Internet Marketing Tips » Make Money

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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Which AdSense Rectangle Performs The Best?

Shabbir — Sat, 09 Oct 2010 15:14:17 +0000

I got a very interesting question in my inbox today. The question is – AdSense offers two rectangle ad units – 300×250 and 336×280. Which one is better? Also many people recommend 336×280 but I see most of them use 300×250 and I see the same on your forums/blogs.

It is a very tricky question where he is not only asking me why I am using an ad unit that is not best recommended by others.

I will answer this question in two parts but before we begin let us see the Adsense Rectangles first.

Adsense does not offer two rectangle ad units but actually they offer three rectangular ad units.

336x280

300x250

180x150

Coming back to the original question -

Which Adsense Rectangle Ad Unit performs better?

As a general feeling we may think that the larger the ad space the better it’s earnings will be and this is the main reason why some people suggests 336×280 over 300×250 but 300×250 is much more popular among advertiser’s and especially among the CPM ad networks. In Adsense you can opt for Google certified CPM Ad network ads and so if you have 300×250 it may actually have more advertiser’s to compete for an ad view giving you higher return. So instead of going with what I say is best, test both as there’s a good reason why the smaller ad unit can perform better for you and vice versa.

The other part of your question is -

Why I use 300×250 more than 336×280?

Adsense is not the only Ad network I use. The other network prefers 300×250. It is one of the main reason I prefer 300×250 ad units more than 336×280. Apart from that I personally like 300×250 integrated into the design more than 336×280 because later looks less professional to me.

How about sharing your best performing Adsense rectangle?

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Why I Make $10,000 Doing Freelancing And Now You Can Too

Shabbir — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 07:28:19 +0000

I am sure many of us will be more than happy to get an extra 10k USD doing what you love to do and today I will not only share with you why I make so much money doing freelancing but will also suggest, how you can also do the same.

Let’s begin on why I make $10,000 doing freelancing.

1. I Refuse to Give Up On Freelancing

Freelancing is a very small part (less than 5%) of my total monthly revenue and yet I don’t prefer to give up on freelancing because it actually adds to my overall revenue without much of an effort from my end. Yes you heard it right – without much effort from my end. Many freelancers make it harder than it actually is.

2. I decide what to work on

I am programmer at heart but if you check my Elance Profile you will hardly see any development work. Development projects usually are big budget projects but also needs more time and effort from your end on a continuous basis. I prefer to concentrate more on my own blogs and forums and yet make some extra income and so small size jobs are perfect for me. Small sized projects not only help me getting in touch with more number of clients but they also help me in learning more new things.

3. I decide on the pricing

Many freelancers think that if you want to be among successful bidders on sites like Elance you have to quote lowest price. This is completely a MYTH and you can take my words on this and quote me anywhere. There are innumerable feedbacks on my Elance Profile like this

This means I charge clients premium rates for being professional and maintaining the quality.

Let me go ahead and frame a golden rule for bidding. You should be able to show your expertise to whatever project you bid for and win the project bid even if you are not offering the lowest price. People select the best suited person for the task and not the cheapest.

4. I decide when to work

If I have a very busy schedule for my own work I decide to decline new work and also let existing client know about my non-availability. I only choose the best projects for myself at the price I am comfortable at and this way I can not only setup my own working hours but also my own working weeks and dedicated more time to my own websites. Many freelancers think that this may hamper reputation but on the contrary many clients thanks me for letting them know my availability and expertise well in advance.

5. I decide where to work

I shared sometime back I how to work from the comfort of your home and I love doing it but remember every coin has two sides. Working from home needs lots of discipline and many of us (including me) lack that discipline.

Final Thoughts

You may be wondering why I did not answer the question on how you can also earn $10,000 doing freelancing. Don’t you think the answer lies in the above list?

Just don’t give up on freelancing and work for what you can show you are best at.

Share the reasons why you’re still freelancing in comments below.

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DevHub Review

Shabbir — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 06:23:25 +0000

Lets be honest… . No matter how easy it is to build your blog these days, it do require you to do lot of things like getting a good web host, find that perfect theme for your blog, Installing the plugins… . The process does not end here and you may need to wait for few months and reach some traffic levels before you get into advertising networks.

But today I will tell you something where you don’t need anything like those to make your website going and it is as simple as click, drag, drop and EARN. Yes you heard it right. Click, drag, drop is all you need to do to setup your website and start earning.

First check out my site which I have just setup – shabbirbhimani.com

You might be wondering how?

