Internet Marketing Tips » Make Money

Ways to Make Money Online – The Complete Guide

Shabbir — Sun, 06 May 2012 06:38:07 +0000

My free course deals with ways to making money online but there are many readers who gave me the feedback that they cannot wait for each of those chapters to be delivered and want to know instantly what are the ways to making money online. So let me craft a complete guide to understand ways to make money online. I still recommend my course because each chapter is followed by action item to help you decide the right way to get started.

Blogging
Freelancing
Consulting Services
Affiliate Marketing
Product Creation
Online Auctions
Online Forums
Niche Sites
Membership Sites
Website Flipping

1. Blogging

Everybody is blogging. At the time of writing this article WordPress.com Stats say they host more than 73 million+ blogs.

Blogging is one of the best ways to setting up business online and make money out of it because it leads to multiple source of income. You can use blogging to

Promote your product or services
Get freelancing opportunities
Network with like minded people to promote your products
Make affiliate sales

And the list continues but the ideas of making money from blog is based on the principle of generating value to your blog reader first and then possibly monetize your blog. Blogging is a long-term money making option where you provide values to your blog readers and then monetize your blog but many new bloggers try to monetize blog very early and in the process fail miserably.

Blogger by Google can be wrong choice to getting started with blogging and see why here. If you want to get started to blogging check out my step by step guide to getting started with WordPress

2. Freelancing

Freelancing is one of the most effective ways to make money online. In fact it is one of those few ways to making money online where you can start cashing in from the day one.

August 11, 2010 is when I shared my $10,000 milestone in elance. 20 months from that post this is what my elance account stands at.

Approximately $500 per month doing freelancing through Elance and yet freelancing is not something I am very actively focusing in 2012.

We all have certain skills and expertise. It is about realizing the expertise and then helping people with it and making money out of it. If you think you don’t have those skills that can help you make money online, you can work on developing them. I was more of a C++ programmer in college days and in my job profiles but as of today most of my freelancing income is by optimizing vBulletin for large forums or marketing and traffic generation for websites.

There are several sites to get started with freelancing and the most popular ones are Elance.com, ODesk.com or vWorker.com

3. Consulting Services

In my wildest of dream also I could not imagine myself being a consultant for finance and as of today I also think that I should not be the person to consult on financials because I don’t have formal education and till date I admit that I am not aware of many investment option myself. Yet I see lot of my blog readers asking for my consultation services. It is one of those pages of my blog that is not very actively promoted by me and yet I see so many people asking for my consultation service.

This is yet another way to making money online and it is yet another example of developing your skills. I learned trading in market because I wanted to trade and profit in market. Once I started making profit in market I shared it on my blog transparently and readers could relate their trading losses with mine. Now they want me to be their mentor and teacher. I never thought I would write an eBook on finance and this is the opening line of my eBook as well.

It is very important to build credibility online (See Simple Tips to Build Credibility and Trust). The more trusted you are, it becomes that much more easier for you to offer consulting services online.

4. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing is great way to make money online but when you talk about Affiliate marketing people think it is:- Find a product to promote and then register a keyword-rich domain name related to that product. Copy one page review from product site itself or somewhere else and then start spamming in blogs and forums about the one page website to generate traffic and backlinks.

I don’t like to call it as affiliate marketing but it is spamming.

Affiliate marketing is more about reviewing and recommending products that you would like to be associated with. As an example I recommend lot of resources here at IMTips and it is not because I want to be making money from those recommendations but because I use them myself to make money online.

Let us take example of Elance.com under freelancing way of making money online. I recommended Elance because it has helped me make $20,000. I would be paid only $1 if someone sign up at Elance as developer with free membership but the recommendation is not because of the commission it will generate but because I think if it has worked for me it is more likely to work for others and I don’t mind endorsing Elance. There are many other freelancing sites that would pay much higher than Elance but unless I have used them personally, I would not recommend them.

You don’t necessarily need to practice unethical marketing to make money from affiliate products. You can make lot of money doing affiliate marketing promoting good and genuine products.

5. Product Creation

What if a niche does not offer any genuine product that you can endorse? It is not something that should discourage you but instead it is an opportunity for you to come up with really good product for you blog.

