How to Make More Money with Your Website (without Getting More Traffic)

It’s possible to increase the amount of money you earn from your blog or website without increasing the amount of traffic you currently receive. While the amount of traffic greatly affects how much money you earn, all income sources can be tweaked to generate more revenue without an proportionate increase in traffic.

One simply needs to strategically optimize your website in order to best accommodate whatever traffic you are currently receiving.

This article will provide some useful details on the various methods and principles you can immediately use to improve the overall net revenue from your website or blog.

Main Principles to Follow for Greater Income

There are three main principles you should remember when trying to increase the overall income for your site. These are conversion, leverage and diversification:

• Conversion. If you want to make money from the same ad space on your blog without an increase in traffic, you need to develop greater conversion rates for affiliate programs and contextual ads. This includes restructuring your website to highlight specific webpages, projects or advertisements.
• Leverage. To expand your income beyond on-site advertisements, you need to start using your site as a platform towards something a specific service or product that brings in an external income.
• Diversification. To increase your overall earnings, you also need to gradually develop a diverse income stream by experimenting with multiple ad programs and monetization strategies which fit the overall content and direction of your site. This also involves the development of content that can be easily monetized.

5 Ways to Gradually Make More Money from Your Website

These five methods are practical explanations of how you can apply the three principles outlined above to your own website or blog. Consistent application of these methods will ensure that you increase the income generated from each site.

1. Make an Effort to Use Affiliate Links Regularly

Reviews of products like books and software or other websites will allow you to generate income via affiliate links. Conversions for affiliate links will always work best when combined with personal recommendations within content.

Strive to write objective reviews of these products or websites on a regular basis. Write one review every week and you’ll gradually develop a substantial archive of monetized content accessible by search engine traffic and other visitors.

2. Develop and Display a List of Recommended Websites/Products

This list of websites should be prominently displayed on a sitewide level although you can choose to display it on its own webpage. Each of the recommended websites should preferably be linked to a presell page on your website.

This can come in the form of a review post or a short note detailing your experiences with the website or product.

3. Focus on Conversion: Optimize your Existing Ad Placement

Income generated from on-site advertisements can vary a great detail depending on placement, particularly if they are contextual CPC or CPA ads. Try experimenting with ad formats and placement on your site while monitoring your click-through rates and ad earnings at least once every week.

This should gradually give you a good idea of where to best place your ads for maximum earnings. You can also choose to place ads on specific areas of your website for greater overall performance.

4. Diversify Your Income: Try New Monetization Tactics

Diversification of your income is one method to make full use of your blog’s earnings potential. Sign up with new ad networks and run ads to test if they produce equal or higher earnings. Some websites work very well with Adsense, others would probably do better with text link sales (aff) or direct ad sales.

A good way to pick up different ad-models is to observe the various sites in and outside of your niche. How are they monetizing their site? Can you apply the same method to your own site?

Another method of monetization would involve offering premium features or content for subscribing members. This requires a substantial amount of work but may work if your site already has an established audience which trusts your product or brand.

5. Leverage Your Blog to Promote Your Services or Business

If you have a particular skill such as web design or writing, I would recommend putting up a page on your site promoting your services. This aim of this page is to let visitors know that you are available for hire and will encourage interested visitors to contact you for assignments on specific projects.

This indirectly increases your monthly income by providing a revenue source on top of your regular monetization methods. David Airey is a good example of a freelance graphic designer who leverages his site to promote his services.

David’s blog clearly shows that he is available for hire and prominently displays his portfolio. A collection of featured articles on topics such as graphic design, advertising and branding demonstrates his knowledge on the topic to prospective clients. It also helps that he has optimized his site to rank well for local search terms like ‘graphic design edinburgh’ and ‘web design edinburgh’.

Building Traffic is Still the No.1 Priority

While the above methods will definitely increase your online income, building regular amounts of traffic to your website is still of primary importance because it exponentially increases the amount of money you can earn from every single ad format or program that you run.

Should you need more information on traffic building, do check out my category of articles specifically on how to get more visitors to your website.

How To Find A Proven Legitimate Online Business

If you are looking for a proven legitimate online home business there are a number of things you can do to try and establish whether the opportunity is legitimate or a scam. This is not always easy but it is to your advantage to invest some time in researching the opportunity before parting with any money.

There are thousands of scams on the internet as well as legitimate online home businesses and for new visitors to the Internet the task of trying to distinguish between the two can be very overwhelming.

Often the scam sites look so attractive and offer such great incomes or rewards that it is hard to believe that it is not legitimate, hence the reason so many people fall prey to the scammers.

So one thing to be wary of is those sites that make huge income claims, like earn $10 000 in your first week or month. This really is totally unrealistic and if that amount is perhaps fives times your current salary, do you really think it is possible to earn such a huge income in such a short period of time with no prior experience of the business?

If the opportunity is legitimate then it would not be unreasonable for somebody who has been in the business for a couple of years to be earning a huge income. But be warned that nearly all the business opportunities on the Internet advertise the income of their top earners who have been working hard for a couple of years. They rarely advertise the income of those just starting out in the business. An online home business is like any normal business, you will need to work hard at building it up over a period of time to produce a good income.

So then do not get carried away with excitement when you find a website making such unrealistic income claims. The Internet does not have magical powers to enable us to earn magnificent incomes overnight.

One can get so caught up in all the hype that it is easy to sign up for an online home business opportunity that does not live up to its promises and this can result in huge disappointment, so a Web site that is not promising the Earth is probably a safer route to take.

When you find a Web site offering an online home business opportunity that appeals to you, spend some time going through it and do not jump in immediately and part with your money.

Have a look on the Web site to see if there is any contact information, either an email address or a Contact icon like an envelope, and send a short message expressing your interest in the opportunity and see if you receive a response. Check also to see if there is a physical address on the Web site as this adds credibility.

