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MMO Blogs

My blog is number 53 on the top 100 Make Money Online blogs. It has hovered right that number for a while. Amazing, considering that I have neglected this blog a lot. The reason: I have other blogs and while this one talks of making money, it doesn’t really make money iteself. I wiped banners out here and went back to my roots in affiliate marketing, leaving this blog a journal of making money rather than a “buy this now so I can make money” blog.

I didn’t start making money on the internet as a blogger. Before that I was an affiliate marketer, which I still am. And that was after being a product developer and Ebay seller. I hid behind the scenes and made money promoting other people’s products. I was lucky to pull my head out of the sand long enough to notice that there were a lot of make money online blogs showing up all over the internet and I had to get in on it.

Before Blogging

One way I made money was build sites with whatever content I could find. Whether it be software listings, free articles or my own articles. I would link to landing page for products from the content. Finally, I would build links to the site.

Then I learned how to use Adwords. I found that if I knew the keywords from my efforts described above, I could build some really high returns on every dollar I spent in advertising.

And then I started blogging. I listened to blogging gurus about private ads this, widget ads that and tweaking your blog to get the most out of Adsense. And I tried this for a while. It didn’t work for me. It felt like I was a dollar waiting on a dime. I was spending three times as long to make 10% of the money. Believe me, with a blog that has lower traffic, affiliate marketing will take you farther. If you have John Chow traffic, you can do whatever you want. You are going to make money.

Where I am Going

So I figured I would go back to my two original money making methods, with a better platform for building a site, WordPress and more unique content, my own.

And the only advice on blogging I would be throwing out is a lot of the monetization mumbo jumbo. I would throw out the banners, the Adsense, and accept no money for posts. And I would diversify income through multiple affiliate programs.

Everything I learned about blogging I would keep and learn to use, because dependence on search engines alone is putting too many eggs in one basket.

I could use what I knew to build links manually to my site through article marketing, directory submission and the like. I could stay active in the niche I was in. And I could write great content that would get links.

The money comes into play when I would use this heavily linked content to channel the link juice back into product landing pages.

I would do this by importing the products into their own category with one of the CSV file import plugins I have seen floating around the net.

I would then set the similar posts plugin to pull only posts from this imported products category. And a keyword linking plugin to further link to the product pages.

Tracking will be a must. With search terms saved to use in the keyword linking plugin and Adwords campaigns. The key to using a blog for Adwords is to create a seperate page template for your landing pages. And with the landing page surrounded by a blog with unique related content, the landing page is bound to have a great quality score and cost less for clicks.

Putting the Brakes on Development

And I wanted a control center and more automation. And this is where the issue comes in, because I will spend a lot of time chasing an initial goal when I could have been a step closer to the real goal, which is making a bit more money online.

Instead of trying to trim seconds through automation, I needed to realize that the part that takes the most time, the writing, I will still be doing myself for a while and saving a few seconds on checking sales or monetizing a post isn’t going to make up for it.

So, for now, I am pushing ahead without all my ducks in a row. The time I spent looking for an automation solution could have been used writing more content or building more links. And it should have. The results show in my recent affiliate sales which I have neglected too long.

I figured I would write this post for those of you who don’t subscribe to Digital Products Review. This type of stuff is now what I cover over there. While here, I rant, organize, prioritize, get ducks in a row and sometimes, yes, bitch like a bald cry baby, there I write about making money. Each has a part in making money online. I think most people are looking for that part of making money online. It is only after I hit the first plateau and it stuck around for a few years that I realized that there was more to making money online.

If you know your niche, that’s basically all you have to look at when you are searching for ways to monetize a site, along with "how big is the cut".

I didn’t start in internet marketing. I started before I had a computer in my teens with "Make Money at Home" offers. I never fell for any of them enough to sign up, but I got myself on every list I could. I would get an offer and follow the money trail in my mind. I realized why most MLM products are so expensive. Because everyone and his brother gets a cut. I approached it from the mentality of someone just getting an entry level job and telling his boss, "I want your job."

Your Own Product

In my last post, I forgot to mention that probably the best way to monetize a site is with your own product. That way the only person who gets a cut is the payment processor. And with digital products like software and ebooks, there is no overhead once the product is finished, except for updates. Plus, if you sign up some affiliates, you don’t even have to cover the marketing. Of course, affiliates get a cut now. But it is much better to get 50% of the profit from 100 people promoting your product than 100% of the profit from doing all the work yourself.

Affiliate Programs

Affiliate programs were the first way the average person could get online and start making some money and I bet that some of those people who signed up for the first affiliate programs are currently deciding in which one of their five houses they will be spending the summer in.

You have to investigate affiliate programs to see who gets cuts. With most digital products, only the product vendor, the payment processor and you get a cut. And usually the average cut you will get is close to 50%. Digital products are unique in that the break even point for the vendor who created the product could be only a few sales in, yet people are willing to pay $100 a pop years after he has paid off his house with the sales. Digital products solve problems.

