Great Money Making Links

This is Part 8 in our series “How To Make Money From Your Blog”. For some further reading on how to make money from your blog, there are some great resources out there. Try these three links and let me know what you think. There are still a couple of parts of our series to go, so keep reading!

http://www.stevepavlina.com/

http://www.masternewmedia.org/

http://www.problogger.net/

PageRank and AlexaRank

This is Part 7 in our series “How To Make Money From Your Blog”.

Google PageRank and AlexaRank are two ways of measuring the popularity of your website.

PageRank

PageRank is what enabled Google to become the #1 search engine and be thrust into the limelight. In essence, each website is ranked on a scale of 0 to 10 based on a certain number of factors, mainly how important the sites are that are linked to that site. Google says:

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important”.

Simply, the higher the PageRank of your site, the more incoming links you have from higher ranked (relevant) websites (with useful keywords), and the “better” your site is performing. However PageRank is only updated about once every three monts, so is often an unreliable method.

For a more technical explanation of how it works, try Wikipedia and an overview from Entrepreneurs-Journey.

AlexaRank

Alexa is a website that, among other things, tries to measure the amount of traffic a site receives by gathering data from the Alexa toolbar that a lot of people have installed. It’s a combined measure of the reach of a website (number of users) and page views.

Entrepreneurs-Journey does a great job of explaining AlexaRank.

SearchStatus Firefox Extension

SearchStatus is an extension for Firefox (and Mozilla) that provides useful information about the site you’re visiting and your own sites:

For every site you visit using, SearchStatus lets you view its Google PageRank, Google Category, Alexa popularity ranking, Alexa incoming links, Alexa related links and backward links from Google, Yahoo! and MSN. This combined search-related information means you can view not only the link importance of a site (according to Google), but also its traffic importance (according to Alexa), so providing a balanced view of site efficacy.

The two little ranking bars (above) provide a snapshot of a site’s importance, but with dubious accuracy (the toolbar is accurate, whether PageRank and AlexaRank are is a different matter). Much more information can be gathered using the context menu (below), with backward links always being interesting.

Overall, whilst these tools are useful and interesting, they shouldn’t be taken as gospel. Your own server stats are usually much more interesting especially in conjunction with an analytics package (such as the free Google Analytics).

How To Test The Effectiveness of Your Adverts

This is Part 6 in our series “How To Make Money From Your Blog”.

You may be earning very little from your chosen advertising solution. You’ve experimented with different layouts and designs, yet it can sometimes be difficult to tell what is the best design and type of ad for your blog. There are a couple of similar ways of addressing this.

Use Mulitple Palettes

Web Ads Blog talks about a way to reduce ad blindness, that is people getting used to your ads and therefore ignoring them.

1. Log in to your account at https://www.google.com/adsense
2. Click the AdSense Setup tab and choose AdSense for content as the product
3. Choose an Ad type and format.
4. In the Colors drop-down box, click “Use multiple palettes”, then select up to 4 color palettes by holding down the Control or Command key
5. Copy-and-paste the AdSense Ad code into web pages

This will only change the colour of the same ad type, to test different types of advert, use A/B testing.

A/B Testing

A/B testing is simply testing the performance of ad A versus the performance of ad B. You need to set up the two different types of advert (ad units) you want, on two different channels. Then simply use a piece of javascript to randomly display either one or the other. You can then measure the performance of both of them. Google themselves provide the code:

<script type=”text/javascript”>
    var random_number = Math.random();
    if (random_number < .5){
        //your first ad unit code goes here
    } else {
        //your second ad unit code goes here
    }
</script>
<script type=”text/javascript”     src=”http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js”></script>

Good luck!

Make Money from your Videos

UPDATE: The updated guide can be found here.

This is Part 5 in our series “How To Make Money From Your Blog”.
Previously we have talked about video being the future of online and how revenue sharing could make you money. So why not combine the two?

YouTube may be the most popular video sharing site, but is it the best? Our series of posts looking at video sharing sites, is now available in a free eBook that us only available via our RSS feed. A quick summary matrix can also be found here. Take a look, see the column called Revenue Sharing? That tells you how you can make money from you videos.

Some of the test videos made me money

In the course of looking at 26 different video sharing sites, I noticed this interesting trend. I hadn’t meant for it to happen, but I made a little money. The way the sites do this vary. Revver embed an advert at the end of the video, take a look below (I only make more money if you click on the ad, that’s not why I’m showing it to you!), it’s only 13 seconds long.

If someone clicks on the advert, they split the revenue 50/50 with the content owner (i.e. you). You do not get paid per number of views. Some sites do, such as Producer Rewards from Metacafe, though you have to pass a review and have a minimum rating. Other sites give you a share of any Google Adsense revenue they earn on the page your video is shown on.

AdBrite have launched a new free video player that (when released) allows you to brand your videos and allows others to embed on their site, creating further revenue for you. You can sign up here.

So if you’re planning on using video on your blog, then why not earn a little extra?

Get Paid To Write Reviews

This is Part 4 in our series “How To Make Money From Your Blog”.

There are two ways to get paid for blogging, one is to write for someone else. However if you want to get paid for writing on your own blog there are currently three methods of doing it.

LoudLaunch

LoudLaunch is the newest entrant into the paid blogging market, and is paying us for this post.

How it works:
Publishers select which campaigns they wish to write on and issue what they call “a Micro Press Release” on their blog. It allows bloggers to be paid for helping advertisers distribute their press releases or whatever news they wish to share.
For example, LoudLaunch wishes to get news of their new site out and so have placed an offer that suitable blogs can accept. The type of blog that can accept is restricted to which category the blog is located in and whether that matches the category of blog the advertiser wishes to attract. The price paid for a review depends on their review of your blog and some undisclosed metrics. [Read more]

Sources Of Advertising Revenues

This is Part 3 in our series “How To Make Money From Your Blog”. Google Adsense and Yahoo Publisher adverts are fine, however it’s always best not to depend on just one source for your advertising revenue.

Text Link Ads

Google Adsense and Yahoo income depends on the number of clicks you receive on the adverts.
For the security of income no matter how many clicks, try Text Link Ads (aff). The system automatically rates and ranks your blog and sets the price at which your links can be sold at. Text Link Ads receive a 50% share of each link you sell. It is up to the publisher to track how many visitors they receive from your site, you will receive a flat payment for however long they decide to advertise on your site. You can choose where and how to display the adverts, and links are added and removed automatically from a small script installed on your site (or a Wordpress plugin). It’s worth signing up and measuring their benefit compared to other sources of income.

If you wish to buy links on other sites here is a link for $100 in FREE Links, or why not buy a link on Life Goggles?!

AdBrite

AdBrite (aff) is an advertising network that displays text links in a similar fashion to Google. However it is non-contextual and as well as displaying general network ads allows advertisers to buy spots on your site, in “ad zones” that you can set up. [Read more]

How to use Google Adsense

This is Part 2 in our series “How To Make Money From Your Blog”.
A great first step into the world of monetizing your blog is Google Adsense. Adsense is a system where you can embed pay-per-click (PPC) adverts on your website, such as the one in the post below. If someone clicks on an advert on your site, you receive a part of the payment the site has paid Google for placing an ad. Google receive the rest. These adverts are contextual, that means they differ depending on the content of your website, so if you blog about cars for example, the adverts displayed will also probably be related to cars.

The adverts can be customised in terms of size, location, colour, and whether it should be text, images or video, all through the Google Adsense online menu. You can even filter out competitor websites that might inadvertently appear on your blog. [Read more]

« Previous Page — Next Page »