Indian market don’t have any product that teaches people about technical analysis online but there are thousand of stock tippers who provide stock tips that can make people millionaire if they pay them few hundreds every month. Instead of promoting those stock tips services on my technical analysis blog for an affiliate commission I preferred creating a product that can help my blog readers understand market in a better way.

A secret way to make lot more sales and make more money online is by adding more value to your product by adding bonuses. Bonus can be anything like a personal one on one interaction with you for an hour or offering free access to private member area of your site or an audio version of your eBook etc.

6. Online Auctions

You can make money online by selling items on eBay. Let me share my experience of 2004 to make money from eBay.

In 2004 GMail was launched and you could only create account if you had an invite. So I purchased a GMail invite for $2.5 in eBay.

Once I had my GMail account, I remember correctly that I got 6 invites to share and decided to sell them in eBay. The process I followed was to sell 5 invites and create a new account with the 6th one to get more invites to sell.

If I remember correctly I generated more than $25 in the process. Nothing big but those were my starting days into making money online. Apart from that in 2004 I remember that PayPal was virtual money for Indians i.e. you could not withdraw money to your bank account in India but still I was fine making money in PayPal to spend on things online.

The idea is to see the items selling on auctions site like eBay and see if you can also sell those items. I have seen people order Goods from China and sell them on eBay but I don’t suggest doing it.

7. Online Forums

Online forums is yet another way to making money online but it is yet another method with lot of misconceptions. I see lot of new forums coming up but the second step after making it live is to add Google Adsense everywhere they can. The focus should be to generate user engagement and content first and then possibly try to monetize it.

I have shared a detail article on How to REALLY Make Money From Forum but remember that forums are comparatively more difficult to get going because you have to make sure members are around that can get the conversations started and drive other people to join the discussion. If you expect new members to get the ball rolling for you, that will never happen. You have to take needed steps to generate lot of content for your members to interact.

8. Niche Sites

Niche sites is something which I am experimenting and so I will recommend you article by Pat Flynn on How to Build Niche Sites which is undoubtedly the best article on internet for building niche sites.

9. Membership Sites

Membership site’s is yet another avenue for me to explore but you can read How to Launch membership sites by the best in the business Yaro Starak.

10. Website Flipping

I purchased CodeItWell from DigitalPoint in August 2008.

The purchase was not for flipping website for profit but was mainly to add more technical sites to my list of web properties and so flipping website is not something I can talk about with great conviction. If flipping website for profit is something that is done successfully by many webmasters and if it is something that interests you, you can read about How To Buy A Website And Flip It For Profit by Yaro Starak

Final Thoughts

What’s your preferred way to make money online? What other methods you want to add to the list? Feel free to share your thoughts in comments below!

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Do You Need New Account For Every Product You Sell On Clickbank?

Shabbir — Fri, 04 May 2012 15:20:08 +0000

User Question :

Do I have to create a new account for every product I sell on clickbank?

The answer is NO you don’t need multiple Clickbank account to sell more than one item in Clickbank. You can use one Clickbank account to sale upto 499 items. Each Clickbank item is assigned an item number ranging from 1 to 500 and so you can sale 499 items from one clickbank account and the payment link for each item that you place on the sales page becomes

http://ITEM_NUMBER.YOUR_CLICKBANK_VENDOR_ID.pay.clickbank.net

Like for my Technical Analysis eBook it becomes

http://1.sbhimani.pay.clickbank.net

Check out Step By Step Guide to Start Selling With Clickbank

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How to Make Extra Money Online

Shabbir — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 13:02:37 +0000

When I visit any family function I have hard time explaining what I do for my living. Many a times I take a short cut of not explaining about “online blogging” but just tell them that I work for online clients because it is something really easy to explain. Freelancing is not major part of my income but forms considerable part of my income online (See here).

I am always looking for more than one income source. When I was doing a 9-5 job I had extra income from my sites and stock market. When I am into managing my forums and blogging I look for extra income from clients.

Before I explain how I go about making that extra income online let me clarify that I am not talking about making extra money doing nothing but I am talking about doing few extra things that can help you make extra money online.

Visualize my Adsense earnings when I was doing a full-time job. The numbers are not important but the important part is the growth in income.

