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HOW I DIDN’T MAKE MONEY ONLINE…

Not making money online is the ultimate in self-fulfilment. I know it
to be so because I’ve lived it. And I continue to live it. Every
blessed damn day.

Here’s how I did it.

1) I copied other websites, word-for-word, template-for-template;
particularly John Chow, Problogger and ShoeMoney. If they made it, so
could I.

2) Once my site was up, I dabbed on my best perfume and waited for the
traffic to come. “You’ll see”, I told my imaginary friend.

I didn’t lift a finger. Not even a pinkie. I left no comments on other
people’s sites, didn’t link to them and I sure as hell didn’t submit my
site to search engines.

Nope. I just sat there. And meditated. Meditation is the key, you see. It’s the future.

3) My therapist told me, “Believe you’ll have overnight success and
it’ll happen. There’s an over-worked under-paid genie in a bottle, just
waiting to make your dreams come true.”

4) I updated my site as infrequently as possible. “That should get my visitors talking”, I chuckled. “All 5 million of them.”

5) I’ve spent the past 6 centuries reading about how other people make
money online. Reading how other people make money online is more
important than maintaining my site. But I’m not worried though. My site
is self-sufficient. It’s read a lot of self-help books and knows how to
take care of itself.

And that’s it. Easy. Follow the above, and I guarantee you’ll find
yourself in the same wonderfully exquisite position in the money-making
world.

Good luck, be brave and may the Google be with you.

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Ok, what do you think? Kind of vague? Useful? Redundant?

People (aka your potential users) like to spend money during Christmas. And if you are just figuring this out today (December 11th), you have pretty much missed the holiday season. Yes, you can jump in now and monetize your traffic for the next couple weeks. But you missed the chance to hook people in early and often. How about this for a great list of Christmas affiliate (and a CPC) programs:

1. Amazon

Why list Amazon first? For beginners, it takes virtually no time to set up their affiliate codes. I mean, you can use some simple Javascript that they provide to set up basic Amazon affiliate links (a must if your topics cover… ohh… just about anything). If you have specific product tie ins that you can make, then their individual product links are just as simple to put in. Remember though, they only keep their affiliate cookie around for 1 day. Get your user to a product that they will buy!

2. CJ

I am not a CJ fan. However, you can find an affiliate link for just about any product on CJ it seems. So no matter what your subject matter, I’d bet you can find a product to direct link to using a CJ affiliate merchant. At a minimum, with no technical skils, you can drop in a product link. Repeating my earlier comment — people spend money during Christmas. If you can put a product link in for a product that someone would want for Christmas, you can generate a commission.

3. Shareasale

While not a fan of CJ, I am a big supporter of Shareasale. They do affiliate networking right! No, they do not have as wide a selection of product links as CJ (I’m not sure anyone does). You can count on their integrity in dealing with both merchants and publishers, which is what you really want. As with CJ though, you will want to find product links that you can integrate with your content that will send a user straight to a product. Ideally a product someone will want for Christmas.

4. Adsense

You know, it is probably not the most lucrative revenue model at Christmas when you could pick up percentages of product purchases, it is like a more stable revenue source. If your content is such that it can be related to Christmas, be especially sure to use product keyword rich content so that you can increase your chance at higher paying CPC. I’d guess you are already running Adsense. All I am saying here is that if you can include this type of content while staying on topic and message, do. As a last thought on Adsense, do remember that they have affiliate offers as well. I had very little success with them, but that does not mean you won’t. Test.

There are other affiliate networks out there to choose from. I mentioned CJ and Shareasale for the reasons indicated. Don’t use this post alone though as a reason to skip other networks.

Good Luck, and don’t forget that Santa does exist. If you do, you will Lose Money Today!

Users have to know that your blog exists to get traffic. Otherwise, you got it, you lose money today! Even if you are naturally an introvert, there are ways to publicize, advertise, or otherwise tell people about your blog that won’t stress you too much. I’m going to cover 5 Ways to publicize your blog without raising the introvert alert.

1. Ping! Ping! Ping!

If we are talking about a blog, then you surely know about pinging the ping services. Heck, the default install of WordPress auto pings pingomatic on new posts. I’ve seen rumblings that pingomatic pings were sometimes dog slow in the past, so you may want to add additional ping servers to your blog. Others I’d recommend include (but are surely not limited to):

1. http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
2. http://ping.feedburner.com/
3. http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
4. http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
5. http://www.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

You can add as many as you want, but these in addition to pingomatic will likely boost your traffic significantly if you are putting out quality content. Beware – the more ping services you ping, the slower your posts will be processed when you create them. It is a trade-off, and each person decides for themselves what this is worth.

2. It’s Delightful, It’s Delicious, It’s Social (networking)

If you are reading this, and you do not know about Digg, Delicious, or Stumbleupon, then you likely need to spend about an hour searching and reading about them. These services (among the tons of social networks that you discover with a little searching) have the potential to drive huge traffic to your sites (again the quality content caveat applies).

Specific ways to drive traffic to your site is to include their little widget buttons so that users can vote for your articles. In it’s most innocent form, you would create great content, have users come to your site, and have them provide the first vote for your content. This really is not the greatest solution (not even a decent solution). Why? Users submitting your content to a social network will create their idea of what the title and description should be — quite possibly not a very optimized combination (for either traffic or buzz generation). If your content is great, do the submission yourself. Make it buzzy, keep it non-spammy. It will pay off in the long run.

There are lots of schemes out there to boost the performance from social networks. All I’ll say here is, read up before you buy in to any scheme. And the ultimate caveat — if it sounds too good to be true, it likely is too good to be true.