Look for logos on the Web site of the respectable bodies on the internet like the Better Business Bureau (BBB), Truste.org, Alexa Ranking, i-Cop.org click on these logos and you should see information about the site. You could also look up the domain on the DomainTools.com (previously called Who is) Web site and you will see the registration details, spend time to see if they look legitimate. For example you do not want to see a phone number listed as 1234567890. You will find a lot of information from this Web site, so it is advisable to spend time doing some research.

Check on the Web site if there are any guarantees offered, such as a 30 day 100% money-back guarantee or perhaps a 14 or 30 day free trial offer. It is also a good idea to see if any training is offered, this is really important if you are new to Internet marketing.

There may also be the opportunity to sign up for a free Newsletter, which will give you the opportunity to not only learn from what the newsletter offers but also enable you to get a general feel for the opportunity and put you in touch with your referrer.

At the end of the day, once you have researched thoroughly the opportunity you are interested in, sleep on it and take heed of your gut feel and all being well you will learn how to use the Internet to generate an income with your own online home business.

Guide to StumbleUpon: How to Build Massive Traffic to Your Website

What is Stumble Upon?

Stumble Upon is a social website which allows its users a new way to experience the Internet. Instead of searching for specific items on search engines like Google, Stumble Upon users only have to tag specific personal or professional interests and then ‘channel surf’ the web by simply clicking on a button on Stumble Upon tool bar.

Upon doing so, they will be randomly directed to specific websites which adhere to their lists of interests. Users can then choose to tag the webpage they are on or give it a ‘thumbs up‘ or ‘thumbs down‘ to indicate if they want to see it again.

Users can also use the Stumble Upon toolbar as a form of social bookmarking. By surfing the web and tagging or submitting specific websites, each user can keep track of which websites they like and share it with others.

How do I get started with Stumble Upon?

You can get started by installing the toolbar, which is compatible with I.E. and Firefox at Stumble Upon’s website. After which, you can check to see if your website is already listed on Stumble Upon. You can do this by visiting this page and typing in your site’s URL.

If your website is not listed, you can start using your newly installed toolbar to tag and review it by clicking on the blue thumbs up symbol which has “I like it!” next to it.

This will open a pop-up panel which allows you to categorize your website, write a short description and tag with specific keywords. Following which, your website will be included in Stumble Upon’s database and will show up when other users with interests similar to your tags use the Stumble Upon toolbar to surf the internet.

Why should I use Stumble Upon?

Stumble Upon is known for its ability to generate massive amounts of traffic to a specific webpage or website that’s been stumbled. If you just wrote a great article or created a website which offered creative and useful content, you’ll want as many eyeballs on it as possible.

Once your website gets stumbled, it’ll usually start to immediately receive visitors from all over the world.

This allows you:

1. Generate rapid exposure for a specific website, brand or concept.
2. Establish a reader base for your blog very quickly.
3. Gain numerous backlinks from StumbleUpon visitors with websites.

What type of traffic can I get from StumbleUpon?

StumbleUpon is different from a search engine, which offers very targeted traffic that matches keyword searches with the content on your blog.

On the other hand, the very nature of Stumble Upon invites open exploration of various websites which are loosely tagged by other users and hence may produce weak targeted traffic with specific characteristics.

My experience over the past few months has led me to the following conclusions on traffic from StumbleUpon:

• Diverse demographic. Visitors from StumbleUpon come from many countries from all over the world, though 40% of my traffic came from North America.
• Very low Adsense or contextual CTR. Why click on an ad when you can stumble to the next site in a few seconds?
• Good web design is important for StumbleUpon visitors. The average time spent on a web page can be less than 10 seconds. They tend to look more than they read.
• Fickle RSS subscribers. My feed subscription doubled when certain posts received a lot of traffic but 50% of the readers unsubscribed over the next few days. This will vary depending on your website.
• Not all websites are made equal. Video, Humor, Web 2.0 and eclectic websites do extremely well with SU. Some friends with video websites and Boing Boing-ish blogs usually retain at least 25% of Stumble Upon visitors after a spike in traffic.
• Traffic is long-term. I’m still continuing to receive traffic for specific webpages that I’ve stumbled several weeks ago.

How can I ensure repeat visits to my website?

The very nature of channel surfing is to assess with one glance and determine if the channel is worth watching. Similarly, Stumble Upon visitors are people who will evaluate your website instantly and decide to either continue browsing or stumble ahead to the next site.

Stumble Upon users are generally attracted to interesting news, good site design and unique content/concepts. Making sure that these elements are all present can ensure that you receive a thumbs up as well as repeat visits to your website.

Here are some points which may help you to improve the rate of repeat visits from Stumble Upon visitors.

• Content Depth. Your website should be full of content that cannot be digested in one single visit.
• Ad Saturation. Your website should not have too many poorly blended ads, which makes it look amateurish.
• Site Design. Your website should be visually appealing, with an attractive site design.
• Exclusive on-site materials. Your website should offer tools or in depth material which can only be accessed from your website.
• Feed/Newsletter Subscription. Your website must prominently ask visitors to subscribe to your blog feed or newsletter for updates.
• Branding. Your website should have memorable branding or an easy to remember URL.

How can I use Stumble Upon to increase my blog feed/newsletter subscribers?

It’s very likely that your blog will experience a mini spike in feed subscription, which may decrease gradually with time. Your goal is to retain these subscribers and make them a part of your reader base and community.

While there is no definite method that guarantees success, here are some ways which will increase the likelihood of converting Stumble Upon visitors into feed subscribers.

• Ensure content quality. Try to only stumble the best content available on your website.
• Enable and offer email subscriptions. Providing an alternative subscription option can be very helpful for different types of visitors.
• Offer subscriber-only benefits. A classic trick to use if you want to build up your marketing list or feed subscribers. Give away free videos, eBooks or other materials that are only available to subscribers.
• Welcome new visitors. You may want to include a welcome message to all stumblers if you notice that your web page is being heavily stumbled. Wordpress users can install the What Would Seth Godin do Wordpress Plugin which encourages all new visitors to subscribe to your feed.
• Use signature links. Include links at the end of your post which push for readers to subscribe for updates.
• Produce great content after stumbles. It’s very important to put out great content after you’ve been stumbled. Perhaps something similar to what received a large number of stumbles will be appealing.
• Increase the comments on your blog. A blog with a large community will encourage participation, which motivates a reader to return to your blog.
• Hold a contest. Everyone loves winning free stuff or money. By offering tangible benefits, you can convert one-time traffic into a continuous stream of repeat visitors.

