Make Money Online How - Adxem.com » Aweber

How to Jazz Up Your Affiliate Program

Luu — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 14:07:00 +0000

Breathing new life into your affiliate program may be easier than you think. Some affiliate marketers use the simplest tools. The most successful ones go way beyond basic online advertising. Learn to give your visitors longer, more descriptive pre-sales text in addition to good graphics. Revamp your affiliate advertising using these simple steps:

Pull the Reader In

To convince your audience that your text is worth reading, make your first sentence or two very interesting. Make a bold statement, say something seemingly ridiculous, or appeal to your prospect’s emotional side. Then, tie this grabber in with the rest of your copy.

Introduce the Product

What is the product you’re advertising? What does it do? Directly after your grabber, give a compact explanation of your product. Keep this explanation short, while still being very clear. This should still be a very short section of your text.

Explain the Product’s Significance

What will it do for me? By writing your own copy, you can directly target your unique audience. Make the most of this opportunity! Clearly explain how your readers will benefit from this product.

No one knows your audience like you do. Suggest a variety of product uses just for them, and give examples. This is the time for details – make this section long and rich.

Tell the Reader to Make a Purchase

You’ve come so far – you’ve laid out exactly what the product is and how it will help your unique audience. Now, seal the deal – tell your readers to purchase the product! Include your affiliate link in this section.

This step may sound strange, but it’s necessary. Often, people hear about a product and are genuinely interested, but fail to actually make a purchase. A clear call to a simple action cuts down on buyer ambivalence. Don’t be pushy – just change your verb tenses to the imperative. Instead of:

“If you think that you fit this profile, you might want to think about buying this product.”

Say: “Click here to order an account today.”

Drive Sales – Use Long Copy

If you don’t feel ready to write long copy yourself, ask your affiliate program manager for help! Many companies release well-written articles by respected authors that you can reprint free of charge.

The novelty of the Web is wearing off. People online now are busy. Surfers won’t make a purchase unless you make a great case for what they’ll get out of it. And you’re not going to do that with just a banner ad.

About the Author
Beka Ruse fights spam as the Business Development Manager at AWeber Communications. Ad tracking, live stats, and a strict anti-spam policy. Automated E-Mail Follow Up From AWeber.

28 Ways to Make Money with Your Website

Luu — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 13:13:43 +0000

By Daily Blog Tips

There are several lists with “ways to make money with a website” on the Internet, but none of them seem to be complete. That is why I decided to create this one. If you know a method that is not listed below, just let us know and we’ll update it.

Notice that ways to make money with a website are different from ways to make more money from it. Methods to increase your traffic or click-through rate will help you make more money, but they do not represent a method of making money per se.

For example, one could suggest that blending AdSense ads with the content is a way to make money from a website. In reality it’s not; it’s just a way to make more money by improving your ad click-through rate. The real monetization method behind it is a PPC ad network.

The list is divided into direct and indirect methods, and examples and links are provided for each point. Enjoy!

Direct Methods

1. PPC Advertising Networks

Google AdSense is the most popular option under this category, but there are also others. Basically you need to sign up with the network and paste some code snippets on your website. The network will then serve contextual ads (either text or images) relevant to your website, and you will earn a certain amount of money for every click.

The profitability of PPC advertising depends on the general traffic levels of the website and, most importantly, on the click-through rate (CTR) and cost per click (CPC). The CTR depends on the design of the website. Ads placed abode the fold or blended with content, for instance, tend to get higher CTRs. The CPC, on the other hand, depends on the nice of the website. Mortgages, financial products and college education are examples of profitable niches (clicks worth a couple of dollars are not rare), while tech-related topics tend to receive a smaller CPC (sometimes as low as a couple of cents per click).

The source of the traffic can also affect the overall CTR rate. Organic traffic (the one that comes from search engines) tends to perform well because these visitors were already looking for something, and they tend to click on ads more often. Social media traffic, on the other hand, presents terribly low CTRs because these visitors are tech-savvy and they just ignore ads.

List of popular CPC advertising networks:

2. CPM Advertising Networks

CPM advertising networks behave pretty much as PPC networks, except that you get paid according to the number of impressions (i.e., page views) that the ads displayed on your site will generate. CPM stands for Cost per Mille, and it refers to the cost for 1,000 impressions.

