When Should You Use Kontera Ads?

I have been meaning to write about this topic and was reminded of it recently when I read Shai’s post last week called, “Kontera: In-Text Advertising“.

At the end of the post, Shai asked:

“...do you think Kontera is something you’ll be interested in using on your blog or site? Why or why not?”

Here is my answer:

I have played around with Kontera ads on some of our blogs and I know from that experience that some people don’t like to see them on a website, while some people do like to see them on a website. Why is that?

Why are there so many mixed opinions on Kontera In-text Ads?

I can tell you why. In general, I have found that the people who don’t like them are the people who see them on “make money online” blogs and on tech blogs. At first I thought the problem was that tech savvy people don’t like them. While that may be true, I think a bigger reason that they don’t like Kontera ads may come down to the fact that the ads just aren’t targeted well on non-product related blogs.

I put Kontera ads briefly on our Summer Olympics blog and it was horrible. The ads were showing for all sorts of random words and made the blog look ugly.

On the other hand, I have put Kontera ads on product related blogs and most of the ads are relevant and help people find things they are looking for.

So, when should you use Kontera ads on your blog or website?

I don’t recommend using them on blogs or websites where there is a focus on information (news sites, “how to” sites, etc.). I do recommend using them on non-technical product type sites, or on “how to” sites that make mention of a lot of products in the text of the articles (like a recipe site).

What do you think about in-text advertising? Would you ever use in text advertising like Kontera on a site?

Getting Ready To Make Money Online With The Olympics

Well, the 2008 Olympics are about to start and I wanted to share a little about what we have been doing to get ready.

For those of you who don’t know this, we made some decent money a few years ago when my wife Jill blogged the winter Olympics. We then decided to blog every Olympics, because Jill really enjoys it and it is a good way to make some decent money.

To be honest, with the new baby’s arrival we did not do as much preparation for the Olympics as we originally planned. I was going to redesign our blog to look nicer, but after redesigning this blog and watching my Search Engine rankings immediately drop 5 spots for the “make money online” term I decided I would put the redesign of the Summer Olympics blog on hold. Also we found the current design to work so well for making money with the last Olympics that it didn’t make sense to change the design without the time to test it’s monetization.

Anyway, over the next three weeks I will be very busy with the Olympics. I do intend on giving you updates about other things we did in preparation of the Olympics, as well as things we are going to do to make money with our blog during the Olympics. So stayed tuned…

Blog Mastermind Bonus

Blog Mastermind is opening it’s doors again, BUT this time it’s not closing!

Blogging guru, Yaro Starak, is opening up his Blog Mastermind training program to new members on Tuesday. Leading up to the opening Yaro released some great free videos that reveal how to make money blogging. You can see all the great videos here:

• Coversion Blogging


• Interview with a million dollar blogger


• How Yaro’s blog makes money online (2 videos)

As an incentive to buy, I am offering an exclusive bonus to those who buy it through my link. For those who sign up for the Blog Mastermind program, I will put on a free teleconference to answer your most pressing questions. Because of our blog about the Olympics in China I won’t be holding the conference until after the Olympics are over.

To claim your bonus for ordering the Blog Mastermind:

1. Click here to sign up through my affiliate link
2. Email me your receipt to george @ websitepromotionbook.com
3. I will then contact you with details about the teleconference
4. After the teleconference, you will get an mp3 recording of the call

That’s all there is to it.

Apparently This Is How You Really Make Money Online - Or Is It?

I’ve done many things over the years to make money online and have heard of countless other methods that I simply never tried for one reason or another. But I must not have gotten the memo on the newest trend in making money online.

If you follow the make money online blogosphere at all then you have probably noticed the same trend I have seen spring up lately. I’m not sure what to call it but it goes a little something like this… start a blog, build up it’s popularity, get a lot of readers, and cash out big time by selling it.

I guess this must really be the way to make money online. I mean if all these well-known bloggers are doing it then it has to be a great thing to do, right? Well, I suppose it can be a great way to make a nice chunk of money all at once.