How many visitors can I get from Stumble Upon?

Expect an average of 100+ to 8000+ daily unique visitors for a specific web page that is stumbled. I’ve stumbled several post pages on Dosh Dosh as an experiment and the best performance was 2000+ visitors in 6 hours for a very short post on Dovetail.

The number of visitors slowly petered out as the day went on. I’m actually amazed that it received so many stumbles because the article in question was only a short news piece. Perhaps this indicates that brevity appeals to Stumble Upon visitors.

According to this article at SEOmoz, Stumble Upon outperforms Netscape and all other social networking websites by sending 12000+ visitors to a specific webpage in one day. The article in question was buried in Digg so there wasn’t a way to make an actual comparison.

A graph of the number of visitors to SEOmoz in the early half of 2006.

What determines how much traffic I receive from StumbleUpon?

There are so many factors which may have an impact on the number of visitors you receive from Stumble Upon.

StumbleUpon does not openly reveal the traffic algorithm they are using and these are just some factors which I think will positively affect the amount of traffic you receive.

• No. of StumbleUpon users who thumbed up or tagged your webpage. This is by far the most important factor, in my opinion.
• No. of users in your network. A wider reach might translate to more influence when it comes to tagging or thumbing webpages.
• No. of StumbleUpon friends you have. Perhaps this increases the authority or strength of your stumbles.
• No. of profile reviews and thumbs up you currently have. May legitimate you as a user.
• Types of users who tagged or submitted your website. Are they power users with a lot of Stumble authority?

One can assume that the easiest way to increase the number of visitors you receive Stumble Upon is to exponentially increase all of the above factors.

Here are some of my observations following various experiments on several websites.

• You need other Stumble Upon users. The traffic you receive partly depends on other users submitting and reviewing your website. I’ve noticed that when other users review or submit a specific post, it usually receives traffic immediately.
• Self-submission and review does not necessarily lead to SU traffic. A blog of mine did not see enormous traffic until it was thumbed, reviewed and tagged by other users as well.
• Your Stumble Upon profile plays a role. Hypothetical, but perhaps the number of SU friends, the range of your network, the number of stumbles you’ve done and the number of profile reviews you’ve gotten determines how much traffic directing authority you have.
• Broad tagging helps. Try using tags that are more general and less specific. For example, some tags which have worked for me are ‘weblogs‘ , ‘internet‘ and ‘money‘.

  The fact that you’re limited to five tags per submitted item suggests that you should use terms that are more general, and hence more likely to be searched for or stumbled by SU users. Very unique tags may work but I’ve not gotten much success when I used them.

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Tactic #1 - Building your network, personal and site profile.

One way of doing this easily is to use StumbleXchange, a website that allows users to exchange stumbles for each other’s websites. You’ll need to sign up and stumble other member’s websites in return for other members thumbing and tagging your website.

This expands your reach and social profile on StumbleUpon and number of reviews for your website. I’ve noticed that this can help to increase the number of visitors to your website, but the effects may die down after some time and so the benefits of participating in StumbleXchange are not consistent.

Do note that StumbleXchange’s model potentially violates StumbleUpon’s TOS. It has also been said that StumbleUpon is aware of users exchanging stumbles and has oddly enough, approved of the StumbleXchange website.

For references on this issue, see here and this Digital Point thread for more info on StumbleXchange and StumbleUpon.

Do also bear in mind that StumbleUpon explicitly forbids reciprocal stumbling (stumble me to get a stumble in return) or incentive-based stumbling of any sort.

More details from their Help FAQ:

StumbleUpon does not allow personal accounts to be used for the purposes of incentivization or promoting sites. This would be considered a breach of our Terms.

The practice of sending PM’s encouraging or inviting other stumblers to rate/review sites in exchange for reciprocal reviews/ratings, monetary, or any other form of reward is strictly forbidden.

The practice of actively soliciting a rating or review for a site is also forbidden. Should you receive a PM, or encounter forum postings that breach this rule, you are encouraged to report this via feedback.

Accounts participating in such practices will be deleted and banned, and the related sites deleted and banned from the system.

A cleaner and simpler alternative would be just to network with high profile StumbleUpon users by adding them as your friend or reviewing their profile. This can help you win a few friends while increasing your social profile on StumbleUpon.

Tactic #2 - Collecting Stumbles and getting listed on Stumble Buzz.

Another point to consider is that you want to get your site on the Stumble Buzz webpage, which is something like the Digg homepage. Websites which consistently receive positive stumbles will move onto this homepage.

Here’s a screen grab of Stumble Buzz:

To get on this homepage, you’ll roughly need around 300+ positive stumbles. Here are two ways which might help to increase the number of visitors you get.

• Form a Stumble team. Get fellow bloggers to seed your webpage by stumbling, tagging or reviewing it. This is more focused and faster than using StumbleXchange.
• Include a Stumble Upon button on your webpage or blog post and encourage your users to use it. Like the smart Digg buttons, visitors can choose to stumble the webpage if they like it. Might be redundant because most stumblers will surf with the toolbar on.

Tactic #3 - Stumbling websites that link to you

Loren Baker from Search Engine Journal wrote about how to build super links and traffic with StumbleUpon and mentioned this very cool trick.

Let’s take a recent example. Say someone like John Chow linked to me yesterday in a post, what I’ll do is that, I’ll visit his website and stumble his post and get other users to do the same.

Thousands of StumbleUpon visitors will visit his blog and read the specific post. They’ll then visit my blog through the link in his post. The end result is that I’ll eventually get traffic by pushing stumbles towards his website. Sweet.

How do I monetize Stumble Upon Traffic and make money from it?

From my experience, Stumble Upon visitors are known to be averse to contextual ads, hence the low CTR and ad earnings. There are however, a few other ways which you can monetize the massive amount of visitors.