A blog that generates 100,000 page views monthly displaying an advertising banner with a $1 CPM, therefore, will earn $100 monthly.

CPM rates vary with the network, the position of the ad and the format. The better the network, the higher the CPM rate (because they have access to more advertisers). The closer you put the ad to the top of the page, the higher the CPM. The bigger the format (in terms of pixels), the higher the CPM.

You can get as low as $0,10 and as high as $10 per 1,000 impressions (more in some special cases). CPM advertising tends to work well on websites with a high page views per visitor ratio (e.g., online forums, magazines and so on).

List of popular CPM advertising networks:

3. Direct Banner Advertising

Selling your own advertising space is one of the most lucrative monetization methods. First and foremost because it enables you to cut out the middleman commissions and to determine your own rates. The most popular banner formats on the web are the 728×90 leaderboard, the 120×600 skyscraper, the 300×250 rectangle and the 125×125 button.

The downside of direct banner advertising is that you need to have a big audience to get qualified advertisers, and you will need to spend time managing the sales process, the banners and the payments.

Related links:

4. Text Link Ads

After Google declared that sites selling text links without the nofollow tag would be penalized, this monetization method became less popular.

Many website owners are still using text links to monetize their sites, though, some using the nofollow tag and some not.

The advantage of this method is that it is not intrusive. One can sell text links directly through his website or use specialized networks like Text-Link-Ads and Text-Link-Brokers to automate the process.

Text link marketplaces and networks:

5. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a very popular practice on the Internet. Under this system you have a merchant that is willing to let other people (the affiliates) sell directly or indirectly its products and services, in exchange for a commission. Sometimes this type of advertising is also called CPA (cost per action) or CPL (cost per lead) based.

Affiliates can send potential customers to the merchant using several tools, from banners to text links and product reviews.

In order to find suitable affiliate programs you can turn to individual companies and publishers like Dreamhost and SEOBook, or join affiliate marketplaces and networks.

List of popular affiliate marketplaces and networks:

6. Monetization Widgets

The latest trend on the web are widgets that let you monetize your website. Examples include Widgetbucks and SmartLinks. Some of these services operate under a PPC scheme, others behave like text link ads, others yet leverage affiliate links.

Their main differentiator, however, is the fact that they work as web widgets, making it easier for the user to plug and play the service on its website.

List of companies that provide monetization widgets:

7. Sponsored Reviews

PayPerPost pioneered this model, with much controversy on the beginning (related to the fact that they did not require disclosure on paid posts). Soon other companies followed, most notably Sponsored Reviews and ReviewMe, refining the process and expanding the paid blogging model.

Joining one of these sponsored reviews marketplaces will give you the opportunity to write sponsored posts on a wide range of topics. Not all bloggers are willing to get paid to write about a specific product or website (because it might compromise the editorial credibility), but the ones who do are making good money out of it.

If your blog has a big audience you could also offer sponsored reviews directly, cutting off the commissions of the middleman.

List of sponsored reviews and paid blogging networks:

8. RSS Feed Ads

With the quick adoption of the RSS technology by millions of Internet users, website owners are starting to find ways to monetize this new content distribution channel.

Feedburber already has its own publisher network, and you can sign-up to start displaying CPM based advertising on your feed footer. Bidvertiser recently introduced a RSS feed ad option as well, with a PPC scheme.

Finally, some blogs are also opting to sell banners or sponsored messages on their feed directly. John Chow and Marketing Pilgrim are two examples.

Related links:

9. Sponsors for Single Columns or Events

If you website has specific columns or events (e.g., a weekly podcast, an interview series, a monthly survey, a special project) you could find companies to sponsor them individually.

This method increases the monetization options for website owner, while giving advertisers the possibility to target a more specific audience and with a reduced commitment.

Mashable illustrates the case well. They have several advertising options on the site, including the possibility to sponsor specific columns and articles, including the “Daily Poll” and the “Web 2.0 Invites.”

Problogger also runs group writing projects occasionally, and before proceeding he publicly announce the project asking for sponsors.

10.Premium Content

Some websites and blogs give away part of their content for free, and charge for access to the premium content and exclusive tools.

