Make Money Online Blogging

Make Money Online for Beginners - Make Money Online Blogging Part 2

How to Make Money Online? - The Secret

I recommend you read Part 1 of Make Money Online Blogging first - a highly entertaining explanation of the basics of making money online blogging (with poetry) click here how to make money online for beginners

As my poems proved so popular (not) I have knocked them on the head.

(........ Making Monkey Online - The Origin of Blogging for Money by Charles Inward)

Making Money Online is all about Back Links or should that be Backlinks?

Myth and rumor has it that the best way to get free traffic to your blog and thus increase your chances of actually making money online and catching those beavers (as explained in Part 1 of How to Make Money Blogging - Do beavers eat wood?) is by writing articles and putting them on article sites. There are two reasons why this should be so 1) people will read your article and click the link to your blog at the bottom of the article 2) other websites will post your article, and that will give you a backlink to your site. And according to those in the know backlinks are the bee's knees when it comes to making money online.

The theory of why you need to get visitors to your site is easy enough to understand. Get your site onto the first page of Google and the other search engines Yahoo and MSN, this will bring in thousands of visitors a day and some of those many thousands will click on those pesky Adsense ads. and Google will share some of their vast wealth with you! The best guy for doing this and explaining how it's done is make money online Griz who has just such a site about making money online and has recently said he gets around 5500 visitors a day to one of his blogs and has published screenshots showing that that blog makes him around $140 a day from Adsense.

So clearly if some people can do it then so can others, but probably not in the make money online niche. Like I said in my previous excellent and exceedingly humorous post (with poetry) - make money online blogging - it's probably better to go for a niche that the general public is actually interested in, rather than just trying to target cheapskates like me who are interested in making money online without spending a dime, money for old rope you could say.

So, backlinks are important, but backlinks from whom or from where? Google in its wisdom has decided to rank pages based (to a certain extent) on the number of links to them from other pages or websites, which is all well and good, but bear in mind that irrelevant links i.e. links from a site about women's leather handbags to an exercise bike site are not very highly thought of. So what is required are relevant backlinks, preferably from pages with a high pagerank. The best links to get are from sites that are PR5 or higher, particularly if they are .gov or .edu sites.

How many backlinks do I need?

A few hundred or more, with at least 14.99% of these links coming from sites that are PR3 or higher, which is a bummer because it's easier said than done, particularly if you ain't got 24 hours a day to go around creating backlinks. Also you've got to be careful, as Google soon gets supicious if your unknown blog suddenly gets 20 links from sites with high PR, so you've got to use a bit of commonsense and take things slowly while nevertheless doing what you can to get those links.

So the aim of these backlinks is to get yourself onto page 1 of Google. The reason for this is easy to see if you consider the following.

If you Google "make money online" what you will see is that first Google will throw up 14.9 million pages (a lot) but also that none of the big 'A list' bloggers appears on page 1 (it should be pointed out again here that the big names make their money from the network of adoring fans they have built up and who buy ebooks and stuff from their site and from the advertisers who place ads. on their sites each month eager to get access to the many thousands of bloggers who visit these sites in the hope of finding the holy grail or because they're lonely or whatever - some people categorize all this stuff as dog doodoo and useless and a waste of time, personally I've never bought any of it so I can't say one way or the other).

Back to the Google results. The first name I recognize in the Google results for "make money online" is Garry Conn, who appears on page 3. From this we can conclude that page 3 just ain't good enough! Why can we conclude this? Because Garry Conn himself has said that he doesn't make any money from his make money blog! see my previous post - making money online for beginners

Doshdosh have an excellent looking site done by professionals, but it doesn't appear in the results until page 5 and they are not making money from Adsense as they haven't got it on their site, they are making money from the ads which they can charge large amounts of doshdosh for on a monthly basis, as, according to their own figures, they get 250,000 page views a month. Slightly more than I get.

Problogger appears on page 6 and JohnChow on page 7. Their sites are very impressive and run by teams not by a lone gunman in his garage, so there is no way you are going to be able to compete (as can be seen from Garry Conn's experience). They also pay people to design their templates and they pay for advertising no doubt too.

So the thing to retain is that you need to get onto page 1 - like I said Garry Conn is on page 3 and that isn't high enough to make money online or offline. [Update he has slipped to page 4, which happens, except it never seems to happen to that guy who ranks no. 2 on page 1 !]

