January 2010 Income Report

Posted by Alan Mater on Feb 14, 2010

Ahh… the first income report of the new year. This is where it gets really exciting as I can now use this report as a base for the next 11 reports of this year. I’ll be able to see how much my income is improving (or not) and tweak stuff as necessary to hopefully squeeze more money out of my site. All the while I’ll be improving on my marketing and driving more traffic to my site.

So, without further ado, here it goes.

Total Income for the month comes out to: $223.88.

Now, I know that’s not a lot and nothing to get really excited about. But, you have to start somewhere and most never even get this far.

I’d like to introduce an exciting addition to my monthly income reports. I’ve been doing freelance internet marketing work for a very successful internet marketer for some time now. This has been great as I get to learn from him and at the same time make some additional income each month.

Total income for my internet marketing services totals $160.

Also, if you didn’t know I also do proofreading/re-writing freelance work as well. My total income from those services came out to $75 for last month.

So, total income from all three sources comes to $458.88

That’s it as far as income for January. I’ll be including all three of these sources in my monthly income reports from now on.

As you can see, making money online is very possible. :)


December Blog Post Roundup

Posted by Alan Mater on Jan 2, 2010

December was a very busy month for offline commitments, not to mention Christmas celebration and New Year’s.

I was able to post a considerable amount, although not as much as I would like. I did however meet one of my goals, and that was to get my Alexa Rank down to 250,000 or less. The lowest reached was 245,449.

I was happy to reach my accomplishment, and I have my readers to thank for that. Thank you! 2009 was a great year, and I look forward to great things to come in 2010.

Let’s recap the posts for December:

November Income Report

Work From Home With Affiliate Marketing

How To Avoid Getting Scammed With Work From Home Jobs

Make Money With CPA Affiliate Networks

Where Can You Find Legitimate Work From Home Jobs?

Finding The Right Legitimate Work From Home Job For You

Merry Christmas!

I’m giving away $10 – Limited Offer – If you’re new here, I highly recommend you check out this post.

Do Legitimate Work From Home Jobs Exist?

That wraps up December and the 2009 year.

I wish everyone a very happy and successful 2010. Let’s make it the best year yet!


Make Money With CPA Affiliate Networks

Posted by Alan Mater on Dec 20, 2009

CpaIn one of my previous posts about working from home with affiliate marketing, I talked about how affiliate marketing is the easiest way to get started making money online.

This post is going to cover a way in which you can start generating money with affiliate marketing without having to actually sell anything. Interested? You should be. You can earn a decent amount of money from your web traffic by promoting CPA ads.

CPA stands for Cost Per Action. The way CPA ads work is that you promote a particular ad or ads that are related to the content and niche of your site.  CPA ads can be found for practically any niche you’re in.

When someone comes to your site and sees a link to a product or service you’re promoting for a CPA network, and they click on the link, they’ll be taken to the owner’s site for that offer. Your affiliate ID will be included.

Here’s the best part. All that person has to do is take some sort of ACTION. This action doesn’t involve actually buying anything. If the person is interested in the offer and fills out a form to learn more, you automatically get credited for the sign-up. This earns you a set commission into your account for that CPA affiliate network.

The commission earned for each sign-up can range from $1 to $3. If a sale is generated, the commissions can be $20 all the way up to $60 or more, depending on the offer.

Here’s an example…

You’re promoting a survey site for a reputable company, and they’re paying $3 per lead. Someone comes to your site, sees the ad and clicks on the link. They go to the survey site and read over the offer. There’s a form that requests their name and email address so they can be sent further information (which is how leads are generated). They fill out the form, and you’re automatically credited with $3.

It’s that simple. You don’t have to sell anything at all. Although, the money you can earn is a lot more if you do make a sale on top a lead.

Here’s a tip: The shorter the form is, the more likely someone is going to fill it out. So, try to find offers that only have one or two lines for them to fill in. If you can’t, don’t worry, if it’s a good offer it may convert just as well. It all comes down to testing different offers.

Here are the two CPA Affiliate Networks that I use and earn money from:

MaxBounty

Responsive Data

I just want to note that getting approved for CPA affiliate networks can be a little tricky. If you decide to sign up for one of these and run into any problems, just let me know, and I’ll help you out.

Also, both of these companies have the option to be paid directly to your PayPal account, which is very nice.