But, then what? Your blog is now gone. Your monthly income is now gone. All the hard work you put into it for months or even years… gone!

It’s definitely not an easy or quick task to build up a popular blog so this isn’t one of those “rinse and repeat” business models that you can do over and over again to keep making money. Out of the thousands of bloggers out there only a small percent ever build up a highly popular blog.

Not to mention this is horrible for the person that gets suckered into buying the blog. Most of these blogs are selling for a lot more than they are actually worth. Yeah it looks good on paper because they do have a lot of traffic and a big following. But they aren’t following you, the new owner; they are following the original owner.

These blogs that are being sold have been branded by the original owner and the readers are following them because of their writing style or personality or some other trait they possess. As soon as the blog is sold all that goes away and so do the readers.

The new owner isn’t left with much more than if they would have just started a new blog and built it up themselves. Now they are out $25,000 or so without a whole lot to show for it.

So, let’s take a look at where the seller and buyer are sitting at this point…

The seller has a full bank account but nothing to bring in more income and the money they just got from the blog sale won’t last long. The buyer has an empty bank account and a blog that might be bringing in a little income but not nearly as much as they thought it would.

Neither side wins!

Therefore, I don’t think this is a very good way to go about making money online for either the seller or the buyer.

Of course there are a few exceptions to this. One being if the seller can no longer keep the blog for some reason and must sell it. Another being if the buyer is getting a popular blog for a super low price. And search engine rankings also play a big factor. But these exceptions are a whole other article themselves so I won’t go into them here. I will save that for my next post.

Ebay Drops Commission Junction

Early this week I read on SEOBook that eBay has dropped commission junction as their affiliate program. Ebay is launching a new affiliate program in May. This kind of sucks for those who have Ebay links scattered across multiple sites. I have a bit of work to do on some of my sites, but it is definitely worthwhile for me to join the new affiliate program.

Ebay has a pretty good affiliate program (it’s one of my favorites). You should join the Ebay affiliate program if you have websites related to anything sold on eBay. If you want to see an example of the primary way I use Ebay’s affiliate program then check out my dinosaur toy pages.

Why Blogging Alone Won’t Make You Money Online

If you are one of the million bloggers hoping to earn a slice of the big “can I make money online” pie, then you need to get some of your priorities right first. Blogging alone won’t make you money, unless of course you are getting paid to blog for somebody else.

To make money with a blog, you need a plan of attack right from the start. Unfortunately, most bloggers don’t have a plan at all. All they want is to make money – and fast.

Let me tell you, fast doesn’t work, regardless of what the next A-lister tells you. We intend to throw our credit cards at any new offer that is hyped up on the Internet, promising us to be the final answer to our never ending quest to make money. And yet, it never happens.

Partially this is because most people fail to act on anything they hear, whether good or bad and then others who do act still fail if they are being fed the wrong information.

When we see those promising offers of instant riches we are lured into the belief that this will work for us too, despite the fact that most bloggers don’t have a clue on how to market. Those A-lister who peddle their wares and every other marketer that hypes up their product only make $100,000 and more in 24 hours because they own a well established list.

This means that the moment they launch their product they send out the same email to thousands of people via auto responders and given the law of conversion they will make their insane amounts of money in seemingly no time.

A common blogger can never achieve this without owning a huge and responsive list! So before you throw away your money to yet another “great offer”, work with the ones you already possess.

Making money on the Internet is very much possible with the following tools – ideas:

• Creating your own ebooks


• Starting a membership site


• Working niches away from the “make money niche”


• Creating your own “how to” course


• Designing WordPress themes


• Designing software

I’m sure that each and every one of you reading this (who has yet to make any money online) owns an ebook, course or report that delves into these subjects.

My advice is to grab one that appeals to you and follow the steps to build your business.

And let me just repeat this one again: fast doesn’t work!

Believe me when I say that I wasted years online by following the wrong advice. I believed everything those A-listers were preaching. After all, they made it, so they had to know – right?