SEOMoz is a good example. They have a very popular blog that gives advice and information on wide range of SEO related topics. On top of that visitors can decide to become premium members. It costs $48 monthly and it grants them access to guides, tools and other exclusive material.

11. Private Forums

While the Internet is populated with free forums, there is also the possibility to create a private one where members need to pay a single or recurring fee to join.

SEO Blackhat charges $100 monthly from its members, and they have thousands of them. Obviously in order to charge such a price for a forum membership you need to provide real value for the members (e.g., secret techniques, tools, and so on).

Performancing also launched a private forum recently, focused on the networking aspect. It is called The Hive, and the monthly cost is $10.

These are just two examples. There are many possibilities to create a private and profitable forum, you just need to find an appealing angle that will make it worth for the members.

List of popular forum software:

12. Job Boards

All the popular blogs are trying to leverage job boards to make some extra income. Guy Kawasaki, ReadWriteWeb, Problogger… you name it.

Needless to say that in order to create an active and profitable job board you need first to have a blog focused on a specific niche, and a decent amount traffic.

The advantage of this method is that it is passive. Once you have the structure in place, the job listings will come naturally, and you can charge anywhere from $10 up to $100 for each.

List of popular job board software:

13. Marketplaces

Sitepoint is the online marketplace by excellence. Some websites and blogs, however, are trying to replicate that model on a smaller scale.

Depending on your niche, a market place that allows your visitors to buy, sell and trade products could work well. Over the time you could start charging a small fee for new product listings.

The problem with this method is that there are no standard software on the web, so you would need to hire a coder to get a marketplace integrated into your website.

You can see an example of a marketplaces being used on EasyWordpress and on Mashable.

14. Paid Surveys and Polls

There are services that will pay you money to run a small survey or poll on your website. The most popular one is called Vizu Answers.

Basically you need to sign up with them, and select the kind of polls that you want to run your site. Most of these services operate under a CPM model.

15. Selling or Renting Internal Pages

Million Dollar Wiki made this concept popular, but it was being used on the web for a long time around (check Pagerank10.co.uk for instance).

These websites sell for a single fee or rent for a recurring fee internal pages on their domain. Usually they have either high Pagerak or high traffic, so that people purchasing a page will be able to benefit in some way.

Implementing this method on a small blog would be difficult, but the concept is interesting and could be explored further.

16. Highlighted Posts from Sponsors

Techmeme probably pioneered this idea, but somehow it has not spread to other websites. The tech news aggregator displays editorial posts on the left column, and on the sidebar they have a section titled “Techmeme Sponsor Posts.”

On that section posts from the blog of the advertisers get highlighted, sending qualified traffic their way. Considering that the monthly cost for one spot is $5000 and that they have around 6 sponsors at any given time, it must be working well.

17. Donations

Placing a “Donate” link or button on a website can be an efficient way to earn money, especially if your blog is on a niche where readers learn and gain value from your content.

Personal development and productivity blogs, for instance, tend to perform well with donation based systems (one good example being Steve Pavlina).

A small variation of this method appeared sometime ago with the Buy Me a Beer plugin. This WordPress plugin enables you to insert a customized message at the bottom of each article, asking the readers to chip in for a beer or coffee.

18. In-text Adverting

In-text adverting networks like Kontera and Vibrant Media will place sponsored links inside your text. These links come with a double underline to differentiate them from normal links, and once the user rolls the mouse over the link the advertising will pop. Should the user click on it the site owner will make some money.

Some people make good money with this method, but others refrain from using it due to its intrusiveness. It is also interesting to note that very few mainstream websites have experimented with in-text advertising.

19. Pop-ups and Pop-unders

Pop-ups are a common yet annoying form of advertising on the Internet. If you are just trying to make a much money as possible from your website, you could experiment with them.

If you are trying to grow the traffic and generate loyal visitors, however, you probably should stay away from them. Just consider the hundreds of pop-up blockers out there: there is a reason why they are so popular.

Ad networks that use pop-ups:

20. Audio Ads

Also called PPP (Pay Per Play), this advertising method was introduce by Net Audio Ads. the concept is pretty simple: play a small audio advertising (usually 5 seconds) every time a visitor enters into your website. The user should not be able to stop it, creating a 100% conversion rate based on unique visitors.