Do you use CPA affiliate networks to earn money? What companies do you use? How are you doing with them? Share your comments below…


November Income Report

Posted by Alan Mater on Dec 14, 2009

Atop Afton Mt., Virginia

I’m back from Virginia after visiting with family for my cousin’s college graduation. My fiance and I had a great time, although it didn’t last long. Here’s a picture taken atop Afton Mountain, Virginia, along I64.

November was a great month for this site, mainly due to a couple of advertisers, which you’ll see below.

Here’s the total November income for my ReplaceYourSalary.com site:

Not a bad showing at all for last month. However, my biggest earner was for two ads on my home page. Two different people contacted me about advertising on my site, and after quoting a price, they both agreed.

2 Home Page Ads (6 months) – $150 each = $300

Total November income is: $450.37

Not bad at all for just one site. I made even more with my freelancing services, which pushed me well over the $500 mark, an accomplishment I’ve been looking forward to. Overall I’m very pleased.

This is proof that you CAN make money online. :D


August Blog Post Roundup

Posted by Alan Mater on Sep 2, 2009

August came and went so fast. The summer is almost gone, and Fall is right around the corner. I didn’t do too much posting the past month, but if you happened to miss anything, you’ll find the posts below.

Get Top Quality Internet Marketing Articles

My JV Partnership Endeavor with David Hurley

Thank You To All Of My Readers

Google Adsense Alternative – Yarie.com


Google Adsense Alternative – Yarie.com

Posted by Alan Mater on Aug 31, 2009

I’ve been running Google Adsense ads on my website for well over a year now. I’ve made a decent amount of money from it so far, but not enough to get overly excited about. I know many who make a living from Adsense alone, but there are those who would rather use an Adsense alternative.

If you’re currently using Google Adsense, or perhaps Google banned your account (read this post by Peter Lee to find out how to prevent it from happening to you), and you’re looking for an alternative to Adsense, you may be interested in Yarie.com.

Yarie doesn’t automatically generate content related ads like Google Adsense, but instead, the ad categories are pre-chosen for you based on the niche of your website. For example, my site is geared towards the work from home and make money online niche. The categories that they choose would revolve around the niche, sort of like a sub-niche, if you will.

The best example of this would be on this site. If you go to my Replace Your Salary home page, look at the top right sidebar, and you’ll notice the heading “Real Online Jobs.” Below the heading are online job categories, which are the ads.

There’s not as much customization available to you as there is with Google Adsense ads, but so far I’ve seen good results. I’ve been running these ads from Yarie for two months now, which have actually made me more money than my Adsense ads.

Check out the screenshot below of my earnings for the past two months of using Yarie:

It’s not a whole lot, but consider the fact that this is completely automated, and I do nothing extra.

Setup is easy as well, although a little more complicated than with Adsense. You’ll have a piece of code to place anywhere on your site that you want the ads to show up, just like with Adsense. The difference is that you’ll also have to create another web page and upload it to your server. Details will be given to you and are easy to follow.

Once you’re setup, you’ll want to place the ads as close to the top of your page as possible. The closer to the top, the better the click-through-rate you’re going to get.

Right now I only have Yarie ads on my home page, and as I said, they’re performing better than my Adsense ads that I have on many different pages. I believe Yarie is a very good Google Adsense alternative, and I will continue to use them.

**UPDATE**

Moments after writing this review, I got a check in the mail in the amount of $43.20 for July’s earnings. See scan below:

Are you looking for an Adsense alternative? What do you think about Yarie from reading this post? Leave your comments below…


How To Make Money Blogging – 10 Step Solution

Posted by amater on Apr 10, 2009

Firstly, we all want to know How to Make Money Online, and one of the best ways I have found is by creating blogs. In this article I intend to show you how you too can learn How to Make Money Blogging by telling you how combining the techniques I have gathered from across the web helps to make me $$$ every day. Secondly, I am not trying to sell you my latest “Get Rich Quick” scheme because I don’t have one. Each eBook you read will have a wealth of information within them which will, without a doubt, help you to discover the secrets of How to Make Money Online. I am only going to tell you which ones out of the 100’s available you SHOULD read if you too want to make lots of money.

I use a 10 step guide to setting up and starting all of my blogs.