• CPM advertising. Idiot-proof and easiest way to monetize your website. Get a good banner company that pays you a good CPM rate. Also try private ad arrangements and negotiate for specific CPM rates.
• Use affiliate banners or affiliate text links within content. I would suggest cloaking the links to improve your CTR.
• Video advertising. Revver allows you to put up videos and get paid whenever anyone clicks on ads within the video. GUBA will also pay you money if anyone signs up with their website through your embedded video. These are just two examples of numerous video-based affiliate programs you can use.
• Monetized image hosts. Several image hosts allow you to earn money whenever anyone clicks on a thumbnail which leads to the full image on their website. Great for picture intensive sites or blogs. Here’s a list of image hosts that pay.
• Use subscription based monetization. An example of this is an online magazine, business networking community or forum which offers a premium section for paying members.
• Buy sponsored stumbles. You can run an advertising campaign with StumbleUpon and pay 5 cents for every targeted person they send to your website. You can target according to personal interest, history of rating similar sites, location, and demographics such as age and sex. Very useful if you’re focusing on long-term monetization strategies and plan to build a community such as a social networking site or niche forum.

One should also take note of StumbleUpon’s suggestions on content monetization in their advertising FAQ:

Some content doesn’t work well with StumbleUpon. A hard-sell offering little introduction or supporting information will seem out of place to StumbleUpon’s community members. Remember that they’re using the service to find something new, something different. Pages that contain little more than a list of ppc or affiliate links also will not perform well.

What are some other essential resources on StumbleUpon?

I have written two other articles that will be useful if you’re interested in using StumbleUpon for your website. I highly recommend that you check them out:

Five Ways to Grow Your StumbleUpon Network: An Ode to Altruistic Stumbling

The number of StumbleUpon users who stumble your webpages has an effect in how much traffic you will receive in the long run.The other obvious benefit to having many friends is that your StumbleUpon experience will be enriched and more fulfilling.

StumbleUpon Optimization: Leveraging Photo Stumbles for More Web Traffic

This article on photo stumbling will offer some detailed tips on how you can use and optimize your images in order to increase the potential of receiving more stumbles and hence, visitors to your website.

The internet marketing and SEO community have come up with a steady collection of great articles about StumbleUpon. Some of them focus on how to increase traffic through StumbleUpon and others have examined how StumbleUpon’s sponsored stumbles compare to Pay Per Click campaigns.

Randy Fish on Stumble Upon’s Fantastic Ability to Drive Traffic.

Stumblers tend to have accounts at Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit and others and more than once, I’ve seen Stumble traffic lead to a re-surgence of traffic to a particular site or page that Stumblers have given high marks.

Garrett French has a post on The Why, How and Who of Marketing in StumbleUpon:

If you’re launching a site and have invested in branded content that’s intended to convert viewers into linkers, subscribers or buyers then SU should ABSOLUTELY be on your list of places to advertise.

Allen Stern from Center Networks made a short study of StumbleUpon Sponsored Stumbles vs. Google AdWords:

I think StumbleUpon is a great alternative to click based traffic in the sense that you get a continuous stream of interested visitors. The traffic is qualified in the sense that the visitors said they were interested in your topic or category.

Tamar from 10e20 writes about How to Use StumbleUpon for Your Business: The Definitive Guide

Why should you look at into directing StumbleUpon traffic to your site? Beyond the obvious benefits of extremely targeted traffic, the traffic doesn’t come all at once compared to a site like Digg. There’s the inherent benefit of having that “15 minutes of fame� on Digg until it crashes your server. StumbleUpon traffic is generally much more gradual.

Neil Patel has a short post on Increasing your StumbleUpon audience:

Each user is given an audience number. The number could be 1 or it could be in the thousands. The overall goal is to get your audience number as high as possible because then when you stumble stories more people will see them, thus increasing your traffic.

Dan Grossman writes about his experience buying sponsored stumbles on The StumbleUpon Experiment:

The results? No sales, 96% of the visitors only viewing the landing page for the campaign, and none of them rating the site positively or negatively with the toolbar. That says to me that most people that see a commercial site, or a site that isn’t immediately interesting to them with StumbleUpon will simply move on and click the “Stumble!� button again.

Muhammed Saleem tells us that what content works best for StumbleUpon in I Wouldn’t Submit That to StumbleUpon:

While Digg, Netscape, and Reddit are socially driven news and content sites, StumbleUpon succeeds more in delivering content (i.e. media) than it does in serving important news items. The news items that I StumbleUpon are often old and outdated..

What I learned from this, and from my own voting habits on the content that was displayed to me is that photography, videos, humor, and other types non-temporal content generally tends to do better and has more of a chance of creating long-term traffic

Mike Bogo has created an Ultimate StumbleUpon resource:

Since Stumble has been sending many of us a huge amount of traffic, I thought it would be useful to find some resources on how to best make use of this traffic. This list will be kept updated with the best articles found.

How to Increase Affiliate Conversions and Advertising Sales

Affiliate for Aaron Wall’s SEO Book (aff) and took a good look at the salesletter, which was apparently rewrote by Brian Clark late last year. The copy for the new sales letter was well done and I think the main improvement was the reduction in its length as well as the strategic insertions of recommendations from notable personalities like Seth Godin and Wharton Professor J Michael Steel.

A more subtle but equally powerful change was moving the specific call to query or feedback all the way down to the bottom of the page. Here’s a side by side comparison of the old (left) and new (right) sales letter.

The old newsletter puts a list of additional recommendations and reviews below the call to query and potential buyers who are as yet undecided might be swayed to click on them instead of the designated query link.

This is a bad move because these links point to reviews or webpages that may not be effective in taking advantage of the buyer’s interest in SEO Book. It also assumes that the buyer requires more detailed information or sales pitches when this might not be the case all the time.

On the other hand, the new sales letter removes all the external links and leaves the call to query right at the bottom. This is more professional and gives the effect that all information has been duly presented and laid out before the buyer.