Now if you change the phrase you Google and Google "make money online for beginners" instead, you will see an enormous drop in the number of results Google throws up (only 67,000 this time) so this particular phrase might be easier to target, although as mentioned before you are far better off targetting a different niche altogether. You will see also that Griz is top again on page 1 and wonder of wonders one of my blogs appears on page 7 woohoo !! I say wonder of wonders, but I should say 'mystery of mysteries' - Google moves in mysterious ways its wonders to perform - as the blog in question that belongs to me is a blog about investing and the stockmarket not about making money online and it appears to have been found by Google because once upon a time I had "make money online for beginners" in my 'about' section. The blog you are reading here, which does pretend to be about making money online for beginners, and even how to make money online for free, is nowhere to be seen!

But if we take our investigation one step further and Google "make money online for rookies", my wonderful blog appears on page 1! Unfortunately this is not difficult as there is only 1 page for that particular phrase and I get very few visitors who type it in. So a rethink in strategy is called for methinks.

So the moral of this particular story is - don't aim too high, go for longtail keywords i.e. phrases such as pink digital cameras rather than just plain old "digital cameras" but you do need to target phrases people actually type in to Google, for which you will need to use Google Keyword Tools, but I'll dissect that particular pile of poo next time. If I live that long.

Breathing in and out, getting older as I do
I blog away and wonder 'I am who'? Do you?

make money online
make money online for beginners
make money online blogging

Make Money Blogging for Rookies

Make Money On the Internet Blogging for Rookies

How to Make Money On the Internet - A Beginners' Guide

Times are hard! But as those wise old philosophers in the US of A say "when the going gets tough, the tough get blogging!"
So, you have decided to make money online blogging. You figure how difficult can it be? A bunch of other loonies are doing it so why not me? Money for old rope as we say over here.
You just create a blog (free with Blogger). Sign up for Adsense (free). Stick the Adsense ads on your free blog. Write shome shtuff. Then check your Adsense account ten times a day to count the money rolling in! Easy peasy!

The bad news is, you can't make money on the Internet doing nothing, but the good news is - it is possible provided you do something, for example you can make money online blogging!

So before we get going here is a little poem I wrote, I call it - "I'm Blogging for Money, Honey"
(Nervous cough)

Making money blogging
Has got to be easier than logging
No more hard work slogging
Chopping up that wood

No more hunting beaver
With your dirty cleaver
Now you're a high achiever
Beaver likes you good

I think that about sums it up.
Become a famous blogger, make a pile of dosh and those pesky beavers will take care of themselves. Beavers have apparently already invaded cyber space, gnawing away at cyber logs with their little teeth, hypnotizing law-abiding citizens by fluttering their cute beaver eyelashes and generally creating havoc. But fear not, with your new-found beaver trapping skills you will soon have them eating out of your hand. Do beavers eat wood? Who knows? But that's something for you to Google (later! - pay attention I’m just getting to the important bit). Right now we've got to trap the smelly little critters.

So, here goes. To make money on the Internet blogging there are basically two methods, which I have very considerately numbered 1 and 2 to make them easier to follow.

Two Ways to Make Money Blogging

1. Copy what other successful billionaire bloggers do.
2. Do something totally unique i.e. something that no-one else has ever done.

If you want to follow route no. 2 that's fine, you just need a unique (and interesting) idea - like those guys who created that cute cat can i haz cheezeburger site, which just took off and made them a pile of money. Your great unique idea gets a viral infection and a million visitors a day fall about laughing at cats (I was going to say pussies but I don't want people thinking I'm crude) and you make pots of money. Good luck.

If you don’t fancy the route 2 way to making money blogging, then you need to follow good old route 1 i..e. copy what other blogging trailblazers have done. We ain't proud.

Now this is where it gets complicated, so I will now subdivide this route no. 1 into two further sub-sections will I shall call 1A. and 1B.
[My night at a swanky dog food restaurant - Chez Woof]

In method 1A. you follow the route of the famous 'A' list money-making zillionaire blogger 'gurus' e.g Mr Problogger, Mr John Chow, Mr Shoemoney, Mr Dosh Dosh, Mr BigFat Money Maker etc... and others who all write the same ‘wonderful content’ (wonderful if you can’t get to sleep that is) – haven’t you heard ‘content is king’ ha ha – you write wonderful content about how to catch your beaver by enticing it in to your lair with an old sock or was it an old sack ? hmmmm I must check that out again, maybe I got it wrong ? – they all have wonderful sites (usually on Worpdress) and thousands of adoring beaver fans who religiously dissect the entrails of their blogs every day, click on their ads. and buy all that stuff they advertise down the sides and on the top. Thus making the gurus a whole pile of dosh, but not making the disciples a cent. They make their money from advertising or selling stuff which the disciples buy.