I will give you a list of the top 10 resources later that I use and recommend to everyone who is serious about making lots of money online. One of the vital aspects people seem to miss out when they first get into blogging is the fact that their blog must contain information that people want to read.

Many bloggers are looking through closed eyes in this regard and if you browse through 50 blogs you will notice that most will tell you they know How to Make Money with Blogs when really all they tell you is where they went on their vacation or how many cars they have.

Are you ready to learn How to Make Money Blogging?

If the answer is YES then read on and start to make money with your blog. I am not here to tell you how to write your blog, that’s up to you, but what I am about to tell you is the 10 things I use to make money on the internet. You can choose to use these techniques or not, that’s your prerogative.

Step 1 – Finding a Topic

Turn off your computer, grab a pen and some paper and sit somewhere you can relax but also stay focused (if you are just starting out this step can be a pain because we all want to know How to Make Money Online and we want to know how to make it NOW). Think of a topic you are interested in and write it down (this helps because you will be more committed to trying instead of giving up in a day or two) and also make sure it is something other people are interested in too. A couple of ways I use to think of a topic is by using MetaSpy to find out what people are searching for, Ask IQ to find what’s popular and VRE Toolbar to find out how many people search for the topic (this is also useful later on to get traffic). Write down your top five keywords, you will want to use them later in your blog.

Step 2 – Create Your Blog

Find and create your blog online. I like to use Wordpress for it’s SEO benefits but there’s also Blogger and Movable Type. You can find all the help in the program you use to get information when setting up the blog. Create your content, make it original, and make it informative. This is one of the main keys to learn How to Make Money with Blogs. You need to include the keywords you wrote down in Step 1 in the content of your blog. Try not to overuse these as it sends out bad signals to the search engines, and this is 100% not what you want.

Step 3 – Go Google

Sign up for Google Adsense and insert the code in the margin of your blog. You can customize your ads in many ways, such as including text links or image links. I prefer the text links only, as they are easier to blend in with your blog and don’t take the focus away from the information. Google Adsense will probably not make you a millionaire but it is an instant way of generating a small amount of money.

If you want to track where your visitors are coming from with regards to direct hits or from search engine results then I would suggest you use Google Analytics and again you can get all the help you need setting that up from within the program.

You will also want to add your URL to Google’s index.

Step 4 – Find Something to Sell

If you don’t want to sell anything and are happy with the income Google Adsense is bringing in then you can skip this step. If you want to maximize your income and truly learn How to Make Money with Blogs you will want to find an affiliate program to join. A couple of affiliate programs I would suggest are ClickBank and Commission Junction. You can sell anything from office furniture, pet supplies, movies and clothing to PC games, Dieting tips and Audio software.

Whatever program you join will give you help inserting the code you will need to insert into your blog, but be sure you do this correctly or you WILL NOT earn money from your visitors. If you do not know how to edit HTML, W3Schools HTML tutorial is a great place to start.

Step 5 – Social Bookmarking

There is no better advertising than word of mouth, but the next best thing is social bookmarking. You will want to make things easier for people to do this. Social bookmarking sites I use and recommend are OnlyWire and SocialMarker and they are used for people to share their bookmarks or websites that they have liked with other people in their online community.

I would not suggest you add your own links to these services, but provide visitors to your website the ability to do so.

Step 6 – Write an Article

Whether your blog is about a specific product, for example a certain MP3 Player you are promoting, or just about giving people information, I would suggest you to write an article or a review of it. Most article directories require articles of 500 words and over so I would use this as a rule when writing to ensure your article is published.

Submit your article to any of the 100’s which are out there. I personally use a few of the Top Article directories such as EzineArticles, Article Dashboard, Amazines.com, isnare and SearchWarp. I also use a nifty piece of software called Article Submitter which will submit your articles to over 600 article directories, which saves you lots of time and leaves you to focus on writing your blogs.

Step 7 – Ping The Hell Out Of It

Every time you add new information to your blog, you want to let the blog directories know about it, this is known as pinging. Some Blog providers automatically send out pings when you update, but to be on the safe side you will want to do this manually too. Wordpress already does this for you. Add any pinging services to the list already provided. Word of note – ONLY PING WHEN YOU UPDATE.

There are a couple of Ping sites I use which will send a ping to multiple blog directories at the same time. PingMyBlog would be my first port of call and then if for some reason that site is down I would use Ping-o-matic. Remember, to only ping when you update or you could get blacklisted, and that is bad.