Having had the impression of perusing all there is to know about the SEOBook, the buyer will be persuaded that clicking on the link is the final option available.

Here is a screenshot of what shows up when you click on the “if you aren’t ready to buy, click here” link:

Collecting feedback from your potential buyers or advertisers is a tremendously important process because it allows you to customize your product price or ad offering to suit their needs.

Implementing the Call-to-Query on your own Blog or Affiliate Landing Page

Here are two very quick and simple steps you can undertake in order to increase the likelihood of affiliate conversions and advertiser signups

1. Create a short one-liner that pre-empts the potential customer by suggesting that they are still indecisive about buying a product or committing to an arrangement. Include this at the bottom of your sales page or Advertising options page on your blog.
2. Develop a customized feedback page and point the link in the one-liner to it. For bloggers, I would suggest creating another Contact page with a customized message for advertisers. Something like Aaron’s feedback box would be ideal.

And you’re all set. Potential customers and advertisers can be rather hesitant when it comes to spending money and this little trick allows them to directly communicate all concerns they might have with you one-on-one.

This feedback loop also allows you to enter into a two-way negotiation process which ultimately gives you more willing and long-term buyers or advertisers.

21 Ways to Increase your Text Link Ads Commissions

Most of you would have already heard about Text Link Ads, a popular ad marketplace where publishers and advertisers can meet to sell or buy text links on websites or blogs. TLA’s affiliate program allows you earn US $25.00 for every publisher or advertiser that you refer to their website. In order to qualify for a payment, a publisher you refer must install an advertising script on their website for the minimum period of seven days.

Referred advertisers will be counted in your affiliate account within 24 hours whenever the new advertiser purchases a link. You’ll get paid on the 1st of every month, via check or either Paypal. Now let’s take a look at how you can make money online by participating in Text Link Ad’s affiliate program.

You might have noticed that a lot of blogs are running TLA’s graphic banners as a referral link. While passively displaying ads might send some visitors to TLA, the rate of conversion can be unpredictable, to say the least.

Improving your Ad Placement - Making your Readers Click.

Poor ad placement is one of the most common problems which can lead to poor conversion rates. Placing graphic banners or text links in strategic locations throughout your website can lead to more potential signups.

Getting any visitor to click through on an ad is the first step towards a successful affiliate conversion.

My suggestions on this topic are largely influenced by heat map studies that tracked user eye movement as well as Benway and Lane’s influential work on Banner Blindness.

Here are Benway and Lane’s design recommendations for websites:

One item separated visually from everything else on a web page may be completely ignored by web searchers, even by searchers who are deliberately searching for the information provided in that item.

Designers should be cautious about following guidelines stating that increasing the visual distinction between “important” items and other items is desirable; the visual distinctiveness may actually make important items seem unimportant.

Any item that is visually distinguished on a page should be duplicated within a collection of links or other content areas of the page. That way, if searchers ignore the large, salient item, they can still find what they need through basic navigation.

Conversion Obstacle - TLA’s affiliate requirements

Even after you’ve succeeded in getting visitors to click on your TLA ads, there are still some factors which can prevent you from earning any affiliate commission.

Two main obstacles lie in the way of successfully referring potential publishers: Firstly, websites need to have a certain level of link popularity or Page Rank before they can be accepted into the TLA network.

Secondly, publishers will need to place TLA’s advertising script on their website for the period of 7 days before they are counted as your referral.

All in all, this makes it rather difficult for just anyone to click through and sign up as a publisher. The blog or website submitted might not be approved or the approved publishers might not include the advertising script on their website.

Potential TLA advertisers - Easy Conversion Targets.

On the other hand, advertisers are much easier to convert because of two key reasons. TLA has a large and reputable catalog of link sellers, which makes it naturally attractive for link buyers. Secondly, TLA offers $100 in free links as a starter package for advertisers, which again naturally appeals to advertisers.

An example of the specific banner targeted at advertisers can be seen below:

21 Ways to Increase your Text Link Ads Affiliate Commissions

Now that we’ve examined our targets and limitations, let’s look at 21 methods you can use to boost your TLA affiliate earnings.

Six Ways to Improve your TLA Ad Placement

• Place TLA ads above the fold. Visitors to your site should not have to scroll down to see any ads.
• Include TLA banners or text links after each post as a call to action.
• Integrate TLA as a text link in your categories or links section. Research also suggests that highlighted links can improve click throughs.
• Revise and change ad placements and types often through ad rotator scripts. This depends on your referral performance.
• Invite your friends or fellow webmasters to critique your ad placement. Learn from their comments and make changes if necessary.
• Create TLA landing pages specifically for search engine visitors. Find out some of the related keywords that visitors use to land on your website. Configure your website so that a text message or banner ad shows up only for search engine visitors who visit your site through specific keywords.

  Wordpress users can use the More Money plugin for this purpose.

Four Tricks to Counter TLA Banner blindness.

• Use suggestive text links that invite exploration. E.G. “I made money selling links. Wanna know how?”
• Exclude TLA’s brand name. Some users are less likely to click on text links that are already familiar to them.
• Create your own banners or buttons. Fresh graphics and images will pique curiosity.
• Link TLA ads to a squeeze page on your website. Push the program with personal recommendations.

Seven Ways to Promote your TLA Affiliate link

• Buy forum signatures to promote your link. Write a persuasive one-liner and use forum members with a lot of posts.
• Use Adwords and send hits to your landing page. You can also choose to target popular and relevant websites. See what John Chow did to Darren Rowse.
• Buy blog posts from pay-to-post networks. Direct the blog posts to a squeeze page on your website or blog.
• Write personal emails to bloggers you know. Will work best on bloggers not familiar with TLA.
• Create a definitive web page that promotes TLA and your affiliate link. Promote it using blog traffic exchanges.
• Sponsor a popular E-zine. Allows you to include links to both your website and web page promoting TLA.
• Make special deals with other webmasters. Get them to promote your affiliate link in return for your promotion of their referral link for an unrelated affiliate program.