3. What Do You Think (commenting on similar blogs)?

I’d be willing to bet that you are not blogging on a completely unique topic. More likely, you are blogging on a topic that is covered by many other bloggers. I’ll even go so far as to guess that you visit some of these other blogs regularly. Have you ever thought about actually participating in these blogs by commenting? If not, you are missing out on a great way to start getting your blog’s name in front of potential users. Potential users who probably have the same interests that you are using on your blog.

Comment, regardless of whether they have no follows in place. Yes, you always want links to your site (in particular followable links). But in this case, you can use well thought out, non-spammy, comments to create a buzz for your site. Search engines give you rankings, but users who actually come to your site can be more beneficial for actually generating links. Give users every reasonable chance to come to your site.

4. Directories

There are as many diverse opinions about the value of pursuing directory links as there are people spouting opinions. (Yes I know that mine is just adding to the disarray). So my position is simple. The big guys (BOTW, Yahoo) are likely worth getting a listing it. Yahoo is a recurring cost, BOTW has a one time option or a recurring option. For the remaining directories I have a general rule that I use — if a directory is highly ranked for a search phrase like “KEYWORD directory” (where you obviously replace KEYWORD with the keywords most related to your site), then it is likely worth a few minutes effort to submit to if the cost is marginal. “Highly rated” is subjective, but my own preference is top 10.

5. You Got To Have Friends

Ok, so even the most introverted person I know has friends. Tell them about your site. If they are familiar with the topic at all, tell them to stop by your site to give you some feedback if nothing else. If your site has the magic content, they will likely subscribe to your RSS feed. Users who read your RSS feed are likely to come back in the future as a topic of interest comes across their reader. Traffic = potential money. No Traffic = no money.

If you are the type who just prefers to work on your merry way, not really talking about your blog with friends, how about this simple solution. Include your blog URL in your email signature (also your forum signatures if allowed). No, this is not going to cause a sudden rush of traffic to your site. It will actually surprise you though how the clicks from these links will be consistent if not spectacular.

Tiny Traffic = Big Traffic?

I’m not saying all of these suggestions are going to send you so much traffic that your server crashes. I am saying that if you are reading this post, looking for tips, you likely have very little traffic. When you have very little traffic, every little bump up is a step. My general believe on blog traffic is that it takes small bumps until it reaches some critical mass. At that point you are going to start experiencing something closer to exponential traffic growth than linear traffic growth.

Don’t leave money on the table. Get the traffic, and monetize it!

Actually, that is not true. There are tons of sites that do not show ads on their sites. Or, if they are showing ads, they are not showing ads where visitors will actually visit.

I have a nice chunk of websites. Some that I picked up in land grabs when I’m in a site buying frenzy. Others that I have just not touched in a long time. I can say with absolute certainty, that there may be a site or two (maybe three), that I am not showing ads on. Or maybe I have ads so tightly embedded in content that they are nearly invisible to users. There might even be a site or two that I felt were not traffic’d enough to deserve ads.

In my original way of thinking coming up on 10 years ago, I felt (as did some of the prognosticators of the day), that you should build out content and a critical mass of readers before dropping ads on the site. The thought was that users who saw ads would immediately hit the back button and poof, your traffic was gone. Now there may have been some validity to that point. But I believe looking back now, that the true meaning behind that thought was that you did not want to overwhelm your user with so much advertising that they we unable to appreciate your content. Remember, the primary ad media back then were graphical banners. Some were quite unappealing.

At this point on the Internet though, I feel that users have come to expect a reasonable level of advertising on a site when they visit. And reasonable is somewhat dependant on the niche you are in. Users expecting a classy, almost educational like resource don’t want to be bombarded with ads I’d guess. But users visiting sites more akin to sins of the flesh site might be willing to put up with a more robust advertising experience.

The real key though for the webmaster is to set the tone such that the level of advertising is acceptable while out in front of the user enough to acquire clicks. I struggled with the right word for that. I think entice is too aggressive. What we really want is to sustain advertising as a viable business model is for users to click knowingly and to convert. Tricky clicks, while a nice revenue model in the short run, do not encourage advertisers to keep paying big bucks.

Lastly, while I am sure you probably have seen it if you are reading this, you should at least give a peek at the AdSense heatmap for improving performance. The thing to keep in mind though is that although this is provided for AdSense, you can expect similar tracking patterns for other advertising media.

You might notice that I am not running ads on this site right now. That will change shortly. I’m kind of in the get the content rolling mode right now, and have really slacked on the revenue generation plan for Lose Money Today! I guess that is kind of the gist of this post anyway. Touche.

Why a Blog on Losing Money?

Honestly, I have found in all of my reading, experimentation, and coding, it is far easier to lose money than to make money. So why not approach the issue from the reverse side. On a more humorous note, it is easier to find domain names that center on losing money than making money right now.

My domain hunt started just on a whim while conducting one of my marathon domain name searches on GoDaddy (20 or so minutes of typing domain names! ). I was drawing a blank on my primary searches, and I started thinking… “Geez, it sure is easier to lose money than make money”. Thus this humble blog was put on the todo list.

What Can I Teach Me About Losing Money Online?

Quite simply, at a minimum I could catalog the many half hearted attempts I have made in an effort to make money online. Kind of a “best of” list of failures. What is so intriguing about this approach is that some readers may actually be able to take a way I have lost money and turn it in to a way to make money. I’m not claiming to be the best money maker online, I’m just claiming to be very honest about how to lose money online. Take the failures I throw out and use them as either a road map of pitfalls to avoid, or, use it as a motivational list of ways you can succeed where others fail.

When Will I Spread the Good/Bad Word

Well, I’ve actually been working on some ideas like this for a while now. It is truly a matter of my taking the ideas from my todo list, and dropping them in this blog. I expect to have my first post in place tomorrow, Tuesday, November 27.

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