Step 8 – Yahoo! Answers and Forums

One of the easiest ways to get targeted visitors to your blog is to make use of the people you want to target. I would suggest you sign up to at LEAST one forum in the topic you are writing about, and don’t just go straight in there and start posting comments for people to look at your blog, they won’t.

The secret is to add the link to your blog in your signature and actively become a member of the forum, posting relevant topics and starting debates within them. The more you post, the more your link will show, and if you provide someone with good info the chances are higher they will click your link.

Yahoo! Answers is along the same lines as forums but the beauty of this is it’s viewed by thousands of visitors each day. If you don’t already have a Yahoo! account get one and then login and search for questions relating to the topic of your blog and answer them well. You can then insert the link to your blog and as with the forums, if you answer well you may have not only earned yourself a point or two on Yahoo!, but also earned a visitor to your blog.

Step 9 – Update Your Blog

This can be by several means, one is to add new reviews or content to your blog, and if you are going to do this I suggest updating every couple of days. This helps to keep the search engines happy as they love to see new and original content.

Another way of updating your blog and keeping the content fresh is to add RSS feeds to it. Make sure the feeds are relevant to your blog and provide visitors with helpful information. Visitors to a World of Warcraft blog don’t want to read feeds about knitting, or do they?

Step 10 – More, More, More

Repeat steps 1 – 10, this is the only way How to Make Money Blogging.

Step 11 – A Bonus Step

If you have your own product or newsletter, give your visitors an easy way to sign up to receive updates or information. This helps you to contact the visitor again with more great info or products you wish to sell.

How to Make Money Online is easy if you follow the above steps.

Some important things to remember so you don’t get disheartened with your blog is the fact that you will not become a millionaire overnight, it takes hard work and a lot of effort. If you are really serious about learning How to Make Money with Blogs then stick with it and eventually you will have an Ah-Ha moment. This is when things start to work and you think to yourself Ah-Ha, that’s how they do it! Your moment could be sooner than you think.

My Top 10 resources I use and recommend are:

1. Rob Benwell’s Blogging to The Bank 2.0
2. Wordpress Goldmine
3. Rob Atherton’s Building A Blog Empire For Profit
4. The Blog Challenge
5. Hinge Marketing Magic
6. Blogging For Riches – Complete Video Tutorial
7. Social Bookmarking Demon
8. Adsense Inbox
9. Wordpress SEO Sniper
10. RSS, Blogs and Syndication…

Distributed by:
Save My Marriage Today Scam
Amy Waterman

Find free experiences to website traffic – your own guide.


Google Adsense Revenue – Another Income Stream

Posted by Alan Mater on Feb 27, 2009

Many work from home business owners will try to create as much revenue from their website as possible. That’s just plain common sense. Like myself, they put a lot of time and effort into building their site or blog and would like to be rewarded in some way.

Creating income streams for your business is essential. Some of the ways you can do this is by offering affiliate products on your site, providing a free newsletter and building your list, and also by placing ads on your site.

The types of ads you place can be varied. The important thing to remember is if you’re going to place ads on your site you want them to be relevant to the content.

Google Adsense has this down to a science. You place a piece of code on your site which generates advertiser’s ads. When someone clicks on one of those ads, you get paid. The cost varies and will depend on the bid price of the advertiser.

Adsense revenue is an easy way to generate some extra income for your work from home business. Just don’t expect to get rich from it.

You may notice that I have Adsense ads on this blog. Take a look at them and see how they’re formatted. You can customize the appearance of the ads to blend into your site. This you want to do, and you’ll learn why in just a second.

Once you get your ads up you’ll want to do some testing so that you get a good conversion rate. Over at InfectedByBugs.com, Shannon provides some really great tips on how to do this. Check out his Adsense Tips and learn 5 ways to increase your Adsense revenue.

Another factor that determines your Adsense revenue is your ad position. Here’s a video that provides some more great tips on how to boost your Adsense revenue including the best location for your ads… Enjoy!

By now you should have a good understanding of what Google Adsense is and also how to increase your Adsense revenue. When working from home, it’s important to test every aspect of your business. Conversions are key, so it makes perfect sense to always be testing and keeping an eye out on your ads so that you generate the most Adsense revenue as you possibly can.