Wrong!

Most of them are only concerned about their bottom line profits. They don’t give a toss about you or me, and they use us to fuel their insane profit margins. Once you understand how marketing works, how copy writing works and how the human mind works, you will know what I’m talking about.

But to be fair, it isn’t just the A-listers who play unsuspecting newcomers for their hard earned money, there are also many black hatters who do the same.

The sad part of this whole scenario is that making money isn’t really a nice man’s game. It is the game of knowledge and power, regardless of survivors, and the sooner you understand this, the more money you will save (by not spending yours on every new product launch) and make in the long term (by developing your own launches).

Free Blog Mastermind Lesson - Check It Out Soon Because…

Yaro Starak has announced that on Monday December 10th he is going to be closing the doors on the blog mastermind program for a while. In anticipation of this closure, he has released a free lesson from the program called “Marketing Through Conversations”. Marketing through conversation is something I have been focusing a lot of my attention on this year, and it has been extremely helpful. In fact, I believe it has been laying the groundwork for an extremely successful 2008. This free lesson is very valuable. You should click here to go check it out.

After you check it out, come back and let me know what you think of it?

Six Ways to Make Money Blogging

Guest Post by Trent Brownrigg

Blogging has become a huge craze in the past couple years and with it’s increasing popularity has also come an increase in people wondering how they can make money with their blogs. I see questions on internet marketing forums all the time asking how to make money blogging. I also get frequent emails from people wondering the same thing. Therefore, I decided to write up this post discussing a few ways that I make money from my blogs.

So, here are a six ways I make money with my blogs on a regular basis and you can too:

1) Sell links in the sidebar or blogroll.

Charge a certain amount per month for a link in your blogs sidebar under “favorite links” or in the “blogroll” if that’s where you put your links. This is a very good way to make recurring income from your blog. Set up a monthly subscription for each advertiser that automatically bills them each month until they cancel. Most people will keep their links for many months, or even years. If you have a high traffic blog people will pay big bucks to get a link from you.

You might want to be careful with this one though because Google has recently cracked down on blogs selling text links. They have lowered the PR and in some cases the rankings of blogs doing this. However, it seems that most blog owners are not too worried about this because traffic comes from so many different sources that Google doesn’t make much of a difference. Plus, the PR of your blog really doesn’t matter. If you are only selling links based on your PR then you need to change your strategy anyway.

2) Charge for postings on your blog.

You can have an advertising option where businesses and website owners can pay a certain amount for a post on your blog. You can have them write up a review, article, press release, advertisement, or any other type of post. Or you can write it for them. Limit it to maybe 250 words or less to ensure they don’t make it too long. This method is great because you are adding content to your blog and getting paid for it.

3) Adsense.

By now pretty much every blog owner knows what Adsense is so this one is basically self-explanatory. Just sign up for Google Adsense and put the code on your blog. You make money every time someone clicks on an ad.

4) Affiliate reviews.

Every once in a while you can write up a review for a product or service that you are an affiliate of. If anyone buys it from your affiliate link then you will earn commissions. This is a really good way to make money from your blog. However, don’t get in the habit of posting lots of affiliate reviews. I like to do maybe two per month or so.

5) Get paid to blog sites.

There are sites such as PayPerPost.com and ReviewMe.com where you can sign up and get paid for blogging about other people’s sites. How much you get paid depends on a number of factors but if you have a popular blog you can make quite a bit per post.

6) The news cash method.

This one is very simple. All you have to do is go to http://www.thenewsroom.com and sign up for free. Then find some news related to the topic of your blog. You will see a little “embed” button next to all the news articles and videos. Click that button and copy the code to put it on your blog. You will then get paid every single time someone visits the page it’s posted on. You only make a very small amount of money per visit, but it adds up over time and you can post these news articles as much as you want.

There you have it. Six ways to make money blogging. I’m sure there are more ways that you can make money with your blog but these are some of the more popular methods, and they are the ones I have been successful with.