I used to work on my sites after returning home from my day’s job and on weekends.

When I am into managing my forums and blogs, I have an extra income from my clients. Apart from freelancing I also do a lot of equity investments and they also form a lot of extra income for me but we would try to avoid that part of the equation because we want to be focusing on Making extra money online and not focus on making extra income.

So I will explain how I did it and how you can also start making an extra income online and scale up that income to make it your full-time income like I have done.

So let us begin…

Blogging along with Job or College to Make Extra Money Online

Setting up a blog is very easy and there are plenty of resources to help you get started. I also offer Free Blog Setup service to help you get started.

Once you have your blog online you can add couple of articles per week to your blog for next six months. I am sure you can get this done along with your day’s job or college. I was able to get this done for my forums and blogs because it only means writing one article each on Saturday and Sunday. Assuming you do this for the next 6 months, you have 50+ good articles for your blog.

Remember you should only focus on writing two good articles on your blog each week and not worry about too much about any other aspect of blogging like links, social media promotion, search engine optimization etc, etc. If possible don’t even install stats software like Google Analytics or WordPress stats on your blog for checking how many people visited your blog and other things because it really does not help when you are getting started and makes you a stat addict. We are focusing on building a blog to make extra income online.

Once you have your 50+ good articles on your blog, you can apply for Adsense. Adsense needs blogs to be online for 6 months and as you have added really good content over the past six months it should help you to get approved in Adsense fairly easily. Now you can add Adsense to your blog. Before you add Adsense to your blog I will recommend you read Why Most New Blogs Fail?

Don’t worry too much about how many more cents you have earned from your blog in Adsense because the idea is not to make a living out of Adsense from your blog. Having single Adsense Ad unit somewhere in the sidebar should be able to help you understand the working of Adsense and make extra income online just for working few hours on weekends.

Instead of focusing on building Adsense income focus on building your blog. Read as much as you can about blogging and you can even ask your friends and colleagues to contribute some articles to your blog. Slowly but surely you can build into the extra income online with your blog and as your blog starts picking up you can decide on what you want to be doing more. Blogging or Job.

Is Blogging right for you?

Many would argue that I am not a writer and cannot write articles like you do. Let me share with you something. Being an Indian, English is not my first language and I am still horrible in English Grammar. In my wildest of dreams I could not imagine about becoming an author of an eBook. Till date I am still not confident where to use their and there or week or weak. I use Microsoft Word’s English Grammar tool and other software’s to make better English of my article and so if I can write and get going into online blogging, I am sure anybody willing to try CAN. If you know your weaknesses, you can work on them and improve on it.

You have almost 15 to 16 years of education to get a job. If you are passionate of becoming an entrepreneur, can’t you just give blogging a try for few months learning better English and see what happens? There are many services that allow you to start a blog for free like WordPress.com or Blogger.com and you can use them to get the feel of blogging.

Once decided that you want to stick with blogging you may need to make your self hosted blog because you cannot make money from your free blogs that effectively. See why here. Anyone trying to make money with a blog or a website will probably be more successful with a self-hosted blog. Getting a self-hosted blog is not free, but not very expensive either. Costs $5 per month for having your blog online. Check out Bluehost my favorite shared host to get you started.

How to Make Extra Money with Blogs?

What if you are already blogging and would like to have an extra income from your blog? If you are looking to expand your income from your blog means you are already doing good with your blog and now looking to expand your income online. You would see the following are more popular ways to make money from a website or blog

CPC Ad Networks
CPM Ad networks
Direct Ad Sales
Affiliate Commissions
Selling own products or eBook

You can apply any or all of the above if you are not having it on your blog but what more you can add is have a freelancing or consulting profile on your blog where potential clients can hire you to get the task done from you or can hire you for consultation.

Lot of things depends on the niche of your blog. As an example if you have a blog about cooking you may not be hired for cooking the recipes but you can be hired to write recipes on other sites or may even be hired by other related forums to become a moderator.

Consulting really works well on both of my blogs (Other one is Technical Analysis Blog) where I provide one on one consultation that forms considerable amount of extra money I make from my blogs.

