review plugin for wordpress
Oct 26

3 ways to monetize your blog without banners

Blogs, Doodling, Fire and Forget, Heavy construction, Internet Marketing, Mind over Pixels, Moniez, Noobs, RGBhat, Techniques, mAdsense 7 Comments »

Every blogger reaches that dilemma at some point. Do I whore out my site for extra cash, or do I leave it pretty and bannerless and making a hole in my timeline with no benefits?

For affiliates I believe, the choice is much easier. Most of us are in it for the money, so it’s weird for us to see a site without at least an ad. 

Hobbie bloggers/webmasters though, the ones that actually made the internet what it is today, reach that intersection at some point, and hate the idea of flashy ads all over their pretty little snowflake.

Well, I am here today to suggest something radically different. 3 bannerless ways to monetize your blog, here it goes:

What are they? They are automatically selected keywords in your site’s content, which have a double green underline. When the visitor moves the mouse over the link, a banner pops up from it. The banner is discreet, and mostly relevant to the keyword. 

If the mouse is somewhere else, the ads are nowhere to be seen.

I have never seen this technique in any other site, I may even be the only one that uses it. Honestly, I have found this technique working so well, that I just drop the code in every site I make, be it normal or sploggy. A simple, clever, practical fire and forget method, just the way I like it!

How do you make it? Simple.

  1. Signup for AdBrite if you are not already.
  2. Create a new zone. 
  3. Put your site’s info.
  4. Uncheck the other boxes, leave only the inline ads checked.
  5. They give you a small piece of code, and you simply put it between the body tags of your template.
  6. Voila, you are done.

Practically, the links get clicked a lot despite them having small bids. The layout of your site remains untouched and pretty. And you still get some revenue. The inline ads I believe are much better than banners.

Amazon has a similar trick in their program, and I have tried that as well. My opinion is that Amazon’s script is much heavier, producing larger page load times. Also, it does not seem to convert that well, and with AdBrite you get paid per click.

What is that? It’s a very clever business model actually… Basically, SpeakToMe provides a service to you, through which you can give personal, one-on-one consultation, paid by the minute.

It really needs some explaining to understand it because it is so revolutionary. The idea itself is old, it is the same as those phone lines, where the caller is charged by the minute, and the receiver helps him, and gets paid his cut. 

Well, take that tried and tested business model, and put it online.

You have your online presence, your reputation, your audience, your writings etc. And people contact you all the time, asking for your advice and help. 

Well, now you can do the same, while getting paid as a consultant. If your advice is as good as you think it is, you will actually be doing your clients a favor, by giving them a cheap, easily accessible way to rent your time. And since you are getting paid for it, you will be more focused in actually giving them good advice so that you show you are worth their time and money.

On a more practical note, the SpeakToMe service basically gives you a widget that you can easily integrate to your website, for example a page named “Speak to me now”. The installation itself is a simple copy paste after you have signed up. Another benefit is that payment is accepted inside your website, so the visitor never leaves your site.

Do you want to see a demo? You can nag the creator of this service right now! SpeakToMe expert widget demo.

The service is free to signup, easy to use, and they even give a guarantee of 50$ for the first 1000 visitors. Now that is confidence.

SpeakToMe’s cut is 20%, leaving you the remaining 80%. I find it a rather logical percentage for a service. Not much to discuss on that issue.

To avoid any misconceptions on the charges of this service, here is the exact page from their signup page:

SpeakToMe’s service charge
Broadcasting on the Internet to an unlimited audience is expensive. Accordingly, SpeakToMe charges a service fee to experts of 1.5 pennies per minute. 10 hours broadcasting time, in other words, will cost you $9 in future fees generated.

Credit card processing fees of 6%
Client accounts are funded through credit cards, and we pay a 6% processing fee for this service. This 6% is charged to your gross revenues.

SpeakToMe takes a 10% cut of revenues
In addition to the credit card processing fee of 6% and the $0.015 per minute service charge, SpeakToMe takes a cut of 10% of gross revenues. The remainder (over 80% of gross) is paid to the expert. 

If you are an expert on a niche, and your audience would be glad to pay a small amount in exchange for your one-on-one consultation, it is worth at least considering this business plan. It does not fit all businesses, but it can work wonders on others, and remember that the offline version is tried and proven to work amazingly well.

The most discreet way to monetize a blog. TLA needs no introduction, you see their banners all over the blogosphere. I have mentioned this again, but it fits this “bannerless blog” issue as well.

Text link ads can pay as much and even more than banners. The added benefit is that the income is stable, even if you get a sudden traffic drop, the link is still there. Of course, if you do not provide a valuable link spot to the advertisers for a long time you will lose them as well, but there is a much larger time buffer than ppc banners for you to react.

TLA has recently opened their “secret” inlinks marketplace to the public, and in summary, they are now selling like hotcakes for 7$ a pop.