Four Ways to Guarantee Publisher and Advertiser Signups

These fool-proof methods are different from hit-or-miss advertising and guarantees that visitors will sign up through your affiliate link.

A vital element for successful implementation of these tactics depends on your understanding what publishers and advertisers want.

Advertisers want traffic, improved search engine positioning and higher Page Ranks. Publishers only want the money that comes from selling links. Understanding these factors allows you to come up with some irresistible offers for both parties.

• Start a contest. All visitors that sign up with your affiliate link will be entered into a draw to win a cash prize or whatever you want to offer.
• Offer cashbacks. Offer to give a percentage of what you earn to your referrals. This could be something like 50% of the affiliate commission ($12.50).
• Give out free links. Declare that you’ll set up a page and list the websites of all the publishers or advertisers who signed up under you. Remember to declare how much your link is worth. Very powerful tactic for popular blogs.
• Trade commissions. Broker private deals with your visitors by offering to sign up under their referral links for other affiliate programs in return for them signing up under your TLA link.

Some of these methods can be controversial and might not be something that you would want to try, although they can be pretty effective ways of converting visitors into referrals.

You’re very likely to earn more than what you spend or give away so these methods can be seen as cost-effective strategies to maximize your affiliate commissions.

12 Quick Ways to Maximize your ReviewMe Affiliate Commission Earnings

ReviewMe has finally launched their affiliate program today, which means that you can start to make some money by promoting their sponsored blogging service. ReviewMe will pay you $25.00 for every new advertiser you refer to ReviewMe who purchases a blog review.

This is similar to Text Link Ads (aff), which also offers $25 for every referred publisher or advertiser. The only difference is that ReviewMe will only pay you for advertiser signups and not publisher signups.

This is probably the best time to start convincing everyone you know that getting a top quality blog review will help to generate buzz and build exposure for their website. Pro-actively promoting ReviewMe’s program now is a wise choice, because the current advertiser market out there is still conversion friendly.

Wait a few weeks and ReviewMe will start going the way of Text Link Ads: You’ll see affiliate links and badges all over blogs and websites, which can make it increasingly difficult to acquire fresh advertiser signups.

Without further ado, here are 12 quick ways you can immediately implement to increase your ReviewMe commission earnings.

1. Tweak your Forum Signatures. Are you a regular member of several forums? Change your forum signature instantly by including ReviewMe’s affiliate link. Example of an anchor text that works: “Want more visitors to your website? Get it reviewed.”
2. Make a forum post or thread. Promote ReviewMe’s service at your favorite forums. Place your post in relevant sub sections of each forum and make sure that your affiliate links are already prominently displayed in your signature.
3. Revamp your links. Did you previously link to ReviewMe in your previous blog posts? Dig through them and change the urls to affiliate links.
4. Integrate links into previous posts. This will work if you’ve already written about topics such as blog promotion, internet marketing, advertising, traffic building and paid posting etc. Weave a short paragraph which mentions ReviewMe into your posts. Include your affiliate links.
5. Use affiliate text link signatures. Try adding a text link signature (E.G. “Get your website reviewed on this blog“) under all your blog posts. To automate the process in Wordpress, try the Add Signature plugin, which allows you to add a customizable signature that shows up instantly under all your blog posts.
6. Send email pitches. Know any webmasters personally who have been hesitant about trying out ReviewMe? Have a bevy of grateful webmasters in your debt? Give them a friendly nudge by sending them a short pitch on Review Me.
7. Display your ReviewMe Badge. Put up ReviewMe’s affiliate badge on your website or blog. You might want to create your own badge so that it fits better with your site design. A example of the ReviewMe affiliate badge can be seen at the top of this post. Clicking on it will take you to Dosh Dosh’s page on ReviewMe.
8. Write a blog post. Do up a blog post announcing the new ReviewMe badge and affiliate program. This is the easiest way to get immediate attention and possibly some advertiser signups if your blog has some decent traffic.
9. Create a ReviewMe Linkbait. Create a killer resource list which collects information and blog posts about ReviewMe within a single post. This can serve as a definitive guide or primer to their website that others can reference.

   This method also allows you to send trackbacks to dozens of other blogs. You’ll end up with permanent link backs in the comments (if approved) of other blogs which point to your blog post which has affiliate links. Other usual linkbait ideas can also apply.

10. Build a landing page. Good old affiliate marketing style promotion. Easiest way to do this is to do up a blog post which lists the benefits of using ReviewMe from the perspective of an advertiser. Try something simple like “10 reasons why ReviewMe is an advertising option you should consider.”

    Linking to specific examples of advertisers benefiting from ReviewMe blog reviews is a powerful way to attract advertisers. Allenation’s testimonial and analysis after being reviewed by the very popular John Chow dot Com is a great example of what will motivate advertisers to sign up with Review Me. Link to the landing page post using a text link or badge and display it prominently on your blog.

11. Plead for signups. Not all bloggers might like to do this but I think statements like “Please support this blog by signing up with my ReviewMe affliate link” are reasonable and can work with loyal blog readers. I’ve responded favorably to these sorts of requests on several occasions because I liked the blog I was reading and wanted to support the blogger.
12. Make an offer they can’t refuse. Announce that you’ll split the commissions you earned with the advertisers who signed up under your link and bought a blog review. This helps to offset the advertiser’s overall cost and is almost always a guaranteed way to get advertiser signups.

How to Develop an Alternative Revenue Source for Beginner

Selling advertisements on a website is one of the most efficient and easiest ways to make money online. Many bloggers and webmasters utilize ad networks like Text Link Ads and ReviewMe, both of which take a huge 50% cut of all your ad earnings.

These third party ad brokers dominate our monetization strategies because of the strength and trustworthiness of their brand as well as their advertiser reach, which gives them the leverage to demand a cut of our ad earnings.

Alternative profit schemes are not often considered because of the lack of know-how when it comes to direct advertising sales, which simply refers to the selling of ads directly to advertisers without the assistance of middlemen.

Do you really need to sign up with as many advertising networks as possible in order to make some decent money from your websites? When was the last time you actually sold a link or review through these brokers?