I did this in few minutes using DevHub’s Dashboard with few drag and drops.

Devhub is a website builder with a gaming touch. You can build web site or blog with which can be anything like social media page, local business website, blog, or an affiliate websites and make money with it instantly.

As you build your site you get DevHub coins which you can trade in the Market to buy services or merchandise to enhance your site.

You read all good things about DevHub now it’s the time for not so good things about DevHub.

I just keep getting error when using the DevHub Dashboard

but then when I check my site I do not see any such error. So I assume it is the error with the panel and does not affect the live websites.
The Recommendation information when you are editing your website in the bottom left corner is very annoying and no matter how many time you minimize it, it keeps coming back after each save.
You do not have much control over the navigation column and you can only work on things in the other 2 columns.

Final Thoughts

According to me it is a good place to start for people who are not comfortable at getting that techy stuff.

Do share your thoughts and experience about DevHub in comments below

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Chango – An Alternative to Chitika

Shabbir — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 05:16:21 +0000

Chitika has been on of my favourite CPC Ad network (See why here) until last month when they started lot of upgrades (as they term it). In the middle of all such upgrades page views and earnings is tending towards zero and I see a very canned response for each question that I shoot to them.

They always reported un-audited earnings and actual earnings used to be slightly different from reported earnings but I think if the fluctuation was within a limit it was fine but recently they had many issues such as no reports or zero earning reports. Now to add to the shock they announced at the official blog that there are more changes in reports. The thing which concerned me was

With the addition of these CPM ads, we will no longer be reporting on clicks. Because of this, the CPC and CTR values in your reports now become quite irrelevant and alter your focus from your actual revenue earnings.

I think this is absolutely ridiculous. We know that Adsense also started showing CPM ads from other Ad network but that does not mean they stopped showing how much we earned from clicks and yes per click earnings is elevated for each click due to CPM earning added but then CTR and other metrics are still very helpful in knowing which ad unit is performing and how.

I always love to make lot of tests with my stats and each of the metrics gives me a little more clue to my next test. If you add more stats it is always fine for me but if you take them away you are trying to fool me and that too if it is one of the most important one i.e. CTR.

Beginning May after exchanging few emails about my doubts and queries I finally decided to quit Chitika and started to look for alternatives and I found Chango which is pretty much inline with the previous version of Chitika which I really liked.

Similarities between Chitika and Chango

They show Ads to Search Traffic from US and Canada.
Non-contextual and so is fully compatible with Google Adsense.
CTR and eCPM close to what it used to be with Chitika previously.
Like Chitika you can collapse your Ads to nothing for non-search based traffic or traffic where Chango does not have any ads to show.
Exactly the same referral program as Chitika.

Difference between Chitika and Chango

Chango supports lesser Ad formats than Chitika but they do support popular IAB standard sizes.
Chitika minimum payout is $10 but Chango has this value a bit higher to $25 which is again not very high and should be fine for majority of publisher.
Chitika is following Adsense to become CPM Ad network yet Chango is still 100% PPC ad network.

Here are Sample of How Chango Ad looks.

If you are unable to make much through Chitika, try Chango.

Click Here to Sign up at Chango

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Tribalfusion Review – How I tripled my eCPM

Shabbir — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 08:25:58 +0000

A picture speaks thousand words so let’s first see the picture. On y-axis we have an eCPM for the month of April where I started doing lot of experiments

I will share a very detailed review about TribalFusion and suggest how you can also make such a jump in your eCPM and your earning. This is very general review about CPM ad networks and not concentrated only to TribalFusion publishers but examples I will give will be mainly from Tribalfusion.

About TribalFusion

TribalFusion is one of the few premium CPM networks that pay premium CPM rates for each ad viewed on your website. It has very high site requirements to be accepted into the publisher network. You can check the official site for publisher site requirements. Point to note is they need a minimum of 500,000 unique users per month. It’s a bit too much for new websites but when it comes to established players it is one of those premium CPM networks that pay great value for each page viewed by your user on your site.

Now let us first see couple of myths about CPM networks in general.

1. CPM Network Ad Placement Myth

One of the biggest myth about CPM network is that people believe that they will make more money from the website if they place CPM networks below the fold and mainly in footer and CPC network in header areas. The main reason for such myth is because CPC network pays based on clicks and so having them above the fold will generate more clicks and hence more money and to add to the earning you get paid for impressions of CPM network from footer. This looks true but is not the actual truth.