I am not advertising myself on my technical analysis blog but I do that a lot here and you can see that in my post about vBulletin Optimization where the closing of the article has an option to hire me for further vBulletin optimization. I had numerous clients contact me for custom vBulletin optimization suggestions.

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My Ways to Making Money Online in 2012 – Partnerships

Shabbir — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 13:35:12 +0000

November 2011 is when I shared my first income statement publicly and it has been more than a year now and so I thought I will share my income statement once again and see how the progress has been so far and share some very important aspect to understanding online money making game in 2012. How the equation is changing and what to expect in future?

In the Month of December 2011 my total income online was $6853.82. The breakup of my income is as follows.

Comparing the above data with October 2010 numbers there are some key differences.

Understanding the Advertising Business Model

You may have already read in public forums that AdSense does not work any more. From the above chart you may draw the conclusion that AdSense is working for me and yes it is working for me in 2011, you need to understand how to make it work.

So let us look at some numbers.

In October 2010 AdSense was 37% of my total online income. In December 2011 it is 22% of my total income. Though I am not allowed to share specific figures as per AdSense TOS but based on gross numbers, you can see there is an overall decline in AdSense income where as the traffic to my sites is at all time high. (See here). This means AdSense is either paying less or I am not sending as much impressions to AdSense as I was sending previously.

The reality is, as AdSense revenue is not increasing in accordance with traffic, I am sending fewer impressions to AdSense.

Coming back to public forums, there are webmasters who do not see growth in revenue despite growth in traffic and then they post such comments like AdSense does not work anymore or death of AdSense but now you know the REAL reason for such comments. I do agree that those comments are true but not the complete truth.

You can combine AdSense with other Ad networks to make AdSense work for you. Combine AdSense and CPM Advertising from the above chart and you will see a growth in revenue pretty much inline with my traffic growth.

If you rely too much only on one Ad network like AdSense, you will not see much growth in revenue. Look for other methods to monetize your sites as you grow your site.

Things that worked well for me in 2011

Content Links

Webmaster’s should always experiment and my experiment of moving from Kontera to Vibrant Media increased my content links income from 2% to 5% of my total income.

Affiliates / Products

I had my doubts when writing my eBook for Indian audience but this was yet another experiment that has worked really well for me in 2011. My Technical Analysis eBook has contributed lot to my affiliates and products part of my total income.

Freelancing

December was yet another month where I had lot of consultation work coming my way and so it becomes considerable chunk of my total income for yet another month in 2011.

Things to Focus on in 2012

Partnerships are one thing where I had very little focus in 2011 and the highest priority in 2012 will be to focus more on partnerships.
Product and Affiliate incomes are growing faster than my expectations and this will be yet another area of focus for me in 2012.
I have not added much to my direct advertising sales in last one year and thus it remains roughly the same. Thanks to my long-term advertisers but this also means I need to focus more on getting more direct advertisers.

Final Thoughts

In 2012 I will be focusing less on freelancing, consulting and more on partnerships where I can form teams / companies to make more and more money online for my team and me. If you want me to be part of your online venture, do let me know here.

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Multiple Income Streams

Shabbir — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 12:21:41 +0000

Most webmasters think advertising as the only moneymaking option from websites. Advertising is definitely the better option to monetize your content-based site but remember it is not the only option. I have seen many bloggers and webmasters who have advertising as monetization strategy in mind, misses out on the other monetization option to multiply income streams. I am going to share what other income streams you can have along with advertisement for your content site or blog to multiply your income.

#1 Consult to Increase Income

If you have a good content site, you’re already helping your readers. If you provide them for more option like a personal one on one consultation, they will be more than happy to hire you for a fee because they already know you are an expert in the domain. On my Technical Analysis Blog, I share my views on Indian market and though I don’t have any consultation services option on my blog, there are readers who have hired me to get a personal consultation from me adding one more income stream to my blog.

#2 Affiliate Programs to Increase Income

Do you often recommend products or services on your site? Why not earn a commission from those recommendations? I use lot of products for my websites. I share my experience with those products or services and I recommend the same here on IMTips and some of those products earn me a commission.

Note that I don’t recommend products only for commission but I recommend products that I use which I think will be useful to my readers and some (not all) of them earn me commission.