More importantly, why not supplement or replace these ad brokers with direct advertising initiatives?

As such, I’ve decided to start a series of articles on how to increase your direct ad sales revenues. In the next few posts, I will examine the steps you can take to increase your ad revenue without sharing it with ad brokers.

Topics covered will include learning how to determine the ad value/pricing for your site, ways to find direct advertisers, advertiser-oriented site optimization as well as various types of direct advertising options available.

I’ll start things off with a brief introduction to the pros and cons of direct advertising before going into suggestions on creating an advertiser sell page, which should be the first step you should take.

Benefits of Direct Advertising

* Set your own Ad Rates. Not all brokers allow manual price setting and this is obviously one of the greatest benefits of direct advertising. Another key point is that you can utilize variable pricing to fit specific advertisers.

* Direct Contact with advertisers. You can negotiate pricing without having to go through any middlemen. This direct contact increases the likelihood of having long-term relationships and arrangements with advertisers.

* More Payment options. Some advertising brokers only allow you to receive payment once a month through a specific method like PayPal. Direct advertising allows you determine how you want to get paid and when.

* Diverse Advertising options. Direct advertising increases the type of ads you can sell. Advertiser networks and link brokers usually go by predetermined space allocations or ad types but direct advertising allows you to sell any type of ads or links you want without having to sign up with various networks.

Disadvantages of Direct Advertising

* Potential disputes. Some buyers might break long term ad arrangements and ask for a refund. You’ll have to assume the possibility of such disagreements occurring and take the responsibility of resolving them, instead of leaving them to ad networks.

* Difficulty of finding advertisers. Ad networks usually have a large inventory of ready advertisers who are looking to buy ads. Direct advertising requires you to find your own advertisers.

Should I still consider Direct Advertising as a revenue option?

My answer is simple: Definitely. I’m a very big advocate of direct advertising because of the freedom it gives and the potential for higher earnings. I love working with advertisers personally because it allows for a better fit between both party’s needs and goals.

The disadvantages involved in potential disputes can be resolved by finding reputable advertisers and having verbal/written agreements in place before committing to an arrangement.

Finding advertisers is also not as difficult as it seems. I will be dedicating an entire post in this series to the topic of marketing your ad space and ways to find relevant advertisers.

Getting Started with Direct Advertising: Create an Sell Page for Advertisers

An advertising sell page is basically a one-pager which tries to ’sell’ the benefits of advertising on your website to potential advertisers. An excellent sell page should also include the following details:

1. General traffic statistics. This includes monthly pageviews or daily visitors for your site. Using a graphic with values over time will make your stats easy to read and understand.

Statistics should be considered a compulsory requirement because most advertisers are concerned with the amount of eyeballs who will view their ads.

If you are uncomfortable with displaying them in public, give general figures and ask the interested advertiser to contact you for more information.

2. Third-Party Ranking Schemes. This refers to ranking schemes like the Alexa Rank for all sites and Technorati rank/RSS subscribers for blogs. If your site doesn’t fare well on third party ranking systems, do not list them because it might deter immediate advertisers.

3. Types of Advertising Options available. Indicate what type of ads you will be willing to sell on the site. Try not to overwhelm the buyer with options and do not include advertising networks. Advertisers are drawn to ad options that are clearly defined and uncomplicated.

4. Disclosure Policy. Inform the buyer about your stance on paid links. Will you be declaring them as sponsor links and how will you be doing so?

5. Advertising Guidelines. If you don’t want to sell advertising to websites of a specific genre (adult, gambling, Made for Adsense etc.) you should indicate this so that you’ll only get quality queries from buyers.

6. Advertiser Testimonials or List. Including testimonials from previous advertisers will make your site more attractive to potential buyers while allowing you to gain their trust. Note that not all advertisers are willing to write testimonials so an alternative would be to put up list of previous advertisers.

7. Site Awards and Reputation. This is where you get brag about your site’s achievements and list out any awards it might have won. Include quotes from notable bloggers and places where your site content is syndicated. This adds to the overall ad selling value of your site.

8. Call-to-Query note. This should be placed at the bottom of the sell page and should request that the potential buyer contact you if they are hesitant about buying an ad. See my post on buyer pre-emption for an example of a call-to-query note.

9. Contact details. At the very least, you need to provide a valid email address or contact form. Internet Messengers or telephony can also be helpful but are optional.

This advertiser sell page should be placed as a banner or link at a prominent position such as your header, or the top left or right sections of your site.

Using Variable Advertising Rates to Your Advantage

Do not list your advertising rates because you should not assume to know the budget or expectations of the buyer. Two things may happen if you list your advertising rates openly:

1. You are liable to lose buyers if they find the ad price to be even slightly above their budget. You also automatically forfeit the ability to negotiate with buyers who can easily afford to purchase advertising on your website.

2. Openly declaring your rates will stop you from using variable pricing because you’ll have to charge each advertiser the same rate, which is exactly what the middlemen are already doing.

How to find business ideas, domain name businesses to make money

Finding business ideas:

1. Spend all day browsing Site For Sale forums (like the list we have here) for the myriad ways people earn money online. People looking to sell their sites actually tell you how they make money! Pick one that suits you. Research it a bit, and away and start your own business. Or use a search engine to find ways to make money online. It seems to be so easy that it's almost impossible to find someone who doesn't know how to do it. (But why stop at one search engine (SE)? Most people get to less than 1% of the top qualify info they're seeking because they use just one SE like Google, don't have the vaguest of ideas of the advanced search features available, and don't know the benefits to be had using specialised SEs, local SEs etc. )

2. Bundle the two above to tell other people how to make money online. They always want to know. It doesn't matter if you don't know yourself, you can still charge them for it. I obviously don't have a clue as I'm giving it all away. You can now ignore everything else I say. But don't go spending money on internet cons promising to make you a millionaire and here's how to spot them.

3. Be more inventive with your search. Look for small business franchise newsletters. Or for home jobs in your particular niche or hobby. (And check point #2 above for those specialised SEs). You can also go through the appropriate DMOZ categories (examples: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12)

But using "search" is just the start of the game. There are simply so, so many ways. We hope you hang around to find out.