The company is still rolling tests, but some users are reporting to get from a $4 to a $6 CPM. Regardless of the pay rate, though, this is a very intrusive form of advertising, so think twice before using it.

21. Selling the Website

Selling your website could be your last resource, but it has the potential to generate a big sum of money in a short period of time.

Market places on online forums like DigitalPoint and Sitepoint are always active with website buyers and sellers. Keep in mind that they most used parameter to determine the value of a website is the monthly revenue that it generates, multiplied by a certain number (the multiplier can be anything from 5 to 30, depending on the expectations of the seller, on the quality of the site, on the niche and other factors).

Some people also make money trading and flipping websites. They either create them from scratch or buy existing ones, and after some revamping they sell them for a profit.

Related links:

Indirect Methods

22. Selling an Ebook

Perhaps one of the oldest money making strategies on the web, using a website to promote a related ebook is a very efficient way to generate revenue.

You could either structure the website around the book itself, like SEOBook.com, or launch the ebook based on the success of the website, like FreelanceSwitch did we the book How to be a Rockstar Freelancer.

Related links:

23. Selling a Hardcover Book

Many authors and journalists leverage their blogs or websites to sell copies of hardcover books. Examples include Guy Kawasaki, Seth Godin and Malcolm Gladwell.

While most of these people were already renowned authors before they created their website, one could also follow the other way around. Lorelle VanFossen did exactly that with her Blogging Tips book. First she built her authority on the subject via her blog, and afterwards she published the book.

List of self publishing and publishing services:

24. Selling Templates or WordPress Themes

As more and more people decide to get an online presence, website templates and WordPress themes become hotter and hotter.

On this segment you have mainstream websites like TemplateMonster, as well as individual designers who decide to promote and sell their work independently.

Brian Gardner and Unique Blog Designs are two examples of websites that make money with the sales of premium and custom WordPress themes.

25. Offering Consulting and Related Services

Depending on your niche, you could make money by offering consulting and related services. If you are also the author of your blog, the articles and information that you will share will build your profile and possibly certify your expertise on that niche, making it easier to gain customers.

Chris Garrett used a similar strategy. First he created a highly influential blog on the blogging and new media niche, and afterwards he started offering consulting services to clients with related problems and needs.

26. Creating an Email List or Newsletter

Email lists and newsletters represent one of the most powerful marketing and money making tools on the Internet. They offer incredible conversion rates, and the possibility to call people to action in a very efficient way.

Creating a big list is a difficult task though, so if you have a popular website you could leverage it to increase the number of subscribers on your list.

Yaro Starak is a famous Internet marketer, and if you visit his blog you will notice that right on top he has a section encouraging visitors to subscribe to his email newsletter. Yaro generates five figures in revenues each month from his email newsletters, proving that this method works.

List of software to manage email newsletters:

27. Mentoring programs

People are willing to pay for someone or something that will teach them and give them knowledge (as opposed to mere information). Education is one of the biggest industries in the world, and the online landscape behaves in a similar way.

Creating a mentoring program related to the niche of your website could be very profitable if you manage to structure and promote it adequately. There is a wide range of media and tools that you can use to deliver the information, from text articles to audio and video lessons.

Brian Clark leveraged the success of Copyblogger to launch a mentoring program teaching people how to build membership and how to sell content online. The program is titled Teaching Sells, and it costs $97 monthly. Sounds expensive, but they have over 1,000 members.

28. Creating a conference around the website

If your website takes off and becomes an authority on its niche, you could create a conference around it. Depending on the size of your audience, the event could attract thousands of people, and you could make money directly from conference passes and sponsors.

Search Engine Land, for instance, created a series of conferences that visit several cities on the United States and on other countries as well. The conferences are called Search Marketing Expo, and the tickets and passes cost thousands of dollars.

About the Author:

Daniel Scocco, Editor: Born in Brazil, Daniel has lived and studied in several places around the world, including Italy, England and Chile. After receiving a degree in International Economics and working for a year within a multinational company, he decided to quit and pursue entrepreneurial projects on the Internet. When he is not blogging or involved with these projects, he likes to write in the third person about himself.

Aweber – one of best email marketing softwares

Luu — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 14:28:42 +0000

Who Is AWeber?