#3 Referral Programs to Increase Income

Consider creating a referral program and reward your existing customers for sending new customers to you. I used to follow this a lot when I was new in freelancing. Remember one of my client responded that I don’t sell my friends for cash and yes you will see such responses but it is then when I decided to give my existing clients discount for sending new clients my way.

#4 Add Services to Increase Income

Another way to boost your income is to expand your services. If you are providing web designing, you can think about adding web development, or even web hosting service.

I use to provide vBulletin services when I started and I added few extra services like server management for large sites or forums and as I added more services, I was overbooked with lot more work than I can actually handle.

#5 Membership Programs to Increase Income

A membership program provides you with a consistent monthly income. It helps you make more money each month. If you have a product where you are charging your client a one-time fee, you can look about expanding your product to add some membership type program where you can make lot more monthly consistently over the period of time.

Apart from advertising, what other income streams you use on your sites? Share your income streams in comments below.

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Revresponse Review – Get Paid for Generating Leads

Shabbir — Mon, 23 May 2011 06:47:37 +0000

What is Revresponse?

RevResponse is an ad network that pays you for generating leads using your website, blog, newsletters and even mailing lists. You refer a user to sign-up for the free content or magazine and RevResponse pays you commission on every qualified subscription. There are many other affiliate networks that do the same only for US users but Revresponse accepts international traffic.

1. Pays for Lead

Revresponse pays you for leads (i.e. free signups) and so your users don’t need to buy anything for you to be getting paid. It means better conversions. Payout per signup is in range of $1.50 to $20.00 per action.

2. Payments

Revresponse offers PayPal as the payment method with minimum payout level as $50. Payment is on a net-45 payment model, i.e. money will be sent approximately 45 days after the end of the month where a publisher crosses the minimum payout level.

3. Co-branded site integration

Like any other Affiliate network, Revresponse also offers normal banners and links but they also offer a Co-branded site that you can integrate and design like your own site. See this or this

4. Wide range of offers

Revresponse not only accepts international publishers but also offers wide range of products and offers ranging from Agriculture to manufacturing to Energy services and lots more.

5. Referral Program

The referral program pays 20% of the earnings that a publisher generates for the first six months. (Signup as my referral here) 20% is really good cut but there are very few publishers who would generate considerable income in the first 6 months. Ideally I would like to have lower percentage say 10% or so of publisher earnings for lifetime.

6. Can promote without a website

This is a big advantage of Revresponse over other ad networks. You don’t even need to have a website to be promoting their offers. You can even monetize your email newsletters, 3rd party lists, blogs, RSS feeds, your Facebook friends and lot more…

7. Offers

There are no clear cut guidelines as to what a valid lead is and what is not. Lead Qualification criteria are determined by the magazine owners, and are not very transparent to publishers. Reports reveal very little information as to why leads get rejected. Go4Expert saw 98% rejection.

And you can see that most of the offers were much related to Go4Expert audience i.e. technical.

Offer listing doesn’t reveal any helpful information either.

And many a times, magazines become unavailable without any notice to the publishers.

Final Thoughts

Success with Revresponse depends largely on the fact that there are offers that fits your niche. I think it would be worth trying Revresponse because they don’t need a banner space at all and you can even test them on certain specific pages of your site like a thanks page. Just after user register’s you can offer your user some free magazines. That is where I saw maximum leads were submitted for Go4Expert. If you see your leads are being accepted by the magazine owners, you can continue using them.

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Why I don’t Recommend vBulletin 4

Shabbir — Mon, 09 May 2011 04:58:55 +0000

Being a die hard fan of vBulletin for almost 5 years (See here) I am yet to upgrade any of my forums to vBulletin 4 and it is not that I have not tried but I just could not get it working the way I wanted it to be.

I did order vBulletin 4 in pre order offer on Oct 17, 2009 and have not used it till date on my MBA Forum

In my opinion, the new vBulletin team (Remember vBulletin is not owned by Jelsoft now but by Internet Brands) is just putting out a horrible product. Being a developer I can understand that when the original developers of the product are not working on it anymore, there are bound to be a difference in the product development approaches but the actual problem is new vB Team is not accepting that there even is a problem.