Dedicated to your success,
Trent Brownrigg
Home Based Business Opportunities

Poll Results - How Much Money Would You Sell Your Blog For?

A few weeks ago, I ran a poll asking you,

How Much Money Would You Be Willing To Sell Your Blog For?

48 of you answered the poll and here are the interesting results:

1-10,000 dollars (23%)
10,001-20,000 dollars (2%)
20,001-30,000 dollars (19%)
30,001-40,000 dollars (4%)
40,001-50,000 dollars (0%)
Over 50,000 dollars (38%)
I Would Never Sell It (15%)

The most popular option was 50,000 dollars or more. I have to be honest with you, from a pure business standpoint most blogs aren’t worth over 50,000 dollars. In fact, most are worth under 15,000 dollars. Over half of you (53%) said you would either sell your blog for over 50,000 or not sell it at all. Wow! I think that just shows how personal blogs are and how attached we as bloggers are to our blogs. I was a bit surprised by the 15% of you who said you would never sell your blog… never??? If someone gave you a million dollars you wouldn’t sell it?

Does anything from the poll results surprise you?

Am I A Sheep In The Googlesphere?

There were some rather interesting posts and developments this week. Most of them were about Google. So instead of my normal “Internet marketing tips from the web” post, this post should be titled “Internet marketing tips from the Googlesphere”.

Hmmm… Did I just create a new term?

I will have to go “Yahoo” it… back in a sec.

Nope, Yahoo shows 999 results for Googlesphere, rats!

Anyway, the biggest news of the week across the blogosphere was that Google is lowering the pagerank of sites that sell text link advertising. I don’t know if this includes buying and selling banner links or not, but it should since banner ads normally don’t use the no-follow tag.

I think that those who made this decision at Google don’t understand how powerful the blogosphere really is, or they expect most bloggers to act like sheep and fully support Google.

Here are some of the many posts I have read this week about paid links causing websites to lose Google page rank:

Official: Selling Paid Links Can Hurt Your PageRank Or Rankings On Google (I read it here first)

Part Three – NoFollow is for Blog Spam…no Paid Text Links, wait…Paid Ads…Aww Heck, Just Stop Linking and Let Calacanis Decide the Rankings

Penalty Confirmed – But I Don’t Sell PageRank

Dancing With The Gevil – Defamed By Google?

Garry Conn and Google

How to Profit from Google’s War on Paid Links

Last, but not least, Aaron Wall pretty much takes the words out of my mouth on this topic:

Google is Becoming Wikipedia Without the Talk Page

So, what am I going to do about this issue?

I haven’t decided yet. On the one hand, I have come up with a plan that could REALLY tick off Google, on the other hand I can be a sheep. Decisions, decisions...

In other news…

Tiny start-up rival to Google?
A new company called Proximic has come up with a very cool new technology. From the sounds of things it might become a great way to monetize your site and be a huge competitor to Google’s Adsense. Microsoft, Yahoo, Google… let the bidding wars begin!

Lastly, I got an email from Google’s Adsense program last night about a new service that lets you make money from YouTube videos. I am very excited about the possibilities for some of my other blogs.

That’s it for now…

How Much Would You Sell Your Blog For?

Recently, an Internet marketer who sells quite a few info products, approached me about buying my blog. I wasn’t really considering putting this blog up for sale, but I decided it would not hurt to see what he had to offer.

He wanted me to get back to him with a price, so I had to do some pricing research. I have to say that I was a bit disappointed with the prices that blogs normally sell for. From doing research, it seemed like fair market value for the blog would be somewhere between 12,000 and 30,000. When I looked at my current plans and made a realistic estimate at next years profits from this blog I came up with a higher number than 12,000-30,000. So, I went ahead and asked for a price that was over 30,000 dollars. I don’t want to give specific numbers in case someone else offers to buy my blog in the future. Also, the number I gave was higher than the number I would have taken.

