How to Start Earning Online

Now that you have learnt how to run a blog and use Adsense, we’re going to look at other ways of making money from a website.

One of the most common ways of monetising a site is to use an affiliate program.  There are lots of different programs – here are a few that I use:  Affiliatefuture.com, tradedoubler.com and clickbank.com.

Affiliatefuture and tradedoubler have a wide range of well known clients whose affiliate programs you can join – selling things ranging from finance to broadband, chocolates to clothes.  They are free to join, so it’s worth signing up and taking a look around their site to see if there are any programs that fit with the subject of your site.

For the next few posts I’m going to be looking at Clickbank.  Why?  Because an online contact of mine has issued a challenge to me and another contact.  I like a challenge, so I couldn’t resist.

The challenge: To build a site in the reverse phone look-up niche.  This is a niche that mainly operates in the USA where, for a small fee, if you know a person’s cell phone number you can do a reverse search to find out who owns the number.  This has obvious uses if you are concerned about who your child is calling, or to see if you can trace a scammer if they are using a US cell phone number -a subject close to my heart because I run an anti-scam blog.

The idea is that we each build a site, sign up for a Clickbank program (or programs) and then promote the site.  The aim is to see if we can achieve an income of $1000 a month from our site.  Sounds like a tall order – but like I said, I like a challenge.

I decided that if I post my progress on here, step by step, that should give you an idea of how to monetise a site using affiliate programs.

I’ll start in the next post by telling you how to register a domain name – so far we have used a free site from blogger, but sooner or later you will want to own and run your own site with your own domain name – and this is a good time to start.   So read the next post to find out how to register a domain name and how to find hosting for it.

Website and blogs need content.  If you enjoy writing, you can earn money by writing content for others.  To make a success of this you will need good writing skills and enjoy spending time researching your content.

There are many sites on the internet you might want to look at:

The Warrior Forum.  Members can offer their services in the “Warriors for Hire” section.  New members/writers often start by offering to write free articles for a few warriors.  This allows Warriors to see the quality of your work, and allows you to get some all important feedback.

Daily Article. A site where you submit articles that you’ve written for sale.  You can write about any subject you like and choose your price.  Some articles sell quickly, some don’t.

Constant Content.  I haven’t used this one, but I think it works in much the same way as Daily Article.

Helium.  This works differently.  You don’t sell articles, but you can get paid according to your rating . It’s a bit complicated – you have two ratings – number of articles written, and number of “rates” you”ve submitted.  All the articles on the site are peer rated – ie members rate each others articles.  Take a look to see what I mean.

I hope these sites give you a few ideas to get you started.  Being a content writer can be lucrative once you have built a reputation and you only need to accept the amount of work you feel you can cope with.

I’m a member of the Warrior Forum.  It’s by far the best place to learn all there is to know about Internet Marketing.

When you’re new to IM, the forum can be a bit overwhelming.  Don’t worry – it’s like learning any new skill.  It will slowly start to make sense and the place is a goldmine of information.  It’s where I learnt most of what I know about IM – and I’m still learning.

You don’t need to join the forum to read most of the posts – you only need to join if you want to take part in discussions.

There is a search facility so you can search back posts to find information.

The answer is no – and yes!

Adsense works by autodetecting the content of your page.  Usually it is fairly accurate.  However, if ads are displayed that you don’t want for any reason you can block them by adding them to the “competitive ad” filter.

How to Use the Adsense Competitive Ad Filter

Log into your Adsense account and click on the “Adsense Setup” tab.  Then click on “Competitive Ad Filter”.

Enter one web address per line in the box and scroll down and click on Save Changes.

How can you tell the web address of an Adsense ad? NEVER click on your own ads to find out where they take you.  Google will BAN you for click fraud.

Fortunately – they provide an answer in the form of the “Adsense Preview Tool”.

What is the Adsense Preview Tool?