We think that we are smart enough but don’t you think ad networks serving billions of impression per month know this before hand and have a method to understand the placement very easily. A simple logic could be placement CTR. Apart from that if you view this from advertisers viewpoint, advertiser would want more out of your each penny spent. As a publisher if you want most of your each page views same is the case with advertiser. So next time you consider placing CPM network in footer think twice about it.

2. Inventory Fill Myth

Second myth about CPM network is inventory fill. Many CPM network guarantees 100% inventory fill but there is no CPM network who can (and will) do that. Yes many fill all your inventories with 100% ads but they are not all CPM ads. Did you notice the catch. They fill most of them with CPM Ads but rest of the ads are either CPC ads or CPA ads. 100% inventory filled but not all are CPM Ads. TribalFusion is not different.

I could see that Tribalfusion fills remnant inventory with lead based CPA ads. I also verified the reports to see if that is case world wide or is it only in India. Report about advertisers from TribalFusion Direct Ads confirms that they have lot of CPA Ads when serving TribalFusion Direct ads. They use a general set of CPA ads like smileys and screensaver ads that works for majority of audiences and payment is based on geo-targeting free leads.

How I increased my eCPM

I always have CPM network in more prominent placement than Adsense for Go4Expert.com and the main reason for this requirement from TribalFusion to have leaderboard ad above the fold and the other reason is I think CPM ads pay a lot more per click then what CPC network does because of the added revenue from CPM ads.

As I have very good positioning of CPM network I thought of experimenting with my own CPA ads from various CPA network like CJ / ClickBank / ShareASale / Amazon … and which I think are related to Go4Expert audience. I instantly saw conversion and that gave me encouragement towards more experimentation.

Then I started my own CPA Ad network using Google Ad Manager. I started showing CPA ads that I thought would work best for my site users and as I experiment more I now have better paying CPA ads for my inventory.

The jump in eCPM was a result of experimentation that I did and that is why I always suggest to experiment.

To Block TribalFusion non-CPM ads go to ad server management and set a higher floor value for your ads. I have 0.6 (Max value) eCPM and this means any advertiser paying less than 0.6 eCPM will not be shown and my default CPA ads will run.

You can also try the same experiment.

If you are just starting on your CPA ad network building I will suggest you to add Job CPA ads to start with because no matter what job CPA ads work for majority of audiences and niche. Many a times if you don’t have a CPA Ad and you can use smiley and screensaver ads as well. If done in a right way you will actually make more from same ads because no share is taken by the CPM ad network for the action.

Final thoughts

If you want to make the most of your inventory you should not consider placing CPM ads in invisible areas where no one actually see it but consider them as an advertiser who is ready to pay you for getting noticed.

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ProBlogger’s Guide To Successful Blogging Take-2

Shabbir — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 13:57:23 +0000

Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett have just released their 2nd edition of their best selling book “ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income“. You can order now at Amazon.com. If you have read the first edition (which I have) then you will enjoy the new edition as well because Darren and Chris have added lot of new stuff to the new edition.

If you don’t have the first edition you can read my tips on better blogging taken mainly from the first edition. Second Edition has lot more and if you have questions like

How to write about any topic?
How do you get links for your blog and dominate in search engine?
What should be your post titles?
How do you make money from blogs?
How you can better than just few cents per click from CPC ad networks?

And many more …

So go get your copy now

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JohnChow’s Make Money Online Book

Shabbir — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 05:09:50 +0000

John Chow, is one of the most influential blogger in make money online niche and this time he comes up with a book on Make Money Online Roadmap of a Dot Com Mogul by John Chow and Michael Kwan and it is #1 on The New York Times Best Sellers List!

His book is not yet been published and as I read on his blog the probably date of shipping is May 1, 2010. The 160 page book retails for $14.95 at Amazon but it is available for pre-order for only $10.80.

Check out the news on his blog.

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Get Paid to Tweet with SponsoredTweets

Shabbir — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 11:23:04 +0000

If you happen to read my review about Ad.Ly you may be aware that twitter is new money making source and advertisers are paying decent amount for tweeting stuffs but Ad.Ly is not the only way to make money with Twitter.

SponsoredTweets is the new way. With SponsoredTweets I am making hundreds of dollars tweeting things I like and now you can also do the same.

Does this means anybody can make a fortune with SponsoredTweets?

No. There is definitely a catch. Your Twitter account must be at least 60 days old, have at least 50 followers and must have more than 100 status updates. This means only genuine users who actually use twitter will be eligible and will make money tweeting.

If you think you satisfy the above criteria Click Here to sign up to SponsoredTweets and see how much you can make.

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