Horrible Front End Design Control

They have just too many issues when it comes to front end template system. Creating new templates with Style Generator does not even generate a theme using the color selected (Needless to say selecting the color in the Style generator can be an issue for even experts). You are left to modify lot of style vars to match the color code especially member pages and other login forms. Editing each of those is a hell of a task where you have to find thousands of variables at various places and update them. vB team does not consider this as a bug which should be fixed on priority basis.

I can write paragraphs after paragraphs for vBulletin 4 templates issues like rounded corner issues, navbar menus … but I don’t think they even deserve it and so let us move on.

Horrible Backend Code

PHP coding is way below par but let us see issues which any common CMS can have for day to day management and not being very technical about server and load. Normally vBulletin coding is such that you can identify each page with a variable THIS_SCRIPT but when it comes to CMS that variable is same for all CMS pages. So you cannot identify if your user is viewing category page or content page and so it becomes that much more difficult to get simple functionality like insert ads on only content pages.

Shift of focus

vBulletin for last year or so is focusing more on Integrating new products to generate revenue but not working heavily on bugs to make forum script better. I don’t see a single reason to be coming up with new product integration like skimlinks, VerticalResponse, CKEditor … when you have more than 2000 open bugs. Some of them are just too serious to be ignored unless you are only worried about only profits and not about your customers who are using it.

I remember they did stop allowing users to upgrade to latest version of vBulletin 3 but were forcing people to buy vBulletin 4. They finally realized that trying to force existing users to adopt 4.x wasn’t going to happen and now they have given the ability to update to latest vBulletin 3.

Most IB sites don’t use vB4

This tells me that even management is not happy with the product. If they themselves don’t put their money with their product, why would I?

Apart from DigitalPoint (Shawn has completely changed vBulletin core and has even helped vBulletin team fix some major issue) I am yet to see one large forum running in vBulletin 4.

So what’s Next?

Time to move on to Xenforo or IPB for upcoming forums and use vBulletin 3.8 for existing ones. What about you?

Update: It’s not only me who is not with vBulletin 4. See other articles on poor quality of vBulletin 4.

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How to REALLY Make Money From Forum

Shabbir — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 04:42:39 +0000

I get lot of requests to become an admin for forums and unless I see a good business plan I normally don’t take the next step forward. Last week an old friend wanted to meet me to discuss about an internet business idea he was working on. The idea was having a forum and wanted my honest opinion. Naturally, I accepted.

So once we met we discussed good old days but finally I asked about the business idea.

Friend: I follow you and your online forums and also want to start a forum for XXX niche because I think I can help people really well like you and I am open to take this full time few years down the line. What do you think about it?
Me: Very good idea but what is your business plan and how do you plan to grow your forum and make it a business in future?
Friend: Like you do using Google Adsense and other Ad networks.

Probably this is the business plan for majority of forum webmasters. Have a forum and add Google Adsense as soon as you can. This is not the way you should be creating a community. So I shared with him how to go about building a forum for business which I am going to share with you here.

Building a Community before building Business

Generally any business idea should have a revenue model but you should not focus on specific revenue streams like Adsense when forming the business idea. The first thing you should focus on is how you can build a community of users. Content websites especially forums can always make money from advertising network especially Adsense but any business needs to have a long-term strategy and goals of building the product.

If you know me personally you may know that the idea of Go4Expert was to make my content online and help others. After sometime I decided to even monetize it. I converted it into real internet business few years down the line. Still you can see that I monetize my other forums (MBAGuys & CFanatic) more heavily than Go4Expert because I am still building the Go4Expert community.

So if you have a plan to launch a forum for putting Google Adsense, Infolinks and Adbrite then just don’t think about having a forum in the first place.

How to Really Profit from Forum

There are multiple ways to make money from websites and as your forum grows you can experiment on what works the best for your niche forum. I am going to tell what has worked for me over the years.

1. Google Adsense to Start with

Adsense is one of the easier ways to make money from websites especially forums because there is very little work required in getting started with Adsense and so you can concentrate on things that matter more i.e. generating content and building community.

When you start using Adsense, you can be distracted for getting your Ad placement right for maximum revenue generation. One thing you should understand here is that if you have 1000 people visiting your forum you will not make more than few dollars per day in Adsense no matter how hard you try and so instead of focusing on tweaking Ad placement you should focus more on generating more traffic. Once you have decent traffic, you can worry about increasing Adsense revenue.