Founded in 1998 to create email marketing software, we help small businesses automate email follow up and newsletter delivery for website visitors.

Our growing 30-person team shares a wealth of experience and knowledge about permission-based email marketing with the over 41,300 current customers we work with daily.

What Format Should I Write Messages In?

Luu — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 14:27:38 +0000

You can create plain text and HTML versions of your messages to send to your subscribers. There are compelling reasons to use either or both. Once you decide which version to use:

For Plain Text Messages:

We recommend creating your plain text messages in Notepad, then copying and pasting them into the plain text section of your message.

For the HTML:

You have several choices:

Use one of our HTML design templates; or

Create your message in our HTML editor by copying/pasting from a text editor or typing directly in it; or

Create your message in an external HTML editor (such as Dreamweaver) then copy and paste that HTML into a message you create in your account

Please do not use Microsoft Word or other word processing programs to create your messages. Copying content from those programs causes formatting issues, as they contain proprietary formatting that will not render properly in an HTML email message.

If you are going to create your message outside of AWeber and then paste it in, use Notepad or another plain text editor that will not insert proprietary formatting.

source: Aweber.com

How Do I Put Links/URLs in Messages?

Luu — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 14:26:46 +0000

You can add links to plain text and HTML messages.

To see how to do so for each type of message, see below.

Plain Text Messages

To add a link to a plain text message, simply enter the full URL:

Be sure to include the http:// part at the beginning.

It won’t look clickable in your account, but when the message is sent most recipients’ email programs will make it clickable for them.

In order for links to be clickable for subscribers using the AOL program (as opposed to AOL webmail), HTML would need to be used.

For instance, if you’d like for this to be clickable:

http://www.aweber.com

… you’ll need to type the following into your plain text message:

http://www.aweber.com

Because the HTML will appear in most other email applications, you’ll want to consider this option only if you have a high concentration of AOL subscribers.

HTML Messages:

To add a link to an HTML message, highlight the text that you want to make clickable by clicking and dragging your mouse over it.

Click the “Insert/Edit a Hyperlink” icon in the HTML editor in the toolbar near the top of the box.

This brings up a popup window:

Type the address where your image is located online into the “Address” box and click “OK.”

source : Aweber.com

How Can I Drive Traffic to My Website?

Luu — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 14:25:03 +0000

In most cases, publishing a sign up form to a web page is the best way to build a list of targeted, responsive subscribers. But if a form is published to a site that no one sees, does it do any good?

Although we would only ever claim to be email experts, we can provide some advice on how to attract traffic to your website based on our own experience.

Publish Quality Content

Of course, you should be sure that you have worthwhile content on your site so that once you have visitors, they have something to see. But did you know that publishing quality content can also help to attract traffic to your site in the first place?

Search Engines Can Send Traffic

Search engines continually crawl web pages and index what they find. So, whatever you have published on your site becomes part of the directory people get results from when they search (e.g. “email marketing”, “restaurant in philadelphia area”, “homeowner tips”, etc.).

Think of search engines as catalogs of most of the information on the web. As long as you’re publishing a unique perspective on a topic, new people should find your website this way.

Publish a Blog

Blogging an easy way to get content onto your site in a highly readable way, and in a way that search engines can easily index the information. There are also blog search engines, such as Technorati, out there that will index your articles and could potentially drive a significant amount of traffic to it.

Syndicate your blog content using our RSS to email feature to help build a base of regular readers.

Don’t have a blog? You can find several blogging solutions, many free, on the web.

Advertise

This one may be obvious, but sometimes the obvious is overlooked. There are many opportunities out there to advertise the content of your website. Before you begin to gain momentum through the other suggestions offered here, spending within your business’ budget for some advertising may be the key to early success.

Search Engine Advertising

Pay Per Click

Examples include: Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and MSN adCenter. Companies like Google have massively grown as a result of search advertising, and for the most part, this would not be true if it wasn’t effective in driving traffic to websites.

By advertising on search engines, you can bid on the advertising space people see when performing searches on what they’re interested in.

Advertising on Websites & Newsletters

Referral / Sponsorship Advertising

Some website owners will install an advertisement block, such as Google AdSense to allow advertisements relevant to the content on their site. By exploring this option, a link to your website will appear on pages the agency you use deems worthwhile, and you’ll pay based either on the number of clicks or impressions (views).