Hard Products

With hard product affiliate programs, you have to go all the way back to the person that mined the silicon for the computer chips, but not always. Some markets, usually the type you see in MLM’s like herbal supplements, will give you the same cut as digital products. They no longer have to pay off everyone and his brother. Only you, the affiliate.

Then there are leads, which is a different animal altogether. You get paid a flat rate for someone to sign up for something. Usually they don’t have to pay anything to do so. And the cuts are harder to see, since the company paying you is playing the cell phone company trick. We will give you this phone, but at the end of two years, you will have paid us many times the price of this free phone. So they pay you the affiliate hoping to make it up in the end. And they always do. If not, the amount they pay you will adjust to make everything profitable.

You have to watch affiliate programs sometimes though. A lot of the products you can promote through Amazon can be promoted through each companies own affiliate program without Amazon taking their hefty cut first. But there is something to be said about the automation Amazon provides.

When we move to CPM (getting paid a flat rate for every 1000 visitors) and CPC (getting paid for every click), your cut really starts getting smaller.

CPM is Crap

CPM is crap. Let me repeat that. CPM is crap. CPM is for people that have so much traffic that they don’t know what to do with it, so they sign up for CPM programs because they don’t want to screw with it. CPM is the model of huge companies. If you are the biggest computer maker in the world, you can afford to make only $1 profit from each computer if you are selling a billion computers a year.

Let me put it in other words. If you have a site that can make good money from CPM, you are probably not reading this sentence. CPM is shotgun marketing. Throw hundreds of ads at the wall for cheap and see what sticks. I have been on the other side of this equation a few times.

You pay something crazy like $2 for every thousand visitors who see your ad which you think is a deal. Chances are that less than 1% of the people will click the ad. Of those people, you are lucky to get 3%. So by paying $2, you may only get one sale. The prices paid for this type of advertising is not going up. If anything, it’s going down as advertisers get more savvy with their money. Not every advertiser is a lawyer with 40% commissions to throw around. Some are like me, affiliate marketers, who still have other people waiting for their cuts after I make a sale.

And, of course, the company that these ads are generated by, (i.e. Adwords), get their cut too, with the average being around 50% of what the advertiser is willing to pay.

As a publisher, you feel like the pizza delivery guy who gets a 25 cent tip after delivering 100 pizzas to the Lions Club.

CPC is not much better

CPC is about the same, but sometimes you can pick some winning clicks by focusing on certain topics and subjects or by signing up for a new program where the advertisers are still throwing money away.

It’s about the same, because all the same cuts are taken out. And if everything were balanced, CPM and CPC would be the same price at the end. Holes get plugged. If advertisers discover that CPM is cheaper through a system, a bunch will move in that direction, which will cause the CPC ROI to increase and send advertisers in that direction. An endless cycle that results in a net balance.

The more people involved in an advertising system, the less room for runaway profits. New systems like AdBrite and Bidvertiser offer better CPC payouts compared to Adwords. I have tested them. But they are still in their wild west phase. Advertisers overspending in a system they are just learning. Not enough sites in the system to have real variety, so all the advertisers are bidding on the same limited amount of sites. These programs will either level out or fade away.

And Optimizers

Oh, my God. They had to take the cuts one step further. There are currently a few sites in beta that optimize your CPC ads for you, testing and running the most profitable ones. They are free in beta. But soon they will be taking their cut, about the 400th cut in that money line. Yes, they optimize your ads so you make more money and if you already make a lot from CPC it’s worth it. But if you have 100 subscribers, don’t bother.

And Masqueraders

There are few widget ads companies out there. I am not sure of their actual inner workings. I am planning a WordPress plugin and system that will take them out of the equation for bloggers who want to get their hands dirty. People are getting paid 30 cents a click on hard product ads. Better than Google, but not even close to the average 10% commission you can get from a sale.

Wild Cards

Paid reviews and text link ads are a different animal.

Text link ads have more value than just for advertising. They can actually improve rankings in search engines for the advertiser. Currently I think a lot of these are underpriced due to the "Google is going to find out" scare. And this is a game to be played by experts, not that I am at text link ads. I am just learning this one myself.

With paid reviews, you are also walking a fine line with Google also. And depending on who you go through, the cuts that everyone takes varies. But with newer sites, the promotion value of being in a system outweighs the cut.

When you are up to the "guru" stage, like John Chow, you really don’t need a program to go through. When the price for one post starts hitting the hundreds, you are not only getting paid to get the word out about something, you are getting paid because "you" got the word out about something.

If you can sway a lot of people and your word is trusted, there is a little slop. Yes, the person getting paid millions of dollars to plug basketball shoes can get a whole bunch of people to buy, but does it have anything to do with the shoes or the words he is saying. How much would the average no-name actor get paid?