Inlinks are simply handpicked keywords from advertisers, like “texas holdem” or “seo services” for example, that are linked automatically from the TLA plugin to his site.

The links are normal, like any other link on your site, and they are as discreet as it gets.

Of course, you can still review the links and deny any dirty ones, though the ones I have are all quite clean up to now.

So, here they are, 3 ways to monetize your website without any banners whatsoever. Go. Create.

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written by Glowleaf \\ tags: , , , , , , ,

Oct 20

TLA vs TNX, Round 2: Fight!

Fire and Forget, Inorganic agriculture, Internet Marketing 2 Comments »

This an addon post to my previous TLA vs TNX preview. Since people liked it so much, I thought I would give some more information on the matter.

Two things have changed since the time of the first review’s writing:

  • TLA has opened their previously “secret” inlinks marketplace to the public.

This move has significantly increased their marketplace, and also decreased the average link price. Buyers can now find the anchor text they want, on old, linked, PR posts, and pay a logical price like 7-9$, rather than the ridiculous 300$ older links.

For my sites, the old inlinks had not wielded a single sale, whereas now, they are selling like hotcakes. I have an average of 1 inlinks sale per week, and those are cumulative, meaning that I expect to reach 100$ passive income in 3 months from the inlinks alone. Not bad, for doing absolutely nothing.

  • TNX has perfomed beyond expectations, selling links steadily. Also, they increased their buyout price.

They have been selling links all this time, without falter, filling up close to 85% of my inventory. Also, they increased their point buyout price by 0.03$, to 0.93$ per 1000 points. It may not seem much, but it adds up. 

Honestly, when I read that they would increase their point buyout price over time, I thought they were lying. Guess I was wrong.

You can also sell points to other users, by checking the first option in “Sell tnx points” page. But I fail to see the use in that. If I wanted to barter all day for selling points, I would sell the links on digitalpoint in the first place. 

Also, a thing I did not mention in the last post, is that the TNX forum has plenty of information about tech issues in various CMSes etc. Personally I had no use for any of that, but it’s there, and it deserves to be noted.

Something that I am writing with caution, is that I am fairly certain TNX has sold 5 links on some of my pages. Their system claims the max is 4. Either this is true, or the code is messing up with my caching plugin. EDIT: I am an idiot. Ignore this.

A little hint if you are buying TNX links, is to ignore their advice to put text around your link. I have seen the high PR buyers put only 1-2 words, just the anchor text, so that may be a nudge in the right direction. Plus the text thingie really screws up the formatting, making it impossible for a publisher to make them look good. They should at least make it standardized, like an xml feed.

All the other points remain the same, TLA is still a pain in the ass to register all your sites, and their other links are still too expensive to ever actually sell. But their inlinks move has changed the scene, because it shows actual constant link sales. The move really put them back on the market.

So, now its a close match. Which one is better, remains to be seen in Round 3. I suggest that you use them both though, they are slightly different in the application.

And somebody tell that idiot who owns tnx.com that he could earn thousands by putting up a single referral link. The waste just tears my heart in two.

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written by Glowleaf \\ tags: , , , ,

Sep 14

TLA vs TNX

Fire and Forget, Inorganic agriculture, Internet Marketing 12 Comments »

Here is a practical post for a change, I am going to review the link selling and buying service, TNX.net

Honestly, I found the service much better than I expected. I used TLA, and their method of registering pages is a pain in the ass if you have many websites. Also, despite their prices being high, its been months and they sold  only 2 links for me.

On the flipside, TNX truly underpromises and overdelivers. They say they review your website in 3 days, I got reviewed in 24 hours, even less. They say they need 3 days to send your payment, I got it 2 hours later.

The code is truly a simple copy and paste, except if you wanna reduce the loading times by using their other methods (which you should, but the basic installation is noob friendly, and deserves to be noted).

A thing that pisses me off (as well as many other people) is the point system. They have really cheap links, a PR 0 earns you 4,5 tnx points in the travel niche, which is 0,00405$. Personally, I would have no problem at all not having that point system, it would save my twisted mind from the unwilling automatic calculations.

Despite that, they really do sell links, and fast. As I mentioned, its been months for TLA to sell a link for me, whereas TNX started selling only a week after approval. I admit that my sites are not the kind that every link buyer craves for, like a PR 7 poker site, but they are decent, and they simply don’t sell on TLA. I got all the options on, feedvertising, individual blog post and all that crap, but I believe they are simply too expensive. I prefer services that focus on doing what they do, rather than providing a list of other flashy options and neglecting their primary purpose. And that is exactly what TNX does. It just sells links.

I throwed at them quite a large inventory, we are talking more than 50.000 pages in total, with all kinds of PR and linkjuice, and on various categories, even various languages. Higher PR pages sell very fast, and over time, they fill up most of your inventory. Remember to click to increase the links to 4, its a permanent setting, under site options, for each site.