I don’t prefer to have an Adsense on my forums unless it has a traffic level of more than thousand visitors per day and this way I keep myself focused on building community and not on few cents here and there on Adsense.

2. Direct Advertisers and Premium CPM Advertising

CPM advertising networks require a minimum traffic level before they accept sites. Unless you have 100k visitors per month you should avoid looking for CPM advertising network for your forum. It will be nothing more than just waste of time. Remember before applying for any CPM advertising network go through their site requirements to see if they accept un-moderated content sites like forums because most CPM Ad networks don’t accept forums.

One you are approved for a CPM Ad network along with Adsense, you will need to manage your ad inventory efficiently to maximize your revenue. I use the following methods to manage my ad inventory efficiently.

Using Google Ad Manager for CPM ad network with a minimum eCPM floor value. If Adsense can better that eCPM, Ad Manager shows Adsense or else CPM Ad network ads.
The other way to manage Ad inventory is to opt for Adsense for unsold CPM ad inventory.

3. Newsletter Sponsorships

Ideally you can start your newsletter from day 1 but at times you can have difficulties generating all the content for your forum as well as for newsletter and so once who have decent number of members to take control of the content you can work on getting the newsletter for your forum.

Newsletter helps your community grow in many ways. One of them is you can email your users with a welcome email (See how to write well targeted welcome email) detailing about what to expect in the forum. Needless to say you can email users about new areas of your site or any new product or service you come up with in the future and this way you can boost your new product or service very easily.

I use AWeber for Go4Expert Newsletter.

Once your newsletter readership grows, you can promote related products for an affiliate commission or look for advertiser to sponsor your newsletter. Remember if you work on generating good ROI for your advertiser he will sponsor your newsletter again and again.

4. Premium Membership

As your forum grows you can start premium membership where you offer some extra stuff that people actually want. Remember that you should offer things that members actually want but how do you know what people want?

Use your forum suggestion sub forum to get the idea about what members are looking for?

Are they looking for extra PM space?
Looking to support the forum?
Asking for Personal Blogs/Groups …
Access to special private forum …

Use those kinds of threads in your forum to bundle a premium membership package for your members.

5. Forum Sponsorship

You probably have multiple forums on your site and each forum is different from the other. Instead of offering only complete forum sponsorship, allow advertiser to sponsor a specific sub forum. You will be amazed to see how many advertisers opt for a specific forum sponsorship at premium rate than complete forum sponsorship for a cheaper rate.

You can use Adsense to backfill non-sponsored forums. To further increase bidding/revenue in Adsense, create targeted placements for each sub forum throughout your site.

As an example:
Adsense Placement for Forum A
Adsense Placement for Forum B
etc

The aim of forum sponsorship is to Maximum advertiser’s ROI so they keep coming back to your site for advertising opportunities.

Final Thoughts

Advertising earning does not move very fast, so you will not see things moving a lot in first few years of operation.

For a forum to work you have to focus more on things which is used by people because that is the real traffic tip for me -Usage rather than users. If people keep coming back to your site because of good experience and quality of your forum, advertisers will. It is just matter of time.

Be creative to monetize your forum… Some stuff might be unique to your forum, so it’s impossible to say there’s one right or wrong way to do it.

Share your views in comments below.

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Infolinks Review – A Better Alternative to Kontera

Shabbir — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 09:13:35 +0000

I have been using Infolinks on my MBA Forum for quite sometime now and so let me share with you my views reviews and experience about Infolinks.

What is Infolinks?

Infolinks is CPC based contextual advertising network that offers In Text advertising also known as InLinks or ContentLinks. Ads are integrated within the content and so no additional space is required to display ads.

As always I start with the negatives and this time it will be no difference.

Negatives

Low Per Click Earnings – If you compare Infolinks with Adsense then Infolinks has a very low per click earnings. We are here comparing apples with oranges but when both of them are CPC based advertising networks comparison is inevitable.
Unrelated Ads – Time and again I see ads which are not close to keywords. On my MBA Forum I see ads related to cars for keyword MBA Projects.