That has to be a nice place to be though.

Follow the Money Trail

Like I said, that’s basically all you have to do. See who gets paid every step of the way and it doesn’t matter what the commission is, you will know when you are running around in a gerbil wheel for peanuts.

I couldn’t resist the "Oh, My". Sorry about that.

I want to write more reviews here. The issue right now seems to be that I’m a cheapskate. But a weird kind of cheapskate. I have spent anywhere from $2000 to $4000 a month in the last year on Adwords. I only recently started investigating ads of the text link variety, but I had to keep it under a budget of $50. See what I mean by weird. Next month I am kicking it up a notch though. Well, I’m seeing the results from those ads and I’m really not afraid of Google finding out when it comes down to it. If you only knew what  has available…, but I am sworn to secrecy. You have to sign up and buy regular text ads first. But you can get $100 off your first purchase of over $120 worth of text link ads. And there will be a review, but I am not quite sure how to it yet, with all the secrecy.

Ok, back to the title. Seth Godin wrote a book a while back called "Unleashing the Idea Virus". You may have heard of it and if haven’t yet, wake up. He spoke of trusted sneezers and promiscuous sneezers. I hope to be a trusted sneezer. That’s why I have totally dumped the idea of any pay-per-post type monetization. It just won’t work for me. That is the ultimate example of a promiscuous sneezer. Pay me and I will sneeze for you.

Last month, I made about $50 in commissions from Zen to Done. I purchased the book. I read the book. I use the book. I don’t tell you to buy everything under the sun, because I do this on a shoestring, other that the Adwords. It would be wrong of me to recommend things that I have not used. And that is trusted sneezing. If you have read my posts for a while, you know if I find something free and something you have to pay for and they both do the same thing, I will recommend the free one. And it doesn’t matter what the commission is.

But I don’t buy many things until I need them. When I met my wife, my entertainment center was an iguana cage that I put a towel over. It worked, damn it. To me, need has a definite definition. You need air, food, sleep, water and really when it comes down to it, you don’t need shelter if you live in the right place. No, I’m joking, sort of.

But when it comes to product reviews, this becomes an issue. I need to pry open my wallet.

I do make money from affiliate marketing, but take an SEO approach currently. I write articles but not reviews. Then I match articles to products. This is on my other sites. So it’s more of a passive approach.

I started to question whether paid ads or banners creates the impression of promiscuous sneezing. But I will try it for a while. I have checked the income reports of a lot of blogs and affiliate sales and private ad sales top the list. I haven’t had a single sale I can track to a banner here. Clicks, but not a sale. I have to figure this is because there are a lot of bigger bloggers using the same banners. The chances that someone coming here read one of those bloggers and saw the ads there is pretty high. So putting up the same 125X125 ads that everyone else has might be just a waste of blog space.

But with Scratchback and Project Wonderful, I do have the option to be paid upfront and approve or unapprove at will. I will see how that goes. And the next traffic update will be an income update also. Not much income, but I think I am close to a breakthrough here.

Who are your trusted sneezers? Who do you think sneezes too much to trust all the time? I can name a few, including one big one. Does Agloco ring any bells?

I never heard of Zanox until they released to the press that they had changed their website to add more information to help beginners on their way with affiliate marketing. It seems that the amount of affiliate networks have increased exponentially since I first become involved in affiliate marketing and there is just not enough time to even hear about all of them.

The biggest change in their site is the addition of video tutorials for both beginners and professionals. The beginner videos cover the basics of affiliate marketing such as setting up an online store and recommending products to their visitors. The professional video’s are more in depth, covering SEM, building portals, email marketing, and incentivized offers. Zanox has also opened up their video system to their vendors, allowing them to reach affiliates with their communications.

I have to admit that sign up took a while. Zanox wants detailed information on your website before you can even get to the point you can browse the offers. You will have to choose categories for you website, add a description, and list all the methods you will use to promote products.

When I finally saw the offers, I was a little disappointed, expecting something close to Commission Junction with hundreds or even thousands of vendors. There is only about 40 available to me currently. Their homepage claimed over 2000 advertisers. Maybe I am only seeing a few because of the site categories I chose or because I have not yet made a sale. Or maybe most of the programs are only available in other countries. Zanox is worldwide, even in China. But I realized that some of the vendors in my list are not available anywhere else:

• YesAsia.com – For all asian video aficionados.
• Swarovski – Crystal
• ZoneAlarm – Computer Security
• A lot of mobile content providers – At least 10
• Bidz – A jewelry retailer
• Four or Five European airlines

So it is worth taking a look at. For beginners, they have what is called shop@us which allows you to set up your own shopping portal of all the products Zanox vendors have to offer. They also have a software development kit fot you techy types. Another feature is Adserver which allow you to create specific ad sizes that will rotate all of your offers. There is much more here than one post can cover. Zanox is definitely worth a look.