This is an add-on for Internet Explorer.  Download it from here – Adsense Preview Tool.  One this is installed it adds an extra item to the RIGHT click menu in IE.

When you click on “Google Adsense Preview tool” from this menu you will see a list of ads that could be displayed on your site.

You can click to put a tick beside the ads whose URLs you want to know.

Then click on “Show Selected URLs”.  The URLs will be displayed in a box.  You can copy them from here and paste them into your competitive ad filter.

NOTE:  If the URL you copy is too long for the ad filter, you will see a message in red displayed after you click on “Save changes”.  Just delete as much of the URL as is necessary to reduce it to 64 characters or less.  If you look at the URL, you will probably find that most of it an be deleted so that you are just left with something like www.myunwantedsite.com

Once you have your site up and running you will want to know if it gets visitors.  I usually use either Statcounter or Google Analytics.  In this post I’m going to show you how to add a Statcounter to your blogger blog.

Start by going to Statcounter and signing up for a free account.  Once you have your account, sign in.  You will see a list of your projects (if you are setting up your first project, your project list will be empty).

Click on “add new project”.Fill in the details of your blog:

I usually leave the rest of the options on this page unchanged.

Scroll down and click on “next”.  Then click on “Configure and Install Code”

I always use an invisible counter – it’s a personal preference, but do you really want the first few visitors to your site to see that you have only had, say, 6 visitors?

Click on “next” and then select your site type – there is an option for Blogger, so we will use that – although I usually just use the default guide.  (The code you are going to get in the next step is the same – it’s just that the instructions for its use change.)

Now follow the instructions that Statcounter give for using the code to install your Statcounter.  I could give instructions here, but they would be exactly the same.

Using your Statcounter

From time to time, log into your Statcounter account.  Click on the name of your project (there will be a list of names if you have more than one site with a counter on) to see your stats.

I’m going to click on “keep safe” – a blog I run to help prevent people falling victim to scammers.

Choose which stats you want to see from the left hand menu.  I usually use “Recent Keyword Activity” – which tells me which search terms people used to find the site and “recent came from” which tells me if people came to my site from an external link – for example from one of the social bookmarks you made if you followed the previous post on this blog.

I hope you are remembering to add posts to your site.  This is the best way of making Google (and other search engines) take notice of your site.  Google loves content and so do your visitors.

There are many ways to get visitors to come to your site.  One fairly easy way is social bookmarking.

What is Social Bookmarking?

You might have already heard of some of the social bookmarking sites.  Reddit, Digg, Clipmarks, Delicious and Stumbleupon are some of the best known.  I have the Clipmarks and Stumbleupon toolbars installed in Firefox.

Go to these sites and open an account.  Once you have an account you can use it to store links to your favourite sites.  Add a link to your site to each of these bookmarking sites.

There are hundreds of bookmarking sites and in a later post I will tell you how you can automate this process.  For now, though, just get into the habit of bookmarking EACH POST you make to your blog.

Bookmaking an Individual Post

As well as bookmarking the main address of your blog, you can also bookmark each post.

If you look at the first screenshot here you will see the main address of the blog displayed in the browser bar at the top of the screen.

If you click on the heading of a post (in this case the word “laminitis”) you will find that each individual post also has a page of its own, with its own address in the browser bar – like the second screenshot.

This means that you can bookmark each post.

Bookmarking like this is one way of building links to your site.  Search engines like sites with links.  Also, you can get visitors directly from these links.

Don’t worry, it doesn’t hurt.

It is a good idea to get into the habit of pinging each new post to your blog.

What do I mean?  Pinging notifies a selection of web services to tell them that your blog has been updated.

It’s really easy to do.  There are two sites you can use Pingomatic or Pingoat.  There’s no need to use both – they both ping the same sites.

Here is Pingomatic.

Just fill in the details of your blog.  Click on “Check All” to select all the Common Services and then scroll down and click on “Send Pings”.

Do this each time you add a new post to your blog, or each time you edit a post.