchoice.com. This site provides a directory of web hosts as well as educational resources about hosting, to help novices and more experienced bloggers or webmasters. Among the resources are an article on how to identify webhosting scams, as well as an article on Colocation, which is an advanced topic I never knew much about until now. In addition to these informative articles, webhostingchoice.com provides the advanced search feature which is especially helpful because it allows you to specify just what you want in a web hosting choice. You can set the specifics for bandwidth, diskspace, subdomains, FTP, emails and more. You can also type in your maximum monthly payment for web hosting (within reason, because 99 cents won't get you anyt results). A sample search I did with a maximum monthly payment of $9.99 turned up the exact host I chose to go with a few months ago, Hostgator, so I know this resource does what it says. Many people have recommended Hostgator, but after I specified just what I wanted in a webhost, it was the only choice which came up for me. Perfect. In addition to the search, you can look at their various Host directory choices such as best options for Blog hosting, Adult Hosting and E-commerce.

Check out webhostingchoice.com if you're looking for the best web host for your blog or website project. It can save you hours of pulling out your hair while trying to find the best hosting choice for you!

Make Money with Vinefire, Maybe?

Have you joined Vinefire? Members could make anywhere from $10-$100 a day with this new online moneymaker!


So the other night I stumbled onto a new blog that was all about ways to use Squidoo lenses and defending them as a great moneymaking, linkbuilding tools. The blog which is run by PotPieGirl, a Squidoo moneymaker, had some valuable insight and information regarding making profitable lenses that get indexed and ranked in Google. From that blog, I decided to click over to another associated site which talked about building Niche sites with Wordpress, something Internet marketing coach Courtney Tuttle also discusses. From there, I learned about a free web tool I wasn't aware of yet, called CBAnalytics, which helps people rate and compare various Clickbank affiliate products. And from there I learned about an interesting "potential" moneymaker named Vinefire, which I also had never heard of until that night. It's amazing how many things you can learn about in this MMO niche, meaning there's no true experts on all make money online concepts...

So back to Vinefire, it's a "free" member driven content site much like Digg or other sites where you submit site links and vote on popularity of various items. The moneymaking scenario sounds not only tempting but easy and almost "too good to be true". 54 cents for every posted link you visit, 90 cents for every sponsor link you visit, 12 cents for every link you vote on, 4 cents if someone votes up your link, and 50% of the earnings of any friends you refer to Vinefire. As a basic member you can earn up to $10 a day with the site, and there's an option to pay $5 to verify your account which then enables you to earn up to $100 a day. Not too shabby right?

But wait, there's a catch, which will seem like "Agloco deja vu" to many people. Vinefire really wants to pay its members, and intends to, but they can't...yet. They are sitting back and waiting for Vinefire to grow in popularity and when certain site growth metrics have been achieved, they are also expecting to be bought up by a large company. At their forums in their FAQ they mention there is a potential suitor already in line to buy them. From the proceeds of that sale, which Vinefire expects to be valued in the millions, members will finally get paid. Vinefire has set their target payout date of June 1, 2009, not too far away. The interesting thing with that is originally they were planning to pay people in January of 2010. So they moved it up to keep people interested in the prospects. Apparently the villagers had their pitchforks and torches ready when they found out how long it might take to get money from Vinefire.

At the Vinefire forums they also add:

Please don't assume that the payout date has moved to June 1, 2009. It is simply a possibility...if we are able to reach certain growth goals. This includes things such as the number of new members, listing upgrades (Yellow Star, etc.), verified accounts, etc.

Yep, I know what everyone's thinking. Vinefire sounds like another Agloco or Boomertowne just waiting to collapse right underneath all its loyal members. There was a lot of angry people over those two websites and rightfully so. And to be honest, I was thinking the same thing about Vinefire too. It would be a shame to invest a lot of effort in promoting and frequenting that site with one's time only to receive a "Sorry Out of Business" notice one day. But despite that The Monetizer still joined, for the simple reason of testing it out. There's no reason not to get your feet wet with another money opportunity online. But definitely keep the lessons you may have learned from Agloco and Boomertowne in mind. Don't go all out with promotion, because if you do and they fail, it will be a tragic waste of your efforts trying to make money online.

If you're interested in a potential moneymaker, join Vinefire and take their special 10 day challenge...

Update: My account is at the $20 level on Day 2, just for clicking several links..of course, time will tell if that money is delivered...

Everyone's a Twitterer, even Oprah!

It's official. After yesterday's episode of Oprah hit the airwaves, millions of Americans more have now learned about the phenomenon that is Twitter (You can follow Oprah on Twitter here). On yesterday's show, Oprah had the creators of Twitter on including Evan Williams, as well as Mr. Twitter popularity himself, Ashton Kucher, aka @aplusk. As you may know Kucher was in a heated battle with CNN's Twitter to see which of them could amass 1 million followers first. The movie star won it, and was saying how great it is that he can defeat a media giant like CNN, because it shows just how powerful social media really is. On an interesting note, Kucher promotes the celebrity gossip humor site blahgirls.com with his Twitter profile. And by the way, CNN has also achieved 1 million followers. It's starting to look like the next battle may be Britney Spears versus Ellen Degeneres for 1 million. It's also amazing how now that the 2008 election has passed, Barack Obama's Twitter is falling down the Top 10 list.. View the top Twitterers here

Also, there's talk about Google possibly buying up Twitter. You can already feel the moneymaking wheels start to spin.

In Google's earnings call, CEO Eric Schmidt is quoted as saying:

"Without commenting specifically about Twitter ... you could imagine that ... it could be a channel for product information, marketing information, real-time information for which you can hang advertising products, whether it's a text ad or a video ad or so forth off of it ... It strikes me that's a logical strategy for them to pursue and something that we would be very happy to pursue with them and all other players in that space.” (via SIA)

As we all know Google is slowly taking over the web world, and if you're using Adsense you're probably aware there's Adsense for websites/blogs, mobile content, RSS feeds and domain names. So what's next, Adsense for Twitter?

If you're not on the bandwagon, now's as good a time as any to join, and Follow the Monetizer at Twitter. It's rare these days not to go to any company or superstar's website and not see icons or "join up" pictures for Facebook and Twitter. If the big folks are doing, the little folks can benefit just as much. I read an article discussing the concept of getting rid of the whole "follower count" on Twitter, because it makes those with less followers feel as if they're not being heard. That may be true, but there's plenty of ways to increase your followers, namely following others, holding contests and tweeting things that others will be interested in. Others have even mentioned that you should make it a habit to include hashtags "#" in front of key words when you send a Tweet. An example would be:

Learning a new strategy for testing #Adsense ads on my site.

In that Tweet, the word Adsense gets emphasis and picked up amongst searches for Adsense via Twitter. If you do this regularly, supposedly you can gain more and more followers. Also consider using search.twitter.com where you can type in specific searches across Twitter, then follow people who mentioned those keywords in their Tweets. These are just a few tips and tricks to get targeted Twitter followers based on your niche.

The Monetizer will be one of the first to admit I'm no Twitter expert, but have started learning ways it can be implemented into my various projects. You may hate technology but it's usually the businesses, brands and entrepreneurs who embrace it and find creative new ways to market who benefit the most from sites like Twitter.

Extra tip: Check out the Top Twitterers list and see what sorts of websites each are promoting. You may discover some new monetization ideas from their sites, blogs, etc for your niche!

Follow the Monetizer at Twitter!