The payoff seems low, but I honestly don’t believe that it is. If I separate the quality part of my inventory, and compare it to TLA, here is the data:

  • TLA was a pain in the ass to register all my sites
  • TLA sold 2 links, for 18$, from which I get 50%. 9$/month
  • TLA took 4 months to sell those 2 links
  • TLA paid me those measly 9 bucks, at the first of each month
  • TNX was a simple copy paste (I tweaked it later, but the basic process takes 2 mins and most will not bother with it ever again)
  • TNX sold 4300 links, for 140$, from which I get 87,5%. 122,5$/month
  • TNX took 3 weeks to sell those 4300 links
  • TNX paid me those, still measly but much better, 120 bucks the next day that I requested them.

The conclusion practically draws itself here.

TNX is an easy, fire and forget method of monetizing your websites. I admit the link formatting is crap, they let you put a few text characters before and after the link, which messes things up. 

How much will you earn? I have no idea, they have a site calculator, check that out. But, the sure thing is that you will sell at least half your available links, which makes them quite reliable. You have to agree, having TLA price your link for 400$ per month means shit if it never actually sells. It only serves for epeen purposes. I believe that it’s possible though to sell 20.000 links in TNX for 400$.

Also, you can buy links from the marketplace. I have not really tested that thoroughly, I just made some cheap campaigns to play around. I was surprised to see a traffic jump though. Getting targetted traffic and an seo benefit at the same time, from 1000 links for only 17$ per month, well, lets just say its good to have that option. I don’t have the campaign running long enough to affect my rankings to weigh the seo benefit, but there is a traffic boost.

And somebody please tell them that “thanks” is written “THX”. Yeah, I know, its a loud trademark.

Here is my shameless animated banner with a chick on the beach sipping a cocktail:

Sell links on every page of your site to thousands of advertisers!

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written by Glowleaf \\ tags: , , , , ,

Sep 09

Eggs, cookies, passive income and html

Inorganic agriculture, Moniez No Comments »

You need to understand something very basic in affiliate marketing. 

You don’t make all your money from one source/program/offer/site.

It’s common sense, but I see people every time whining that they don’t make enough from adsense, or from their parked domain portfolio, or from a ppc campaign etc.

Not only that bolded text above is true, doing the opposite is a dumb thing. Like the saying “don’t put all your eggs in one basket”, you cannot rely on a single monetizing avenue.

Instead, create many smaller income streams. Not only is this safer, its also the way you can actually make some money from internet marketing.

Do you think that 1000$/month passive income is something impossible for you? Think again. Lets discuss how you can create revenue streams of 100$/month each, adding up to 1000$. This is more of a checklist, but you can learn something I hope.

Do you have a profitable and stable ppc campaign that brings in 100$/month? Cool, Leave it as is, work on something else. Trust me, its not worth tweaking it for hours to squeeze in another 5$. That is, of course, after you have actually optimized the campaign. Bidding on low competition keywords sending traffic to an offer that converts normally, is an easy thing to do. Just monitor the campaign, tweak it so its profitable, and as soon as the profit hits a certain stability, leave it alone.

Do you have 5-10 referrals to networks that bring you 50-100$/month? No? What are you waiting for? Practically every network has referral links. I am sure you browse through fora. There are people there asking all the time, where can I find this, which is the best network for that etc. Give some good advice, and send him your referral link via pm politely. If he wants to, he will sign up under you. If not, no big deal. Find others.

Maybe a bunch of splogs? How do you monetize them? Just ppc ads? How about cookie stuffing them? Or selling links on them?

Any single splog can easily make 10$/month from ppc alone, and that is the bare minimum. So lets say we already have 10 splogs, with ppc ads on them, each making 10$. Throw text links on them, and you get another 5$ from each. Cookie stuffing? It depends on the niche, but you can easily get another 5$ stuffing ebay, on practically any niche.

Total up to now is 400$/month.

Lets dabble in domaining for a while. Browse through the moniker and sedo marketplace, and find domains that cost 50$, and have revenue. You can find deals that give you 30-50% ROI. Yes, that is small time investing. Sometimes you can find steals that yield in 100% or 200% ROI.

Or just scour for misstypes and opportunities to buy brand new domains, and park them. Invest what money you can spare, at least 200$, and try to find some gems among the trash. At first, you need to be very picky, because your budget is small. Later, when your portfolio rakes in enough, you will afford to be more risky.

A great way to find misstypes is to go to Alexa, check the top 100 sites by country, note down all the non trademark ones, and try to find misstypes for them.

There is no formula here, but you can easily invest in domains that bring you 100$/month through parking with a small capital and half a brain.

So, we are at a total of 500$/month. This is it, we are done.

“Oh, no, you said 1000$, this is half of what you promised!”

Seriously. No, seriously, what the fuck prevents you from going all over the list again from the top? What?

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written by Glowleaf \\ tags: , , , , ,