I personally just couldn’t see selling this blog for it’s fair market value, because of the plans that I have for it. If he had made an offer at the upper end of it’s fair market value, I would have seriously considered it. I am glad he didn’t make an offer that was in my “I don’t know” range. He made it quite easy to turn down the offer.

The price I ultimately asked for was pretty close to the numbers being discussed in the sale of the Blog Herald. The potential buyer let me know that on average he was buying similar blogs to mine for under 10,000 dollars. He actually, gave me an exact number, but I don’t want to reveal it.

That’s when I changed from selling mood to buying mood!

I mean if I could buy a bunch of blogs with similar content and traffic to mine for under 10,000 dollars each… I am pretty sure I could make my money back in no time and have a nice network of blogs for fairly cheap. Alternatively, I could buy other people’s blogs, monetize them better and then flip them. That’s actually a business I would really enjoy.

Needless to say I have not sold my blog. However, the conversations I had with the potential buyer did help me to think more about what I need to do with this blog to make it more remarkable.

So, after going through this whole process, I am REALLY interested in knowing…

What would you be willing to sell your blog for?

Take the poll below and/or leave a comment to let me know.

Internet Marketing Tips 8/24/2007

I am starting this week’s links with something different. It’s not an article on Internet marketing, but it is a great example of drawing readers in with a story:

LOT OF POKEMON CARDS THAT MY KIDS TRIED TO SNEAK BY ME
In this ad on ebay, a mom with her hands full tells a great story to sell some pokemon cards. I love this story! It is funny and makes you want to read every last word. Because the ad was so witty it has become quite viral. The person who wrote the ad, also has a blog at http://mom2my6pack.blogspot.com/ which is getting TONS of new traffic. Not only that, but she got over $100 for something that would have cost about $3. You can learn a lot from this story, be sure to check it out.

Google Proxy Hacking: How A Third Party Can Remove Your Site From Google SERPs
Dan Thies writes about a Google hack that really needs to be fixed. Black hat SEO gurus can use it to remove your site from the SERPs, just like they did to Brad Fallon’s wedding favors site last year.

Summer Slowdown Myth
Alice Seba says we should ask the question “Is it your market or you who is slowing down?” Very interesting post. I personally have not seen a slow down in traffic this summer, but I have had a slowdown in comments.

How To Launch A Membership Site – Part 4: Content and Pricing
Yaro continues his membership site series with part 4 – “Content and Pricing”. In part 4 Yaro discusses how to choose the right price for your membership site. He also discusses what type of content to provide to your members and how to provide it.

How To Launch A Membership Site – Part 5: Triggers
In part 5 of Yaro’s series, he covers pyscological triggers. I like his disclaimer at the start of the start article, because the idea of using triggers to make people buy is a hard one for me to come to grips with ethically. Ultimately, the money we earn is directly or indirectly a result of advertising that uses phsycological triggers to get us to buy. Love it or hate it that’s just the way things are.

How Not Knowing Something Makes You More Of An Expert
Very good read about what makes you an expert in your niche.

Will The FTC Investigate Google & Matt Cutts For Paid Links?
Andy Beard takes an interesting look at Google’s stand on paid links. I don’t think the FTC will ever attack Matt Cutts for the lack of disclosure on his blog. If he worked for Microsoft it might be a different story…

This World – This Next Activity Map
This Next is a new social shopping site. What is really cool is the activity map (see link above). You can actually watch people buy stuff in real time. It shows what people are buying and where they are buying it from. Very cool! Found via Jack Humphrey.

Defeating Self-Limiting Thoughts
Chris Garrett wrote a nice post about staying confident and positive by removing negative thoughts. If you want to have long term success online, you need to stay positive.

WEB USERS NOW SPEND HALF THEIR TIME VISITING CONTENT, FAR OUTPACING TIME SPENT WITH SEARCH, COMMUNICATIONS AND COMMERCE
Very interesting study showing changes in the way people are using the Internet. How can you use this to your advantage?

That’s it for this week’s Internet marketing tips from around the web.

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