That certainly is one way of trapping those beavers. Like Mr John Chow once said "I make money by telling people how much money I make."

These sites do work, apparently (let's face it I ain't got access to their bank accounts so I gotta take what they and others say on trust) - but they have largely cornered that particular beaver market and so you would have to be some sort of genius brain surgeon rocket scientist smelly nerd ubergeek beaver magnet to get a piece of that action. But once you’ve cracked it, it don’t matter how disgusting you look, those beavers will find you irresistible !

Can it be done? Maybe. Good luck. But, bear this in mind, one guy who had a site that looked very much like these guru sites and who had lots of readers and adoring fans leaving multiple comments along the lines of "gee thanks Garry for the great post" ! (despite the fact that you can read the same posts on any and a million make money blogs around the Internet) recently said it was all a crock of beaver poo.

Despite the fact that he had a great looking site and lots of fans and readers, he wasn't making any money ! How do we know this? Am I guessing ? Have I hacked his bank account ? No, that was not necessary, because in an admirable display of honesty he wrote a post explaining how his blog made NO MONEY and never would and how "social networks are stupid" and how they have provided "absolutely ZERO help towards the growth of this blog". Way to go Garry! It takes courage to do that, and Garry Conn had (and still has) a good-looking blog going. You can Google him too (later !) – I ain’t puting a link up, ‘cause although he told it like it was he still don’t deserve one of my PR0 links !
So, that's enough of make money on the Internet blogging method 1a. -
I could go on, but you get the picture - nice-looking blogs are fine and may make you some friends, and may make money for the A list bloggers, but in these harsh economic times you will need to be good to make money doing what they do (and licking those furry wriggly little beavers into shape of course!).
So now we come to method 1B. - much less glamorous, but more effective. And also more logical.
Method 1a always seemed illogical to me and I thank Garry for confirming my belief. But for method 1b I have to thank a certain Mr Grizzly make money online, who explained how a beginner should go about making money blogging.

• First, find something you want to blog about and, more important, something that other people want to read about (personally I recommend an actual product that people already want to buy e.g. loft insulation – mmmmmmmmmm loft insulation, crazy stuff but people do actually buy it, if they've still got a house that is).
• Second, create a blog (free using Blogger) so that you can actually blog about loft insulation, not just think about it.
• Third, sign up for an Adsense account (free).
• Fourth, blog away to your heart’s content about loft insulation, then stick your Adsense ads. on your blog. That is the basics, but to actually make any money is a bit more complicated there are a few more things you need to do .
  
  A make money blog that beavers don't visit is clearly of no use to beast or man. People have got to find your blog ! You need visitors to make money on the Internet. So, how do beavers find blogs ? They type stuff into Google that their beaver brains tell them they are looking for and click search. Then what do they do ? They click on the sites that are first in the list!

There are statistics somewhere that show that something like 60% of people click on the site that is Number 1 on Page 1. 20% click on Number 2 5% click on Number 3 etc... – so if you are on page 245 for loft insulation then you will be waiting a long time before that beaver wanders into your trap!

The only way people are going to find your blog about loft insulation is if your blog turns up on the first page of Google when people search for "loft insulation". Google at the moment gives me 442,000 pages if I google loft insulation without quotes, if I put it between quotes "loft insulation" I get 244,000 pages.

That's a lot of competition, but if you add another keyword to your search such as 'savings' the results are reduced to 43,000 - that's more manageable, so when writing your loft insulation blog posts make sure to include the word 'savings' – that’s just an example by the way. Make plenty of posts and include the same keywords each time.

This on its own, however, is not enough. In addition to the keywords (and don't repeat the keywords too often - as Google doesn't like it and will penalize you for it - Google has lots of hoops you gotta jump through, but unfortunately Google is the boss, as it's their ball you're playing with, so you either play or get gone and find your own beavers) - you need backlinks!

What are backlinks? They are links to your site from someone else's site and this is the tricky part. Reciprocal links i.e. you link to my site and I link to yours are not so good - another Google hoop – Google is not too keen on reciprocal links, although they are better than nothing, what you need are one-way links from someone else’s site to yours.