4. Like the guy you can pay to stick a message in a bottle for you and throw it into the sea. He's made tens of thousands of dollars already. And there are several others like him in all parts of the world. Do you live near a sea or river? Or join the cleanup of those bottles and get your council to contribute.

Domains

5. The dot com gold rush made many millionaires but there's still plenty of money in domain real estate and still some good catches available. A good dot com may be difficult to find now. But there are a lot of gTLDs and ccTLDs from the .info to .eu to .tv to .co.in and they all present opportunities being discussed in several good forums. Put your thinking hat on, buy a famous word domain for a few dollars and put it up on the domain selling sites.

6. Lost your thinking hat? Hang out at SEDO. DNForurms, Afternics and other places where domains are bought and sold. Provided you learn enough about the market to recognise bargains you could make a living from just buying existing domains and reselling them.

7. If you're smart you'll run dictionary checks against available domain names and auto-check them against search volumes (using OST, Wordtracker etc.) for that term and Pay Per Click (PPC) rates in the major ad networks (example) to work out which ones are likely to be more profitable. If you can pick up the domain for a profitable term that's searched for often you can use a domain parking program. Or post a little bit of relevant content and get a link or two ... and the search engines will start sending you traffic. If the phrase people are typing in coincides exactly with your domain name it gives you a great head start with SEs.

8. If you're smart AND a linguist you'd be doing that in multiple languages. And not paying for any domain till you've tried it free for five days to see if it does indeed get any type-in traffic (and how well that traffic converts). After you've tried it for five days and dropped it there's nothing to stop you immediately picking it up again for another five day trial. Strange, but true. It's not kiting, it's legal.

9. Misspellings. Massive opportunities still exist in the misspelling/typo market. People trying to get elsewhere land on your site instead ... and you sell them stuff (or use the domain parking idea). Some even tempt fate by making PPC opportunties out of typosquatting on trademarks. Finding typos has never been easier. There are many tools that will find misspellings for you. How easy can it get?

10. Domain parking and type-in traffic: People sometimes guess at URLs. If they want a plumber they may try plumber.com though they've never used that site themselves. Find terms that people may be typing in (I will provide a detailed guide to this when I get a chance), buy the domain and populate it with ads. There are several ad programs to monetise your parked domains. Or combine this with the previous idea to buy plummer.com or similar typo domains to make money online.

11. Drop catches. People sometimes forget to renew their domains and these expire. Picking them up will give you some remnant traffic from sites that link to this domain/people who've bookmarked it etc. In some cases the traffic can be pretty high. Provided you're fast enough to replace the copyrighted content that was there with something else you can make quite a profitable business from doing nothing else but this.

12. A variation on the above. Sell the domain back to the previous owners. Note that you may want to tread carefully and get familiar with the rules for that TLD before you start sending off ransom notes. For example, with ICANN (domains that end in .com, for example) the moment you send the previous owners an email saying you've got their domain and you'll give it back for $10K... you've lost. It can't look like a ransom demand. Be reasonable and read the small print of the UDRP. No UDRP required if you're sitting hostage on myspace.com/theircompanyname or the equivalent at blogger, mybloglog, or other big destinations. LOL, watch them kick themselves and sack their web advisors who told them about taking the "dot info" but omitted to mention the importance of protecting the brand by owning the associated myspace directory (and others)! And it costs you nothing!

13. Run a domain management service. Hundreds of thousands of webmasters (or more) have a large portfolio of domains. A lot of them would like the boring bit taken out of their domain management. You can run their DNSes or just a service reminding them when each domain comes up for renewal. Or an automated monitoring service to tell them when one of their domains/sites is inaccessible.

14. Start a directory to list domains for sale. That's what people like SEDO do. You can get money just for allowing domains to be listed in your directory.

15. If you're running a service putting buyers and sellers of domains/sites in touch with one another you could get money for add on services (like providing escrow facilities). For ideas have a look at what existing domain intermediaries offer.

16. Run a domain research service. Wonder what happens when a manufacturer is looking to name a new model car? Or starting a new range of clothing? They need trademark and patent research but now they also need some domain research. Which of the literally thousands of combinations and misspellings (+ sucks.com) are taken and which do they need to buy? With a few of the free domain tools discussed on this page and one or two more - like free DNS tools - and a little time you could provide them a service they'd pay a lot of money for.

17. Start your own country: Whoa! yes, you're reading it right. If you've heard of Sealand (what is Sealand) you'll know that starting your own country is not that far fetched. Once you have your own WhackyCountry you can apply for a .wc (yuk) TLD. Sell millions of domains. Keep some for yourself. Ever wanted a Google.___?

18. Perform domain services for businesses and then send them a proforma (even if they've never heard of you). Explain that it's free this time but you'll gladly keep acting for them for a small fee. For example, there are thousands of big businesses whose half-wit webmasters/ developers didn't put in a redirect from the non-www to the www versions of their sites (or vice-versa). One entrepreneur made a few thousands just from pointing out to businesses how they were losing hundreds of customers every year who were landing on http://companyname.com/ and finding nothing there.

I'll talk about domain opportunities some more on this page when I get a chance.

Buying and selling internet businesses

19. Many sites runs on "auto-pilot". A common price these sell for in site-for-sale forums is 12-24 months' worth of net earnings (silly price, but it's true). Provided you don't mess the site up you can recover your capital in as little as 12 months and then ... sell the site to recover your capital again. Double your capital every year. 100% return. Sack your stockbrokers. It really is a crazy world!

20. Site flipping doesn't require as much capital and expertise as many people believe. Like property flipping, you buy one that needs a bit of TLC. Do it up, then sell it on for a whacking great profit. And, the beauty is you never have to deal with tenants!

21. How about cornering a little market? There are DMOZ categories with grandfathered sites (sites that have been listed for many years) which aren't being updated. If you can pick up a few sites in the same category and merge their content suddenly you "own" that niche. That opens a lot of possibilities.