Keep in mind, though, that you must be getting traffic to your site in order to see any kind of results. To learn how to do this check out my posts on building your work from home business:

Follow these steps and you will be well on your way to building your work from home business and generating decent Google Adsense revenue.


Monetize Your Twitter Account with this Online Ad Network

Posted by Alan Mater on Nov 13, 2008

Have you signed up for Twitter yet? If not, read my last blog post to find out why you should. As I had said there have been many different applications and websites to utulize Twitter, so it really comes to no surprise that there is now an online ad network for Twitter as well.

The ad network is called Be A Magpie. As stated on their website, you can “convert your tweets into bling-bling.”

How it works is you enter your Twitter name, it looks at all of your previous tweets, and calculates how much potential money you can make. You can determine this before you even sign up. Go ahead, see for yourself… http://www.be-a-magpie.com/start.

The types of ads that will be sent through your Twitter name is based on the content of your tweets and the ads that are available. They provide an illustration that better describes what I’m saying.

The ad frequency can be changed from 1:5 or 1:20. Meaning that for every 5 tweets that you make, one ad will be displayed, or one ad for every 20 tweets. I do believe the amount of followers you have is taken into consideration as well. They provide FAQs that you can look over.

Before you sign up, I would highly suggest you think about your followers first. You want their best interest in mind. Yes, you can make some nice, extra cash from this online ad network, but you don’t want to annoy your followers with ads all the time. Just something to keep in mind.

Here’s a review of Be A Magpie that was recently done by Kid’s Cash Connection…

Magpie, for those who don’t know, is an Ad Network for Twitter. Some have raised the question “How do we make money on Twitter?” This company will pay you to use your name to tweet about things that are related to you or your company. They match ad campaigns with the users and tweet the ad in your name. Every time they do this you get paid so many Euros depending on how many followers you have. We got paid $68 US dollars for our first week.

When you get to fifty Euros you can cash out into your Pay Pal account which converts the money into whatever you use. You can also use that money to start an ad campaign of your own. This enables you to advertise your site, blog or company for free!

What I have gathered from the experience is that Magpie will pay you and it is legitimate. It is, however, clear to me that they would much rather have you run an ad than cash out. Remember that we got $68 in one week but when we cashed out and did not choose the advertising option all of the sudden the tweets went silent. Here is a record of our account you be the judge:

2008-11-18 02:41:07 Magpie twittered. You earned! €9.51
2008-11-11 17:35:39 Magpie twittered. You earned! €9.17
2008-11-07 12:44:54 Cashed out () €-54.94
2008-11-07 11:52:12 Magpie twittered. You earned! €8.25
2008-11-06 17:18:31 Magpie twittered. You earned! €8.07
2008-11-04 22:13:57 Magpie twittered. You earned! €7.08
2008-11-04 09:02:40 Magpie twittered. You earned! €6.96
2008-11-04 00:11:32 Magpie twittered. You earned! €6.35
2008-11-03 11:52:58 Magpie twittered. You earned!)€6.25
2008-11-02 23:05:01 Magpie twittered. You earned! €6.00
2008-11-02 14:24:04 Magpie twittered. You earned! €5.98

If you notice after we cashed in, 4 days went by then a tweet after that 7 days went by and then another tweet. We earned €-54.94 in 5 days and cashed out. We made €18.68 in the next 11days!

When I emailed them about this they said that it had to do with the ads that were compatible for us. All the tweets on this page were for Magpie. How was that any different? Is the real reason that they don’t want to pay out so much?

One point that has been raised is that it will ruin the Twitter experience. That there will be too many Magpie tweets.  I have to say that it wasn’t very noticeable from a user standpoint. Now watching Magpie tweets all day long is not my idea of a good time, but it has not gotten out of hand yet.

The deeper implication, however, is that is not how Magpie is viewed by the Twitter universe. They see it as a sell out or a prelude to more ads and marketing campaigns. That is not what they signed up, for as a matter of fact, it is causing people to get quite angry to the point they stop following you, if you promote Magpie.

The bottom line is it is up to you. I think from our experiment if you are looking to advertise something Magpie may be for you. If you are out to make money off Twitter I think you may want to build a strong community rather than turning to Magpie. Here’s the source again… Kid’s Cash Connection

Follow Me on Twitter