One way, and, allegedly, the best way to get backlinks is to write articles and post them to places like GoArticles.com. Why would you do that? Because you can include a backlink to your blog at the bottom of your article. If your article is really good, or even if its really awful, other lazy people will download it and use it on other sites, so you get more backlinks and your traffic increases exponentially ! That is the theory, but I'm a lazy ole son of a gun so I ain't got round to doing it yet. which probably explains why my sites are languishing on page 699 of Google and people find this blog by typing in crazy stuff like ‘Fila Brasileiro’ (it’s a dog in case you were wondering).

Well, that's the beginning, forget about trying to outgolf Tiger Woods (he makes most of his money from sponsorships anyway) do what works. Bloggers are basically publishers and, like newspapers, they make their money on the Internet from advertising, but the more readers they get for the adverts the more valuable they become.
So, this make money blogging post is long enough and longer than I intended and I need a rest. I will carry on with this intriguing beaver hunt at a later date, for reasons known only to myself, in the meantime, as I am a bit of a novice in this particular area of blogging, despite having been around for two years, I recommend you check out Mr Grizzly's site, he is a veritable encyclopedia.

So far, as far as I can tell he's the only one who talks any sense (but once again I ain't checked his bank balance so I’m taking a lot on faith - although he has posted about how much he makes) - he knows a lot more than me (but he ain't so good looking) and if he's right then it is feasible.

Do I make money online from blogging? Yes. But not much with this blog as yet. Most of the money I make blogging comes from my financial blog - about online stock trading - how much do I make ? Enough to pay the rent but not enough to live off yet but that makes me carry on 'cause I think I can do it better and one day I will retire to my very own beaver lodge.

So if you've read this far then well done and thank you for sticking with it. I recommend you check out Mr Grizzly's site - the link is somewhere back up in this post - and that represents another gratuitous one-way link back to Griz's site - like I said he appears to be the best at explaining how it works.

So until I come back and continue this make money on the Internet saga I will leave you with another poem

Staring at my PC screen
I saw that life was just a dream
But I was broke
Which was no joke
So I awoke
And now there's no-one to be seen
And if you understand that then you have no need of me or any beaver on this planet!

NudeTube Sells for 167K

Make Money Online - from domain sales

YouTube certainly started something when they chose the name for their video clip site! Now just stick a tube on the end of a noun or an evocative adjective and you've got a video site.

In a recent post Top Domain Name Sales for 2008 I pointed out that although the prices paid for the big name domain names were down 17.5% in 2008, nevertheless there were still 100 big name sales of over $100,000 - only the second time that this has happened. So domain names are clearly a way to make money online, if you can find the buyers. For other (slightly smaller) sales check out DNJournal.

In 2009 the first big 6 figure sale has been NudeTube.com (no prizes for guessing what it's about - don't bother looking, you need to fill in a form to get in) - it sold for the princely sum of $167,500.

This is actually quite a good start to the year, from what I can see there were no such big sales so early on in 2008. So maybe 2009 will surprise everybody and be the year for big domain name sales! You may even have some money saved up to buy some bargains. There are certainly bargains around in the housing sector if you are looking for a house to do up and sell on - see Buy a House for $1000 - and there are a lot of domain names dropping as people decide not to renew them.

The big problem for domain name owners at the moment is the fall off in PPC revenue - development is now the buzz word, so expect to see more companies offering some form of development instead of just plain old parking.

Domain and Hosting Discount Codes

Make Money Online - More Domain Name and Hosting Discount Codes

I posted some Godaddy discount codes in an earlier post - link - but new codes are constantly being issued. Here are some of the latest updates of Godaddy discount codes I have discovered

yhkw105a = 20% off
emma1 = 10% off any order
emma2 = 20% off any order > 50USD
emma3 = .com domain for 7.49USD
emma25 = 25% off any order > 100USD
promo10 = 10% off any order
cjc20host = 20% off hosting
gdbb776 = $7.50 for renewals
CJCTLD749 = register, renew or transfer .net for $7.49
gdr0103ar - 25% off .COM - new, renewals or transfers
gdbb776 .org Renewal only $7.69
gdp1237d .org New or Renew $7.99

To see the outrageous prices obtained for domain names in 2008 see Domain Name Prices in 2008. Outrageous because they were not my domain names e.g. $9.9 million paid for Fund.com!

Top Domain Name Prices 2008

Make Money Online - The Top 100 Domain Name Prices Achieved in 2008

Last year I analyzed the top 100 domain sales that took place during the record year of 2007 - Record Domain Name Prices and discovered that prices for the top 100 domain name sales had increased by 43.3% compared with 2006. So here is my brief analysis of the top 100 domain name prices achieved in 2008

Was 2008 another record year for domain name sales?