Positives

Global Inventory – The best part of Infolinks is they have a very good Global Inventory. MBA Forum is mainly Indian centric and Infolinks works much better than Kontera. Kontera’s recent product Kontera Synapse – where they don’t show ads if they think user is not likely to click actually means they have lesser inventory to fill. My Kontera earnings decreased by almost 50% in past that product launch news and when I contacted them it was not very positive.
Adds to overall income without any banner space – Inline ads never take up any banner space and so you are never concerned about the placement and it adds well to the revenue. Intext links has never been a major source of income for me (See the break up here) but it adds to the final total. Apart from that I follow couple of rules for inline text advertising.
1. I only show inline ads to guests and not to members. This gives me an added advantage to ask guests to register.
2. I only show inline ads within the content and not everywhere in headers and footers. I find it very unprofessional and also on forums I make sure the ads only appear on the thread pages and not on home page or forum/sub-forum pages.
Innovative Products – Infolinks have been very innovative with new products and their latest product – Related Tags works really well. The only problem is they don’t have reports to judge how this product is working but increase in earnings after installing Related Tags suggests it is working.
Pays with PayPal & Payoneer – Infolinks supports PayPal but recent PayPal issues in India & they soon started supporting Payoneer prepaid debit card (More about Payoneer here). Payoneer is great for publishers in India who wants to keep their business out of PayPal.
Good CTR – I have seen far better CTR for Infolinks then in kontera. 5 to 7 times better in CTR than Kontera and this compensates very well for low per click value and brings the eCPM higher.
Works with Adsense – InText links not only are banner space independent but also works with Adsense TOS and apart from that I have not seen any decline in my Adsense CTR or earnings after using infolinks. Extra income is not bad at all.
Highest Revenue Share – Infolinks offers highest revenue share in the industry i.e 70%. It is even better than Adsense which is at 68% and many other in-text ad providers give only 40% to 50%.
Infolinks has Much Better Support than Kontera – When Indians had problems with PayPal, I was using Kontera as well as Infolinks and Infolinks reacted very early to email about the updates and steps they will take to solve the issues with PayPal refunds, where as Kontera did not even respond to the support tickets for 15 days and once I posted this on Facebook they looked into it.

Final Thoughts

I have been using Infolinks for couple of years now and yet I have very less negative points to share then positives. Apart from that I think Infolinks works better for majority of people because they have great CTR and world wide ad inventory and so if you still have not given them a try go Signup Now.

If you are already using Infolinks share your experience in comments below.

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What Makes Me More Money And How Much?

Shabbir — Sat, 13 Nov 2010 15:21:54 +0000

Yesterday I shared a topic where anyone can Ask me Anything and as expected the first comment question was related to How much money I make and from where.

I will be answering each of the questions in comments at Ask me Anything in the detailed possible way I can and so it may take some time to answer all those questions but keep them coming as all the questions will be answered.

First let us take the first question by Jagat Bhupati which is

Which forum earns you more money? Go4Expert / MBAGuys or any other.

But I will also add one more related question by Mayank

So how much money do you make a month through Blogging, Go4expert etc…? I always wondered this!!

I have never shared the exact numbers on how much money I make for a very simple reason that I see the same being done by many co-bloggers I follow in the same niche and so I did not wanted to be doing the same. (Some USP in this niche as well phew)

Now I see that readers are really keen on knowing the same and so let me also share the same.

In the Month of October I made $5623.95 and breakup of my income is as follows.

As you can see majority of my income is from Adsense and CPM Advertising networks. I have a very small affiliate income tickling in and I expect this to go higher as I move forward with my blogs more and more in the upcoming months.

Now coming back to question by Jagat about which site makes the most. It is of course Go4Expert for the sake of numbers but if I count the ROI of my time. I will rank higher MBAGuys and CFanatic because I hardly spend any time on them and yet they give me very good income.

I have not included my offline income part in the above chart because the question was mainly for online income. I have decent offline income as well by virtue of equity trading and investment. I made close to $1000 (45k INRs) in October from an experiment with ShareKhan PMS.

Apart from that I have also not included my online expense which includes server cost and other online marketing costs. The reason to avoid them is they hardly are 10% of what I my make.

Share your thoughts in comments below and if you have more questions do ask them here.

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