Banner & Skyscraper Ads

These ads are graphical in nature (as opposed to the often plain-text search ads) and appear directly on someone’s website, often via a third-party service like DoubleClick.com.

You can also contact website owners who advertise on their sites to discuss a paid agreement for an exclusive ad on their site.

Offline

There are always the old standby, traditional means of print advertising. At one point, this may have been only marginally effective. But as the online experience continues to become more ubiquitous in the lives of people, your efforts to advertise offline in meaningful ways should translate to the benefit of your website.

Consider advertising on whatever print materials you use, both at your physical location and at materials you use for business promotion (business cards, advertisements, etc.)

Build a Reputation

Some traffic building techniques are highly visible and easily measured. But there’s another that is less so but very important — your reputation. The type of word of mouth advertising that holds true in the realm of offline may even be amplified online.

The main way to build a reputation that helps to drive traffic to your site is as simple as providing a product or service that people find useful. But you can further the cause by putting your name out there where people interested in your industry tend to interact:

Publish blog articles that are easy to link to and share with others, and link to other blogs in your articles whenever possible.

Post highly relevant comments on others’ blogs and in related forums.

Encourage your email subscribers to forward your messages, which should contain a link to a page where the recipients can sign up easily.

But Don’t Do This!

All traffic generation methods were not created equal. Some will help you to build your business for the long run while others pose a high risk to the longevity of your success.

Avoid these traffic generation methods:

Purchased Leads and Traffic. In fact, purchased leads are prohibited from use with our service. All traffic is not created equal either, so inflated numbers of visitors may lead to a deflated conversion rate.

Reproducing others’ content on your website without permission. Link to others’ articles like you would reference in a research paper. But don’t copy their content.

Spamming blogs, forums, or emails with advertisements for your website or email campaign. This will quickly get you into hot water and may make your email marketing campaign permanently ineffective, as ISPs filter your messages to the junk folder.

source: Aweber.com

3 Tips For More Clicks and Website Traffic

Luu — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 14:22:12 +0000

Sometimes our emails are focused on a single goal, aiming the entire message at driving to a specific landing page.

Other times when our purpose is more general, it makes a lot of sense to take a broader approach, aiming to get our subscribers back to nearly *anywhere* on our website. We can let them choose their own adventure from there, hoping they’ll eventually complete a site goal (e.g. ordering, membership sign up, etc.).

For those times, here are 3 techniques that could significantly boost your click through rates back to your website:

Include Some Website Navigation Links

If your site uses a navigation bar, most likely every page of your website contains those links in a predictable place, allowing visitors to select from at least a few things that might catch their interest, so why not experiment with adding them to your email newsletter?

Adding links to the most popular sections of your website in a consistent way across all messages might bring more overall traffic to your site.

As Chris Lovejoy points out, even if the specific topic of your newsletter doesn’t speak to someone, they may be interested in checking out more general (or specific) information section at your website.

Great tip, and definitely worth a split test.

Link More of Your Text

It’s called “the web” for a reason. Most websites aren’t structured hierarchically or in a linear way where a single page leads to just one other page, which leads to another, and so on.

Instead, pages are linked together from one another in a web, where a single page can link to many others, and many others pages can link to a single one.

A single email can link to several pages in this same way.

Hyperlinking Contextual Words and Phrases

The -> Click here < - type of linking strategies have gone out of fashion in favor of more relevant and contextual approaches involving words and phrases found directly within the paragraphs of the content (often strategically placed).

You probably already do this to some extent on your web pages. Have you ever tried this out in your emails with your headings and paragraph text?

Link Your Images to Relevant Web Pages

This tip is like icing on the cake, and because plain text messages are just that — plain-text — it’s an option only available to those of us sending HTML versions of our newsletters.

If you are sending in HTML, take a look the images in your messages. Readers’ eyes are naturally drawn towards them, and often times, so are their mouse pointers.

So, the difference between them seeing a (non hyperlinked) or (hyperlinked) pointer can ultimately make a minor or sometimes a significant difference in the click through rates for your campaigns.

It is especially important to link your logo, which people tend to expect is directed to your homepage, whether its seen on your website or in your email.

source: Aweber.com