In case you hadn't heard, there has been an economic crisis/meltdown/ Armageddon while you have been asleep, even Warren Buffett himself is having trouble making money investing online. So how have domain names stacked up as an alternative investment?

2007 was a landmark year for domain name sales, as it was the first year in which the price achieved for every name in the Top 100 was $100,000 or more. In 2008 this was repeated, with the lowest price for any name in the top 100 being once again $100,000.

The highest priced domain name sold was, of course, a dotcom - Fund.com at $9,999,950. The highest non dotcom was again a .de (as it was in 2007) and for the first time a .de domain name was sold for over $1 million - Kredit.de at $1,169,175. This was also the third highest price overall, the 2nd highest price overall was DataRecovery.com at $1,659,000 - 4th highest price was also a non dotcom and was also over $1 million - cruises.co.uk $1,099,798 - the highest .co.uk in 2007 was 31st overall, so that's quite a move up for .co.uk. 5th highest was Invest.com at $1,015,000.

In 2007 there were 9 sales of $1 million or more, compared to only 3 in 2006, this year there have been 5 sales over $1 million, so a rather large drop there.

In 2006 the overall total for the top 100 domain names was $29,750,000 - in 2007 this total rose to $42,682,500, which meant an average price for 2007 of $426,825 per domain name compared with $297,750 for 2006. This represented an increase of 43.3% in prices from 2006 to 2007. A pretty effective way of making money online

In 2008 the overall total for domain name sales was $35,185,276 which is an average of $351,852 - not bad but nevertheless around a 17.5% decrease compared with 2007 (NB : I didn't count the last one in the DNJournal list as that is in fact no. 101).

With regard to extensions, .com is still way ahead of the rest with 81 .coms in the top 100 domain names sold, but .org and .de were the big winners for 2008 with dot mobi being the big loser.

The Different Extensions in the Top 100 Domain Sales Sold

81 .com - average price - $289,730 (compared with 87 in 2006 and 83 in 2007) 4 .de - average price $503,714 (1 in 2007)
4 .org - average price $122,850 (0 in 2007)
3 .co.uk - average price - $581,502 (4 in 2007)
3 .net - average price - $236,143 (4 in 2007)
2 .nl - average price - $184,673 (0 in 2007)
1 .ca - price $600,000 (0 in 2007)
1 .es - price - $173,682 (0 in 2007)
1 .mobi - price $110,000 (5 in 2007)

There were no .info, .tv, .in, .asia in the top 100.

Different 'categories' of name :-

Random Letters - highest was SC.com at $300,000 - 12 names in total
Random Numbers - highest was 770.com at $343,308 - 11 names in total
Finance/credit names - highest was the overall highest Fund.com at $9,999,950 - 10 names in total
Porn names - highest was porn.net at $400,000 - 7 names in total
Place names - highest was daytona.com at $151,395 - 7 names in total
Holiday/tourism - highest was cruises.co.uk $1,099,798 - 4 names in total
Peoples names - highest was Alice.com at $250,000 - 2 names in total

Of the 70 names that weren't just numbers, letters or proper nouns - 44 were one word and 18 were 2 words, very few were more than 2 words.

CONCLUSIONS

1. My main aim in looking at domain name sales over 2008 was to see if average prices were up or down. Well as shown above - prices were down overall 17.5% - over the same period the stock markets around the world fell by between 30% and 50% - so the fall in domain name prices could have been worse
2. It is clear that .com is still the undisputed king
3. Short names are best (one word or at a pinch two words - this applies to all categories inc. porn and place names)
4. Letters and numbers do well as long as they are short (generally 3 characters max. - although 4 letters sometimes sell for high figures - see riva.com, unet.com and igen.com all of which sold for $100k or more and which still show more or less blank pages - these are what domainers refer to as CVCV or VCVC names - a pronounceable mix of vowels and consonants)

So if you can find a .com domain name that fulfils the above criteria for less than $100,000 then you might be on to a winner ! If you already own such a name then well done to you.

If you don't have thousands of dollars available for investing in the best domain names but you think you have what it takes to be the next Kevin Ham then you can always start at the bargain basement end and work your way up by flipping domain names (some people make money doing this but it is not a get-rich-quick scheme unless you are extremely lucky - it does take work).

You can buy domain names for around $10, but wherever possible try and use discount codes to get them even cheaper. Don't forget also that while you are waiting for your domain names to sell you can always use them to create a blog and make money online blogging.

selling domain names
make money online
parking domain names
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